Pete Holmes's Minimalist iPhone Habits and AI Optimism

Pete Holmes has achieved a jealousy-inducing feat: He spends very little time on his iPhone. To pull it off, Holmes keeps his phone in grayscale and has the screen-time widget displayed prominently on his home screen. He has a deep hatred for the tedium of responding to messages (“somehow all of life feels like we work in an office”), but the star of HBO’s Crashing and the special “Silly Silly Fun Boy” is not a luddite by any measure. In fact, he’s an AI optimist. Holmes also has a deep appreciation for FaceTime and thinks of his computer as “a girlfriend you know is going to move back to Barcelona.”

Holmes spoke to WIRED about his first foray into comedy, FaceTiming his mom’s forehead, and why he thinks we’re all going to “slowly walk away” from our phones.

Phone model: iPhone Air

It's the iPhone Air from 2025. I love this phone so much. The first thing I love about it is that it did not do well. No one bought it. And when I saw it, I couldn't wait to get it. People often think it's an Android. People often don't know what it is. I love all of this. I like having a phone nobody else has.

Everybody has the same fucking ugly spider eyeball phone. Everybody's just getting the Max, the 2,800-hour battery life. Get all that shit out of here. The iPhone Air is the first iPhone I've seen in a very long time that looks like Steve Jobs had a say. Everything else is just Apple playing catch-up with Android, Apple mimicking something they saw Google do or whoever, and giving us a bunch of stuff we don't need. And the flex is that it has a short battery life. You see my phone and you go, “Pete must not be on his phone much.”

There was a time when Apple was trying to make the 11-inch laptop. They were trying to make the future. They were trying to have things look clean. And now it's just, “Here's everything.” You look like you work in Silicon Valley. You look like you're a programmer. I want to look like I'm in Blade Runner.

Average daily screen time: 1 hr, 15 min

It's a dream of dreams to finally have someone ask me in a public way, “What's your screen time?” I've been living for this day.

So today, it's 2 o'clock, and I'm at 27 minutes. And every day I aim for sub one hour and—I'm so aware of what a flex this is—I just got my screen report. An hour and 15 minutes was my average for the week. And here's the punch line: That's still too much. I still feel stressed out by my phone. I'm still looking at it more than I would like to. And it still gets its claws in me at some points. It goes higher if I watch a movie on it or something, if I've been flying.

I keep the widget for screen time on my home screen, which is a good hack. If you're trying to lose weight, you have to weigh yourself. And if you're trying to get your screen time down, put the widget on your phone.

There's no social media on my phone. It's not natural to be in line at airport security and finding out everything from every corner of the globe and your own personal life just constantly. I found that if you step away, people get the message pretty quickly. You have to tell people. A lot of my texts start with, “Sorry, I'm not a big text person.”

And my phone is in black and white. That's a nice little hack. Your phone is like a slot machine, so the more you can limit its color and sound, the less it can lull you in.

Unread texts: 80

I have 80 unread texts. The thing I do most often when I read a text is mark it as unread. That was the greatest achievement in tech in the past 10 years.

If my wife texts me, it's different, but a lot of times I feel like people are just bugging you. I'm like, “Do I work for you? When did we start?” Somehow all of life feels like we work in an office. Even your friendships are like, “I got to get back to Jennifer.” I think a change might be coming. I think AI is going to lead to so much disinformation in your inbox, even in your texts, that we're all just going to slowly walk away. We're just going to be, like, Amish. We're going to be hanging out in person and talking again. We're going to be meeting up and having coffees way more.

Unread emails: 55,426

Is that possible?

If you reply to an email more than three times, you have to start a fresh thread. I'm not going to dig through. I'm getting better at just being like, “You don't have to do that.” I don't think it's a show business thing—I just think I'm 47 years old.

So much of modern life is manufactured urgency. We perpetuate that by taking it seriously. So we're passing this hot potato back and forth. If anybody could just snap you out of it, you'd be like, “That email didn't need to exist. We didn't need to do that. We didn't need that meeting.” We're rising and grinding ourselves to death, because nobody knows what the alternative is. I'm out here with 55,000 saying it's possible. You can make a living, you can have a life, and leave 55,000 emails unread with a big fuck off.

Music app: Spotify and Apple Music

We do have Spotify, but my wife will often kick me off of it. I'll be in the car and then all of a sudden Beyoncé starts playing and I'm trying to listen to dad rock like The National. I don't think my wife knows we have Apple Music. I like knowing that my little secret is Apple Music.

Computer model: 2022 MacBook Air

It's a MacBook Air from 2022 with the M2 chip. I had a slightly thin kind of fun one that snapped in my backpack. So I just bought this pretty thoughtlessly, which is kind of a shame. This was my “I just need a laptop” laptop.

There have been other laptops I've had far more feelings about. There was a MacBook Air 11-inch that I still think about. It was the smallest thing I've ever seen in my life. And then there was a MacBook that was 17 inches. It was huge. I still think about those computers like they are old friends.

I do feel like there’s planned obsolescence too. No matter how many times I clean my Mac and try to keep things minimal, it's going to start fucking up pretty soon. And that stops me from having a relationship. It's like having a girlfriend you know is going to move back to Barcelona.

Last person you FaceTimed: My wife Valerie

I was solo parenting on Sunday, and we FaceTimed my wife, Valerie, so my daughter could say hi to her. Which really is one of the great achievements of modern life, is that it does kind of synthetically re-create—from my daughter’s perspective—“I saw mom, and she was there.” I also FaceTime my mom. I like to say I FaceTime my mom's forehead. She can't frame up properly.

Last thing you Googled: Reverse image search of a muskrat skull

My daughter found a little skull in nature and we used Google Images to tell us what kind of animal it was.

Last video you took: My daughter putting her face in a strawberry shortcake

We have a tradition where we go to this pizza place in town and get the strawberry shortcake, and I always make a video of her sticking her face in it, which was the first bit I did when I was her age. My first foray into comedy was always mashing my face into bowls of ice cream or cake.

Last thing you asked AI: Swim soreness solutions

What a self-serving one. I swim every day and I get sore arms and shoulders and it wakes me up at night. It was like, “Take a hot shower or do light yoga.” It wasn't a great answer.

Don't get me started on AI. It’s interesting that we call that intelligence because it's actually something very different. Don't catastrophize. I think everything's going to be okay.

Favorite social network: None

I hate all of them. If I am looking at one, it would be Instagram.

I will say that Reels and TikTok, if you get in a pocket, it's a treat, like a piece of cake. I will give credit where it's due. I got to give respect. It can break me and make me laugh so hard. But it never happens two days in a row.

Least favorite: Sora and X

Well, they just got rid of Sora. Sora was just an absolute nightmare. It actually gave me hope—I was like, “This doesn't work.”

But I would also say X is my least favorite too. I'm old enough to remember when Twitter was where you went for fun. Shelby Farrow is a good example—she was just writing killer jokes on Twitter. We were all passing them around. Or Rob Delaney was incredible at Twitter. And you’d just go on and it would brighten your day.

Top three or most recent used emojis: 😭❤️😘

It's weeping face—the face with the streams of tears. It's the red heart. And it's the kissy one too. I always send my wife a text when I'm on a plane. And then the green check mark, because I record my standup, and when I listen to it, I mark it with the green check mark.

Favorite news source: None

I don't fuck with it. Zero. I get my news from people. That is my unreliable, biased news source. And there's nothing more fun than watching them fumble through the mismatch—they can't even remember why they're angry and scared.

Here's the difference. People all get misinformation. When I get misinformation, I can go back and be like, “Hey, Ted. That was wrong.” Someone I could look at and go, “You were wrong.” You can't tell Anderson Cooper he was wrong.

Favorite subreddit: None

I don't fuck with Reddit either.

Favorite tech product: Noise-canceling earbuds

I love my noise-canceling earbuds. I have a real loving feeling when I think about them because I'm sound sensitive—and with travel, you’ve got to have them. I like having a little pair in my pocket at all times. It’s basically earplugs. I put them in all the time with nothing playing. It's also a way to tell your airplane neighbor you don't want to talk.

Burner accounts:

Just one main one for Uber and Amazon and pretty much everything. I love that feeling when somebody wants your email and you know it’s so they can put you on some horrible mailing list and you're just like, “Go ahead, man.” You're throwing it into a void. Every single email on that account is something like “How was that thing you ordered?” We're not friends, LL Bean.

Technology you're most nostalgic for: TasCam four track

It was a tape deck four track. You had the little knobs and you would record four tracks, so you'd play the guitar, then you'd go back and record the bass. And it was so fun. It was so tactile. You hit record and it's the pressure is on. Garage Band is like, who cares?

Craziest internet rabbit hole you've gone down:

I have a really weird obsession with people who speed run video games from the '90s. I think they're brilliant. I think the community is very moving to me. They help each other. They figure stuff out. I love Summoning Salt on YouTube.

I'm in a real AI optimism wormhole where it's people going like, “Look at the money, look at the marketing. Don't forget this is a business. Don't forget that it really helps these companies to tell people that it's the end of the world if they get it wrong, because that's how you get regulations lifted. They can do anything they want.”