01x01 - The Spark

[bunniefuu]

[typing]

[indistinct chatter]

[anonymous male employee] I'm not sure

this story can be told on the record,

but I'm gonna tell you anyway.

[David Pierce] 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.

[man] Everybody was there for a purpose.

Build something

that would change the world.

Tech was gonna fix all of our problems,

all at once.

[Dr. Robert Jackler] 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.

[Pierce] 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.

[Allen Gladstone] I'm optimistic

that this new innovation

will completely replace cigarettes.

[Pierce] 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.

[Pierce] They saw this

as just another tech product.

It's not a tech product.

It's a nicotine product.

[man] f*ck it, ship it.

[Pierce] Their goal was not

to make people quit smoking.

Their goal was

to make people start JUULing.

[Ash Casselman] I don't think anyone could

have anticipated how many children

would want this product.

[woman] 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.

[man] It was like a wave, it swept over.

Everyone was like,

"I don't know if I want to vape anymore."

[Gladstone] We would get hate mail.

"Kid k*ller, I hope you die!"

[Pierce] 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.

[woman]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?

[Ralph Eschenbach] 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.

[Casselman] The story of JUUL,

I don't think it's black and white.

The reality is it's gray.

[tense music playing]

[Pierce] In the early 2000s, there was

this sense tech could do no wrong.

We place a really big premium

on moving quickly.

[Pierce] "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.

[Gabriel Post] James Monsees

and Adam Bowen were classmates

in the Stanford product design program.

[typing]

[Jamie Ducharme] 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.

[Ian Fernandez] 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.

[Adam Bowen] 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.

[Post] 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.

[anonymous Stanford classmate]

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, d*ed at a sadly early age.

I hated cigarettes.

Every time I picked one up,

I felt conflicted about it.

[anonymous Stanford classmate]

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.

[Post] 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.

[Fernandez] 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 dr*gs

to keep my heart rate pressure down."

This is like This is like nicotine.

[Ducharme] 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.

[Monsees] 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.

[Dr. Proctor] Cigarette makers knew

they had a problem.

They were never happy about the fact

their products were k*lling 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.

[Steven Parrish] 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.

[Gregory Conley]

Every major tobacco company lied,

saying that there is no way

to deliver nicotine

in a way safer than a cigarette.

[Ducharme] 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.

[Monsees] 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.

[Bowen] 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.

[Fernandez] People were raving about it.

And James, you know,

he was on to something

and really hitting it big.

But still, in the genesis of it,

there was this serious health concern

about preventing people

from getting cancer.

[commencement host]

It gives me great pleasure

to introduce this year's

commencement speaker,

Steve Jobs.

[cheering]

[Post] I remember

all sitting together as a class,

and many of us as designers

obviously very inspired by Steve Jobs.

He was almost like a rock star,

you know. [laughs]

[Steve Jobs] Stay hungry, stay foolish.

And I've always wished that for myself.

Each of us were hungry to make

an impact and a change in the world.

As you graduate to begin anew,

I wish that for you.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

[Fernandez]

I think those two go hand-in-hand.

I mean, being foolish is kind of

not afraid to take chances.

Try it, do it. Don't hesitate.

- Thank you all very much.

- [applause]

This was one of the biggest problems

this program ever tackled

and tried to solve.

And everybody knows James and Adam

have an awesome idea.

It's incredible,

and their prototype is amazing.

Everyone knows.

Now what?

[Ducharme] After they left Stanford,

they decided this was an idea

they were going to run with

and make into a real company.

But James and Adam were

coming at this problem as underdogs,

and they were not successful.

A lot of companies told them

they were not interested.

A lot of VCs have rules against

investing in vices. They won't do it.

[Ducharme] Because of those vice clauses,

and what are seen as vice industries,

like marijuana, alcohol, tobacco,

around 50 firms told them

that they were not interested at all.

So James and Adam realized

that if they pursued individual investors,

they might have more luck

because they weren't necessarily bound

to the same vice clauses that firms had.

[Eschenbach] Angel investing

is investing in start-up companies,

and angel investors

invest their own money.

And what angel investors

are looking to find

is a company that will change the world

in some level.

Doesn't happen often, I will say that.

James and Adam came to my office

to, uh, make a pitch for their idea,

which they called "Ploom."

They came across as very bright,

very passionate,

and they had a very sophisticated design.

There was no proof at that point in time

that heating and not burning the tobacco

was going to be healthier,

but if you weren't burning,

the general attitude and feeling

was that this would be safer.

It had such potential for saving lives.

My mother smoked all of her life

and eventually d*ed of lung cancer.

So I thought about my mom

and thought this would have been a godsend

if she could have been able

to use this instead

and add years to her life.

So

So I decided to invest.

Riaz Valani was the investor

in that first round with us.

He was sort of a no-nonsense,

very strong individual.

We knew that we needed some way

to substantiate the health benefits,

and it needed to come

from someone professional.

They called me and said,

"We have this great new idea

that we think is going to

revolutionize tobacco and save lives,

and we'd like to meet with you."

The idea was that they would heat

the tobacco instead of setting it on fire.

And I said to them,

"That's an interesting idea."

"If you avoid the combustion,

you're going to have

a less toxic mix probably."

"But we need some evidence."

"We need to know what effect

are these things actually having."

This whole idea of

"move fast and break things,"

in terms of public health, is stupid.

We want to move progress forward

as fast as we can,

but when you're dealing with things

that impact people's health,

you need to be careful.

Ploom was starting to look

more like a real company.

The investors were more

than just funding sources,

so they would guide them

on how to keep their business scaling up.

The rule I use is that if you're

not spending as much on marketing

as engineering,

your engineering is being wasted.

That's when Kurt was brought in.

[Sonderegger] My experience with marketing

began when I started working at Red Bull.

They have a very unique philosophy

on how they come to market.

Instead of blasting everybody

with advertising and hoping it worked,

they did the opposite.

It was about allowing people

to discover your product in a cool way.

One day I saw

that there was a message from Adam,

and it said something to the effect

that he and his partner

were finishing school at Stanford,

which, of course,

gave it some credibility.

When I walked in,

sometimes you empty your pockets

when you sit down at the table.

I did that and didn't realize

I had a pack of cigarettes.

Immediately, I saw James and Adam

look at the box and look at each other

with an interesting look on their face.

I think in their mind they were like,

"If this guy's a smoker, he'll get it."

Cigarettes are kind of

the monkey on my back.

I really enjoy the relaxation

of having a cigarette,

but statistics are pretty clear.

If you smoke,

you will very likely die from smoking.

I remember they said to me what

I've heard them say hundreds of times.

"Smoking isn't just nicotine delivery.

It's the ritual."

"How can we preserve the ritual

and eliminate the harm?"

That resonated with me right away

because here I am, a conflicted smoker,

who likes the ritual, but can't stand

everything else about smoking.

If they can do that for me,

that could be a great company,

and also probably a pretty big business.

The meeting went well.

I got the job,

but I did say that I felt pretty strongly

that I didn't want to work for a company

that would sell to Big Tobacco.

I thought they were the enemy.

k*lling people for years,

lying about the nature

of their own product,

which they knew very well was one

of the most addictive products ever.

I didn't want to be associated

with any of those companies.

When James and Adam

started working on Ploom,

around 37 million people in the US smoked.

[Dr. Proctor]

So many people write off smokers

as people who have just made bad choices.

The truth is that the overwhelming

majority of people who smoke

began their tobacco use as teenagers.

[Dr. Proctor] Cigarette makers

recognize that

if they can addict a teenager to nicotine,

there's a good chance

they may have them for a lifetime.

[Casselman] I was 19.

I was like, "I can't smoke weed.

I'll smoke cigarettes."

It was like some sort

of 19-year-old non-logic.

[Gladstone] Thanksgiving dinner,

my brother convinced me.

He's like, "Just have one. After a big

Thanksgiving dinner, it's the best."

And that was that. That was that.

[Chris Charles] The thing I distinctly

remember is my dad making sure my mom,

she had cigarettes.

That was his husbandly duty.

I remember asking her,

"Can you please quit smoking?"

So that's ironic how I wound up smoking.

Nicotine keeps me focused.

When I'm really stimulated,

it can bring me down.

When I'm tired, it can bring me up.

It's a really unique thing in that way.

[Charles] I enjoyed smoking.

Just the physical activity of

blowing smoke and watching it dissipate.

It did have a relaxing effect.

I wanted to quit smoking

and tried so long to quit,

and felt so badly about it.

My dad had been a smoker my whole life.

I told him I was smoking.

He was disappointed,

then I think we shared a cigarette.

He got cancer.

And I remember all through

the experience of him being sick,

feeling such deep shame

about continuing to smoke.

But it was a huge part

of how I coped with stress.

In the end, when he passed away,

every single time I smoked a cigarette,

I felt like I was doing him a dishonor.

[Dr. Healton] The overwhelming majority

of people who smoke want to quit

and have tried multiple times to quit.

But for people who have never smoked,

the concept that it's not easy

just doesn't connect.

[Dr. Proctor] Nicotine can be as addictive

as heroin and cocaine,

in such a way that you cannot feel normal

unless you have the next dose.

[Gladstone] I tried the patch,

that was the worst.

I was having nightmares. It didn't work.

I tried Nicorette Gum, tried cold turkey,

tried a book, tried a hypnotist one time.

Nothing worked, no matter what I tried.

[Charles] I really wanted to quit,

but those replacements

did not work for me.

They just weren't the same

because I couldn't do this,

and I couldn't do this.

[Conley] If you could not quit smoking

with the gum, patch,

lozenge, or cold turkey,

you were doomed to continue to smoke.

For myself and millions of smokers

around the world,

that is a death sentence.

[Sonderegger] When we started Ploom,

we were doing something

to possibly change the world.

It was "f*ck Big Tobacco."

If I walked in with a shirt

that said "f*ck Big Tobacco,"

people would have been happy I wore it.

All, including Adam and James.

I had some ideas on where I wanted

to start with the project,

specifically probably on the branding

and things like that,

but they didn't have

a working prototype yet.

They thought that they would have it ready

after about six months.

It was pretty clear that there were

more challenges than anticipated

to get that product ready.

We had a multitude of problems.

We had some early devices,

and I took a hit,

and all of a sudden, it exploded.

It sh*t the rod up into the ceiling.

I remember the look on James' face

was like, "Holy sh*t."

It could have gone

into my head, basically.

[Eschenbach] Because Riaz was the biggest

amount of money in the company,

James and Adam, when he said, "Jump,"

they said, "How high?"

Riaz became very adamant

that this had to get done fast.

"We're running out of money

and we need to get more."

"We're not gonna get more

if we don't have a working product."

[Ducharme] They were running out of time

because other e-cigarettes

started coming on the market.

This guy is here,

and he is not smoking next to me.

What exactly is NJOY?

NJOY is an electronic cigarette.

[Sonderegger] NJOY was probably

the first company to come on our radar.

They were the anti-Ploom.

As we were using these competitor devices,

which are basically

in the shape of prefab cigarettes,

the question was, "Why are they doing this

if they're trying to help people

quit cigarettes?"

[Sonderegger] And then eventually,

you started seeing

what people started calling vapes.

The products were pretty complicated.

They had to have coils, these batteries,

they had a t*nk that you could fill

with e-liquid of your choice,

flavor of your choice,

nic strength of your choice

The industry was growing rapidly

because there were no regulations

for vapor products.

It was a new category.

The FDA couldn't regulate it,

so no one was checking

anything about the products,

there were no age restrictions.

It was the Wild West.

But Ploom was a really different device.

Adam and James,

they were coming at it from,

how does it fit in your hand?

How are you going to hold it?

There was more thinking involved.

[Monsees] What we've tried to do

is create a new paradigm.

Something that doesn't

look like a cigarette,

doesn't feel or taste like a cigarette.

It's different.

[Ducharme] The Model One was James

and Adam's first product

to enter the market.

It launched in 2010

and represented the first time

that Adam and James had successfully

made their thesis vision a reality.

This is the Ploom Model One,

which you open by removing the mouthpiece

and inserting

a specially-designed pod capsule.

Reinsert the mouthpiece,

push the button on the bottom,

it clicks to start,

it lights up in about 10 to 20 seconds.

[Sonderegger] As we were getting ready

to launch the Model One,

it was certainly an exciting time for us.

I remember we were toying around

with an ad campaign,

and one of the campaigns we launched with

was "Small, dark, and handsome."

And that was it.

And I dropped that

on one of the e-cig message boards,

and it went crazy.

No one had seen anything like it.

We got all these messages,

the number of reservations

sh*t through the roof,

and it felt like,

"This is real, this is happening."

"This could be the future of smoking."

Around that time, I started looking for

brand ambassadors to promote the product.

I met Kurt, and I was invited over

to Ploom headquarters.

And they laid out the product

in front of me,

and they're like, "What do you think?"

And I was like, "This is cool."

But it's powered by butane, so you had

to have a little canister of gas.

And then a tiny little pod

with real tobacco.

Then you put the gas in, put the pod in,

screw it on, and off you go.

They wanted it to be like

a modern, social, smoking experience,

which I was like, "Yeah, sounds amazing."

My job, as the field marketing manager,

was to introduce the world to the product

and get as much information as I could

from the people who use the product

to improve it.

[Sonderegger] At that time,

we had been doing a lot more testing,

we had been inviting people to the office

for social happy hours,

we were taking the product out and about.

In the beginning, we had one or two.

Now everyone had a couple of devices.

Pods were being made

and stockpiled in the back

for hopefully what would be

a tsunami of orders.

When it came time to start doing

the initial tastings and marketing,

I was working all day and going out,

sometimes until midnight,

back at the office at 8:00.

[Salta] We don't know where it's gonna

work yet, so we're gonna try everything.

We're gonna do movie theaters.

We're gonna do cafés.

We're gonna do boutiques, parties, clubs.

Clubs were the worst

because they were so loud,

and everyone was drunk.

You know, Plooms everywhere.

But we would set up in the back,

wait for people to come to us.

We would ask them what they think.

A lot of the comments

in the early days were,

"When are you coming out

with more flavors?"

There was a mint,

there was a chocolate one,

plus blueberry,

honey cognac, organic peach

and people specifically asked us

for these flavors.

It wasn't just about nicotine delivery,

it was about the experience,

so they were into flavors.

Flavors were important to ultimately

get smokers away from smoking,

with various options.

But people who were smokers who Ploomed

would say, "It's fun,

but it's not giving me the same hit

as I would with a big pull

from a cigarette."

[Sonderegger] The Ploom device itself

wasn't very good at delivering nicotine.

It didn't work for me.

I would tape two of them together,

sometimes at extreme displeasure of James,

because by taping two together,

it means his product isn't working.

For a hardcore Marlboro pack-a-day smoker,

they might try it, "Interesting,"

but they're gonna go back to smoking.

Kurt, Adam, and James

were constantly trying to fiddle with it.

Like, change up

the construction of the formula

so that it would be

a bit more turbocharged.

[Sonderegger] A lot of times, engineers,

they know so much about the product

that they don't understand

the pain points.

There were a lot of pain points

with the early Ploom device.

The number one was,

it's powered by butane,

so nobody's carrying around

a giant bottle of butane wherever they go.

Because it was an actual heating element,

there was a danger

of singeing your fingers,

sometimes your mouth

if you took a big hit from it.

It wasn't that every one of them was hot,

but every 50th one turned out

to burn somebody, right? It's too hot.

And with that kind of a yield,

2%, you don't have a product.

[Conley] It was unimpressive.

It was something that maybe

you could get a small market for

if you really dedicated yourself,

but it wasn't going to change the world.

[Sonderegger] I was going to smoke shops,

and I was getting quite a bit

of negative feedback there.

So, eventually, Adam came

to do a ride-along with me.

We went to five or six shops,

and I remember one time in particular,

when it finally, I think,

really hit home for Adam.

Instead of doing

the whole setup for the owner,

I just put it on the table.

The first thing he did was try

to put the butane in. It spilled out.

- He clicked it to start it

- [zapping]

and his finger was in the wrong spot

on the device, and he got a shock.

Eventually, he got it started,

put the pod in,

the top popped off,

and the pod b*rned his lip.

So it was the perfect storm

of everything that could have gone wrong,

did go wrong,

and Adam got to experience it.

I think when we walked out of that shop,

Adam came to the conclusion

that, "sh*t, this product isn't working."

"We're gonna have to redesign it,

and it's gonna take somewhere

between a year and 18 months."

We were frustrated at that point that

we hadn't seen the progress we wanted,

and the buck has to stop someplace.

[Ducharme] James took over in

the CEO role, and Adam took a step back.

And it was kind of a crisis point

for this new company.

Ploom was starting to get low on funds

and struggling to get additional funds.

I thought, "It's probably all over.

It's a shame."

At this point, James was on the hunt for

any investor who could help Ploom succeed.

[Eschenbach] Japan Tobacco International

approached us to invest in Ploom.

$10 million.

JTI was this huge Japanese conglomerate

making cigarettes.

[Sonderegger] We were conflicted.

Again, Big Tobacco k*lling people

for almost 100 years and lying about it,

and they come in

with a significant investment.

It was difficult.

But without that investment,

I'm not sure we would have made it.

Our mission was really important.

We can't scrap it

and go to the next thing.

The goal of the company

was to save a billion lives.

James and Adam told me

that of all the Big Tobacco companies,

JTI was the most progressive,

and they seemed to be

the most open-minded.

It was a way to get more distribution

of a product that was gonna save lives.

[Sonderegger] My spine was softened,

so to speak.

If by partnering with Big Tobacco,

it helps you achieve your core mission,

maybe it's not the worst thing.

[Salta]

Japan Tobacco enabled them to expand,

so now you have the funds

to create your own playground.

What does that look like?

[Ducharme] After the Ploom device flopped,

Adam and James knew

they needed to make something better.

And the $10 million that they got from JTI

gave them the ability to take a step back

and go back to the drawing board.

[Sonderegger] So with that money,

they pivoted.

They didn't come out with

a new and improved version of the Ploom,

they came out with something called PAX.

The PAX was an induction vaporizer

for "loose-leaf" tobacco.

[Monsees] So this is PAX.

A pinch of pipe tobacco.

You can really unlock

the sort of excellence of tobacco.

Pretty awesome.

[Ducharme] PAX was supposed to vaporize

loose-leaf tobacco,

but it became popular with marijuana users

instead of tobacco users.

At that point, cannabis was becoming

more and more acceptable.

Even though it wasn't fully legal

in a lot of places,

it looked like a good opportunity.

[Erica Halverson] A friend,

he handed me this vaporizer

that had this little X thing

on the front of it.

Told me it was called a PAX.

It changed my world.

I made a decision right then

I was gonna work for this company.

The way that you smoke marijuana

is mostly complicated,

mostly bad, mostly inefficient.

PAX showed up and said,

"We'll make it easier."

Suddenly, you didn't have to have

a Ziploc bag with your weed in it.

Suddenly you didn't have to have

a match or a lighter.

You can just vape a little bit,

and you're done.

This is fantastic.

[Sonderegger] It was a beautiful product.

It worked really well.

It was something you want

to share with your friends.

It even had a game function,

so you could shake it up,

and it would go around

Like Spin the Bottle, whoever

it lands on would have to take a hit.

There was a lot of care in even choosing

who we had representing our product.

We collaborate with people

like The Weeknd or Broad City,

one of the coolest, most relatable

stoner shows on TV at that time.

It was really fun,

it was well-thought-out,

and it blew up really fast.

The PAX was very big.

I remember it was all over the city.

You saw people using it everywhere.

Every concert you went to,

you saw the little light.

I have a friend

who was a distributor for PAX,

and he was selling

as many as he could get.

[Eschenbach] It started outselling Ploom,

substantially,

so Ploom dropped to the wayside

and PAX took over.

[Sonderegger] The PAX was

a phenomenal success.

Some people could have just said,

"Okay, we did great."

"Let's kick back,

enjoy the success for a while."

But there's a certain ceiling

in the cannabis space.

So, the venture capitalists

that would back this

were like, "Congratulations, guys."

"You have a successful product,

but that's not what we signed up for."

"We signed up for the big project."

"The project

to solve the smoking problem."

"The $90-billion-a-year project."

At the same time, Adam and James,

they still wanted to do

a revolutionary product

that delivered revolutionary results.

In this case, saving millions,

if not, possibly, a billion lives.

[Eschenbach] They still had that dream

and passion to solve

a critical health problem,

and PAX wouldn't be targeting that.

So I think that led

to the evolution of the JUUL.

[Pierce] In this "move fast

and break things" world of tech,

you should constantly

be cannibalizing your own ideas

and rethinking the way that things work,

all the time.

Look at something that seems good,

and say, "I bet this could be better."

We said, "We're going to

build something from scratch,

from the ground up."

That's really how we became JUUL.

As they went back to the drawing board,

James was focused

on the design side of a new device,

while Adam was more focused

on the science.

[Salta] For James, the design of it

was always number one.

"Let's make it look like

it came from San Francisco."

[Sonderegger] What they needed

to do was two things.

They needed to make it simple,

easy to use.

That was a problem in the vape industry.

Big devices, complicated,

people would try it,

and if it wasn't easy to use,

they'd put it down.

And the other side of the coin

was satisfying.

It had to be satisfying

pretty much from the get-go.

[Ducharme] While James focused

on the design side,

Adam was finding a way to deliver

enough nicotine to keep smokers satisfied.

There was something missing about

the products we had developed,

and the products on the marketplace.

You would vape them, smoke them,

and not get that sensation

of smoking a cigarette.

I knew this because

I was still smoking cigarettes.

[Dr. Proctor] Earlier generations

of so-called electronic cigarettes

used what's called freebase nicotine,

which was difficult to inhale.

[Dr. Jackler]

It had a bite in your throat.

What it did is it inhibited the ability

to raise the nicotine level up,

because it got too bitter.

[Ducharme] Adam was looking

for an answer to this question

of how to make the nicotine delivery

of his product equal that of a cigarette.

And he found what he was looking for

in cigarette industry research.

[Dr. Jackler] What they found is

if you conjugate nicotine

with a weak organic acid,

so-called salt nicotine,

that it tasted much softer.

It b*rned the throat less.

[Dr. Proctor] That overcame that harshness

of the traditional e-cigarette.

It's a kind of a chemical trickery

that allows the body's normal

defense mechanisms to be overcome,

and is very smooth

and goes down very easily.

[Ducharme] In the summer of 2013,

Adam brought on a chemist

named Chenyue Xing

to help with

the nicotine delivery problem.

The question was

what would be the right salt formulation.

[Pierce] When they started

doing the chemistry for JUUL,

it was a ramp-up. Incremental ramp-up.

[Ducharme] Adam and Chenyue

went outside of some of the protocols

in a typical research lab.

They would just recruit their co-workers

to test whatever they were working on.

[Chenyue Xing] It was called

"buzz testing",

it's a commonly-used term by smokers

to describe the nicotine head hit

that they feel.

[anonymous Ploom engineer] The test

was simple. Ten puffs in two minutes.

Around the fourth or fifth puff,

I would have to start tallying

because I'd hit a buzz so hard

I'd be like, "Where am I?"

Then I'd come back and be like,

"I'm done with number six."

The potency, I had never really felt

anything like that before

since high school,

when I tried my first cigarette.

Like a punch in the face, "Whoa."

It really opened our minds

to what was possible.

As soon as we tried nicotine salts,

we were like, "Boom."

"All right, we're done. This is it."

Now it was something

that could actually satisfy a smoker.

Adam discovered the secret sauce

to making it effective.

Everyone knew.

This is it. We crushed it.

[Andre Rougeau] At the 2014 holiday party,

it wasn't more than 25 of us in this room.

They got in front of us,

pulled out the JUUL and showed us.

[Sonderegger] Sleek little design,

no moving parts, no on/off button.

[Pierce] The shape of the pod

sort of told you how to insert it.

That simplicity, I was like,

"Everyone's gonna love this."

[Salta] Everybody was comparing it

to an Apple product.

"God. It's like an iPod,

except it's for a vape."

[Rougeau] There were smokers who hit it

and their eyes lit up.

Like, "We found it. This is great."

[Sonderegger] I knew

that it was significant

when I took the first couple of puffs

because the nicotine delivery was

far better than anything I'd tried.

To be honest, I not only got a head rush,

I almost vomited. It was that strong.

[Salta] I did have a pull off of it,

and I was like, "Damn."

The plume that came out of it

was so satisfying,

and exactly what I think anybody

who wants to vape wanted to feel.

[man] It was a home run.

[Dr. Proctor] It didn't look like

an object that might be abused.

It looked like a thumb drive.

And so, that was part

of the genius of the designers,

make something that not only delivered

a perfect level of nicotine to the brain,

but could be used almost anywhere.

And in that sense, it's the culmination

of this century-long effort

to produce a perfect engine of addiction.

[Pierce] I think JUUL

should have asked the question,

"If we make the greatest e-cig

in the world, is that a good idea?"

"Is that a thing

we should bring into the world?"

But once they decided to,

a lot of what happened after that

feels inevitable to me.

[reporter] E-cigarette use has skyrocketed

among America's youth.

An epidemic among adolescents.

[man] No one should

use vaping products, period.

You're nothing but a marketer of a poison.

[chanting] JUUL's getting richer

while people are getting sicker!

[closing theme music playing]