This article was published on January 22, 2016

Steve Jobs once prank called the Vatican and today Tim Cook is meeting the Pope


Steve Jobs once prank called the Vatican and today Tim Cook is meeting the Pope

Anything Google can do, Apple can do too, right? That’s right, not wanting to be outdone by Eric Schmidt’s reported meeting, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook will today meet with Pope Francis.

What’s on the agenda? I’ve no idea, but Cook is lucky that a few years have passed since Apple’s former CEO once prank called the Vatican to try and speak to the Pope (albeit a different one).

Revealed in ‘Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview’, the late CEO Jobs explains how he and Steve Wozniak used a ‘Blue Box‘ (a homemade device that allowed you to make free phone calls) to try and get in touch with his Holiness.

“Yeah, we did call the Pope. He [Woz] pretended to be Henry Kissinger.

We got the number of the Vatican and we called the Pope, and they started waking people up in the hierarchy,  you know…I don’t know, Cardinals and this and that, and they actually sent someone to wake up the Pope when finally we just burst out laughing and they realized we weren’t Henry Kissinger.”

Putting the former Apple CEO’s youthful pranks aside, Pope Francis has shown a willingness to embrace tech since becoming Pope in 2013, and was the first to harness the power of a tweet, often about issues like climate change.

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From prank calling the Pope to being formally invited to a meeting. That’s quite an achievement for the company Jobs co-founded.

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