‘If this isn’t addiction, I don’t know what is’: Light’s founders get real about screen time
Now, with a new flip phone and a growing wave of “attention activists” pushing back against Big Tech, they think the rest of the world is finally catching up to them. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Amanda Silberling talks with Tang and Hollier about the company’s newly announced flip phone, why they think the anti-smartphone backlash is only just getting started, and what it takes to break an addiction that fits in your pocket. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
- ▪Now, with a new flip phone and a growing wave of “attention activists” pushing back against Big Tech, they think the rest of the world is finally catching up to them.
- ▪On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Amanda Silberling talks with Tang and Hollier about the company’s newly announced flip phone, why they think the anti-smartphone backlash is only just getting started, and what it takes to bre
- ▪You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch — Startups |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/podcast/if-this-isnt-addiction-i-dont-know-what-is-lights-founders-get-real-about-screen-time/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:02:36 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T16:05:58.315Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T16:05:58.315Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 8mApnOv0-4fP · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
‘If this isn’t addiction, I don’t know what is’: Light’s founders get real about screen time Amanda Silberling , Theresa Loconsolo Jul 29, 2026 Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify With the Light Phone, Kaiwei Tang and Joe Hollier have spent over a decade exploring the value of simplicity in our relationship to technology, partnering along the way with players like Andrew Yang, Kendrick Lamar, and Pete Davidson. Now, with a new flip phone and a growing wave of “attention activists” pushing back against Big Tech, they think the rest of the world is finally catching up to them.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch — Startups.
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