I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times.
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork for this week. Diva down. Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO of Apple. What did he get right and what did he get wrong? Then Andrew Yang is here to discuss his early bet on AI taking jobs and why universal basic income may be making a comeback. And finally, hats off for some hat GPT.
Well, Casey, the big news this week is that Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down.
Yeah, it is a really momentous occasion in the history of technology. Apple does not change CEOs all that often. And Tim Cook, while we both have a lot to say about him, I think undoubtedly just had an extraordinary run as a public company CEO.
Yeah. So, Apple announced this leadership transition on Monday. Tim Cook is going to step into a new role as executive chairman. He's not leaving entirely. But John Turnis, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering and a longtime Apple guy, will become the next CEO. This is obviously not a company that has had a lot of CEOs. They tend to stick around and promote from within. And so I think this is about as sort of expected a leadership transition as you could get. There have been rumors and reports that Cook was considering retiring for many months, but this made it official. And today we should talk about what Tim Cook's legacy is, the highlights, the lowlights. How has Apple changed in the years since he took over as CEO, and what do we expect out of John Turnis, the new guy?
Yeah, lot to dive into. So, let's talk about some numbers here because I think Tim Cook's run at Apple is going to be remembered for just the overall growth that the company has experienced under his leadership since he stepped into the CEO role in 2011. Apple's market cap has grown from $350 billion to around $4 trillion. So, a 10x multiple there. Its yearly revenue nearly quadrupled. Its stock price has gone up roughly 2,000%.
And a lot of the products that Tim Cook has overseen have been, I would say, surprising hits.
Yes. And I think this is like, if you want to be intellectually honest about Tim Cook's Apple, you have to talk about this particular dimension because I think the knock on Tim Cook was, well, he's not a product guy. He doesn't know how to launch new product categories. But you look at the past 15 years and he actually did.
Yes. So I think the biggest thing that he will be known for as a new device or as a new platform in his legacy is the Apple Watch, which I am wearing, you are wearing.
I mean, everyone has an Apple Watch now. And I remember when the Apple Watch came out, there was this moment of like, oh, Apple's cooked, like they can no longer innovate. This thing is obviously not going to work. This is just, you know, a gadget for luxury users and this is not going to sort of be useful enough for many people to shell out for. And then I think Tim Cook, to his credit, saw that health was taking off, that people wanted to track their steps. They wanted to know if their blood oxygen levels were changing or if their heartbeat was irregular. They wanted to have fall detection. And I think he really saw that as the way to bring the Apple Watch to the mainstream and it worked. Like it is a huge category now. And I think it is genuinely the best thing that they have launched under Cook's tenure.
Yeah. And where I would give him credit was that when the first version of the Apple Watch came out, it wasn't entirely clear that it was a health product. Like it sort of had maybe one or two features in there, but Apple had to iterate on it over time. And like that is what a great CEO does, right? Along with your users, you figure out what your own products are for and how to make more of the stuff that people want and do less of the stuff that they don't want. And so, I think the Apple Watch is just the best example of Tim Cook doing that during his tenure.
Yeah. And other Tim Cook success stories on the hardware side, AirPods obviously became a big deal during his tenure as CEO. I think this Apple silicon bet that he made and oversaw was probably their most lasting success. They brought their chip design in-house. They sort of weaned themselves away from Intel as their primary chip provider and I think that is sort of underrated as a thing that they did that was risky but that has paid off for them in a major way. They control their chip destiny now in a way that they did not when they were relying on Intel and it has given them the ability to like design custom chips like the M1.
Yeah. And now Intel is partially owned by the government because that's how badly it went for them after Apple started making its own chips. So yeah, great for Apple, not great for Intel.
Yeah. So there are also some successes on the services side of Apple's business. They have grown in places like Apple TV. They now own a big, you know, major Hollywood studio, Apple Pay, Apple Music. These are now something like a hundred billion dollar business for them. And I think there have been some mixed successes on that side too. I don't think they have secured the software dominance that they had hoped to. And it's caused them a lot of problems for things like antitrust. So, I think his legacy will be a little more mixed when it comes to software and services, but still obviously a strong growth for them.
Yeah, this is one where I think my view is a little bit more mixed because on one hand, yes, this was like an unqualified success financially, but this is also the sort of stuff Apple started to do under Cook that I think undermine the love that people have for the company because it seemed like with every passing year, there was another app on your iPhone that Apple was asking you to pay an annual subscription for. And I do think that some of these services really did distort the market. You know, when Apple decided that they were going to get into music and they were going to be able to compete on unfair terms because all the other music streamers had to pay them a significant percentage of their revenue just to be on the app store. And Apple didn't have to do that. Spotify freaked out so much they said, 'Well, I guess we're going to have to own the entire podcast market and also start selling audiobooks.' And so decisions like that that Cook made wound up having these huge ripples throughout the industry that I actually do not think were positive overall.
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's a piece where maybe Cook could have done a little better during his tenure. What else do you think Tim Cook did well?
Well, I think that it really is notable how successfully Apple was able to avoid scandal under his tenure. You know, CEOs rarely get credit for the things that don't happen under them, but like look at the problems that like Facebook/Meta had over the past 15 years. Look at even the issues that Google had to deal with with various employee revolts about, you know, a number of different things. Tim Cook like oversaw some labor struggles. The company's been accused of union busting, but like for the most part, there was never any giant gnarly scandal that Apple had to address under his tenure, with of course the one exception in 2014 when they put the new U2 album on everyone's iCloud account. Other than that, I think Tim Cook really kept his nose clean.
Wait, that was a Tim Cook thing.
That was, yeah, that happened three years into his tenure. Wow. And that rascal Bono convinced him to put Songs of Innocence into the hands of something like 500 million people.
What's your favorite song off Songs of Innocence, by the way?
I have like that album has started autoplaying in my car so many times over the years.
It is just there. So that album became very well known, but not for perhaps the reason that Bono thought, right?
Yeah. No, I think this is a good point. Not a lot of major scandals. I think at a time when mistrust in big tech is quite high and rising, I think that Cook managed to keep Apple kind of above the fray. And I think, you know, has done a remarkable job of becoming sort of the most trusted name in tech, which is not saying much. It's like a little bit of a mixed compliment, but I think people still do trust Apple in part because of the privacy stuff that they've done under Cook's leadership.
Yeah. And like for what it's worth, like you could see how this could have gone badly for them. Like think about all, you know, the screen time debates that we had over the past 15 years. All of the issues that people have with all the social media companies, like some of that could have come back on Apple. People could have gone after Apple and said, 'Hey, why are you like letting all these apps in your app stores? Weren't you developing like real screen time controls and parental controls?' And all that stuff just slid right off them.
Yeah. Okay, let's talk about some of the lowlights of Tim Cook's tenure. Casey, or as one unknown member of our staff wrote in our prep document, okay, now let's talk some about this diva.
That was actually a quote from you in the editorial meeting.
Oh, okay. Because I read that and I was like, I like the attitude. I didn't realize I was just being quoted there. All right, Casey, what are the lowlights of Tim Cook's tenure at Apple?
Yeah, so there are a few that always come up. Number one is probably that under Cook, Apple just became hugely dependent on China to do its manufacturing, which to be clear, for most of the time that he worked at Apple was a boon to the company. They built this supply chain that was the envy of the industry. They were able to create these just-in-time processes, essentially creating iPhones soon after they were ordered so they didn't have a bunch of inventory like lingering and losing value. And so like the logistics were just very good. Like a new iPhone came out and even though, you know, millions and millions of people would want them, you could still get yours within a couple of weeks and relatively affordably, I would argue, you know, based on what you get out of, you know, a phone that you own for maybe four or five years. So all of that was really, really great. And then geopolitics change, right? And the United States and China started to have a much more contentious relationship. Donald Trump takes office, becomes obsessed with the idea of tariffs, and all of a sudden this becomes this huge vulnerability for Cook because now his entire supply chain is located in this country that is an adversary of the United States and where these massive tariffs are being threatened. And so that required Cook to kind of contort himself into various unflattering shapes in order to preserve the logistics network that he had lovingly crafted.
Yeah, I think that's true. And it's not easy to pivot once you have sort of established a dependency like that. They've been trying to like spread their manufacturing around to Vietnam and other countries. But it's just really hard once you have kind of gotten addicted to the efficiency of that supply chain.
Yes. Talking about this diva, item number two, the Titan Project. So the Titan Project was Apple's $10 billion effort to build a self-driving car, which I think was instinctively something that honestly a lot of people really wanted, right? Like when I heard that Apple was building a car, like I definitely wanted to see it. I definitely wanted to test drive it. I definitely wanted to see if Songs of Innocence would autoplay when I turned the key in the ignition, but they canceled the project in 2024. And I'm curious what you make of their misadventures in automobiles.
I mean, I think this was a big miss for Apple. I think they spent, you know, a ton of money, reportedly more than 10 billion trying to develop a self-driving car. It never got there even to the point that they were like, I just found it notable that they never even got to a prototype. It was not like they came out with something or at least like mocked up something and people didn't like it. It was like they didn't even get over the first hurdle of building something that actually worked. And I think maybe they just didn't focus on it enough because it wasn't existential to them. It was kind of this other sort of side bet. And if it had been like the new iPhone in terms of its importance to Apple's future, they might have tried a little harder.
Well, do you think that they would have been able to at least get to the prototype stage, Kevin, if they'd been able to use cloud code?
Like, I think that's a funny joke, but I also think there is something real here, which is that like the key part of a self-driving car is not the hardware.
It is the software. And I think Apple has become, you know, the uncontested leader in consumer hardware, but when it comes to software and especially software like AI that runs the self-driving cars and all the other stuff, like they have just never sort of bet on that in a way that has allowed them to succeed. So, I actually think that that was probably a software flop more than a hardware flop. I'm sure they could have designed a beautiful car, but like to have it be safe, to have people want to get in it, it really has to like have the best software in it.
That's true. And I also think that Cook probably deserves some credit for pulling the plug on something that just clearly wasn't working. Like for what it's worth, at $10 billion, Cook spent roughly an eighth of what Mark Zuckerberg spent trying to build the metaverse.
True. So I think you could argue that Tim Cook got a bargain there.
Well, speaking of the metaverse, let's talk about Tim Cook's other big flop, which was the Apple Vision Pro.
Yeah, it didn't work in the way that they were hoping. But here's the thing. I don't actually want to ding Apple too much for it because I thought it was kind of cool. It wasn't cool in the way that made me think I want one of these, but like I was glad it existed and they were working on it. And you know, I think as we said at the time, like the first Apple Watch was not a big hit. I didn't buy an Apple Watch until the third or fourth version. I sort of assumed the same thing would happen with the Vision Pro. At this point, I don't know if we're going to get to the fourth version of a Vision Pro. But, you know, in the meantime, yes, it is undeniable that this was not a hit.
Yes. And I think the Apple Vision Pro flop points to I would say the biggest sort of macro miss of Tim Cook's tenure as CEO, which was that they didn't find the next platform, right? This was sort of the question hovering over Apple for the last decade or so is like what is the next iPhone and what is the next sort of general purpose computing platform? And I think they had hoped that that would be the Vision Pro. It turns out it wasn't. But I think there was a chance that Apple would have developed the next big thing and I don't think they have. And this is just a case of being a victim of your own success. Like the iPhone in this moment is still arguably like the most important computing platform in the world. Whichever company makes the most important computing platform in the world and the most financially successful one is never the company that invents the next big thing. They have no incentive to, right? It's, you know, it's the classic sort of innovator's dilemma, but also there's really nobody nipping at their heels. Like, yes, Android exists. You know, there are some manufacturers that have some success there, but Apple has very little incentive to try to go out and disrupt themselves. We should also talk about the fact that under Tim Cook's tenure, Apple has become what I would consider an AI laggard, right? They are not a frontier AI model company. Their own AI efforts under the banner of Apple Intelligence have been sort of delayed over and over again. They have not managed to give Siri the sort of brain transplant that they have been teasing now for years. And I think it is fair to say that they are behind when it comes to AI and all AI related things.
Yeah. And I think on one level it's not clear to me that it has cost them anything yet, right? Like nobody is buying another product besides an iPhone or a Mac because of an AI related reason. And I think until that happens, you're not going to see them scrambling here. At the same time, like every day now, I use AI apps that just do things for me on my phone that seem clearly like things Siri should be able to do, right? Because Siri is integrated at that operating system level. It already has the access that it needs and I wind up having to do all these workarounds just to do these things that are now possible through the state of the art. So there is a huge missed opportunity there. It has not yet cost Apple and I think maybe the biggest question for John Turnis as he becomes a CEO is if and when it does start to cost them.
Yeah. And like how would it cost them? Would it look like a new smartphone coming up that just has much better AI integration into it? Is it going to look like some totally new thing that is the sort of the device form factor for AI? Like what do you anticipate?
Sure. I mean, so just look at all of OpenAI's hardware efforts, right? Being led in part by Jony Ive, who is a former Apple guy and knows their playbook from back to front. It is not inconceivable to me that they could come up with something that you put on your desk or a pin that you wear on your sweater. And maybe for whatever reason that means that you decide not to buy an Apple Watch or you decide not to buy your iPod. So, you know, as you sort of said a moment ago, like it's not clear to me that something's going to come along to disrupt the iPhone anytime soon, but you could start to see how AI could chip away at some of these accessories that are around the iPhone. And that might be how we eventually start to see some cracks in Apple's armor.
Yeah. And I think it's useful to contrast them with Google who did make early bets on AI and obviously they were sort of late to the ChatGPT thing. They have sort of spent the past few years racing to catch up. But they have built out their own hardware ecosystem for AI. They have built out their own AI training chips. They have made serious investments at the model level in making like Gemini a state-of-the-art model. And now Apple has to pay Google for Gemini because it can't build a better version of Siri themselves. So I think it really creates like a new set of dependencies for Apple if AI is going to become the long-term next platform shift that everyone is building on.
Yeah, that's true. Flip side, licensing Gemini is incredibly cheaper than building your own frontier large language model.
True. True. That's true. And I think Cook's bet was that they could sort of wait out all of the sort of expensive early stages of the AI boom and just kind of wait until these models become commoditized and then kind of use them and not, you know, plow hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers and chips to start training their own foundation models. And I think so far that is sort of a mixed thing. I think one thing that has happened under Cook's tenure is that most of the cutting edge AI research now happens at other places, right? It has become very hard for Apple to recruit and retain the most sort of cracked AI engineers and researchers because they are just not an AI company in any meaningful way.
Okay, Casey, is there anything else from Cook's tenure that you want to put on the negative side of the ledger?
Yeah, I'm just not sure that history will remember Tim Cook's relationship with President Trump all that fondly. Right. Tim Cook presented Trump with a golden glass statue in August 2025 while he was seeking tariff relief in what just appeared to be an obvious bribe right out in the open. By the way, he did get that tariff relief, so it worked. Tim Cook also attended the VIP screening of Melania, which again when I said this man would do anything for his company, I think that is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. And also I think he was notably muted during moments of public outcry when some of his own employees were demanding that he make a statement such as when we had those fatal shootings by federal immigration agents. Or more importantly because it was more relevant to his platform in my view when people were using Elon Musk's Grok to remove clothing from women and children. Apple did not pull X from the app store or really even make any public comment until eventually some senators started making inquiries. So there was just a lot that Tim Cook was doing in the background to curry favor with the administration. And notably this seems like it will continue to be his main job at Apple. Right? If you looked at the message that Apple put out in announcing his ascendancy to become executive chairman, it said he's, you know, still going to be interfacing with public officials or some words to that effect. And it just became very clear that like Tim Cook is Trump's guy. And in fact, President Trump put out an incredible statement about Tim Cook where he's essentially bragging about how nice he felt about himself when Tim Cook called him when Trump first became president to, and here I am quoting President Trump, 'Kiss my ass.'
Well, at least he's seeing the dynamics clearly. I mean, look, I think there's a case to be made that this was an incredibly successful set of political maneuvers from Tim Cook. It may have saved them billions of dollars in tariffs.
To be clear, if the only thing that is important to you is Apple's stock price, this was the right thing to do. I am just proposing that we might want to have other values in our society.
Yeah. Particularly somebody who has spent a lot of time talking about, you know, human rights and Apple's, you know, place in the great march toward progress. You know, I think there is some hypocrisy there.
Yeah, I think there were certainly moments of spinelessness and this is one case in which like I don't like the thing that people do all the time where they go like what would Steve Jobs have done, but I think, you know, this might be a set of circumstances that he would have navigated differently.
Yeah, this feels like some, you know, John Gruber wrote in Daring Fireball that, you know, and Gruber who's followed the company as closely as anybody over the past 20 years. He just wrote like the stuff that Tim Cook did to curry favor with Donald Trump, Steve Jobs absolutely would not have done. And, you know, I think that is something that people really liked about the old Apple and I think something that people probably like less about the new Apple.
Yeah. Okay, that's enough about Tim Cook. Let's talk about John Turnis.
Now Kevin, do you want to take a moment to gloat here?
Well, sort of because I did predict in our predictions episode this year that Apple would find a new CEO.
Do we have a clip of that? Because I don't really remember that.
Yeah, let's play the clip. Okay. My low confidence prediction for 2026 is that Apple will replace Tim Cook after his retirement with an outside CEO. Okay. Cut the clips. Cut the...
I like that you wanted to cut it after you said the part of your prediction that came true, but before you said the part of your prediction that turned out not to be true.
Yeah, I got this one I would say half right. Obviously the part about an outside CEO is not correct. I had some kind of weird wildcard picks. Jony Ive, Brian Chesky, Mira Murati. None of those were even close to in the running from what I can tell.
When you said those names during our predictions episode, I thought you might have a fever. I almost called the doctor.
Well, this is why it was my low confidence prediction, but they did make the change and they went with kind of the safe internal hire on this. They did not try to sort of blow up their entire succession plan and bring in someone from the outside.
Yeah. And I mean I think that just speaks to the fundamental conservatism of Apple, right? This is a company that is emphasizing stability above all. As I have said, they have arguably the world's most important and lucrative platform under their control. They do not want to upset that apple cart. And I think a big question for Turnis is, you know, let's say we look back three years from now. Was stability actually the thing that they needed? They just had 15 years of stability under Tim Cook and it worked out pretty well for them. I think the interesting question is are we in a different moment now?
Yeah. So I think the first thing to know about Turnis is that he is a hardware guy. I think a lot of people expected Craig Federighi, the sort of software leader at Apple, to take over at various points during Cook's tenure. But I think by going with Turnis, Apple has signified that there is something about his hardware background that is very important to them. He was part of the team behind the release of the AirPods. He was also part of the team behind the Apple Silicon bet and making their own chips. And he's sort of one of these behind-the-scenes hardware development guys. And I wonder if you think there's anything meaningful that we can draw from that.
Well, I mean, I don't really know. I've also read that he likes racing cars. Like that's his big hobby. And if he's a hardware guy who likes racing cars, does that Apple car project ever come back? Probably not. But it's fun to think about.
Yeah, I think this is an important strategic signal about where Apple thinks its future is. I would not be surprised if under Turnis they just lean into being a hardware company and maybe scale back on some of these other bets, these software projects, Apple TV, the sort of flashier but less profitable parts of their business. I would not be surprised if they really double down on being the hardware company and continuing to make the best hardware that all the other software can run on. Do you think that's likely?
Well, I just don't think it's enough. You know, I think that Apple has already reached at least in the United States most of the people who will buy iPhones, right? At least people who are not children who can't afford them yet. And so it won't just be enough to be like, 'Hey, I'm the CEO of Apple and my mission is to keep making computers and tablets and phones.' You know, it has to be a little something more than that. The nice thing about the services business from a purely financial point is that the margins are very good on it. So, they're going to have to do a mix of things here. But, you know, I'm very curious to see to the extent that John Turnis has any larger vision for Apple what it might be.
Should we end with some unsolicited advice for John Turnis as he tries to turn us over a new leaf at Apple?
Sure. I think that if John Turnis wanted to get the entire world to be like, 'Okay, this guy can cook, if you will,' in the next one year, he should fix Siri. Like, if I were him, that's the project that I would go after. It would surprise people because it's not a hardware project. It's clearly a very difficult thing to do. And yet, if he could do it, just get Siri to essentially do all of the things in that vaporware ad that Apple showed off a couple years ago, if he just gets them to that level, I think people will think, okay, like the company has turned over a new leaf. So, that would be my advice for him.
Yeah, that's good. My advice to John Turnis, make some damn glasses. I recently had to buy a pair of Meta Ray-Ban glasses before our family trip to Disney World. And at every point through the checkout process, I was spiteful and resentful that I had to buy these from Meta and not Apple. I think this is a big miss for them in the hardware category. They spent all their time and resources and energy on the Vision Pro. They did not make something that was just simpler and fit into an existing glasses frame and could take pictures and video and upload them to your phone. That is now something they are reportedly working on. But I would like to see him knock this one out of the park. Because I would be an enthusiastic customer of Apple glasses. I imagine that lots of other people would be too.
I think that is a wonderful vision for Apple. A Vision Pro, if you will.
Still a sore subject over there.
Well, Casey, I'm very excited for our guest today. Andrew Yang is here, the former presidential candidate who ran in 2020 on a platform of giving a universal basic income to millions of Americans to cope with the threat of looming automation. And I saw also that you wrote about this topic this week, the return of UBI.
UBI is so back. Yeah, you know, I just noticed that various players in the AI space, some of whom are opposed to each other in various ways, seem to all be coming around to UBI at the same time. So Elon Musk did a post about this on X, saying he endorsed some form of UBI.
He called it universal high income.
Yeah. Which sounds better than universal basic income. So I'd love to learn more. OpenAI recently put out a policy paper in which they call for their own form of UBI. And Alex Bores, who is this candidate for Congress in New York, who has come to prominence in part because the AI industry is investing millions of dollars to defeat him. Because he sponsored what in my view is like a very gentle AI regulation in New York. He also put out a policy platform that calls for what he calls an AI dividend. So if you're on the right like Musk or on the left like Bores or just sort of like a corporate technocrat like OpenAI, everyone seems to be coming around to UBI at the same time.
Yeah. So we thought it was a great week to talk to Andrew Yang, who I think is more associated with this idea of universal basic income than probably anyone else in the world. It was the central plank of his 2020 presidential run and he called it the freedom dividend. So, we thought it'd be a good time to catch up with him, see what he's up to, and how he's thinking about the idea of UBI these days.
All right. Well, let's bring him in, see what he has to say. Let's bring in Andrew Yang. Andrew Yang, welcome to Hard Fork.
Thanks for having me, Kevin and Casey.
It has now been, Andrew, eight years since the fateful first time we met when I was a plucky young tech columnist and you were an unknown longshot person who had just decided to run for president on a platform of universal basic income to protect us against the oncoming AI job apocalypse. Do you remember that article as well as I do?
Oh, of course I do. It launched my rise to the White House. That's why we're beaming in from the Oval Office right now.
That's the power of a Kevin's article.
Yes. But I want to sort of take a trip down memory lane to start today because I think when you were running, I was writing a book about AI and the potential for job loss. And I think one thing that you and I share was that we were both just too early. Like I think the conversation around AI in 2018 was largely speculative. The models had not gotten good yet. They were not doing anyone's job yet. And I think you and I both sort of thought that it would someday. But I'm curious, like do you agree with that framing that like you were right about the effects of AI on the job market, but you were just like, you know, seven or eight years too early?
Dude, in my mind we were right on time. Because the goal was to get ahead of it, to warn people that this was coming. It was a freight train coming down the tracks. You were correct. I feel I was correct. And I wish we were doing more right now. As it is, AI is in position to suck many, many office parks dry. A lot of kids are going to go home to their parents wondering where the heck the jobs went. And so the time to do something about this, in my opinion, was 2020.
For those who are less familiar with your rise, tell us a little bit about what was going on in 2018 that made you say we need to get a handle on this because of course that's still, you know, several years before the launch of ChatGPT and other products that I think got folks to take this more seriously.
Yeah. I dug into why I thought Donald Trump won in 2016, which is what activated me. And I concluded that the reason he became president was that we had automated away millions of manufacturing jobs that were based in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, all states he won. And that my friends in Silicon Valley said, 'Hey, we're working on innovations that are going to do a number on retail workers and call center workers and eventually truck drivers.' We were in the second or third inning of the most profound economic transformation in the history of the world. And by the time you get to inning six or seven, it's madness. And so that's what got me into public life. I will confess to you all, I did not expect to become president. I'm not gnashing my teeth right now like, oh, you mean like, you know, I'm not president. I mean, my goal was to be the Paul Revere of AI and automation and galvanize energy around meaningful solutions. And I will tell you guys, my phone's ringing off the hook now because a lot of folks are calling me saying, 'What the heck do we do?'
Yeah. I mean, one interesting thing about your thesis that was also part of my thesis at the time that I think we both got wrong, if we're being honest, was I think we mostly thought of this as a phenomenon that was going to happen to people like truckers and retail workers. But the actual disruption from AI so far at least seems to be hitting like coders and paralegals and college educated knowledge workers who might have gone into fields like management consulting or finance. Has that surprised you as much as I think it has surprised a lot of people?
Yeah, there's a chapter in my book saying white collar jobs will be automated too. But I agree with you on the campaign trail I wasn't talking about that and I actually find myself thinking would I have talked about that even if I'd seen it coming because it's not as sympathetic honestly in a political setting to talk about whippersnappers getting sent home and not being able to become, you know, office workers. I sat with an AI executive for dinner the other night and he said I didn't know we were going to do language first. I didn't know that that's what was going to happen. And then if you knew you're going to do language first, then it follows that paralegals and the rest of it are in the crosshairs. So I'm with you, Kevin, that if you'd asked me then what the sequencing was going to be, I would have said unclear, but I wasn't trying to raise the alarm about this particular population.
So like if you were trying to build a political coalition today, knowing what we know now about what jobs AI actually is going to threaten first, like how would you go about it?
Yeah. So, the biggest thing to me is you have to try and go cross-cultural and cross-partisan, nonpartisan. Because our country's been sliced and diced and so thoroughly gerrymandered. Some of the stats I like to cite for people because they're depressing but fun, is that Congress has a 16% approval rating right now and incumbent members have a 94% re-election rate.
So it's like a restaurant where people hate 84% of the food but the menu never changes.
And so that's where people are getting stuck. There are folks who think that the answer is going to come from within the existing parties. I'm very dubious of that approach for a host of reasons. I think that you have to be able to bring together, to your point, Kevin, the junior coder who just lost his job with the trucker who's going to lose his job, or the manufacturing worker who has already lost their job as well.
So, I'm curious the degree to which you think that is already happening. When I look at the backlash that we've seen against AI in recent months, it strikes me as already being pretty bipartisan, right? Like when I see the backlash to the data centers, I don't see that as like a group of Republicans who have gotten together. I see that as just like people who are mad about what is happening in their community. So is that your view as well? And what opportunities do you think that creates for politicians?
Yeah, AI's approval rating is 26% which is lower than ISIS or just about any other unpopular institution you can think of. People hate this stuff.
And the tech CEOs have realized that they are very, very hated. And so now you're seeing some of them be like, "Yo, wait a minute. No, no, like we'll do something good for lots of people that aren't just us." And there are people who are rejecting data centers in their communities. There are people from both parties who are saying, I was going to joke, not in my backyard, but that is truly what they're saying in many cases. And that's livability more than ideology.
But also I disagree. I think it is ideology. I think data centers are just like a visible artifact of AI. And if you can stop one from being built, you feel like you've done your part to stop AI.
Well, I think a lot of them don't want the higher electric bills. They don't want the giant structure that they think might emanate something.
They don't want water heading to the cooling system instead of their sprinklers, you know, like that. That's what I meant. And they might not like the fact that they're being replaced, which is the energy around a lot of this conversation. Yeah.
Casey had a newsletter this week about the sort of return and renaissance of UBI. Now, people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are talking about some sort of basic income. Some people are talking about universal high income. There seems to have been kind of a recent resurgence of interest in this idea. How do you feel about that?
I feel great about it because it's obvious, it's inevitable. We need to tax AI and then start distributing the gains as quickly and broadly to the American people as we can. Poverty should be an artifact of the past. GDP is going to roar past $100,000 ahead. And at that point, you should be able to put more into people's hands. AI is going to compound with our current economic system and form economic inequality on an epic, unprecedented scale. I mean, we're going to have our first trillionaire. You know, like the folks in the top stratum of American life are just going to get richer and richer. It's going to compound over itself and then there are going to be a lot of families wondering what the heck happened. My kids studied hard. There's no job. They have these school loans. They're in my basement. They're getting depressed. And so some version of universal income of any level is going to be necessary to reform an economy that people actually find at all satisfying or fulfilling.
Talk a little bit about how you would design that program today. Like is it any different than the one that you proposed years ago and how does it compare to maybe some of the very rough proposals we've seen from folks like OpenAI or Elon Musk?
Yeah, I love the way the conversation's going in part and I do believe it's enlightened self-interest on the part of some of the AI firms and the individuals where they look at it and be like, "Wow, we're deeply unpopular. What can I do about this? Like let me put some money aside and see if we can't get people feeling differently about..."
They are discovering a trick that politicians have been using for hundreds of years.
Yeah. This is sort of like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. It's like, here's your oil money, friends.
Right. But this is where I'm angry at our current legislators and the rest of it. You had Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, say you should tax us. You should put a token tax on. He even put a number on it. He said 3% token tax. Now you might say it's too low, whatever. But the fact that legislators aren't tripping over themselves to be like, sure, you know, I mean it's like found money. Let's go. And then take that money and you could do a lot of things with it. I mean, you know, and then you could extrapolate that across OpenAI and Grok and the rest of it. I mean, there should 100% be an AI tax. It should be going out to people and workers in various ways. We should try and find ways to get off of taxing human labor. We're going to be trying to encourage job type arrangements in every quarter and right now income tax is a discouraging factor on both the employer and the worker. So tax AI, tax the bots, don't tax humans. And the way I would do a universal basic income if any of them come to me and you know, is I would do some amount like $1,200 a month for every American and just start paying it out as quickly as you can and let them know, look, this is from the gains of AI and that would improve the attitude towards AI very, very quickly because the average American doesn't see themselves benefiting. But if they actually felt it in their bank account then they would actually be pretty positive about it.
Yeah. I want to talk about how UBI may or may not change perception because I think again as I first started to write about this, UBI seemed like a kind of elegant solution to a number of problems that we have just been discussing. And yet when I think about it and frankly when I just talk to people who don't like AI, while they have very real economic anxieties, I don't think that it is exclusively about the money that their job is providing, right? Like a job gives people other things. It gives them a place to go during the day, gives them a sense of belonging, gives them a sense of meaning in their lives. And so while I'm sure they would rather have the check than not have the check, I'm wondering if the loss of all of those other things is going to result in them ultimately not being all that happy, you know, with AI companies even after the checks start rolling out.
So one of the misconceptions for me about UBI is thinking that a check actually replaces a job. I mean a job is structure, purpose, fulfillment, community, place to go in the morning, training, value, like all of those things. And so to me, the major question that we face is how do you have millions of Americans get all of those things at a time when our labor becomes more and more irrelevant? And to me, there are two directional paths you could take. One is we're going to put money into everyone's hands and then you are going to start businesses, start nonprofits, start sewing clubs, start whatever the heck you want that ends up creating this structure, purpose, fulfillment, community that you want or we have the government try and do those things. And I got in an argument with Bernie Sanders about this back in 2020 where he was like, you know, no UBI, like governments just guarantee a job for everyone. And then I said, "Do you want to give everyone gray overalls and a pickaxe while you're at it?" Like, you know, those government jobs would end up being like in my mind kind of like paternalistic and dehumanizing. I would much prefer that individuals and communities start stuff that reflects them and their values and their aspirations rather than the public sector tries to step in and provide all of that wholesale.
I think one interesting shift that I've observed is that just this job loss conversation has, I think, not gotten enough attention until very recently when it started to actually appear in some economic data and part of that is because I think the existential risk debate has really dominated at least out here in Silicon Valley. How seriously do you take those threats?
I take them seriously. I see them as low probability, very, very high impact. And then the other one is in my mind near 100% probability and also high impact like around economy and jobs. It's happening now. So I tend to focus more on that one. But I take the existential concerns to heart. And I think that we should be making big moves in that direction too. One of the unfortunate dynamics now is that you know you have the national security apparatus getting involved and entangled with some of these. You do not want AI making decisions around using lethal force or weaponry. They tend to escalate quickly. It's like that Anchorman. It's like, well, that escalated quickly. Like I think if you have an AI in charge like or even worse yet two AIs in charge then you can find yourselves in nuclear conflict faster than we'd like to think.
Something that I struggle with is that when I look at human history, I see technology as a mostly positive force, you know, like I'm not one of these people that wishes we still lived in an agrarian economy. I love the fact that we have like vaccines and iPads. And yet I really empathize with the people who look at the tech industry right now and think these people are out to get me. And it's making me wonder how this plays out politically over the next couple of years. Do you think there is a winning political argument that embraces the potential of tech in some way or are the facts on the ground right now just so bad for the tech industry that the path to victory lies in tearing down tech?
I think we've got a window of opportunity, Casey, to see whether there's like a needle to be threaded or a grand compromise or a coming together. I actually feel like punting this question to Kevin because he's from the Midwest and I feel like if you go and visit the Midwest and walk around, you're like, "Okay, like I kind of see where these attitudes are coming from, but we don't have unlimited time. That is for sure." And one of the things I try and say to folks, look, it's not left or right. It is top or bottom and at this point, the vast majority of Americans see themselves looking up at this thing.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think I understand the anxiety that a lot of people feel in places like the Midwest or in other parts of the country or even here in San Francisco. Like I think there are a lot of people who are worried for rational reasons. This stuff is replacing jobs already. It may not be showing up in all of the economic data, but you know we have covered on the show companies that are laying off workers and saying it's because of AI. So...
Tens of thousands of them.
