- Laughter, applause and a standing ovation met Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak at a keynote interview at F5 AppWorld 2026
- Wozniak described the origin of Apple and said it was nothing like the movie with Ashton Kutcher
- AI is a collaborative tool, not a replacement for human thinking, he said
Steve Wozniak's reputation as a prankster was born from crippling shyness. He didn't speak to a girl until his third year of college, at 21. And when he finally did, she was a psychology student writing a report on an abnormal person, he told the audience at F5 AppWorld 2026 in Las Vegas.
"I was a deliberate prankster because I was too shy to talk to people and too shy to make any friends anywhere," said Wozniak, Apple co-founder, hacker and raconteur, in a wide-ranging interview with F5 Chief Product Officer Kunal Anand. The candid, often funny session drew sustained laughter and applause from the audience and concluded with a standing ovation.
$2 bills and the Pope
Wozniak's pranks have always had an engineering sensibility — find the edge of the system, then push it, he said. His signature move involves pads of $2 bills printed to U.S. government specifications, making them legal tender. He has sold sheets of them for $5 for 30 years, delighting in the confusion they cause. The Secret Service has approved the bills four times, he said — including one occasion where agents read him his Miranda rights before signing off.
And he and Steve Jobs built a Blue Box in the 1970s — a device that mimicked telephone tones to make free long-distance calls. Wozniak used one to call the Vatican in the middle of the night, then called back using a Henry Kissinger accent and was put through to a bishop who had already located the real secretary of state. "I just wanted to make a confession," Wozniak said.
Apple's real origin story
The Apple origin story, Wozniak said, looks nothing like the Ashton Kutcher movie. He had been attending the Homebrew Computer Club since its first meeting and had already designed and given away a complete personal computer — keyboard, video display and all — before Jobs even knew it existed. Jobs was on a commune in Oregon. When he returned, Wozniak brought him to the club and showed him the design. "He said we should start a company," Wozniak recalled. His own ambition had been simpler: he wanted other engineers to look over his shoulder and appreciate the elegance of his work.
Getting Wozniak to actually leave Hewlett-Packard required an intervention. He refused the offer to co-found Apple five times. It took a friend pointing out that he could start a company and still remain an engineer — never moving up the org chart, never going into management — for him to relent, he said.
(Editor's Note: The Kutcher movie, "Jobs," gets a dreadful 27% score on RottenTomatoes, which quotes reviewer Amy Taubin: "A Steve Jobs biopic steeped in the mediocrity its subject despised.")
Have we ground the curiosity out of people?
Anand asked Wozniak whether the education system has squeezed out the kind of obsessive, self-directed curiosity that drove Wozniak to teach himself computer design as a 10-year-old, before any books on the subject were commercially available.
Wozniak doesn't think curiosity can be fully suppressed — it's too fundamental to human nature — but he drew a distinction between people trained in established disciplines and people he described as inventors. You find inventors at a Maker Faire, he said. They're not always commercially valuable, but they're the ones who create genuinely new things. "If you learn very well some engineering principles, you learn the same things as a million other people," he said.
The AI moratorium letter
Wozniak co-signed a 2023 open letter calling for a moratorium on developing frontier AI systems. Many signatories later walked it back. He has not and said he never would. He and his wife attended a meeting in San Francisco organized by a group focused on ethical technology development, reviewed examples of how AI could be misused and concluded the right stance was one of responsibility — not opposition. "It doesn't say don't do it. It doesn't say we're against it. Just be responsible," he said.
Can we teach computers to be ethical?
Wozniak was skeptical that ethics can be reliably taught — to computers or to people. His own definition of ethics is tell the truth, every time, in only one way. It's advice his father gave him and his siblings without ever telling them what to think about anything else. "Always be truthful. That's the one thing that stuck with me," he said. He believes it's the most important thing he can tell young people, because you never get caught saying something that's true.
AI and the question of what kids should study
For parents wondering how to prepare their children for a world being reshaped by AI, Wozniak's advice was traditional: study math, study science, be honest. He still views programming as essential and he sees AI not as a replacement for human thinking but as a collaboration — a tool that generates possibilities that a human still needs to evaluate and direct. Programmers he knows who use it love the productivity but find it makes serious errors and goes off in wrong directions. A human always needs to be in the loop.
His concerns about deepfakes were personal as well as philosophical. Friends of his family have been defrauded of hundreds of thousands of dollars through AI-assisted scams.
Bullying and a girl who almost didn't make it
Wozniak said he was never outright bullied as a kid, just socially isolated — the quiet kid who couldn't talk to people and heard others wonder what was wrong with him. But he has thought a great deal about the young people for whom the situation is far worse and who conclude there is no way through it.
He and his wife contribute to the Inspiring Children Foundation, based in Las Vegas, which works with at-risk youth to give them the tools to become functioning members of society. One girl they sponsored had attempted suicide twice. She is now about to graduate from Stanford.
Wozniak added that any college would have done just as well. What matters is what's inside the person, not the name on the diploma.
Happiness over accomplishment
The interview closed with what Wozniak called his life equation: happiness equals smiles minus frowns. He said he arrived at his philosophy around age 18 when he flipped through a magazine article about a powerful media executive flying between cities buying and selling companies and asked himself whether he wanted that life. He didn't. He had just come from lunch, laughing with friends.
The frowns are the harder part of the equation to manage, he said. His main tool is simple: don't argue. Two people with good minds and good logic can examine the same situation and reach entirely different conclusions. That doesn't make either of them wrong. He pointed to a Dave Mason lyric and a Bob Dylan line that both make the same point: disagreement isn't the same as one person being bad. Music, he added, has given him much of his philosophical direction in life — he introduced Jobs to Bob Dylan albums on the very first day they met.
"On the day I die, I'd much rather be the person laughing about things I've done, laughing about the world," he said.