Will Trump’s Fed nominee do the president's bidding?

0:01Kara Swisher:WBUR Podcasts, Boston. It's still a pretty independent organization, but it's not despite what the president wants. Kevin Warsh says he's not going to be Trump's sock puppet if he's confirmed as chair of the Federal Reserve.

0:28it's tuesday april 21st and this is here and now anytime from npr and wbur i'm chris bentley

0:38today on the show a big shake-up at apple as longtime ceo tim cook announces he will step down. What does it mean for the company and for the placement of this show in the Apple podcast rankings? All right, well, we'll answer at least one of those questions in a few minutes. Also, a 250 million year old surprise in our ancient family tree. This thing that I've held in my hand might have been the first direct evidence of an egg. How about that? But first, if you want to be the Fed chair, first you've got to sit in the hot seat. At a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee, that is, President Trump's pick to run the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, had his confirmation hearing today.

1:24To the President, to the Congress, the nation, I owe my best judgment and my most faithful efforts in serving the mission that you and Congress assigned to the Federal Reserve, including full employment and stable prices. Warsh told senators that he would keep the Fed independent despite political pressure from the White House. Kimberly Adams was watching the hearing. She's senior Washington correspondent for Marketplace, and she spoke to Scott Tong.

1:53Kara Swisher:I mean, there's so much pressure. The president is very openly saying anywhere people will listen to him talk about the Fed, that he wants the Fed to be lowering interest rates. And current chair Jay Powell has been very firm in saying that he will not allow the president to influence his decision and the decisions of the Federal Open Market Committee more broadly. But at the same time, the White House and the DOJ has launched an investigation into the Fed, particularly revolving around cost overruns on a renovation. And this has caused so much consternation within Congress and at the Fed that Senator Tom Tillis, who's on the banking committee, has said that he would not vote to advance the nomination until this investigation is resolved.

2:35Right. And into this cauldron comes Kevin Warsh, the nominee. He's a former Fed governor. He's worked on Wall Street. Where did senators really press him, either on the pressure from President Trump or his record?

2:49Kara Swisher:So there were a couple of really key points that, especially the Democratic senators who were less amenable, were really pressuring him on. Number one was, as you said, Fed independence. There were lots of different versions of the question of how you would stand firm against the president. Senator Warren even asked him early in the hearing to just answer simple questions like, do you believe that the president lost the election? Can you disagree with the president on any one particular economic policy point? And he kind of danced it. Well, he did dance around those questions. Also, he received a lot of very pointed questions about his financial disclosures.

3:26Kara Swisher:He's a very wealthy man and has a lot of ties. He has a deal with the Office of Government Ethics to divest of some very substantial holdings if he is confirmed. But that did not meet the satisfaction of a lot of the senators on the committee. And then also he received some really key questions about his stance on inflation and the Fed's role and when it should raise rates and when it should cut rates with some accusations that he's kind of flip-flopped on that in the past. Right, right. And he was known for a long time as an inflation hawk during his time at the Fed. The question is, is he still now or has he changed?

4:02Today at the hearing, Kevin Warsh blamed the Fed's decision-making during the Biden administration. What did he say?

4:09Kara Swisher:He was talking about the fact that the Biden administration, under the Biden administration, the Fed really waited too long to raise interest rates. Folks might remember this when they were talking about the transitory inflation. And so the Fed didn't really want to kick up rates because they said, oh, this inflation that we're seeing is just short term. And one of the reasons that the Fed held back on raising interest rates, even though we were starting to see the economy start to recover after the pandemic, was because there was a lot of concern that marginalized groups, particularly people of color, women, some of the groups that tend to have job gains the last, were not necessarily seeing that broad economic recovery.

4:48Kara Swisher:And so the Fed was very intentional about holding back on raising rates until, as I said at the time, the economic expansion reached more broadly. And the Republican senators, as well as nominee Warsh, were talking about the Fed kind of stepping outside of its lane into a bit of social engineering, accusing it of being DEI, and then that causing some of the Fed's delayed response to the inflation that we later saw being very high. Echoes of Warsh, the inflation hawk kind of talking there. Finally, you know, in this administration, there has been criticism about institutions being politicized, the Justice Department, the Supreme Court.

5:26Those are not your beat. But what are observers saying about the Fed? Are there signs it has become more politicized or no?

5:35Kara Swisher:Most of the observers will say that it's still a pretty independent organization, but that it's not despite what the president wants. I mean, there's the investigation into Lisa Cook that is happening that's already at the Supreme Court. There's a question of whether or not he could fire the Fed chair. And so the Fed is under a lot of pressures and on the verge of being a lot more political. Kimberly Adams, senior Washington correspondent at the public radio show Marketplace and the host of the Marketplace podcast, Make Me Smart. Kimberly, thank you. Thanks, Scott. Well, there's also a change in leadership coming for a company that's a pillar of the economy in its own right.

6:15Tim Cook is stepping down after 15 years as the CEO of Apple. Measured in splashy Apple product launches, his tenure lasted from the iPhone 4S through the iPhone 17. So what's Tim Cook's legacy? And what does the new guy plan to do with one of the world's biggest companies? David Fulkenflick talks with tech podcaster Kara Swisher in a moment.

6:48Dean Russell here. I've always been curious about our world. When I was a kid, science and stories were kind of my thing. And today, as a journalist and podcast producer, I still count on both those things for answers and for inspiration. That's why I'm proud to share our new series with you, The Midnight Rebellion. It's a story about climate change and choice. I would have loved it as a kid. Find us this Earth Day wherever you get your podcasts. This message comes from Betterment. You know when you sell a stock or any investing asset and start to feel the dread of getting a surprise tax bill?

7:25Betterment's Tax Impact Preview Tool shows you the estimated tax impact of the sale, so you can make informed, tax-smart investing decisions.

7:34Kara Swisher:Get started today at Betterment.com.

7:47Most corporate CEO shifts don't ruffle people as they go about their daily lives. But if you have an iPhone in your pocket or an Apple Watch on your wrist, you might just well be drawn in by the news that Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple's CEO. He's passing the baton to senior vice president of hardware engineering John Ternus in September. So let's take a look at how Cook has led and defined one of the most influential companies in the world. And I'd like to offer a disclosure and reminder, Apple is a financial supporter of NPR. We're joined now by technology writer and podcaster Cara Swisher, who has covered Apple for a real long time.

8:21Hey, Cara.

8:23Kara Swisher:Hi. Did you just call me old? But that's okay. I did not. I did not. Check the tape. Tim Cook took over shortly before Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs died. Cook has now led Apple for 15 years, replacing a visionary, a master of branding, but also of defining what Apple was. What did Cook build? What was distinct about his term? In a way, obviously, it was a follow of Steve Jobs because he was his acolyte and his handpicked successor, obviously. So there is the extension of the Steve Jobs legacy because the same team is in place, really, almost wholly at Apple until this change right now. And so Tim was sort of the heir apparent, essentially.

9:04Kara Swisher:But what he's done is he's like 10 times – made it 10 times more valuable, introduced a wide range of products. There was a lot of worry when Steve Jobs died that it was over, right? As you recall, he wouldn't be able to fix it. Tim was the logistics guy, but he's actually taken it in a lot of important ways that Steve hadn't done. Remind us of some of the products that are now part of everyday conversation and usage that didn't exist until Tim Cook started to lead the company. Well, two critical ones, the AirPods, which everyone sort of remember if you ever made fun of at the time they came out.

9:41Kara Swisher:And then the Apple Watch, of course. And then all manner of hardware, like more hardware, some of which has worked out, some of which has not worked out yet because I always say yet with Apple. but the AirPods alone would be a massive company on their own. Same thing with the watch. And that was both met with a lot of skepticism when he introduced them. He also went in, it seems to me, on content, right? You have Apple News, but you also have Apple TV. How successful a venture has that been for him? Well, it's been a big, big part of the business, but software and services, if you put it together, is a critical part because they've had to not just make hardware, but why do you want to use that hardware, right?

10:21Kara Swisher:They go together. You know, some of their TV stuff has been terrific. Ted Lasso, Severin, stuff like that. They've done a great job on that. And yet you talked about services as well. Are those things like the fitness? Well, that was music, Apple Music. The fit stuff has been okay. But as a whole, it's critically important that you have this Apple ecosystem. The TV stuff is great. It just doesn't make a lot of money. That's all just, you know what I mean? Like it's sort of a sidelight for them. So you use their services. but it's part of the Apple ecosystem. Apple Pay is another thing that Tim had pushed through quite a bit, which is like ubiquitous now.

10:58Kara Swisher:When I first started using it very early, nobody was using it, but now Tap to Pay is critically important to them. You know, there's just a range of things that makes the Apple ecosystem, the Apple ecosystem. And Tim has been great about that, especially because he's a logistics kind of guy. You know, the tech companies are everywhere in our lives. And Apple is such an overwhelming brand. And yet there's been quite a backlash, right? Questions of privacy, questions of usage by kids, the question looming over all of us, the influence of AI. Where does Apple lie? And where do we think Tim Cook's values have taken it in terms of positioning it to address those kinds of issues?

11:37Kara Swisher:Right. Well, Apple's been very proud of it. And that's true. That's absolutely true. So just say that again, if you don't mind. OK, sorry. Apple has been very privacy forward compared to everybody else. It's a low bar, you know, when you have Facebook wandering around stealing everyone's information. But, you know, they've been very forward on that. At the same time, there's been controversies around their manufacturing in China or some issues around encryption, of course. That was a big fight that went on for a while. And some other things, you know, including how we react with our devices. And Apple has been a sort of a side to that because it's mostly been focused on social media and the services, which they don't have a social media company.

12:20Kara Swisher:They tried. They tried under jobs, tried to do something called Ping, which you don't remember. I do not. But, you know, they're part of that ecosystem of where we go. Now, they haven't been heavy into AI investment the way the others have. They're just sort of riding the rails like the rest of us and will take advantage of it. They've tried the glasses and different things, and they're still trying, and that hasn't been a winner yet. And they've obviously, you know, they want to do a lot of home devices. And that's where the new CEO, John Ternus, has been focused in on. And that's, you know, sort of an Apple, a complete Apple environment.

12:54Kara Swisher:They've tried cars. They haven't really gotten there yet. They haven't gotten there. They have a lot of places to go and health and stuff like that. So it's good to have a new CEO to sort of focus on what's next. And one last question. We only really have about 30, 40 seconds for this. But, you know, President Trump posted on Truth Social in praising him, calling Tim Cook an incredible guy. How has Cook managed Trump in comparison to some of his tech rivals? Well, you know, like all the tech rivals, they've licked him up and down. Sorry to say that. But, you know, he gets called Tim Apple, if you remember that name that he had for him.

13:26Kara Swisher:I think it was kind of untoward that he wrote that. I mean, we don't live in an autocracy where we're praising CEOs like the government is doing that. You know, he's kissed up to Trump and has gotten a lot of criticism recently by going to the Melania premiere, giving him that gold statue. I thought he was taking one for the team because in this administration, if you don't do that, you don't get tariff relief or whatever Cook needed. And I think it's been a tarnish of his career, I would say, at the end here, but probably for a reason. We've been talking to technology writer and podcaster Kara Swisher.

13:57You can hear and read her work for Vox Media and New York Magazine, though I'm told she did some stellar work in her cameo in the upcoming Devil Wears Prada, too. Kara, thanks.

14:07Kara Swisher:Thank you. I'm so fashionable. Thank you.

14:14Coming up, birds do it, bees do it. And now, as it turns out, so did our proto-mammalian ancestors. I'm talking about laying eggs. After the break, how a fossil find could rewrite the mammalian family tree. Stick around.

14:43Scientists have discovered that our earliest ancestors as mammals laid eggs. They made the discovery by scanning a 250-million-year-old fossil of an embryo from a mammal-like animal called Lystrosaurus. Caroline Abbott is a paleobiologist with the University of Chicago, where she studies the Lystrosaurus, and she told David Folkenflick the new findings are a pretty big deal. It's pretty exceptional. Honestly, this is the closest we have to positive evidence of eggs from our earliest mammalian ancestors. It's been really hard to figure out when exactly live birth versus egg laying may have come onto the scene.

15:25I've held these specimens, I've looked at them, and getting to have that evidence that actually this thing that I've held in my hand might have been the first direct evidence of an egg. The Lystrosaurus means shovel lizard, which doesn't sound particularly appealing. Why is it called that? So if you look up pictures of this animal, a lot of the reconstructions, honestly, I would say probably don't do these guys justice. But they have a very flat face and this big, deep beak. And so they kind of look like a shovel-faced animal. So they have a bit of a bad rap with their name there, but we love them anyway.

16:04So when they scanned the fossils, this team of researchers, and you were not part of them, but this team of researchers discovered that the embryo's jaws were not completely fused. Why do these researchers say this provides proof that the Lystrosaurus laid eggs. So a lot of animals today that originally come out of eggs, before they hatch, they fuse that lower jaw. And so having a unfused jaw is evidence that this would have been an animal that probably couldn't be using its jaw. So again, animals that have beaks need to come out of their egg using that beak to eat. And so if it's not fused together, That's pretty good evidence that like a lot of beaked animals today, like birds and turtles, that that animal wasn't yet ready to come out of that egg.

16:57Huh. The Lystrosaurus survived extinction during the Great Dying. What was the Great Dying and why did these critters endure? The Great Dying was a climate-driven mass extinction that happened. So this is even before the extinction that killed the dinosaurs. The extinction that killed the dinosaurs, the in Cretaceous extinction, that was about 66 million years ago. This one was about 252 million years ago. How will this discovery help your research and thinking moving forward? One of the things that I'm most interested in with my work is sort of thinking about how mammals and their ancestors persist through mass extinctions.

17:39And one of the big factors that we're starting to see in Listerosaurus's survival is being able to be flexible in terms of how maybe it's reproducing, how it's growing. And so basically, with a lot of animals today, we're seeing these similar responses to climate change. So animals that are changing in terms of their body size, when they're reproducing, how long their lifespans are. And so one of the things I'm interested in is finding those kinds of clues in the fossil record and seeing if during this big climate change event, if Listerosaurus was reacting a similar way. And it seems like it probably was.

18:20Caroline Abbott is a paleobiologist with the University of Chicago. Caroline, thank you. Thank you so much. This has been so fun.

18:30By the way, there are still five known living species of mammals that lay eggs. a group known as monotremes. It's four species of echidnas and that truly original animal, the platypus. I guess now we can say that makes them old-school mammals, still doing things the OG way. Keep it real, monotremes. That's it for Here and Now anytime today. Our show comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Jenea Walker, Jill Ryan, and Sam Rapleson. today's editors were Mark Navin, Michael Scotto, and Kat Welch. Technical direction from Caleb Green and Matt Reed. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and me, Chris Bentley.

19:14Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin, and here and now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with you tomorrow.

19:33Thank you.