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مسلسل Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul مترجم - Episode 1
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00:25I don't think that he has no favorite part in the one that he talked about.
00:33I'm not sure this story can be told on the record, but I'm going to tell you anyway.
00:40This idea that you could come to Silicon Valley and not only invent something that is yours, but also make
00:46the world a better place, that's the dream.
00:50The time was right for new things to happen.
00:54Everybody was there for a purpose, build something that would change the world.
01:00Tech was going to fix all of our problems all at once.
01:03There is but one leading preventable cause of death in America, and that is tobacco use.
01:10Innovation could address all the problems associated with smoking.
01:14And our goal, our mission, is to eliminate combustible cigarettes.
01:18They had this relentless focus.
01:20Too many people smoke.
01:22We want to help them smoke less, and we want to give them a cooler, better, safer way to do
01:26it.
01:26People are just talking about it.
01:28They're like, this is going to be big.
01:31One puff and never, ever again smoked another cigarette my whole entire life.
01:36Never again.
01:38I'm optimistic that this new innovation will completely replace cigarettes.
01:44They had taken every lesson from the tech industry and applied it to tobacco, and people just threw money at
01:49them.
01:51We were the fastest growing company in world history.
01:56They saw this as just another tech product, and it's not another tech product.
02:00It's a nicotine product.
02:01Fuck it.
02:02Ship it.
02:03Their goal was not to make people quit smoking.
02:06Their goal was to make people start dueling.
02:09I don't think anyone could have anticipated how many children would want this product.
02:15In the beginning, you felt like you were a part of a secret club that no one knew about yet.
02:20It is not unreasonable to be skeptical about our intent.
02:27Children's Hospital in Wisconsin is sounding an alarm about serious health problems linked to vaping.
02:32I remember waking up in an ICU bed, you know, with my family by my side.
02:39It was like a wave.
02:40It just swept over, and everyone just was like, I don't know if I want to vape anymore.
02:44We would get hate mail.
02:46Kid killer.
02:47I hope you die.
02:49As Jewel became the story, James became the face.
02:53He was the face.
02:53He wanted to be the face.
02:54You, sir, are an example to me of the worst of the Bay Area.
02:59He felt villainized, and I think it was just too much for him to bear.
03:04There's so much vitriol on both sides.
03:07The debate is unlike anything I've seen before in public health.
03:10We can't completely favor teens and completely ignore 35 million adults.
03:17How many kids are you willing to addict to help one adult quit?
03:21The parents of this country are fed up.
03:24Parents got upset because they forgot that they had to parent their kids, and Jewel isn't responsible for that.
03:29These cigarettes are not helping people quit smoking.
03:32It helped me get off of cigarettes.
03:34Sounds like a smoke cessation device to me.
03:37They had a choice, and they went to maximize the profits.
03:40I mean, we're all in this to make money.
03:42I mean, we come to San Francisco to make money.
03:44We all, you know, this is America, right?
03:48Well, as all of us have probably experienced in our lives, if you watch a major event, different people end
03:53up coming away with different perspectives.
03:55They all say what I saw was the truth, but they end up with completely different versions of the truth.
04:00The story of Jewel, I don't think it's black and white.
04:05The reality is it's gray.
04:20In the early 2000s, there was this sense tech could do no wrong.
04:26We place a really big premium on moving quickly.
04:29Move fast and break things.
04:30That's the tech ethos.
04:31You should never be afraid of making small mistakes in service of huge success.
04:39Stanford and the tech industry have had this symbiotic relationship for decades.
04:45You had these investors all over Silicon Valley who were starting to say,
04:48who's working on interesting student projects that I can maybe invest in that maybe turn into these $100 billion businesses
04:53down the road.
04:54You had all of these undergraduates wanting to create a startup, an app.
04:58There were billionaire professors on campus.
05:01There's this euphoria around the Silicon Valley sort of ethos.
05:05You know, we innovate, we disrupt.
05:08Stanford certainly has a great reputation in attracting talents.
05:12And sometimes it's hard to tell whether it attracts them or whether it makes them.
05:16But in either case, a lot of the really top people are coming out of Stanford.
05:21James Monsees and Adam Bowen were classmates in the Stanford product design program.
05:37James Monsees and Adam were both gifted product designers, and they both studied this concept of design thinking, or basically
05:43infusing design into every aspect of a product and its development.
05:47You're trying to have empathy and understanding your customers, and any problem you see, you can try and make a
05:53product to solve that problem.
05:55It was always drawing things, designing things as a kid, airplanes, cars, you name it, really.
06:01I didn't realize that there was this career called product design.
06:05I was just kind of naturally sketching these things.
06:08My parents always told me I didn't like playing with toys.
06:11I liked playing with vacuum cleaner parts.
06:12When I was 15, my parents wouldn't give me a car, so I built a car.
06:18James and I met while we were in this program at Stanford.
06:22We ended up working on a lot of projects that had some social or environmental impact.
06:26Both Adam and James had world-class minds.
06:31Adam was an incredible engineer and was highly competitive as well.
06:36And then James was very gifted in multiple disciplines.
06:40James was such a good artist, and he's also a brilliant scientist and engineer.
06:47He can do all of that.
06:50We had this amazing place on campus called the Product Design Loft, and we got to hide out behind there,
06:56and we would smoke cigarettes.
06:58Smoking was always a contentious issue in my family.
07:04My mom's father, he smoked a lot.
07:08I smoked many packs of cigarettes a day and died at a sadly early age.
07:15I hated cigarettes.
07:16Every time I picked one up, I felt conflicted about it.
07:21The cigarette smokers were always a little bit of the misfits.
07:24And, you know, it wasn't very cool to be smoking cigarettes in the year 2005.
07:33Adam and I would look at each other, and we would ask each other why we were being quite so
07:38stupid hiding out behind this loft.
07:41And we looked inwards at ourselves, and what we realized was that it isn't smoking that we love.
07:48It is the things that smoking does for you.
07:51It is the sharing that you have, the sharing moments.
07:56We're taking a break from your day.
07:59Those are the things that really matter.
08:02James and Adam were out on a smoke break looking down at the burning cigarettes in their hands and thought,
08:09we must do something better.
08:11James was like, can we take all the bad stuff out and still get the stuff we like?
08:17And that's kind of where James and Adam kicked off.
08:20As soon as they started talking to each other, they found common ground and seemed to be filling in knowledge
08:26gaps for each other.
08:28And James was like, why hasn't someone come up with vaporization solutions yet?
08:32And Adam just started going off on essentially a brainstorm.
08:37Smoking impacts a lot of lives, and it occurred to us that it's a space where there's been little or
08:44no innovation.
08:45There's 38 million Americans that still smoke.
08:49There are a billion people who still smoke globally.
08:52We saw this as just a huge public health opportunity.
08:57I was excited about the promise for what could come from it as the idea matured.
09:04Most people were happy with it, but this might have been more from the faculty side, if I remember right.
09:10They were kind of raising eyebrows.
09:13This is like a drug delivery device.
09:18And not like, oh, I need drugs to keep my heart rate pressure down.
09:23This is like nicotine.
09:26Some of their professors had concerns that they should slow down a little, do more research,
09:30make sure they were building things responsibly, because nicotine is incredibly addictive.
09:36In James and Adam's research, they found this massive archive of tobacco industry documents
09:41that were stored at the University of California, San Francisco.
09:46At the time, what we really just wanted to learn about was, what are the best technologies,
09:50what are the best techniques for eliminating smoking?
09:53It turns out tobacco companies have worked on this quite a bit.
09:58The cigarette makers knew they had a problem.
10:00They were never happy about the fact their products were killing people.
10:04So how can we make a new kind of cigarette that keeps the addiction but loses the cancer?
10:10And that becomes a kind of hidden goal of big tobacco in super-secret projects.
10:16And they already started in the late 1950s.
10:19To make a product that would be less harmful, that was the holy grail.
10:24Is there a way we can reduce the temperature to generate smoke without setting the tobacco on fire?
10:32You would basically warm up tobacco and then get tobacco vapor, which would include nicotine.
10:38And in fact, it would be a truly safer cigarette because most of the harm from a cigarette is in
10:43the combustion products. But if they introduce a truly safer cigarette, what are they supposed to call it?
10:50They didn't want to admit that their regular cigarettes were causing cancer.
10:54It's like they're trapped in their own webs of deception.
10:58Every major tobacco company lied, saying that there is no way to deliver nicotine in a way safer than a
11:06cigarette.
11:08James' theory was that someone on the outside, someone like him and Adam,
11:12would be necessary to come in and actually make that innovation happen.
11:17They really started focusing more on the vaporization of tobacco.
11:22At the time, the vaporizers were a thing, but it was this massive system.
11:28Not at all portable, not practical. And James was really interested in like,
11:32how do you make that smaller? It seemed like a really awesome project to pursue.
11:37James and Adam built the original prototype, and they were very determined to make this prototype meaningful.
11:44So is it even possible to make a safe cigarette? It turns out that actually burning tobacco is
11:50the real problem. Nicotine is addictive, clearly, but it's not the nicotine that's really hurting you.
11:56So our goal was to basically create a whole new experience for people that retains the positive
12:02aspects of smoking, like the ritual and everything, but makes it as healthy and socially acceptable as possible.
12:08People were just like raving about it. And James, he was really on to something and really hitting it big.
12:17But that was still in the genesis of it. There was like this serious health concern about preventing people from
12:24getting cancer.
12:27It now gives me great pleasure to introduce this year's commencement speaker, Steve Jobs.
12:35I remember all sitting together as a class, and many of us as designers obviously very inspired by Steve Jobs,
12:43so he was almost like a rock star, you know. Stay hungry, stay foolish. And I've always wished that for
12:51myself.
12:52Each of us were hungry to make an impact and a change in the world. As you graduate to begin
12:57anew,
12:57I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish. I think those two go hand in hand. I mean, you
13:05know,
13:05being foolish is kind of not afraid to take chances. Try it. Do it. Don't hesitate. Thank you all very
13:12much.
13:13This was one of the biggest problems this program ever tackled and tried to solve. And everybody knows
13:20James Adams have like just an awesome idea. Like it's incredible. And their prototype is amazing,
13:25right? Everyone knows. Now what?
13:33After they left Stanford, they decided this was an idea they were actually going to run with
13:38and make into a real company. But James and Adam were really coming at this problem as underdogs.
13:43And they were not successful. A lot of companies told them they were not interested.
13:48A lot of VCs have rules against investing in vices. They just won't do it.
13:53And because of those vice clauses and what are seen as vice industries like marijuana,
13:58alcohol, tobacco, around 50 firms told them that they were not interested at all.
14:03So James and Adam realized that if they pursued individual investors, they might have more luck
14:08because they weren't necessarily bound to the same vice clauses that firms had.
14:14Angel investing is investing in startup companies and angel investors invest their own money. And what
14:20angel investors are looking to find is a company that will change the world in some level. Doesn't
14:25happen very often though, I will say that. James and Adam came to my office to make a pitch for
14:31their
14:31idea, which they called Plume. They came across as very bright, very passionate, and they had a very
14:38sophisticated design. There was no proof at that point in time that heating and not burning the tobacco
14:44was going to be healthier. But if you weren't burning, the general attitude and feeling was that
14:50this would be safer. It had such potential for saving lives.
14:57My mother smoked all of her life and eventually died of lung cancer. So I thought about my mom
15:03at the time and I thought this would have been a godsend if she could have been able to use
15:07this
15:07instead and add years to her life. So I decided to invest.
15:19Riaz Valani was the investor in that first round with us. He was sort of a no-nonsense,
15:23very strong individual. And we knew that we needed some way to substantiate the health benefits and
15:29it needed to come from someone professional.
15:32Riaz Valani They called me up and said,
15:34we have this great new idea that we think is going to revolutionize tobacco and save lives and
15:39we'd like to meet with you. The idea was that they would heat the tobacco instead of setting it on
15:45fire.
15:46Riaz Valani And I said to them, well, that's an interesting idea.
15:49Riaz Valani If you avoid the combustion,
15:51you're going to have a less toxic mix, probably. But we need some evidence. We need to know,
15:58you know, what effect are these things actually having?
16:02Riaz Valani This whole idea of move fast
16:04and break things in terms of public health is stupid. You know, we want to move progress forward
16:10as fast as we can. But when you're dealing with things that impact people's health,
16:15you need to be careful.
16:19Riaz Valani Plume was starting to look a little bit more like a real company.
16:22The investors were really more than just funding sources,
16:25so they would guide them on how to keep their business scaling up.
16:29Riaz Valani The general rule I use is that if you're
16:31not spending as much on marketing as you are on engineering,
16:33then your engineering is being wasted. And that's when Kurt was brought in.
16:37Kurt My experience with marketing began when I
16:40started working at Red Bull. They have a very unique philosophy on how they come to market.
16:48Instead of blasting everybody with advertising and hoping it worked,
16:52they did the opposite. It was about allowing people to discover your product in a cool way.
16:59Riaz Valani So one day I saw that there was a message from Adam and it said something to the
17:04effect that he and his partner were just finishing school at Stanford, which of course, you know,
17:09give it some credibility.
17:12Riaz Valani When I walked in, sometimes you empty your pockets when you sit down on the table.
17:16Riaz Valani I did that and didn't realize I had a pack of cigarettes.
17:21And immediately I saw James and Adam look at the box and look at each other and they had an
17:25interesting look on their face. And I think in their mind they were like, wow, if this guy's a smoker,
17:30he'll probably get it. I mean, cigarettes are kind of the monkey on my back. I really enjoyed the
17:36relaxation of having a cigarette, but statistics are pretty clear. If you smoke, you will very likely
17:42die from smoking. I remember they said to me what I've heard them say hundreds of times since,
17:49which is smoking isn't just about nicotine delivery, it's the ritual. So how can we preserve the ritual
17:54and eliminate the harm? I mean, that resonated with me right away because here I am a conflicted smoker
17:59who really likes the ritual but can't stand everything else about smoking. If they can do that for me,
18:05that could be a really great company and also probably a pretty big business.
18:10The meeting went really well. I mean, I got the job, but I did say that I felt pretty strongly
18:16that
18:17I didn't want to work for a company that would sell to Big Tobacco. I thought they were the enemy,
18:23they were killing people for years and lying about the nature of their own product, which they knew
18:28very well was one of the most addictive products ever. I didn't want to be associated with any of those
18:35companies. When James and Adam first started working on Plume, around 37 million people in the U.S. smoked.
18:45So many people write off smokers as people who have just made bad choices.
18:53The truth is that the overwhelming majority of people who smoke began their tobacco use as teenagers.
19:00Cigarette makers recognize that if they can addict a teenager to nicotine, there's a good chance they
19:06may have them for a lifetime. I was 19. I was like, I can't smoke weed, so I'm going to
19:14smoke cigarettes.
19:15It was like some sort of 19-year-old non-logic. Thanksgiving dinner, my brother convinced me.
19:22It's like, just have one. Come on, after a big Thanksgiving dinner, it's the best. And that was that.
19:29That was that. The one thing I do distinctly remember is my dad making sure my mom, she had
19:35cigarettes. That was his husbandly duty. I remember asking her, can you please quit smoking?
19:41So I think that's kind of ironic how I wound up smoking.
19:46Nicotine keeps me focused. When I'm really stimulated, it can bring me down. When I'm tired,
19:53it can bring me up. It's a really unique thing in that way.
19:58I enjoyed smoking. Just the physical activity of blowing smoke and just watching it dissipate.
20:06It did have a relaxing effect.
20:09I wanted to quit smoking and tried so long to quit and felt so badly about it.
20:17My dad had been a smoker my whole life. I told him I was smoking and he was disappointed and
20:24then
20:24I think we shared a cigarette. He got cancer. And I remember like all through the experience of him
20:33being sick, feeling like such deep shame about continuing to smoke. But it was a huge part of
20:41how I coped with stress. In the end, when he passed away, every single time I smoked a cigarette,
20:48I felt like I was like doing him a dishonor.
20:52The overwhelming majority of people who smoke want to quit and have tried multiple times to quit.
20:57But for people who have never smoked, the concept that it's not easy just doesn't connect.
21:04Nicotine can be as addictive as heroin and cocaine in such a way that you cannot feel normal
21:10unless you have the next dose.
21:13I tried the patch. That was the worst. I was having nightmares all night long. It didn't work.
21:18I tried Nicorette gum. I tried cold turkey. I tried a book. I tried a hypnotist one time.
21:24Nothing, nothing worked no matter what I tried. I really wanted to quit. But those replacements
21:32did not work for me. They just weren't the same. Because I couldn't do this. I couldn't do this.
21:39If you could not quit smoking with the gum, patch, lozenge, or cold turkey, you were doomed to continue to
21:46smoke.
21:51For myself and millions of smokers around the world, that is a death sentence.
22:01When we started Plume, we were doing something to possibly change the world. I mean, it was
22:07Fuck Big Tobacco. I mean, if I walked in with a shirt that said Fuck Big Tobacco, people would have
22:12been happy that I wore the shirt. All of them, including Adam and James.
22:15I had some ideas on where I wanted to start with the project, specifically probably on the branding
22:21and some things like that. But they didn't have a working prototype yet. They thought that they
22:28would have it ready after about six months. And it was pretty clear that there was a lot more
22:34challenges than anticipated to get that product ready. We had a multitude of problems. We had some early
22:41devices. And I took a hit. And all of a sudden, it exploded. It shot the rod up into the
22:49ceiling.
22:50And I remember the look on James' face was like, holy shit. I mean, it could have gone through
22:55into my head, basically.
22:59Because Riaz was the biggest amount of money in the company, James and Adam, when he said to jump,
23:05they said, how high, right? Riaz became very adamant that this had to get done fast. And, you know,
23:11we're running out of money, and we need to get more. And we're not going to get more if we
23:14don't
23:14have a working product.
23:15They were also just running out of time because other e-cigarettes had started coming on the market.
23:20This guy is here, and he is not smoking next to me. What exactly is Enjoy?
23:24Enjoy is an electronic cigarette. Enjoy was probably the first company to come on our radar.
23:31They were like the anti-plume. As we were using these competitor devices,
23:37which are basically in the shape of prefab cigarettes, the question was, why are they doing this if they're
23:43trying to help people quit cigarettes?
23:46And then eventually, we started seeing, you know, what people started calling vapes.
23:51The products were pretty complicated. I mean, you had to have coils, these batteries. They had a
23:58tank that you could fill with e-liquid of your choice, flavor of your choice, nick strength of your
24:03choice. The industry was growing rapidly because there were no regulations for vapor products.
24:10It was a new category. The FDA couldn't regulate it, so no one was checking anything about the
24:17products. There were no age restrictions. It was the wild west. But plume was a really different device.
24:25Adam and James, you know, they were coming at it from, how does it fit in your hand?
24:29How are you going to hold it? There was much more thinking involved.
24:36What we've tried to do is create a new paradigm, something that doesn't look like a cigarette,
24:41doesn't feel or taste like a cigarette. It's different.
24:45The Model 1 was James and Adam's first product to enter the market, and it launched in 2010 and
24:52really represented the first time that Adam and James had successfully made their thesis vision a
24:56reality. This is the plume Model 1, which you open by removing the mouthpiece and inserting a
25:03specially designed pod capsule. Reinsert the mouthpiece, push the button on the bottom,
25:09it clicks to start. It lights up in about 10 to 20 seconds.
25:14As we were getting ready to launch the Model 1, it was certainly an exciting time for us.
25:19I remember we were toying around with an ad campaign, and one of the campaigns we launched
25:26with was Small, Dark and Handsome, and that was it. And I dropped that on one of their e-cig
25:31message
25:32boards and it kind of went crazy. No one had seen anything like it. We got all these messages,
25:37number of reservations shot through the roof, and it felt like, wow, this is real. This is happening.
25:43This could be the future of smoking.
25:46Around that time, I started looking for brand ambassadors to promote the product.
25:52I met Kurt, and I was invited over to Plume headquarters, and they laid out the product
25:58in front of me, and they're like, well, what do you think about it? And I was like, this is
26:03cool.
26:04But it's powered by butane, so you had to have a little canister of gas, and then a tiny little
26:11pod
26:12with real tobacco. Then you put the gas in, put the pot in, screw it on, and off you go.
26:19They wanted it to be like a modern social smoking experience, which I was like, yeah,
26:24that sounds amazing. My job as the field marketing manager was to introduce the world to the product,
26:31and get as much information as I could from the people who use the product to improve it.
26:38At that time, we had been doing a lot more testing. We had been inviting people to the office for
26:44little
26:44social happy hours. We were taking the product out and about. In the beginning, we only had one or two
26:50devices. Now everyone had a couple of devices. Pods were being made and stockpiled in the back for
26:56hopefully what would be, you know, a tsunami of orders. When it came time to start doing the initial
27:03tastings and marketing, I mean, I was working all day and going out sometimes till midnight at night,
27:08back at the office at eight. We don't know where it's going to work yet, so we're going to try
27:13everything. We're going to do movie theaters, we're going to do cafes, we're going to do boutiques,
27:18parties, clubs. Clubs were the worst because they were so loud and everyone was drunk, so you know,
27:25plumes everywhere. But we would set up in the back, wait for people to come to us.
27:31We would ask them what they think. A lot of the comments in those early days were,
27:36when are you coming out with more flavors? There was a mint and there was a chocolate one, plus blueberry,
27:41honey, cognac, organic peach. And people specifically asked us for these flavors.
27:48It wasn't just about nicotine delivery, it was about the experience, so they were really into flavors.
27:55Flavors were important to ultimately get smokers away from smoking with various options.
28:01But people who were smokers, who plumed, would say like, it's fun but it's not giving me the same
28:09hit as I would with a big pull from a cigarette. The plume device itself wasn't very good at
28:17delivering nicotine. It didn't work for me and I would even tape two of them together, sometimes at
28:23extreme displeasure of James, because by taping two together it means his product isn't working.
28:31For a hardcore Marlboro pack-a-day smoker, they might try it, oh that's kind of interesting, but they're
28:39going to go back to smoking. Kurt, Adam, and James were constantly trying to like fiddle with it,
28:45right, like change up the construction of the formula so that it would be kind of a little bit
28:49more turbocharged. A lot of times engineers, they know so much about the product that they don't
28:56really understand a lot of the pain points. And there were a lot of pain points with their early
29:00plume device. The number one thing was it's powered by butane, so nobody's carrying around a giant
29:07bottle of butane wherever they go. Because it was an actual heating element, there was a danger of
29:14singeing your fingers, sometimes your mouth, if you took too big of a hit from it. It wasn't that
29:20every one of them was hot, but every 50th one turned out to burn somebody, right? It's too hot. And
29:26with
29:27that kind of a yield, you know, two percent, you don't have a product. It was unimpressive.
29:34It was something that maybe you could get a small market for if you really dedicated yourself, but
29:39it wasn't going to change the world. I was going to smoke shops and I was getting quite a bit
29:45of
29:45negative feedback there. So eventually Adam came to do a ride along with me and we went to like five
29:52or
29:52six shops. And I remember one time in particular when it finally, I think, really hit home for Adam.
29:59Instead of doing the whole setup for the owner, I just put it on the table. So the first thing
30:04he
30:04did was try to put the butane in and it kind of spilled out a bit. Then he clicked it
30:09to start it
30:09and his finger was in the wrong spot on the device and he got a shock. Eventually he got it
30:14started,
30:15put the pod in, the top popped off and the pod burned his lip. So it was kind of the
30:20perfect storm
30:21of everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong, and Adam got to experience it. And I think when
30:26we
30:26walked out of that shop, Adam kind of came to the conclusion that, shit, this product isn't working.
30:32We're going to have to redesign it and it's probably going to take somewhere between a year and 18 months.
30:38We were sort of frustrated at that point in time that we hadn't seen quite the progress that we
30:41wanted to see and the buck has to stop someplace. James took over in the CEO role and Adam took
30:48a step
30:49back and it was kind of a crisis point for this new company. Plume was starting to get low on
30:55funds
30:55and was struggling to get additional funds. I thought, well, it's probably all over. It's a shame.
31:05At this point, James was on the hunt for any investor who could help Plume succeed.
31:10Japan Tobacco International approached us to invest in Plume, 10 million dollars.
31:16JTI was this huge Japanese conglomerate making cigarettes.
31:21We were conflicted. I mean, again, big tobacco, killing people for almost 100 years and lying about
31:28it. And then they come in with a significant investment. It was difficult. But without that
31:36investment, I'm not sure we would have made it. I mean, our mission was really important.
31:43We can't just scrap it and go to the next thing. The goal of the company was to save a
31:47billion lives.
31:49James and Adam told me that of all the big tobacco companies, JTI was the most progressive and they
31:56seemed to be the most open-minded. And it was a way to get more distribution of a product that
32:00was going
32:00to save lives. My spine was softened, so to speak. If by partnering with big tobacco,
32:09it helps you achieve your core mission, maybe it's not the worst thing.
32:16Japan Tobacco enabled them to expand. So now you have the funds to kind of create your own playground.
32:21What does that look like?
32:26After the Plume device flopped, Adam and James knew that they needed to make something better.
32:30And the 10 million dollars that they got from JTI kind of gave them the ability to take a step
32:35back
32:36and go back to the drawing board. So with that money, they pivoted. They didn't come out with,
32:43you know, a new and improved version of the Plume. They came out with something called a PAX.
32:51PAX. The PAX was an induction vaporizer for loose-leaf tobacco.
32:57So this is PAX. Pinch of pipe tobacco. You can really unlock the sort of, you know,
33:05just excellence of tobacco. Pretty awesome.
33:13PAX was supposed to vaporize loose-leaf tobacco, but it became popular with marijuana users instead
33:20of tobacco users. At that point in time, cannabis was becoming more and more acceptable. Even though
33:27it wasn't fully legal in a lot of places, it looked like a good opportunity. A friend, he handed me
33:32this
33:32vaporizer that had this little X thing on the front of it, told me it was called a PAX. It
33:37changed my
33:41world. I made a decision right then and there I was going to work for this company.
33:44The way that you smoke marijuana is mostly complicated and mostly bad and mostly inefficient.
33:49And the PAX showed up and said, we'll make it easier.
33:53Suddenly you didn't have to have a Ziploc bag with your weed in it. Suddenly you didn't have to have
33:57a match or a lighter. You can just like vape a little bit and you're done.
34:02This is fantastic. It was a beautiful product. It worked really well. You know,
34:07it was something you want to share with your friends. It even had a game function so you could
34:11shake it up and it would go around like spin the bottle and whoever it lands on would have to
34:16take a
34:16hit. There was a lot of care in, you know, even choosing who we had representing our product.
34:22We collaborate with people like The Weeknd or Broad City, one of the coolest,
34:27most relatable stoner shows on TV at that time.
34:30So it was really fun. It was well thought out and it blew up. It blew up really fast.
34:36The PAX was very, very big. And I remember it was just all over the city. You just saw people
34:40using
34:41it everywhere. Every concert you went to, you saw the little lights.
34:45I have a friend who was a distributor for PAX and I mean, he was selling as many as he
34:50could get.
34:50It started out selling Plume substantially. So Plume dropped to the wayside and PAX took over.
35:02The PAX was a phenomenal success. Some people could have just said, wow,
35:06okay, we did great. Let's kick back, enjoy the success for a while. But there's a certain ceiling
35:12in the cannabis space. So the venture capitalists that backed this were like, okay, great.
35:18Congratulations guys. You have a successful product. But guys, that's not what we signed up for.
35:24We signed up for the big project, the project to solve the smoking problem, the $90 billion a year
35:30project. At the same time, Adam and James, they still wanted to do a revolutionary product that
35:38delivered revolutionary results. In this case, saving millions, if not possibly a billion lives.
35:46They still had that dream and they still had that passion to solve a critical health problem,
35:50and PAX wouldn't be targeting that. So I think that's what led to the evolution of the JUUL.
35:56In this move fast and break things world of tech, you should constantly be cannibalizing your own
36:01ideas and you should be rethinking the way that things work all the time. Look at something that
36:06seems good and say, I bet this could be better. We said, okay, we're going to build something from
36:12scratch, you know, from the ground up. That's really how we became JUUL.
36:17As I went back to the drawing board, James was really focused on the design side of a new device,
36:22while Adam was more focused on the science.
36:26For James, the design of it was always number one. Let's make it look like it came from San Francisco.
36:34What they needed to do was two things. They needed to make it simple, easy to use, because that was
36:40a
36:40big problem in the vape industries. Big devices, complicated. People would try it and if it wasn't
36:46easy for them to use, they'd put it down. And the other side of the coin was satisfying. It had
36:51to be
36:51satisfying pretty much from the get-go. While James focused on the design side, Adam was finding a way
36:57to deliver enough nicotine to keep smokers satisfied. There was something missing about all the products
37:03that we had developed and all the products that were now on the marketplace. You would vape them,
37:07you would smoke them and not get that sensation of smoking a cigarette. And I knew this personally
37:12because even I was still smoking cigarettes. Earlier generations of so-called electronic
37:17cigarettes used what's called freebase nicotine, which was difficult to inhale. It had a bite in
37:23your throat. And what it did is it inhibited the ability to raise the nicotine level up because it
37:28got too bitter. Adam was looking for an answer to this question of how to make the nicotine delivery
37:34of his new product equal that of a cigarette. And he actually found what he was looking for in
37:39cigarette industry research. What they found is if you conjugate nicotine with a weak organic acid,
37:45so-called salt nicotine, that it tasted much softer. It burned the throat less.
37:51That overcame that harshness of the traditional e-cigarette. It's a kind of a chemical trickery that allows the
38:00body's normal defense mechanisms to be overcome. And it's very, very smooth and goes down very easily.
38:08In the summer of 2013, Adam brought on a chemist named Chen Yue Zhang to help with the nicotine delivery
38:14problem.
38:20The question was, what would be the right thought formulation?
38:25When they started doing the chemistry for JUUL, it was a ramp-up, incremental ramp-up.
38:32Adam and Chen Wei went outside of some of the protocols in a typical research lab.
38:36They would just recruit their co-workers to test whatever they were working on.
38:41It was called buzz testing because it's a commonly used term by smokers to describe the nicotine
38:50head hit that they feel.
38:53The test was simple. Ten puffs in two minutes. Around the fourth or fifth puff, I would have to
39:01start tallying because I would hit a buzz so hard, I'd be like, wait, where am I?
39:06And then I'd come back and I'd be like, oh, okay. And that was number six.
39:10I mean, the potency. I had never really felt anything like that before since, let's say,
39:15high school, when I tried my first cigarette. Like a punch in the face, like, whoa.
39:20And it really opened our minds to what was possible.
39:23As soon as we tried nicotine salts, we're like, boom, all right, we're done. This is it.
39:29Now it was something that could actually satisfy a smoker.
39:35Adam discovered the secret sauce to making it effective.
39:42Everyone knew. This is it. We crushed it.
39:47At the 2014 holiday party, it wasn't more than like 25 of us in this room.
39:53And they got in front of us and then they pulled out the jewel and they showed us.
39:58Sleek little design, no moving parts, no on-off button.
40:02The shape of the pod sort of told you how to insert it.
40:06Just that simplicity. I was just like, everyone's going to love this.
40:10Everybody was comparing it to an Apple product.
40:13My God, it's like an iPod, except it's for like a vape.
40:16There were smokers in a room who hit it and immediately their eyes lit up.
40:19They're like, we found it. This is, this is great.
40:22I knew that it was significant when I took the first couple of puffs because the nicotine delivery
40:27was far better than anything I'd ever tried. To be honest with you, I not only got a head rush,
40:31I almost like vomited. It was that strong.
40:35I did have a pull off of it and I was like, damn, the plume that came out of it
40:40was so satisfying
40:42and exactly what I think anybody who wants to vape wanted to feel.
40:47It was a home run.
40:50Physically, it didn't look like an object that might be abused. It looked like a thumb drive.
40:54And so that was part of the genius of the designers is to make something that not only delivered a
41:00perfect level of nicotine to the brain, but could be used almost anywhere. And in that sense, it's the
41:07culmination of this century long effort to produce a perfect engine of addiction.
41:13I think Juul should have asked the question, if we make the greatest e-cig in the world,
41:18is that a good idea? Is that a thing we should bring into the world? But once they decided to,
41:25a lot of what happened after that feels sort of inevitable to me.
41:28E-cigarette use has skyrocketed among America's youth.
41:31An epidemic among adolescents.
41:34No one should use vaping products, period.
41:36You're nothing but a marketer of a poison.
41:38No!�ת
41:39≤
41:391 ≤
41:40≹
41:40≹
41:41≹ ≹
41:42Ah!
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