01x03 - Where's My Juul?

[bunniefuu]

Gen Z is basically everyone born

between around 1998 and 2010.

People that grew up with an iPhone

from the time they were

in elementary school.

I started on social media

when I was a little baby Chance.

We got to post whatever we want to post.

Yeah, cool.

It's fun to see what friends are doing

and follow up with celebrities you like.

Sending each other funny pictures

or memes or whatever.

Gen Z is growing up

immersed in social media.

They can't remember time

before social media.

Everything is unavoidable.

You're pressured to post,

to live this life online, to use products

that might be slowly k*lling you.

And that's depressing and exhausting.

Gen Z realizes

that the American dream is dead,

climate change is inevitable,

you may never be able to buy a house,

you might drown in debt somehow,

you had to take out loans for college.

Life is brutal.

At least you can just go

on Instagram and scroll,

and have a break,

and forget about your problems.

That's something that JUUL taps into.

Taking a hit of JUUL is like getting

a like on social media, or a comment.

It's that rush of energy

or that quick relief

where you feel good for an instant.

It's a break from the nightmare world

we all live in and have to grow up in.

JUUL was this highly addictive product

colliding with a generation of kids

that's been marinating

in highly addictive technology.

It's a match made in heaven

for a disaster.

It went from no one doing it to everyone

doing it within a span of like a month.

The first time I saw

a JUUL, I saw my friend hitting something,

and I'm like,

"What are you doing? What is that?"

She pulled it out and said,

"A JUUL. Ever try it?"

I was like, "No."

She's like, "Hit it."

And I was like "Oh. Okay."

I'm Chance Amiratta,

and I grew up in Miami my whole life.

Growing up in Miami was crazy,

to put it in like, one word.

You get introduced to things

when you're young.

When I started high school,

I didn't know too much about vaping

and didn't even care to.

But I think the second that JUUL hit,

you know, you get curious.

Why is there a flavored stick?

My name is Ksenia Benes,

and I'm from Nashotah, Wisconsin.

The first time, it really is like a rush.

You're like, "Whoa!"

"My body feels different."

And you feel tingly all over,

and it's such a quick feeling

that they're like,

"I want to feel that again

and know what I experienced."

Because it's almost

a hard feeling to place.

Vaping was super easy.

You could vape in any class.

You just like, this

hold it in for two seconds and

right under the desk.

And it just looks like

a little USB in your computer.

Everyone would charge them openly.

I think that's why it got so popular.

We can hit this whenever we want to.

So anyone could smoke 24/7

and most likely not get caught.

You whip it out and you're like,

"I got the mango one. You want to try it?"

Or, "I got a blue one,

and silver, and gold. Oh my gosh."

So it's just It's cool.

It became

such a social thing to do.

The fact that you'd walk

into a bathroom during class

and there's a little circle of people

passing a JUUL around,

we're talking and socializing,

and it just became a different form

of being more social with one another.

JUUL definitely did create

a newfound sense of unification

with the generation that I grew up in.

It's a product that can barely

stay on the shelves at smoke shops

across the country.

Early 2017,

it started to pick up.

And you couldn't even find one

to buy anywhere.

That might have gone on

for six to 12 months.

There was a big problem

with their supply chain.

They could not keep up with the demand.

Not even near.

People were scalping the stuff.

I think it was

the expl*sive demand.

You have to forecast

your manufacturing months in advance.

It's not like you can make them

instantaneously. Takes a while.

I think that was called

the dreaded diamond effect,

where demand outstrips supply.

People raved about the product,

but they were upset they couldn't get it.

Mark-ups were astronomical.

A pod pack that was normally $15,

you could sell for $50 for a four-pack,

$60 for a four-pack,

and people were paying it.

With the problems

that JUUL was facing,

and supply chain issues,

and the growing demand,

they needed a dedicated leader

who could help the company grow.

Since James's demotion,

there hadn't been a clear leader.

So in 2017,

the board finally brought in a new CEO.

And they picked a man named Kevin Burns.

If you want to find a moment

JUUL went from being a tech product

to not a tech product,

it's when they hired a yogurt CEO.

He had worked on yogurt before.

It's a pretty different product.

Not to denigrate yogurt.

Kevin Burns

was a supply chain guru

who, in fact,

successfully got the supply chain going.

He did have

great credentials.

His record at Chobani was outstanding,

and what he had done

to the yogurt industry

was what JUUL was trying to do

to the tobacco industry.

He was brought in

to grow the company.

Certainly there was a tremendous amount

of pressure from the board.

When you have somebody come in

who's not a tech person, not in the space,

it is very clear that their one job

is to figure out how to grow

and how to get bigger.

For me, the size of the opportunity

was intriguing in terms of

a billion smokers around the world.

Like, "This could be massive."

I remember there being

a feeling in the office of, like,

"What is the priority?"

Kevin is like,

"Everything is the priority."

"Everything all at once."

There was a meeting where he asked me,

"What do you need?"

I told him. He's like, "Okay, done."

Kevin Burns makes you feel

like you can move mountains.

He definitely pumped you up.

He would say, "Here's what we need to do.

We need to go do it."

And I needed to double,

triple our production.

The demand got so crazy.

We were looking at numbers every day,

trying to figure out,

"Are we able to sustain this?"

We need 50,000 pods.

All right, we can do 50,000 pods.

By the time they were at 50,000,

we were like,

"Change that. It's 250 now."

200 would change to 500. It would keep

getting astronomically higher.

Everyone from Uber,

Airbnb, Facebook, Apple,

everyone was leaving there

to come to JUUL.

The buzz was out.

We were hiring hundreds,

hundreds of people.

And that was all Kevin.

Expansion was really

Kevin's number one priority.

Asia was going to be

a huge market for us.

And the UK saw the health benefits,

and that was a crucial place for us to be.

There was gonna be

JUUL stores all over the world.

We were primed to be the next Apple.

- The limit does not exist.

- We couldn't grow fast enough.

We couldn't open up enough offices.

It was crazy.

It felt like the rocket ship

was taking off.

JUUL Labs has been able

to achieve something

no other start-up has done

in such little time.

The e-cigarette maker has crossed

the decacorn threshold,

which is a valuation

In the crazy,

fast-moving world of tech,

being a unicorn, a company worth

$1 billion, is now totally commonplace.

Now $10 billion needed its own name,

so it became the decacorn.

JUUL used to talk about, "We don't want

to just own the e-cig market,

we want the entire smoking market."

Which is enormous.

Of course there's

a $10 billion company in that.

It's probably worth much more,

if that's what it can pull off.

It was super exciting.

We had all this growth,

and we were flush with cash.

The reason that everyone

was grinding so hard,

working insane hours,

moving these literal mountains,

was that this was going

to mean something as well.

Kevin's mission from the board

was to grow the company

as quickly as possible.

What I always

appreciated about Kevin though

was the way that he evaluated our success

was not purely revenue,

it was also

the decline of cigarette sales.

He used to send us an email,

and you would see the way

cigarette sales are tracking

overlaid with JUUL's growth.

And those were so strongly correlated.

And I appreciated

that was Kevin's yardstick for us,

because that felt to me,

truly mission-oriented.

Our goal isn't to sell JUUL to everyone.

Our goal is to stop cigarettes.

JUUL is doing what it's intended.

It is really a substitute

for people that use cigarettes

on a daily, you know, weekly basis.

It did feel like we were doing

something good for society.

My first warnings with 20/20 hindsight

It's just

I have this image in my mind

of a specific person

with her big, baggy sweatshirt,

and alternately,

going like this with her sleeve.

And going like this.

And they would take a hit, hold it,

and then they would exhale it

into their sweatshirts.

It just

And that's how bold they were

because they knew we weren't

gonna know what the eff they were doing.

My name is Jonathan Hirsch, I go by Jon,

and I teach in Marin County,

one of the wealthiest counties

in the nation.

When I started with

tobacco use prevention education in 2012,

less than 1% of freshmen

used cigarettes habitually.

It was so fringe.

It's not like we would see

cigarette butts on campus.

And nicotine was just so not something

that we thought about anymore.

We were focused on alcohol abuse.

We were focused on

rising rates of cannabis abuse.

And the tobacco thing,

we thought we'd won that battle.

We thought that was done.

Cigarettes are bullies.

Don't let tobacco control you.

Gen Z and Millennials

have been bombarded since they were born

with anti-cigarette messaging,

the giant warning signs that you see

on the side of cigarette boxes.

Cigarettes were kinda seen

as gross, smelly,

something that your parents did.

It just wasn't as much of a thing.

When I was only six years old,

my mom started smoking.

I really didn't like it.

JUUL made their nicotine product

cool again

by being like, "This is not a cigarette."

"It's this thing that you suck on,

and it tastes good."

Charlie was a sophomore,

and I think we were on a plane to Florida.

And he pulls out this silver thing

and sucks on it.

And puts it in his pocket.

I'm like, "What's that?"

And he said, "Oh, it's a JUUL."

I'm like,

"Should you be doing that on a plane?"

He's like, "Yeah, it's fine.

It's just water and flavoring."

He smoked crème brûlée,

and it actually smelled good.

But I didn't quite know

how to approach it as a parent.

As much as I would put myself

in the anti-smoking category,

JUUL slipped in.

The same thing that made JUUL

a good fit for adult smokers

also made it appealing to teenagers.

So it's small,

it doesn't produce a lot of smell,

and it's really discreet to use.

The first time my mom saw it,

I think she saw a bunch of empty pods

that I had for my JUUL,

and she was like, "What is this?"

And I looked at her and panicked.

I was like, "It was the lights in my car."

"I was switching them out

because it was messed up."

And I was like, "That was a bad lie.

She's gonna know this is like, total BS."

Then she looked at me.

She's like, "Okay," and put it back down.

I was like, "All right, cool."

Teenagers could sit

in the back of classrooms

and be JUULing the whole time,

and their teacher had no idea.

JUUL is basically

tailor-made for content.

You saw so many pictures on Instagram

with people vaping.

Basically because aesthetically,

it looked cool.

Everything looks cooler

with a smoke machine in it, right?

And that's what JUUL allowed you to do.

If you can do a Ghost

or you can do a French Inhale,

you're like "Cool, dude."

You saw a lot of accounts

that were themed about JUUL.

There was #juulnation, #juulboyz.

All of these accounts dedicated to posting

and glamorizing the JUUL lifestyle.

Things like the JUUL pod challenge,

where people are trying to vape

as much as possible before they pass out.

You just saw people

being crazier and crazier.

Vaping was this thing

that became an internet phenomenon.

When we started to realize

that teenagers were using our product,

like, the first initial reaction

was like, "Oh my God. This is so cool."

"Everybody in high school is using JUUL.

Everyone in college is using JUUL."

"We are the coolest thing ever."

"We're the new Nike, the new Vans,

we're the newest fad."

"Nothing's more hip than a JUUL."

And pretty quickly we started to realize,

"Wait a second. This is not good."

Everyone at the company knew

that kids would get their hands on it.

Like cigarettes. Kids aren't supposed

to smoke cigarettes, but they do.

But then you just started seeing

a lot more kids with it.

I was at The Americana in Glendale,

and I remember there was a mom walking

and there were four girls behind her,

they had to be maybe 12 or 13,

and they were passing around a JUUL

behind her back.

I don't know if the mom knew

they were using a JUUL,

but because it was inconspicuous,

they were able to pass it, use it,

and not tell anyone.

And it just was like

Oof.

"It's going to start becoming

an issue if we don't fix it."

I was on our social media team.

I could see what was out there,

and we hated those accounts

showing our product being used

in a very irresponsible way

by people who were not legally

supposed to be using this product.

We were up against

a constant battle every day.

We'd get an account taken down,

five more would pop up.

Instagram would tell us, "These accounts

aren't doing anything wrong."

"They're not pretending to be JUUL.

They're fan accounts."

"There's nothing we can do."

For me, the mission was so important.

I knew what the product had done for me,

I knew what it could do for other people,

and I didn't want that to get lost.

Which is why it was so important for us

to be on social media to counteract that,

having the product in adult situations.

So we limited bright colors.

We were stodgy and boring.

We wanted to say,

"This is what JUUL is and this is

what we represent for the adult smoker."

"We are not this other noise."

We didn't want young people

to be purchasing JUUL.

I met Adam

for the first time in 2017.

JUUL was hiring new people,

increasing their sales month over month.

and so Adam came down to Florida

for what's known as

the Tobacco Science Research Conference.

Late at night,

people were drinking and hanging out,

and we started talking,

and the one thing

that sticks out about that meeting,

I brought up to him,

"You need to recognize

that you are a couple months away

from a calamity of epic proportions."

What I told Adam is that,

"Because of the viral videos,

it is looking like your product

is gaining usage among young adults."

I said to him, "I don't know

what you can do to prepare for it,

but you need to start thinking about it."

Adam recognized that it was happening.

He took my concerns seriously,

but I think he thought it was manageable.

The unprecedented rise in vaping

comes at a time when

traditional cigarette smoking,

drinking, and other drug use

has gone down among young people.

By 2017, the tobacco industry had noticed

that e-cigarettes were starting

to eat into their cigarette sales.

So they were really trying

to get into the game themselves

to try to recoup some of that lost money.

Big Tobacco has been trying

to find some profitable way

out of cigarettes for decades.

Every year that these vaping products

became more successful,

they really couldn't resist.

Altria is the parent company

of Philip Morris,

which makes the Marlboro cigarette.

So they are one of the biggest

tobacco companies in the world and the US.

They had an e-cigarette of their own

called the MarkTen,

but it was starting to look

increasingly out of date

next to products like JUUL.

So, in early 2017,

the executive team from Altria

reached out to the people at JUUL

and told them they were interested

in a partnership of some kind.

The founders were skeptical of this offer.

They didn't think it made a ton of sense.

I know we're out of time. I want to ask,

have you talked to the tobacco companies?

Have you fielded any takeover offers?

We know many folks

in the tobacco industry,

uh, but we're very proudly independent

and growing the company independently.

If a partnership

with a major tobacco company,

if frankly, any number of things

that we could do

would accelerate the decline

of adult smoking,

and improve the lives

of consumers around the world,

then we would certainly consider it.

We're not necessarily convinced that's

the move that would make that happen.

There was a smoke shop

right in front of my school,

and we're not supposed to be

able to purchase a JUUL until we're 18,

but all the kids who were buying them

would go there because the guy was chill,

and he would not ID anyone

and you could just walk in and buy it.

Mango was the best when I first started.

Even now, when I talk about a mango pod,

I'm like, "That was a good one."

But after about two months,

everyone got addicted,

so it wasn't a trend anymore.

It was like, "This is what we do."

When I started JUULing,

I didn't really understand

that there was nicotine in JUULs.

You ever put your face over boiling water

when you're making pasta and you're like

That's kind of what I thought of it as.

I didn't understand how it worked

until I was wrapped up in it.

It happens so quickly.

You don't even realize you're addicted.

You're just used

to the habit of hitting something.

But then all of a sudden you're like,

"Wait, I don't feel good."

Then you hit it and feel better.

I was spending so much money on it,

and I was like,

"I really don't want to do it anymore."

I'd get moments where I threw it away

and was like, "I hate you."

"I don't want this in my life anymore."

And the next day, I'm going to

the smoke shop, buying another one.

I became so addicted to vaping

that it really took over my everything.

I was even a gymnast,

and I remember not having enough energy

to do the things I needed to do.

I didn't think you'd get

so addicted so quickly.

Then I was like,

"Even if there is nicotine,

it's water vapor and nicotine.

It's not that big of a deal."

You know, that can't be that bad, right?

One morning, one of my sons

woke up and couldn't find it,

had to get to work, was rushing,

and ended up punching a wall.

The frustration at that point of,

"I can't leave until I find this thing."

"I got to get to work. Where is the JUUL?"

"Where is my JUUL?"

"Where is my JUUL?"

Hey, have you guys seen my JUUL?

Is that it right there behind the couch?

It's not?

f*ck, where's my JUUL? ♪

Where's my JUUL? ♪

So not cool ♪

Where's my JUUL? ♪

Before the JUUL,

I remember vaping

was already pretty popular

with a lot of teenagers

and high school kids.

But they weren't getting super addicted.

A JUUL does hit different.

Because the nature of the vapes,

they delivered nicotine,

but in a much lower way,

and slower into the bloodstream.

JUUL figured out,

through the nicotine salt technology,

that you can deliver nicotine

in a way that was really comparable

to a Marlboro or a Camel.

And adult smokers want that immediate hit.

Same with the teenagers

when they started using JUUL.

The problem you were solving

from the smokers

became now a problem

of addiction to young people.

They were becoming highly addicted,

and pretty quickly.

When you smoke a cigarette,

you get to the end of it, and you stop.

With the JUUL, the only stop signal

is at the end of the JUUL pod.

Hey, yo. Nicotine addiction check!

A pod is a pack of cigarettes

when you talk about

the amount of nicotine that's in it.

JUUL uniquely is much more addictive

than even cigarettes.

Cigarettes make you cough and wheeze,

and you can't take in so much.

You can take in

a great amount of nicotine through JUUL,

much more rapidly

than you can with a cigarette.

E-cigarettes, nicotine, they all feel good

because they release dopamine

in that special part of your brain

that we call

the pleasure and reward center.

And nicotine is

very dangerous on the developing brain.

It can have lasting and lifelong effects.

Nicotine is implicated in mood changes,

in depression, anxiety,

and certainly withdrawal.

We'll see kids lose interest in school,

and their grades will start falling.

They're no longer interested

in their extracurricular activities,

and that's because these things

have become less pleasurable for them.

Once they're hooked,

they have a decades-long addiction

which is very difficult to break.

I went through a pod every two days,

which wasn't a lot

considering my friends

would go through one a day.

I vaped a lot,

and I did get pretty close

to finishing a pod a day.

And it's almost crazy

to hear myself say that

because I'm like, "I did that?"

I remember what we thought

when we heard,

"That guy goes through two packs a day."

And this, "Oh my God, that's so gross."

"That's so much, that's crazy.

"How could anyone ever do that?"

And there are these 15-year-old kids

who are doing the vape equivalent

of chain-smoking.

By his senior year,

my son was asking for help.

And he said, "I'm up to two pods a day."

And when a kid asks a mom for help,

I think probably the last person

you want to ask for help is your mom.

So we first went to his pediatrician.

And my pediatrician didn't have any ideas.

So I started thinking,

"Well, JUUL created this product."

"They built the amusement park,

and we're tired of the ride."

"Where's the exit ramp?"

So I wrote JUUL.

"Dear JUUL, my 20-year-old son

is incredibly addicted to JUUL

and wants to quit."

"He's using three pods a day."

"Do you have any research or advice

how to quit?"

I wasn't at that point

wanting to pick at JUUL

or make a huge scene.

I just wanted the answer.

"You built it.

How do I get my kid off it?"

"He wants to get off, I want to help him."

So I got a response from Mark Jones,

the Associate General Counsel.

I didn't expect a lawyer to write me back.

He wrote, "You should address this

question to your healthcare professional

since we're not able

to make health recommendations

and would not know of any special factors

that may apply to you

or your son's situation."

It's a "healthcare issue."

And they wouldn't know

any of the "special factors."

It's part of the tobacco playbook, that,

"For most people, this isn't a bad thing."

"There must be something wrong with you."

I was incredibly angry

that this delivery system had been created

for the smoker's experience,

but there had never been any thought

for when you don't

want to smoke it anymore.

What they had created

was an exquisite cigarette.

They had amped up all the things

that smokers loved about smoking,

and they had found a way to downplay

all the things about smoking

that really stigmatize smokers.

It didn't smell bad. It didn't look ugly.

And it wasn't the gateway

to nicotine freedom,

it was an exquisite jail that was created.

Never once,

as a smoker for 20-some years,

I never once smoked a cigarette in my car.

I never once

smoked a cigarette in my house.

It was because I didn't want

the smell, the odor, that's disgusting.

But with JUUL, there's no odor.

I could do it anywhere.

There's never a moment

I don't have it in my hand.

There's never a moment

it's not hanging out of my thing.

There's never a moment I don't have,

like, seven of them on me.

I believe that I'm better off

as a JUUL user

than I ever was as a cigarette smoker

from a health perspective,

but I am also much,

much more addicted to JUUL

than I ever was to cigarettes.

Thus, the conundrum.

We were waiting anxiously

for the 2018 National Youth Tobacco

survey results.

My statisticians first presented

the still raw NYTS data to me,

and my jaw dropped.

There was close to

an 80% increase year-on-year

in high school use of e-cigarettes.

50% or 60% increase

for middle school kids.

And JUUL turns up as the number one brand,

by a long sh*t, with kids.

And I had to go in and share

this unexpected result with Dr. Gottlieb.

Walked into his office,

I laid it out for him,

and his first reaction was, "Oh sh*t."

And I said, "Yeah. Oh, sh*t."

Scott Gottlieb was a medical doctor

who had previously served

in a couple of high-level roles

at the FDA.

And very quickly

after he became FDA Commissioner,

Scott Gottlieb set tobacco

as one of his big priorities.

Tobacco use remains

the leading cause of preventable

disease and death in the United States.

I would have weekly meetings with him,

and I laid out the elements

of a comprehensive plan

that was really tied to this notion

of harm reduction

and the continuum of risk.

And Scott and I were

completely aligned philosophically

in this notion that

not all tobacco products are equal.

There are more harmful

and less harmful ways to deliver nicotine.

Nicotine in cigarettes is not

directly responsible for the cancer,

the lung disease, the heart disease,

that k*ll hundreds of thousands

of Americans every year.

Scott Gottlieb, when

he started, he was a friend of JUUL.

He was our ally because

we both had the same mission,

which was to end cigarette smoke.

They had succeeded

where every predecessor had failed.

They had succeeded with technology

that more efficiently

delivered the nicotine into the lungs

without having to burn tobacco leaves

and inhale tobacco smoke.

Just because

the nicotine delivery is high,

that doesn't mean it's a bad thing.

It could actually be a good thing,

if it's gonna do a better job

of helping smokers

using a demonstrably more harmful product

to get off of the more harmful product.

There are now different technologies

to deliver nicotine for those who need it

that doesn't bring with it

the deadly consequence of burning tobacco

and inhaling the resulting smoke.

As regulators, we follow

the science and try to do the right thing.

And when we saw the quantitative data

that showed just how popular

this product was with kids,

alarm bells went off.

I remember thinking, "There has to be

something going on with this product."

"Why is it that this product has become,

seemingly overnight,

so popular with kids?"

The proportion of high school teenagers

using e-cigarettes has reached

nothing short of an epidemic level,

in my view.

But what we're working on now is a plan

where we would require these companies

to have to file applications

with the FDA demonstrating

that flavored products

have a net public health benefit

The Tobacco Control Act dictates

that a company with a new product

has to go through potentially,

a multimillion-dollar

pre-market authorization process.

What's known as the PMTA process.

And the FDA will judge a product

on whether or not it is

"appropriate for the protection

of public health."

Taking into account

the children who don't smoke,

the smokers who may one day quit,

the smokers who will never quit,

taking all the people

in the United States into account,

will this product benefit public health

by getting on the market?

And the burden is on the company

to prove that the benefits,

at a population level,

to bringing a new product to market

would outweigh the risks

and the unintended consequences.

Passing the PMTA process

was make or break for a company like JUUL.

If they couldn't prove that JUUL

was appropriate for public health,

it could be removed from the market,

and the company would go out of business.

The FDA announcing yesterday

that they have hard data that supports

a "public health tragedy" is now underway.

The US Surgeon General

has officially declared e-cigarettes

an epidemic with young Americans.

The agency

must soon decide whether

to increase regulations on these products

that have attracted

smokers trying to quit,

as well as millions of kids

who never smoked before.

The FDA gave companies several years

to file their PMTA applications.

But executives at JUUL knew

they would need to do something

about the teen vaping crisis,

or they would risk

failing the PMTA process

and getting swept off

the market completely.

So there was a lot at stake for JUUL

to make sure

that they handled this correctly.

Our mission at JUUL Labs is, to improve

the lives of the world's 1 billion smokers

and eliminate cigarettes.

As the industry leader,

we must lead the category

in decreasing underage use.

Today, we announced an action plan

to do just that

When we started to realize

this could be a problem,

this might hurt us,

we started pretty proactively,

pretty quickly,

to put into play plans,

um, to mitigate it.

Part of my salary, and part

of what's paying for my research,

is teenage sales?

It's terrible, and we didn't like it

not only because it's immoral, right?

But it's also just like bad business.

If we don't stop kids

from using and buying this product,

it's going to hurt our sales.

It's going to strike against us.

We were making more money

than you could imagine,

with a clear line to huge profits.

One plan that JUUL came up with

was an education campaign

where they could teach students

about the dangers of vaping

and why they shouldn't use nicotine.

I received a call

from Ashley Gould,

who was the Chief Administrative Officer

of JUUL at the time,

for advice about their school programs.

I said, "I'm happy to talk to them,

but they shouldn't be having

school programs."

And I sent

an enormous amount of information

so that they would understand

that the bad guys go into schools

and talk about their products.

The tobacco industry, when you look

at their strategy in the marketplace,

they're clearly going after youth.

Because they understand, get them young,

they become long-term consumers.

Philip Morris,

they launched their own campaign.

"Think, don't smoke."

But it's a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Think smoking makes you look cool?

No way.

They know

the mindset of teens.

So they create ads

that when kids see them,

they want to rebel against that ad.

On the surface, it looked like they wanted

to prevent teens from starting to smoke.

And yet, if you looked at the data,

it actually got teens

to think about smoking and to smoke.

When you're a corporation profiting

from young people buying your product,

who shouldn't be buying it

in the first place,

you're the last person

that should "educate" them.

I think the first time

I started using e-cigarettes

was in the summer

between 8th and 9th grade.

About halfway into freshman year,

six or seven months

after I started vaping,

I remember hearing we were going

to have a talk at our school.

A mental health speaker

came in to talk to us.

We were told that he was someone

who knew a lot

about addiction and drug use.

During these mental health seminars,

teachers would leave the room.

The idea was that if a teacher left,

people would feel more comfortable,

and feel like this was

a no-consequences kind of zone.

And the first speaker came out

and said that he was a JUUL representative

who knew the owner.

I remember everyone

sitting up in their seats

because 60-70% of my class

was also doing it.

Throughout the presentation,

there were slides up

in which the speaker was discussing

how the JUUL was not harmful

and how it was 99.9% safer

than combustible cigarettes.

That's an actual statistic

that was used in the presentation.

He pulled a JUUL out of his pocket,

referred to it as the iPhone of vapes.

So he really came off as a salesman.

After the talk,

I did not feel the need to quit

because of these facts that he was saying,

about how it wasn't really that harmful.

It was definitely a relief,

and I felt like I could move on

and keep using it without being worried.

After the presentation,

I did not find that many people

shared the sentiment that I had,

that this guy was trying to market

nicotine products to a bunch of teenagers.

It was absurd. I didn't feel

like people would believe me,

and I felt like the only person

who would listen, um, would be my mom.

I was like, "What?"

The guy started telling them,

"JUULing is for adults, not for kids."

"We don't want you as customers."

But it's "totally safe."

I called my friends and I was like,

"You will not believe this."

And over the next few nights, few weeks,

Dorian, and Dina, and I,

we would speak every night.

We were so angry. We decided

we were gonna have to do something.

So the three of us founded what became

Parents Against Vaping E-cigarettes.

We called it PAVE.

And we would start googling,

and I'm a good googler.

Google-google-google.

Research started to come out proving

flavors were hooking the kids on JUUL,

so our advocacy focused on the flavors.

Kids have to be protected

from the forces

that are using flavors to addict them.

There's no question that,

because of flavors,

and how they were being advertised,

this took off with young people.

The JUUL

Fresh out of my middle school ♪

I get to the front of the store

They tell me they don't have mint flavor ♪

What? You don't have mint flavor? ♪

f*ck

Yeah, I think I'm in love with it ♪

Flavors hook kids.

85% of kids using e-cigarettes

use a flavored e-cigarette.

The majority of them say they do so

because of the flavors.

Flavors weren't introduced to help adults,

and their primary impact has been on kids.

Here it is ♪

There's my favorite perfume ♪

We've been looking for everywhere ♪

They did cool cucumber,

fruit, the brûlée,

but mango was that one

that piqued everyone's interest

where they were like,

"Yo, this is awesome."

We heard from adult smokers

all the time,

flavors were important

in helping them switch from cigarettes.

They didn't want to keep vaping

something that tasted like a cigarette.

No one likes that taste.

I worked on flavors

for most of the time that I was at JUUL.

The challenge around flavors is that

the very same things that adults enjoy,

kids do too.

I literally had people tell me,

"No way that adults like mango

as much as kids do. There's no way."

That's a bunch

of bullshit to me. Bullshit.

Adults and kids like mangoes.

I mean,

mango was my favorite flavor.

I was a 35-year-old.

I like mangoes. They taste nice.

Mango and mint

were our two biggest flavors.

They were billion-dollar flavors for JUUL.

I was at a scientific meeting,

and I remember getting in

a long conversation with Kevin Burns.

He was doing his,

"This is a product for adults and to help

people quit and yab-di-dub-di-dub."

And I said,

"Look, I'm telling you, if I were you,

I'd get rid of the flavors right now,

because those are

gonna be your Achilles' heel."

Company advisors

started to tell Kevin Burns

that he should consider

stopping the sale of flavored products.

But Kevin was understandably

reluctant to do that,

because flavored pods

made up the bulk of JUUL's sales,

so if he stopped selling those,

it would be a huge revenue loss.

If we did this tour today

with a parent of a teen

who had been addicted,

how would you defend all this scale?

All this production? All this growth?

First of all, I'd tell them I'm sorry

their child is using the product.

It's not intended for them.

JUUL wanted

to solve this youth issue.

The best way to do it, the fail-proof way,

would be at the product side,

where we could potentially

verify the age right at the device.

It required creating

a new technology.

"This new JUUL's a smart JUUL.

It's a connected device."

"If anyone else tries to use it,

it won't turn on."

We will be introducing

a connected device version of JUUL.

James was intent

on getting that done,

so he was always very involved

in the development process itself.

He had the vision of what

he wanted the product to become.

James has always been

very motivated by design as a solution,

and he seemed to believe this could be

the solution that the company needed.

Other people weren't so sure.

When the kids issue

was really taking off,

James and some executives

came up to my office,

and, you know, they were telling us

how concerned they were about kids.

And we said, "Look, you know,

if you're really concerned about kids,

you wouldn't be doing

the marketing you're doing."

"You'd get rid of the flavors."

They said, "We have this great idea."

And I said, "Do you mean to tell me

that you can communicate

with these devices

in both directions

and control them remotely,

and you can measure second-by-second

how people are puffing on it?"

"The nicotine delivery

puff by puff by puff?"

"You could make that product

a million times more addictive

than a conventional analog cigarette."

I just said, "That's the scariest thing

I've ever heard."

By applying, by bringing

modern technologies to this historically

"light stick on fire,

put in mouth, inhale" uh, market,

what we can start to do is apply

some of those technologies

to things that aren't just

switching consumers off cigarettes.

That's kind of phase one for us

It's such a classic thing to say,

that the solution to technology

is more technology.

At an intellectual level,

it makes total sense.

But the truth that we have discovered

is that if you make good things,

lots of people will get it.

If you make those things addictive,

whether chemically,

or emotionally, or whatever,

people will overuse them,

and then it'll be too late

by the time we realize what's going on.

The founders of JUUL

are earnest and naive idealists.

They had this impression

that this would only have good benefits.

But it's a problem when you make something

that itself creates new kinds of harm.

Unfortunately, JUUL made that mistake

of throwing in a Molotov cocktail

into the cigarette world

that exploded into a youth fad.

We should punish the industry

for methodically taking advantage

of the youth vaping problem.

Parents got upset because they forgot

they had to parent their kids,

and JUUL isn't responsible for that.

When they go after our kids

on social media,

and through the use

of kid-friendly flavors,

how is that bad parenting?

JUUL is stealth by design.

JUUL's small, it's discreet.

That wasn't made for kids that way.

It was made because adult smokers

also want to be discreet.

How is that JUUL's fault?

It's not.

And I don't know why,

out of all the other businesses

that are out there,

JUUL is the one that people

seem to hop on the most.

Do you feel like, with everything

that's happened around this conversation,

that the brand itself has been tarnished

to the point where

even the most well-intentioned actions

are not going to be effective?

I think the burden is very high on us, um

Once JUUL had gone

down this road of growth at all costs

and done what seemed like increasingly

problematic things to get that,

like going into schools and talking

to people about their products,

that was when

it started to be like, "Okay,

this thing that I think we all

maybe naively believed was mission-driven

and about doing the right thing,

and about solving a problem

that is real and worth solving,

is not the whole story."

Our goal, our mission,

is to eliminate combustible cigarettes.

So we're in our infancy.

This is just getting started.

I remember waking up

at like 7:00 in the morning

and getting text messages from co-workers,

like, "Did you see this?"

What the hell is going on?

What? Why would we do this?

It didn't make sense.

Most people joined the company

to b*at Altria, to bring them down.

I woke up and I read it on my phone,

and I was f*cking pissed.

I was really pissed.

Marlboro maker Altria

taking a 35% stake in JUUL Labs,

the board approving a nearly

$13 billion investment, 12.8 billion.

I wasn't surprised at the notion

that Altria would invest in JUUL,

I was surprised at the amount.

Their e-cigarette product

was never going to compete with JUUL,

so they wanted a piece of it.

After I finished the article,

before I made it to the office,

they had called an emergency all-hands.

We were all just like, "What is going on?"

So we all gathered

into the kitchen.

I remember being physically shocked.

And generally, that was the sentiment.

There were rumblings internally,

of people just like, they hated it.

We joined the company because

we wanted to take down Big Tobacco.

If we're gonna team up with Big Tobacco,

then how are we doing that?

Our entire mission

is to put them out of business,

and you just let them buy us?

It felt like they were

partnering with the Devil.

There were people questioning whether

they wanted to stay with the company.

And then, um,

Kevin's pitch was,

"Here's all the money

you're going to make."

♪ Money, money, money ♪

♪ Mo' money, money, money ♪

♪ Money, money, money ♪

♪ Mo' money ♪

They say more money, more problems

♪ I say more money, no problem ♪

The only trouble I got is

♪ I need more room in my wallet ♪

They say more money, more problems

♪ I say more money, no problem ♪

'Cause I've been making withdrawals

♪ And make even bigger deposits ♪

Yeah, I love my money

♪ And my money loves me ♪

♪ All the coin in the bank making the livin' easy ♪

Yeah, I love my money

♪ And my money loves me ♪

More buck when the bank say,

♪ "Cha-ching, cha-ching" ♪

♪ Uh ♪

♪ Money loves me ♪

♪ Yeah, money loves me ♪

♪ Money loves me ♪

♪ Yeah, money loves me ♪