Hello and welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of T9 Texting. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're going to talk about minimalist phones, specifically the new LightFlip, a very cool kind of minimalist smartphone, maybe call it a dumb phone device from a company called Light that has spent more than the last decade trying to figure out how to frankly rescue you from your smartphone. I think the world has changed in a lot of ways that makes sense for what Light has been trying to do for a long time. And I also think Lite has changed in some really interesting ways. So Kai Tang, the CEO and co-founder of Lite, is going to come on the show. We're going to talk about what it takes to make a great flip phone in 2026 and why in the world you would even want to do that. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, July 28th, 2026. Apple just officially launched its new upgrade program, which essentially allows you to lease Apple devices. The system works like this. You pay for a device in installments, you get a MacBook Air for 25 bucks a month, or you pay $12 a month and you get an iPad Air. After 24 months, you can either pay the rest and keep it, you can upgrade to the latest model and keep financing, or you can just return it and be done. This is all obviously happening to make it more palatable to buy new Apple gear, which like everything else in tech is getting seemingly more expensive by the day. But if you're asking me, you should buy nice things and keep them longer, not get in the habit of renting gadgets. Meanwhile, there might be a new upgrade in that program relatively soon. Bloomberg reported today that Apple is about to start a big push into the smart home, and that it could launch a new smart home hub as soon as this October. It sounds like a HomePod crossed with an iPad, if that makes sense. There's also a new Apple TV and a new HomePod mini coming soon, and it seems like even the robot arm with a screen we've been hearing about might really be happening. But all of this is really based on Siri AI. If Apple's assistant is finally good, it could be a game changer. but that's a big if. And finally, XMoney, the payment platform that Elon Musk has been promising for some time, is finally rolling out to the US to premium and premium plus X users. This is a big part of the whole plan to make X the everything app and has been part of the plan since Musk bought the platform formerly known as Twitter all the way back in 2022. But I don't know, y'all. I'm not sure mixing social media and super easy money transfers is a really good idea. You can read more about all of this at theverge.com. That is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, July 28th. When you run a business, you want the right tools. Enter Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style. So if you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into... with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. Go to Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. Power your business with the platform trusted by millions today. What's behind Ukraine's military shakeup? Ukrainians have now surpassed the United States military and basically every other military on the planet in terms of doctrine for how to fight and integrate these autonomous systems on the battlefield, and we should be learning from them. I'm John Feiner. And I'm Jake Sullivan, and we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we're breaking down the dismissal of Ukraine's defense minister, the architect of their drone strategy. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's talk phones. Joining me now, Kai Tang, the CEO and co-founder of Light. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So you and I have talked intermittently over the last, I would say, decade about what are we going to do about all of these smartphones? And I think we've come to a really fun point in that conversation that I am eager to get to. But I do just kind of want to rewind all the way back to the beginning. I was back on your Kickstarter page from 2015 looking at the original Light phone. There's a video of baby Kai explaining what you're doing. But I was struck in reading the Kickstarter page and watching the video that you didn't come into this as far as I could tell with grand theories about defeating the smartphone and addiction to technology. You were building something else, maybe something more specific. So like rewind me back a decade or so. What were you thinking about smartphones the very first time you set out to make what became the first Light Phone? Almost like a reaction. I remember reaction to the observation or just the weirdness I felt when I was in public, right? Watching people sitting in the park with the family on their phone, in the restaurant, everyone swiping in Trent Station, airport. And I think at the time, my co-founder Joe Hollier and I were in this incubator that Google started for designers as well. So we had the chance to speak to a lot of VCs, really successful entrepreneur apps, specifically platforms. And obviously being, you know, kind of encouraged to that direction. But I remember just vividly that almost everyone's talking about the traction of how much time their users spend in the app. You know, breaking about, oh, my user spent two hours in my game. That's why we could collect all this data, you know, we synthesize it and we could, you know, sell it to the highest bidder. I mean, not in those honest words, but that's exactly what happened. Yeah. That was peak engagement, right? That was everybody's favorite metric at the time was how long can we keep you here? That is an unalloyed good thing if we can keep you in our app. Yeah. And that's what we were doing. And the business model makes sense. I get it. It's very efficient, which is why I met Google or Facebook, Twitter are a billion dollar company. It's very efficient. I get it. But at the same time, you know, I was asking myself, what about me? What about my time? All I wanted to do is just use this specific tool like getting a direction home or getting a Uber home. Why do I have to suffer through advertisement? So I want to build a phone for myself that just have the right, just have the thing I wanted to do and then move on. And we did a test with, I think, 20 participants at a time that took away. We took away the smartphone, asked people to go out, you know, for a couple of hours, for a day, come back and tell us how you feel. And almost everyone said, oh, wait, I spent two hours in the museum in MoMA. I remember seeing this. I remember talking to this guy. Oh, I was in grocery stores. I don't have nothing to swipe. I was nervous. But then someone talked to me, and we started talking about this and that. And everyone feel like they're free. They feel like they're outside a cage. They feel, they're saying, oh, this is the best hours after the day, the best day after the week. And I think that's sort of solidified this direction of we want to offer design, offer something that would encourage people to break away from this 24-7 connection. Okay, I wanted to start there because I want to explain to you sort of my sense of the timeline since then. And then I want to know if the way you've experienced it making products matches the way that I've seen it sort of reporting on and living in this world. So I think back then, 2015 2016 that experience you had and the way that you were feeling about technology there were definitely people who felt that way And I think if you sort of explained people it was a real kind of this is water phenomenon that if you were like look around at all of these people looking at their phones instead of playing with their children people would be like oh sure But I don't think most people were feeling that super acutely about themselves in their day to day life. And then I think we got to the point where, you know, fast forward a few years, we get through Cambridge Analytica, we start to experience a real tech backlash. There is the sense that I'm spending too much time on my phone, the algorithmic feeds start to come in. And I think then we get to a point where everybody kind of intellectually understands that they would like to use their smartphone less. And I think then COVID happens and makes this all weird because we all sit in front of screens on our phones for a year because there's nothing else to do. But leaving that one aside, I think there was this sense for a long time that if you asked somebody, do you spend too much time on your smartphone? They would probably say yes. And then if you ask, are you doing anything about it? And really deep down, are you interested in doing anything about it? Most people would say no. And then I think you get to the last, I don't know, 18 months, and it feels like something has flipped that actually in a really meaningful way, maybe as a response to the ever encroaching algorithms, maybe as a response to AI, people are not only understanding that they want to make these changes and that they ought to make these changes and that these things are an incursion in their lives, but are actually actively doing something about it. is that would you again you've been selling people phones along these lines this whole time does that does my experience of this match yours or have you have you seen it happen differently no i i think it's somewhat similar i i i think of the use analogy that using your smartphone is like smoking smoking used to be cool and indoor you could smoke whatever you want to smoke right no one don't say anything about it and it's a fun one because for a long time nobody knew it was a problem it was it was like it was it was not an issue yeah yeah and then and then and then at some point this whole society's uh attitude towards smoking changed i mean partially because education partially because awareness and then and then the government start to find try to find policy to change that and and people start to like you know like uh uh uh uh asking people oh don't smoke around me and stuff like that. I think this is really similar to the trajectory of smoking okay, smoking cool. Ooh, maybe not. Ooh, that's not smoke, right? And smartphones, the same thing. I think it's like, oh, you know, smartphone, social media, so good. Very, very helpful network and getting the community together. It's like, ooh, I feel horrible. Ooh, you know, like it's been so much time on it. What do I do? And then, you know, now we're in this phase of what government do, what can we do, what parents do. This feels like a good segue to your new device, the LightFlip, which I think is frankly not the device I expected you to make. I think the sort of march of LightPhone has been, and again, you and I have talked about this many times, towards this question of what is the least you need to do in order to replace people's smartphones in a sort of meaningful way. Because I think the learning from the first phone was phone calls is not enough. you made a thing that made phone calls and people were like, well, I need a phone that does two or three other things in order for me to leave it alone. And then you give them those couple things and they say, oh, but wouldn't it be awesome if I could do these other two things? And everybody has two things and everybody's list is different. And I've had this conversation with so many people trying to make these sort of minimalist devices over the years. And it's like you eventually get to the point where you say, okay, most people in the world use WhatsApp. Let's give them WhatsApp. And then you're one small step away from just installing Android and giving people an Android phone. And so finding that line, I think is really hard. But with the Light Phone 3, I think you were getting closer and you were, when you shipped the thing, you were still working on some of the stuff. The NFC was still coming, video chat was still coming, but you were, you were sort of on this road to, we're going to nail this middle ground of what a minimalist smartphone is supposed to be that sort of looks and feels and operates like a smartphone, but is, is able to do some of the stuff. And then you just took a big right turn into a completely different form factor. Tell me about that right turn. Yeah, of course. I mean, I never thought about creating or bringing back the flip phone again, to be honest with you, because that's where my career started. Is it really? I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. After graduate school, I went to design school. After that, I was part of a broader team that tried to bring Modola Razor to life. Wow. And I never thought about I'm going to be working on designing a flip phone again. but the last two years we just got so many people emailing us saying oh i love light phone well sorry bragging about ourselves oh i love what you guys trying to do uh uh and and can but i don't want to be seeing using a smartphone can you just can you build a flip phone i love flip phone and maybe this is just outliner but we keep getting those requests uh from especially young younger than me, generations that wanted a flip phone. And I keep thinking this might be just the nostalgia, retro, temporary thing. And so we keep getting those emails. So I set out to interview, I think, 15 young people that use flip phone religiously. And so I start talking to them. I was like, dude, I know you know life phone. And how do you feel about a flip phone? Why do you stick with flip phone? And they're like, oh, my flip phone sucked. They are ugly. They're stupid. And there's no updates. You know, it can't repair them. And I switched like five phones since like 2009. But they stick with it. And I was like, you know, you know, you can get a light phone. Whatever phone you want to get. Like, why stick with flip phone? And there's a couple of things. Number one, it's very affordable. you know so they want to get full of a phone number two they love the satisfaction of opening up and you can shut it down and flip down and the technology goes away it represents something it's almost like a badge of honor for some people that I could flip down the technology and goes away right there's no screen well some of them still have screen outside but it goes away it sounds so ridiculous to say that out loud but I'm absolutely convinced there is something real to that I really am that there is something to saying I am finished with my phone now and you close it. There is something in that that I think is honestly powerful. We do that all the time. We put our smartphone face down, the same idea. We love that action. And then we heard from some hardcore flip phone users that they just don't want to be seeing using a glass or texting on a glass. They want this flip. They want this phone factor. This phone factor represents something else to them. I think it presents almost like a movement they wholeheartedly believe in or the opposite of all this AI everywhere, all this invasive practice or AI everything you touch. And what does that benefit me? A lot of them have that question too. What does that got to do with me? I have that question too. What's all this thing got to do with me? I know the benefit. I know the use case. Some use cases are really helpful. But I think this generation, at least from my understanding, I don't speak for them, but my understanding, they don't, they value their own, you know, like freedom. They don want to subscribe to the gender that technology companies are pushing You know they value real life experience So the implication here is that it actually not just a sort of individual tool for not using your smartphone so much. It's actually a status symbol. It's like, this is so funny, because I think, again, you and I came up in the age where you, like, I remember who my last friend was to get a smartphone, and we all made fun of them for still having a flip phone when everybody else had smartphones. Because it's like, oh, well, you're just, You're the loser being left behind by technology. And you're saying that now, you know, two decades later, that has come all the way back around. And actually, what you're saying is like, if you're 17, you're looking at your friends with smartphones being like, oh, you're the sheep beholden to big tech companies. I'm free. Look at my flip phone. I love that so much. It's so ridiculous. But I love it so much. But I'm different. It's like similar to how when iPhone first on the market, right? People feel when they buy this object, they feel they're a different kind of person. It represents what their belief system. I have an internet sensitive laptop, my tablet. You know, I know I could do social media things and emails here and there. And I don't want to carry this thing 24-7. And this is something we've been talking about too. Like, I'm not asking people to give up technology. We're trying to say we have different car, different shoes, different jacket, designed for different purpose, higher price, lower price, different purpose, right? When it comes to phone the last 20 years, for some reason, it just has to be smartphone. And they all look the same anyway. iPhone, Android, App Store, they're all the same anyway. And there's no other option. You could obviously buy a flip phone 20 years ago. It's 2G, 3G. Reception sucks. No one cares about it. No one's selling them. Coverage is horrendous. and there's no other option. It's just like so unviolence. And yeah, I guess that's where we come in. Okay. So tell me about the process of designing a flip phone for 2026. I think the phone factor, obviously the product looks different as a flip phone, but I actually think the software, it's what those group of people already value, meaning that the LightFlip and LightFone 3 software, user interface operating system are essentially the same and we have a toolbox or tool library i call it aka app store a tool library that we in our community created and that has just essential tools and that will apply to both light phones 3 and life flip so you still have all the modern essential tools that we design uh as a company in the community created for life phone and those tools will follow the same principle of no advertisement do one thing well um and no infinite feet right so you know the tool will continue to grow i want to give everyone like we talk about give everyone all the modern essential tools i can create we just slow because we're smaller but i want to have a box toolbox that has all the tools that you need and you can use that on on Light Phone 3 or Light Flip. And so essentially software design, the same is similar with Light Phone 3. That hasn't changed. But the flip phone, we take away touch screen for the phone factors and all the navigation settings will see the navigation pad. Is that again, because people are like, I don't want to be seen typing on glass, like in a very real way, or like we have to make it not look like this is a smartphone cut in half. We have to actually change the interaction system here. Well, I think, you know, there's no point touching the screen with the keypad. That's how I say this. The whole keypad, I'm a big fan of Deterine, the calculator's buttons, and I want to recreate those buttons to be so tactile, design well with the curvature so it press down and travel down well. So I want to recreate those buttons with navigation pad, and with that pad, there's no point touching your screen. And you flip it down, there's a screen, you flip it up, there's no confusion of where to touch. versus the iPhone 3. The iPhone 3 is a glass screen, it's a touch panel, so it makes sense. And I want the part that looks visually, like, you know, this still has a little speaker grill on the light flip. And when you open it, there's a screen, and there's a key. That's it. So it's just honest and straightforward. That's how I usually design things. Wow, I'm so glad I took calculus in high school and not personal finance. Said nobody ever. Figuring it all out for yourself when you're fresh out of school can not only be daunting, it can literally cost you. I'm Vivian Tu, your Rich BFF, and on this episode of Net Worth and Chill, we're rewinding a decade to when I was first out of college and learning to care for my own finances the hard way, with plenty of slip-ups and face plants. But since I already made those mistakes, I get to share them with you so you don't have to. If you want to swerve all of the potholes I fell into, Give the episode a listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. What kind of technology was hard to do here? I mean, I think especially this long into the smartphone revolution, I would assume it's actually in a lot of ways probably easier to build a smartphone than it is to build a flip phone in 2026. Is that true? Yeah, it is true. It is true. The caveat being the problem being because no one is making mass producing flip phones. So a lot of components are we need to revive them. We need to talk to suppliers to build it for the flip phone. Compared to a smartphone, there's a lot of common parts, which also contribute to the cost. Smartphone company, it builds a smartphone, a lot of common parts, a lot of suppliers, so price are lower. But if you try to make a customized phone, like iPhone 3 or LifeFlip, your cost is just higher. It just gives nothing, no way out. So give me an example. What's a hard thing inside of the light flip? Well, like a hinge. Who is making hinge now? Hinge is no one's making it. So, you know, there's still some vintage phones being built, but there's not a lot of suppliers fighting to build hinge. So suppliers are fighting to build really good display. Memory. We all know what happened out there with the memory. So those are like common components, lots of supply, a lot of their memory, and of course they're cheaper. And like hinge, you know, a smaller display, even smaller displays are hard to find, especially high resolution because, you know, all smartphones are huge and big and entertainment center, right? So components, sourcing components are going to be more difficult for the film. Yeah, it's an interesting mix of there's almost no one out there trying to do this thing and do it in a high-end way. And I don't even necessarily mean that as a knock on other flip phones. It's just that most of their purpose is to be very simple, very straightforward, very retro, and very cheap. That is their job. And that's an easy thing to do. There aren't a lot out there trying to make this thing nice in a sort of meaningful way. Yeah, I guess that's where we come in because you could obviously buy a 20 years ago vintage flip phone, the shell, the guard and just rebrand it and sell it. That's easy. I mean, not easy, but relatively easier. Yeah. But we want to intentionally build this device from hardware, software, replaceable battery. We'll stand behind the flip phone as long as we're here to repair your device. I also want to make it really affordable which is why we launched with a per month contract offer It comes with a SIM card 1GB data unlimited talk So you pay a month for your phone and your service plan That's it for LifeFlight. So I want to make it accessible too. And we get all this feedback from LifeFlight 3 that, oh, LifeFlight 3 is so expensive, $699. I mean, I'll argue all day about that, but I get it. On that front, actually, I think the price is one of the things that was striking to me because it feels like sort of a return to form from the original Light Phone. Like, again, in a certain way, I feel like you've come all the way back around to, I think you spent some time, and you can confirm or deny this, but I think you spent some time trying really hard to convince people to not buy smartphones. You mentioned hopefully shipping early next year. Tell me about Life as a hardware company right now. We are deep in Ramageddon. Are you worried about this moment in trying to actually build and ship consumer devices for people? Yeah, it's pretty difficult, to be honest with you. Like the tariff implementation since last year is horrendous. Our cost is exponentially higher. You can't move your factories anywhere else because there's no one making things here that's affordable. or we can move to a different country, but the tariff is different. And now memory, it's all being bought by data centers, AI data centers, and the suppliers, it's obviously, you know, understandable, shifting the focus to supplying memory DRAM to the AI servers. And all the consumer electronics can increase price because we can't buy memories. We can't buy cheap memories because it's all being used in AI centers. So I expect this price of all consumer electronics to increase in very soon. So our life is difficult, but at the same time, we've been here for 11 years. We went through COVID. We went through tariff. Now memory is just another thing. And we believe in what we're doing. We think I think it's important that as a society, we have the option like this. And so, you know, we de-risk, diversify our platform. We're using a media tech platform versus Qualcomm. Like Feng Shui is using Qualcomm. Like Flip we're using MediaTag. They all have different memory approved vendors so we could choose from. So we're not just limited to certain suppliers. So we try to diversify our vendor base. So at the same time, diversify manufacturers. So we de-risk ourselves. And the last thing would be just our service plan bundle sales. I was shamelessly promoting it because it helped us de-risk that too. So the hardware sales are less sensitive to us because the value that our customers give us is not just one of hardware sales. It's a continuous revenue stream to support our software development and software growth in the company as well. The last few years, it's definitely difficult, but I think we've been here for decades now. We know what we're trying to do. I know where we could diversify to de-risk and I'm excited about Live Flip I think something like that as an option is necessary Yeah And then last thing do you think there is a looming trend in this kind of gadget I think we've been waiting for the disintermediation of the smartphone for some time now and there's been this trend where everybody's going and buying old canon power shots uh wired headphones yeah wired headphones is a great example but i think what we're what we haven't seen yet is a new spin on those old devices right canon has not put out the 2026 version of that power shot people are buying old ones do you think do you think we're due for a new round of this new thinking on these kinds of old pre-smartphone gadgets because there is this real interest in them a single purpose device single-purpose objects are always a thing. We just went too far on cramping everything in a piece of glass. But, you know, like, I don't know, a really good speaker can still make the camera. I think it's less about going back in time, retro product, but it's more about this trend of designing single-purpose objects, a typewriter a camera a phone a chair like when when an object designed for single purpose we as a customer a consumer user we filter that's why when you pick up a can on a a camera or you sit on a a really well designed chair you feel that and that and that experience are way different than try to do everything on a single piece of glass. When you try to do that, I mean, I think some famous designers said that, not me, but when you're trying to design a thing, build a thing for everyone in every purpose, nothing is special. Like, you don't feel anything because you play, like I said, play your piano on your phone, on your guitar on your phone, like nothing is special. I remember this commercial from Apple that's horrendous, that's like new iPads, squash all the uh all the yeah yeah the creativity that yeah all the guitar all the pianos all the painting set into it's a new ipad like dude that's not what i want uh but yeah i think this this this single purpose tool device product will always be there i think we just start to realize you know we're going too far and and more people start to want to experience that specialty special feeling when you use a single-purpose thing. I like it. I hope so. I have been sort of begging for you to be right for about the last four years. Again, it feels like the cultural energy is there. There's proof in the market that there's interest in this stuff. It feels like the thing that worries me is that all of the RAM and memory shortage stuff is going to scare away a lot of potential hardware startups. But my hope is we get through this and people get through this. And on the other side, there is just an explosion of weird new gadgets. And I am very much looking forward to all of that. Me too. All right, Kai, thank you for doing this. Keep us posted. We're going to, we'll probably have you back on when the phone actually launches and we'll just get weird about flip phone hinges here on the Vergecast. But until then, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. All right, that's it for the show. Thanks again to Kai for being here. And thank you as always for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, feelings, if you have feature requests for the light flip, if you want to build some software for it, you actually can. there's a new SDK. I want to hear all of your ideas about what a device like this needs to really work like in a big mainstream way. So get at us. Vergecast to the verge.com is the email 866 verge one one is the hotline. I want to hear from you about all of that and everything else. And as a reminder, the best thing you can do to support everything that we're up to here at the verge and on the verge cast is to subscribe to the verge the verge.com slash subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one, it gets you all of our exclusive newsletters, It gets you all of our coverage. We've been covering the light phone for like 12 years now, and there's a lot of great stories. We had a reporter spend like a year trying to live with one of these things for a while and write about it a long time ago. Really fun story, totally holds up. Go get it all, theverge.com slash subscribe. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next time. Rock and roll.
