Apple CEO Tim Cook Turns Heads After Telling People To Get Off Their Phones And Spend Their Day 'In Nature'

Tim Cook, you know—the CEO of Apple who makes all these iPhones we're all carrying—wants us all to stop spending so much time on our iPhones and go outside. Okay then!

That's what Cook told Good Morning America host Michael Strahan during a recent interview in which he lamented people "scrolling endlessly" instead of enjoying nature.

Which is a bit like the CEO of McDonald's lamenting people's poor nutrition. Or the Bank of America CEO lamenting the ubiquity of bank fees.

Anyway! Naturally, the internet has collectively been like "lolwat" at Cook's bizarre comments. As one person on X joked, "drug dealer thinks people should take less drugs."

Cook told Strahan that he is worried about how much time we're all spending on our phones, which he thinks has gone overboard.

Cook said:

"I don’t want people using them too much."

"I don't want people looking at their smartphone more than they're looking in someone's eyes."

"If they are just scrolling endlessly, this is not the way you want to spend your day. Go out and spend it in nature."

As you likely know, smartphones, screens in general, and all the apps and social media on them have been pretty conclusively proven to be addictive and disruptive to our circadian rhythms in ways that can exacerbate mental health issues.

And tech insiders have openly admitted that social media apps as well as the iPhone itself are quite literally designed to be addictive.

So coming from the CEO of the biggest smartphone-addiction company on Earth, this is pretty rich!

And given that a CEO's primary job is to promote his company, many couldn't help but assume that this was the soft launch of an Apple version of Meta's dystopian wearable glasses.

As one Redditor put it:

"This is a hint to a coming product that will let you look at the world (glasses? meta/rayban direction?) who knows!"—u/BarryMcKokinor

But others suspect it's about a far more likely—and cynical—gambit: an effort to distance himself and Apple from PR or even legal liability as public sentiment toward tech and social media begins to shift amid mental health and privacy concerns.

Backlash against phones, tech, and social media is growing even among the youngest adults of Gen Z as these concerns mount, and many felt this was Cook's way of getting out ahead of that controversy.

As another Redditor put it:

"He might just be trying to distance the brand from the impending screen backlash by being like 'but it's not the screen manufacturer to be clear! Blame the apps that we also profit off.'"—u/SpecialGarlic1203

It's hard not to see this as eerily similar, for example, to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's declaration last year that no one should "trust" ChatGPT, which he said during a public appearance that just happened to coincide with several viral stories about a new affliction call "AI psychosis" resulting from ChatGPT's "dangerously" sycophantic programming.

Whatever the case, the internet was not buying Cook's pronouncements about the value of putting down your phone and touching grass.

Anyway folks, you heard it here first: The phone man says you should do less phone. You're welcome!