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Pete Holmes Is Not Reading Your Email
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.
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.
A regular series that quantifies the tech lifestyles of the rich and/or famous.
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.”