Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul

I'm not sure this story can be told on the record,

but I'm gonna tell you anyway.

This idea that you could come to Silicon Valley and not only

invent something that is yours, but also make the world a better place,

that's the dream.

The time was right for new things to happen.

Everybody was there for a purpose.

Build something that would change the world.

Tech was gonna fix all of our problems, all at once.

There is one leading preventable cause of death in America,

and that is tobacco use.

Innovation could address all the problems associated with smoking.

Our goal, our mission is to eliminate combustible cigarettes.

They had this relentless focus.

Too many people smoke, we want to help them smoke less,

and we want to give them a cooler, better, safer way to do it.

People are talking about it. They're like, "This is going to be big."

One puff and never ever again smoked another cigarette my whole entire life.

Never again.

I'm optimistic that this new innovation

will completely replace cigarettes.

They had taken every lesson from the tech industry

and applied it to tobacco, and people just threw money at them.

We were the fastest-growing company in world history.

They saw this as just another tech product.

It's not a tech product. It's a nicotine product.

Fuck it, ship it.

Their goal was not to make people quit smoking.

Their goal was to make people start JUULing.

I don't think anyone could have anticipated how many children

would want this product.

In the beginning,

you felt like you were part of a secret club no one knew about yet.

It is not unreasonable to be skeptical about our intent.

Children's Hospital in Wisconsin is sounding an alarm

about serious health problems linked to vaping.

I remember waking up in an ICU bed, you know,

with my family by my side.

It was like a wave, it swept over.

Everyone was like, "I don't know if I want to vape anymore."

We would get hate mail. "Kid killer, I hope you die!"

As JUUL became the story, James became the face.

He was the face. He wanted to be the face.

You, sir, are an example to me

of the worst of the Bay Area.

He felt villainized, and I think it was too much for him to bear.

There's so much vitriol on both sides.

The debate is unlike anything I've seen in public health.

We can't completely favor teens

and completely ignore 35 million adults.

How many kids are you willing to addict to help one adult quit?

The parents of this country are fed up.

Parents got upset because they forgot they had to parent their kids,

and JUUL isn't responsible for that.

E-cigarettes are not helping people quit smoking.

It helped me get off of cigarettes.

Sounds like a smoking-cessation device to me.

They had a choice, and they went to maximize the profits.

We're all in this to make money. We come to San Francisco to make money.

This is America, right?

As all of us have probably experienced in our lives,

if you watch a major event,

different people come away with different perspectives.

They all say, "What I saw was the truth,"

but they end up with different versions of the truth.

The story of JUUL, I don't think it's black and white.

The reality is it's gray.

In the early 2000s, there was this sense tech could do no wrong.

We place a really big premium on moving quickly.

"Move fast and break things," that's the tech ethos.

You should never be afraid of making small mistakes in service of huge success.

Stanford and the tech industry have had this symbiotic relationship for decades.

You had investors all over Silicon Valley who were starting to say,

"Who's working on interesting student projects that I can invest in

that turn into hundred-billion-dollar businesses down the road?"

You had all these undergraduates wanting to create a start-up, an app.

There were billionaire professors on campus.

There's this euphoria around the Silicon Valley sort of ethos.

"We innovate, we disrupt."

Stanford has a great reputation in attracting talents.

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether it attracts them or makes them.

But in either case, a lot of the top people are coming out of Stanford.

James Monsees and Adam Bowen were classmates

in the Stanford product design program.

James and Adam were both gifted product designers,

and they both studied this concept of design thinking

or basically infusing design into every aspect of a product

and its development.

You're trying to have empathy and understand your customers,

and any problem you see,

we can try and make a product to solve that problem.

I was always drawing things, designing things as a kid.

Airplanes, cars... you name it, really.

I don't realize that there was this career called "Product Design."

I was just naturally sketching these things.

My parents always told me I didn't like playing with toys,

I liked playing with vacuum cleaner parts.

When I was 15, my parents wouldn't give me a car,

so I built a car.

James and I met while we were in this program at Stanford.

We worked on a lot of projects that had some social or environmental impact.

Both Adam and James had world-class minds.

Adam was an incredible engineer and was highly competitive as well.

And James was very gifted in multiple disciplines.

James was such a good artist,

and he's also a brilliant scientist and engineer.

He can do all of that.

We had this amazing place on campus called The Product Design Loft,

and we got to hide out behind there,

and we would smoke cigarettes.

Smoking was always a contentious issue in my family.

My mom's father, he smoked a lot.

He smoked many packs of cigarettes a day

and, um, died at a sadly early age.

I hated cigarettes.

Every time I picked one up, I felt conflicted about it.

Smokers were always a bit the misfits.

And, you know, it wasn't very cool to be smoking cigarettes

in the year 2005.

Adam and I would look at each other, and we would ask each other

why we were being quite so stupid hiding out behind this loft.

And, um, we looked inwards at ourselves,

and what we realized was that it isn't smoking that we love,

it is the things that smoking does for you.

It is the sharing that you have, the sharing moments,

or taking a break from your day.

Those are the things that really matter.

James and Adam were out on a smoke break

looking down at the burning cigarettes in their hands,

and thought, "We must do something better."

James was like, "Can we take all the bad stuff out,

and still get the stuff we like?"

And that's kind of where James and Adam kicked off.

As soon as they started talking to each other, they found common ground

and seemed to be filling in knowledge gaps for each other.

And James was like, "Why hasn't someone come up with vaporization solutions yet?"

And Adam just started going off on essentially a brainstorm.

Smoking impacts a lot of lives,

and it occurred to us that

it's a space where there's been little or no innovation.

There's 38 million Americans that still smoke.

There are a billion people who still smoke globally.

We saw this as a huge public health opportunity.

I was excited about the promise for what could come from it

as the idea matured.

Most people were happy with it.

But this might have been more from the faculty side, if I remember right,

they were kind of raising eyebrows.

"So this is a drug-delivery device?"

Um...

And not like, "I need drugs to keep my heart rate pressure down."

This is like... This is like nicotine.

Some of their professors had concerns

that they should slow down a little,

do more research, make sure they were building things responsibly

because nicotine is incredibly addictive.

In James and Adam's research,

they found this massive archive of tobacco industry documents

stored at the University of California, San Francisco.

At the time, what we really wanted to learn about was

what are the best technologies and techniques for eliminating smoking?

It turns out tobacco companies have worked on this quite a bit.

Cigarette makers knew they had a problem.

They were never happy about the fact their products were killing people.

How can we make a new kind of cigarette

that keeps the addiction but loses the cancer?

And that becomes a kind of hidden goal of Big Tobacco in super-secret projects.

And they've already started in the late 1950s.

To make a product that would be less harmful,

that was the Holy Grail.

Is there a way we can reduce the temperature

to generate smoke without setting the tobacco on fire?

You would basically warm up tobacco and then get tobacco vapor,

which would include nicotine.

And it would be a truly safer cigarette

because most of the harm from a cigarette is in the combustion products.

But if they introduce a safer cigarette, what are they supposed to call it?

They didn't want to admit that their regular cigarettes were causing cancer.

Trapped in their own webs of deception.

Every major tobacco company lied,

saying that there is no way to deliver nicotine

in a way safer than a cigarette.

James' theory was that someone on the outside,

someone like him and Adam,

would be necessary to come in and make that innovation happen.

They really started focusing more on the vaporization of tobacco.

At the time, vaporizers were a thing,

but it was this massive system.

Not at all portable, not practical.

James was interested in, how do you make that smaller?

It seemed like an awesome project to pursue.

James and Adam built the original prototype,

and they were determined to make this prototype meaningful.

Is it even possible to make a safe cigarette?

It turns out that burning tobacco is the real problem.

Nicotine is addictive, clearly,

but it's not the nicotine that's really hurting you.

Our goal was to basically create a whole new experience for people

that retains the positive aspects of smoking, like the ritual,

but makes it as healthy and socially acceptable as possible.