I started my week by watching a documentary named:
Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of JUUL.
It was an interesting watch.
Quick summary, remember this product?
Alright, you might not remember it like that. How about this:
Yeah, you probably do now.
If its not already obvious (from the documentary and the photos), that’s a JUUL. The highest-selling vape pen in history (I think?).
Now, I know most people think vaping is just smoking that went to Stanford, but really, it’s not. The initial and enduring supposition, which is based on extensive studies, is that vaping is generally considered to be safer than smoking. This is primarily because vape pens remove the need for burning tobacco to release nicotine. That combustion process in conventional cigarettes is precisely what leads to the carcinogenic byproducts that have made them the deadliest product in the history of civilisation.
Anyway, that basic premise was pivotal to the establishment of Ploom, the common ancestor of today’s JUUL product.
Ploom was actually a cigarette that went to Stanford (or at least, came from there).
In 2005, two former cigarette smokers, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, met as graduate students in product design at Stanford University and developed Ploom as a possible “cure” for the deadly habit of smoking. Their initial idea was, since using e-cigarettes was supposed to be much safer than smoking real ones, products like Ploom could replace conventional combustion products and help people quit cigarettes (the deadly product) but keep the habit—the ritual—of smoking (which was now assumably not so deadly anymore).
Ploom failed.
Of course, it did. Like most vaping products from that era, it was complicated, required too many steps to use, and was hazardous (sometimes would explode or run too hot and burn the lips). It was also a supply chain nightmare (according to Ralph Eschenbach, an early investor at Ploom, at some point, every 50th one in a manufactured batch of the vape pens was unusable). It also didn’t deliver nicotine as well as a cigarette did, so smokers couldn’t quite use it as a replacement.
Monsees and Bowen eventually sold Ploom (the company), changed their name to Pax Labs, created a new vaping product called the Pax (which succeeded), and then went on to create the JUUL in 2015.
JUUL was a hit.
It looked better than the Ploom—as slick as its marketing. Worked easier (no need to refill butane or disassemble components). It was a lot more reliable. And, perhaps most importantly, using an innovation of nicotine salts protonated with benzoic acid rather than freebase nicotine, the hit for smokers was significantly better—sometimes even delivering a far *higher* hit than conventional smoking.
By December 2018, just three years after its initial release, Juul Labs (formerly Pax Labs) was worth nearly $40 billion (even though it took a deal with the devil to get it there, but let’s not skip ahead).
JUUL’s success wasn’t just about the money, though. It was fulfilling its purpose—the initial, entirely altruistic idea of helping smokers quit deadly smoking. Anecdotal evidence from smokers turned vapers seemed to suggest so. This paper also corroborated such claims. Published in 2020, it mentioned in its introduction that a study confirmed that about 54 per cent of 3.6 million adult UK e-cigarette users are ex-smokers.
But JUUL’s success was short-lived.
Regulation bans, public outcry and mountains of lawsuits later, the company had lost 95% of its previous value. As of October 2023, Juul has spent nearly $3 billion in settlements with thousands of plaintiffs, including paying $462 million to six states and Washington D.C.
They may certainly bounce back, but it’s safe to say that particular era of their e-cig business is over.
And although it wasn’t entirely their fault (media misinformation also deserves a fair share of blame), it largely was. And that’s the main reason I chose to write about it today.
Key Learnings
In short, it turned out that in helping adult smokers get off smoking by delivering a product that was so much better than cigarettes, Juul Labs had inadvertently made it easier for non-smokers to pick up the addiction to smoking. And by non-smokers, we mean teenagers. A 2018 study of 13,000 Americans found that 9.5 per cent of teenagers aged 15–17 and 11 per cent of young adults aged 18–21 were using JUUL and that teenagers aged 15–17 are 16 times more likely to be JUUL users than 25–34-year-olds. And, remember when we thought vaping was healthier than smoking? Well, it turns out, it is in a sense, but is also just as dangerous in other ways (if not more dangerous). Although long-term health effects are still not known, there have been numerous reports of life-threatening injuries. In some cases, due to the mass, unregulated production of third-party flavours and nicotine pods (the content that is heated to produce the inhaled nicotine), the actual content of some of such pods was found to be toxic and dangerous, causing severe respiratory illnesses. That wasn’t particularly JUUL’s failure, as the pods they were creating themselves were found to be mostly safe.
However, in terms of getting kids addicted it nicotine, the buck stops squarely at their desk (or feet?).
For instance, their marketing strategy.
JUUL tried to insinuate that their teeming youth population essentially crept up on them, but it was hard to believe. The company had used young celebrity figures, urban lifestyle, pop-aesthetic photo shoots, and primarily social media-focused campaigns (on platforms like Instagram. Duh) to market the vape pen. It’s almost comical to not realise that if your goal is targeting adult smokers with your product, then you’re mismarketing it by partnering with a youth-favourite, then 25-year-old The Weeknd.
Stanford researchers (because it’s only fair that they’re from Stanford) eventually released a white paper, after combing thousands of JUUL-sanctioned social media ads and posts to study their marketing, that their ad campaigns were youth-focused from the start.
Now, what makes the story of JUUL interesting to me is not their rapid failure, but the pervasive culture that led to it.
For instance, firstly, their fall is a potent cautionary tale for techno-optimism, something of which every avid technology enthusiast, including myself, is guilty. Technology cannot solve every problem, and won’t always be used for the good it can be used for. We only need to look towards the internet as an avid, ever-present example of this. Inarguably the greatest invention of the modern age, the internet is, also equally inarguably, the most pervasive. And this is understandable. It’s a groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting, era-defining creation. Everything that makes it easier to do better, makes it easier to do the opposite. That’s tough. But it’s tougher when such a product, or service, is created by profit-oriented individuals. Which leads to the next point.
The culture in Silicon Valley technopreneuriship. “Go hard, ship fast, fail hard. Rinse, repeat”. It’s the foundational ethos of nearly every startup in the Bay Area and has influenced even fledgling founders and organisations outside of it. And why is it important? Because it works. It’s profitable. It builds billion-dollar-worth products. It makes people rich. But as you already know if you grew up in the age of teen tech billionaires, people who believe in the “move fast, break things” ideology cannot be the ones to save the world. They mostly only end up changing it. Disrupting. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes, ultimately for the worse. Also, “break things fast” is not a great ethos for a tech company making health-related products that deliver nicotine to the bloodstream. Seems irresponsible.
Another thing I was reminded of while watching this was the curiously devious role marketing plays in helping products establish themselves in the minds of consumers.
For instance, proponents of the JUUL kept calling it the iPhone of e-cigs. That elevated its status for many US consumers. And the JUUL is clearly a great product, a beautifully designed product, but somehow the founders claim that despite marketing it in this way, they didn’t foresee it being great for everybody—even kids. Today’s tech-driven culture relies heavily on marketing to push sales. The storytelling, the product placements, the endorsements...
Companies like Apple are intensely meticulous about how their products are portrayed, spending billions on marketing.
And it just made me think. The celebrity ambassadors. The creative directors. Marketing geniuses—these are the people who do most of the convincing in getting you to use products, and ironically, they are the least involved in actually creating them. They know the least about its demerits, and even if they did, they have an incentive to not share those details. This might be relatively benign if you’re just trying to get people to buy a new phone, but when you’re trying to get people hooked on something else, like say, a drug, that’s a fine line to toe.Our love for too-good-to-be-true solutions is also apparent. Just remember Elizabeth Anne Holmes, who was eventually convicted of fraud in connection to her nine-billion-dollar blood-testing company, Theranos.
I also took notice of the role of impatient investors. This contributed not only to the compromise of the founding vision but also led to the pervasive marketing in the first place. Of course, it is difficult to blame them as a 23-year-old slacker who has no idea what it means to build a billion-dollar business, or what it takes to get there. But I do know that by design, businesses follow the money. And the money doesn’t always lead to the right places. For one, it seems like a terrible idea to take a ton of money from a stranger. Especially when you’re promising them even more in return provided you hit some targets that are based on projections beyond your immediate ability to control. Generally, we call that gambling. In Silicon Valley, it’s just called Investing. And that’s the premise of many multi-billion dollar companies. They take a bunch of money that they can’t afford to lose, and then they make high-stake, huge-proportion decisions to safeguard those investments.
And I’ll piggyback on this to share my final big observation, which is:Essentially, founders are ALWAYS under pressure to deliver.
Now, zoom out of the corporate speak for a minute and think about your own life. Think about all the sub-optimal decisions you’ve ever made—the decisions you aren’t proud of. The ones that led to angry outbursts, tirades, and questionable acts that clashed against your moral values.
Now, think about how many of those decisions were made because you were under pressure.
And ironically, notice how much easier it is to justify, and perhaps even forgive, yourself for making those decisions because you were under pressure. Salaries needed to be earned. Face needed to be saved. Bills needed to be paid. People needed shelter. There’s almost no limit to what you can do if you’re under enough pressure, and there’s almost no limit to what you can forgive yourself for when you’re under such pressure. It’s self-justifying. It brings a me vs them dynamic. “It was either [me/my staff/my kids/my livelihood/my business/my peace] or theirs”. And not everybody faced with this always makes the decision that agrees with their conscience. Because, as a biological being, the mechanics of your neural chemistry prioritise existence—sustenance—over ethics, and will only consider ethics if it leads to sustenance. What I mean to say is, you can sleep on a guilty conscience. But you probably can’t on an empty stomach.
So there we have it. Of course, I’m only talking as a common man with no deeper insight into what it takes to create value on such a scale. So, I certainly give more grace to the people who try. Especially considering that these organisations add a lot of value to their economies and also might’ve even had an honest vision. However, these are just my observations.
I made some other minor ones. One of which is how, when JUUL was selling a 35 per cent stake in their company to Altria, the Big Tobacco group that was the embodiment of everything JUUL stood against (combustible, cancer-causing cigarettes), the disgruntled staff reportedly received a sizeable bonus that may have been worth over a million dollars for some or closer to two million, even.
As you can imagine, this was conflicting. Much of JUUL’s staff took a job with the company to take down big tobacco, not join them. Altria’s products are best known for killing its most loyal customers. And now, they were essentially selling out to the monsters they swore to destroy. A lot of them weren’t happy, that is until they saw the money that was in it for them (although they insist the media exaggerated the final figure). I can’t help but wonder about what we spoke about a few weeks ago, concerning the transactional nature of work today.
Everybody is pivoting into careers that fulfil their desires to make bank. That’s not a terrible thing, and arguably even the people who work for fulfilment and lifestyle are still chasing money (e.g. startup founders). But think about it for a second—let’s say you’re ten years into a career you ONLY chose for the money, and now, you’re one blind eye away from making a million dollars and essentially earning your freedom to go chase the life you actually wanted all along.
Tough right? Feel the pressure? Well, remember what we said earlier about the quality of decisions you make under pressure.
Nine other things worth sharing this week:
A friend sent me this satirical article about "how to tell if you’re a thought leader”. In it, I saw this hilarious video about a thought leader (he’s a comedian) pretending to give a talk about thought leadership in the stereotypical, TED X way.
One of the most worrying things about AI-generated content today is that the more iterations they have, the harder they are to distinguish from real photos/videos. As you can imagine, that poses a problem for authentication. But on Wednesday, Leica announced that their new M 11-P camera will be the first with the ability to apply Content Credentials that can track changes to a photo from the moment an image is captured. This means essentially, that verification for the veracity of an image can now go as far as down to the moment they were captured alongside helping users find out if AI has been used in creating or even altering it. Downside? M 11-P costs $10,000. Upside? It is a first of its kind— a proof of concept for other phone makers/hardware makers/software developers to emulate. They are also not the only ones doing something like this. E.g. Google’s new “about this picture” feature.
I read a newsletter called First Draft, by The Republic, every Friday. They interview writers, authors and poets and release a text transcript in the newsletter every Friday. I recommend it for people who enjoy reading about writing, the process of creating written work, and book suggestions. You can subscribe here.
I wrote a list of movies and shows to see this weekend here for AF24NEWS. We try to do it on most weekends, and we always include some local titles alongside the international ones so that there’s something for everybody. Check it out if you want a movie/show recommendation.
I have an Apple Arcade subscription (courtesy of my brother) and I just found out they have Football Manager there. I never picked it up while in school, which is obviously why I graduated on time. But now, I need discouragement.
If you have any solid negative points as to why I should not do this to myself now, please share.I was thinking about an idea earlier this week and I guess I’ll share it.
You know how most people spur themselves to act using the thought experiment of imagining that life is short? “You only live once and it could all be over in a second, so live your life now”, etc. I use this a lot too and it helps me make intentional decisions about how I chase my goals or handle my friendships. But recently I’ve been thinking more about the opposite. What if, instead of imagining it could all be over before 40, life was actually long? What are the decisions that I would feel safer taking—the places I would feel better staying at longer—if I was sure I would die at say, 100? And the reason I’ve started thinking
that way is because I’ve been exploring the idea of time. How all our maturation, learning, knowledge, understanding, and opportunity, could all be at the mercy of something as uncontrollable as time. Like, no amount of “intentionality” could ever fast-track some processes.
The universe is billions of years old. If you took the entire timeline of existence— from the universe’s birth to date—and put it into a calendar format, the arrival of modern humans (us) occurred on December 31st at about 8 minutes to midnight. Homo sapiens have not been on Earth for that long. We got here 8 minutes ago. There were eras of living beings that survived on Earth for tens of millions of years, that we didn’t even meet when we got here. We’ve just been around for about 300,000. That’s a short time. I can’t even remember where I’m going with this but I know I was trying to relay it with just how long time stretches. Some things took much longer and will take much longer, to happen. That’s beyond your control. It’s not on your time.
And bringing time down to the scale of our own contemporary, human, comprehensible sense, think about the lives of people who have come and gone. When we read biographies of other people’s lives, especially people we believe to have lived good lives, we learn different lessons. Some examples:
If you live long enough, the luck does spread out.
You always have multiple opportunities to try again.
You need the seasons.
You can’t always connect the dots until you’re looking backwards.
It might take you ten years to get that good.
It might take you longer to really find yourself, truly.
You’re not on anybody else’s time.
Another intriguing observation you can make from learning about people’s lives is seeing things play out. For instance, seeing someone chase something that they thought they should be chasing (maybe on the basis of trying to provide for their families, or pleasing their society or loved ones), and then reaching the end of that road, ultimately finding it unsatisfying, regretting wasted time, and starting again on the thing they actually wanted to do all along; their calling.
Somehow, seeing that the satisfaction of conquering a mountain is entirely dependent on whether it’s the one you wanted to climb is insightful. Because you’d think anybody who ever made a bit of money doing anything should be satisfied. Or anybody who had a family, built a brand, or even just lived long enough. But that’s not the case. Apparently, people regret even when they “win”. Because they won the wrong game.
And seeing that makes me more patient.Ultimately I feel like it makes me realise that if you know your path, you’d rather die in the process of climbing your mountain than leave this world at the summit of someone else’s. So, my actions nowadays look a bit like: Whether life is long, or short, how can I do more of the things that make me satisfied with the idea of leaving things where I am? How can I live with the idea that I’m right where I need to be at this very moment?
I finally went back to designing stuff again and I found rust. I did manage to crank out a vector design exploring an idea I had.
Sadly it’s still unfinished because unfortunately, I’m employed. Original Image by Prince Akachi (Unsplash)
But honestly, I’m more excited about the fact that I was about to continue sketching digitally again. For a bit of background, I’m trying to draw more comic strips before the year’s end. I bought a sketchpad a few months ago and that was what I’d been using to practice. But I’d rather draw digitally and before now, I’d been looking for a good drawing/painting app that I could get for my laptop at a reasonable cost. Luckily, I discovered Tayasui Sketches this week. And fortunately, it was available on Setapp, a platform I’m already subscribed to. I have found it to be a much better experience than what I was using before, and I might be doing more comics, or at least more practice, as a result of that.Book recommendation this week: Technopoly by Neil Postman. What’s it about? Well, I haven’t read it yet, as I’m just about to buy the e-copy (because I’m trying to repent of evil ways). But the Amazon description reads, “The story of our society's transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it—with radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth.” It was recommended in an article I read earlier about the pitfalls of techno-optimism, and I am interested in learning more about the overarching thesis.
Last week, I made three movie recommendations, of which I saw one (Angry Dads). Because I indignantly wanted to watch a Scorsese movie, I eventually swapped out The Irishman for The Departed, which I saw on Sunday for the first time in my life. Very gripping. I absolutely recommend it if you haven’t seen it.
And that’s that for another week.
See you next week, similar time, same place.
(Sorry I’m not sticking to one particular time for posting. Testing out different schedules to see which works best for me and circulation).