This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. For decades, people have been trying to figure out how to create a cigarette without many of the downsides. You know, the things that make smoking the biggest cause of preventable death in America. The tar, the carcinogens, and all that stuff.
The early models looked almost like cigarettes, but they gave themselves away in subtle ways. If you looked really closely, you could see that they were made of plastic or metal, and they had a little glowing light on the tip meant to resemble the cherry at the end of a lit cigarette. Or you might remember the big clunky vaporizers that resembled walkie talkies and required users to tinker with battery coils and pour so-called e-liquid into them by hand.
These ended up breaking into the mainstream. Until, in 2015, a company called Jewel Labs rolled out a new nicotine vape that caught fire, both with adult smokers who used them to kick their old-fashioned smoking habit, and with young people, children, who just thought they were cool. The Jewel became a phenomenon, not strictly speaking as a smoking cessation device, but as an entirely new habit, Jewel-in.
In addition to limiting some of the harm of smoking, it seemed to threaten an entire generation with nicotine addiction. The new podcast Backfire, The Vaping Wars, dives into the stories behind the Jewel success and its failures. Listening to the show, it's clear that what began as an arguably promising innovation in harm reduction inspired a backlash that in turn opened the door to a veritable Wild West of vaping products.
Today, we're going to present you with the first episode in which host Leon Nayfok and Ariel Partis track how Jewel's founders figured out that the right combination of chemistry and design could unlock their product's potential, and enhance its addictive qualities. It's really fascinating stuff. Check it out. One afternoon last fall, I sent a Slack message to Ariel Partis, my co-host on this podcast. I needed to tell her something. I feel nervous.
Because every time a conversation starts with, I need to tell you something. It's not good. Uh, generally not good, but this one could be good. I don't know. I'm going to remain optimistic. Ariel and I had spent months reporting on vaping, trying to figure out how it had gone from a niche hobby to a billion dollar industry in the space of just a decade. And the entire time we were doing this, I was also trying to quit vaping myself and telling Ariel about it sometimes.
Yesterday when we were recording, we could probably play this clip. I'm pretty sure we were rowing. Oh, no. At one point, you were like... Leon, was that a vape? No. That did really sound like a vape. I don't, I don't vape anymore. What was that sound? I don't know. Yeah, I was on my phone for a second. Don't lie to us, Leon. I'm not lying. I'm not lying. I'm not lying. The phone makes a weird sound sometimes. I just flatly lied, being like, it's not, and we moved on. But it was a vape.
Why did you lie? Because I really thought it was going to be my own little secret until I threw it away later in the day. And it was, if literally only I knew, it would be like it never happened. That's why I lied. But it's literally on tape. We all knew it happened, and now there's concrete proof of it. Damn. Damn. Well, thank you for your delayed honesty. And... Sorry, I lied, sorry, I lied to you. I forgive you.
A few years ago, there was really only one vaping product that I and everyone else I knew was using. The Jewel. In fact, that's what I thought we'd be making this podcast about. Jewel. But once we dug into it, we discovered there are now literally thousands of vape brands on the market. In flavors like luscious lemon, and watermelon ice, and cheesecake. You know the Cambrian explosion that's responsible for all the world's biodiversity? That's kind of a rat with nicotine vapes right now.
And I unfortunately have sampled a lot of them. I've tried the air bar, I've tried elf bars, I've tried esco bars, I've tried mylees, and I like them. I hate how much I like them, and I hate how hard it is for me to stop using them. I bought one this morning. Why did you buy an air bar this morning? Because my air bar died last night. And you know that's not what I meant. Watching Leon grapple with his addiction was pretty eye-opening for me.
I didn't grow up around anyone who smoked cigarettes, and as an adult in the Bay area, I didn't know many people who vaped either. In fact, in 2019, I voted to ban the sale of nicotine vapes in San Francisco. They just seemed obviously bad. So when we started working on this podcast, I wondered if our reporting would change my mind. My feelings about vaping were complicated. When I was growing up, both of my parents smoked cigarettes, and I picked up the habit when I got to college.
Then, during my senior year, my dad died of lung cancer. He was just 47 years old. And yet, even after that, I had a really hard time quitting. I tried nicotine patches and gum and even hypnosis and nothing ever stuck. Until I discovered the jewel. And honestly, it was a godsend. If I had a jewel in my pocket, I just didn't smoke cigarettes or even think about them.
But at the same time, because I jeweled all day, including inside of my desk, I became way more addicted to nicotine than I ever was as a smoker. All of this is why when we first started our reporting, we weren't sure how to feel about jewel and all of the vape companies that have come since. Were they saving people's lives? Or profiting off of their weaknesses?
It's safe to say we've both been shocked by what we've learned as we spent the past year trying to get to the bottom of who is winning and who is losing what we've come to think of as the vaping wars. Because it's not just one war. There's the war for dominance in the market. Send the logo and the flavor you want and these Chinese manufacturers will send you tens of thousands of them. Jewels like not cool anymore. It's the puff bar. Elf bar and Esco bar have not received FDA authorization.
Thousands of unauthorized vapes are pouring into the United States from China. It's almost like we just can't stop this. We are at the cusp of something that could be a catastrophe. And there's also a war between two bitterly opposed camps. One focused on preventing a new generation from getting addicted to nicotine. They came into a kids school. This is predatory behavior. And the other focused on the potential of vapes to save millions of lives.
This puff I knew that I was going to quit smoking. But before all that, there was first Jewels War on Big Tobacco, which began at Stanford University before the first vape had even hit the market. That's where we're going to begin our story. Two decades ago, when two graduate students in a design program came up with what seemed like a simple solution to the problem of cigarettes. I remember being like, this is it. This is the dream. I'm Ariel Pardes.
I've been a reporter covering Silicon Valley for publications like Wired and the Information for the last eight years. And I'm Leon Nefak, host of the podcast Yasco and the co-creator of Slow Burn. From audible originals and prologue projects, this is backfired. A podcast about the business of unintended consequences. This episode won, Smoking Gun. In January of 2015, a 30-something entrepreneur named James Moncies sat down for an interview with a journalist.
It was just a few months before the Jewel would be released. I don't know if I started this in grad school and at Stanford. We didn't really have a hard set goal on starting a company out of it. The past decade had been a struggle. But Moncies felt like the company he had co-founded with his classmate, Adam Bowen, was finally on the cusp of revolutionizing the world of nicotine. So he was ready to tell their origin story. So you wanted to start the beginning. I was first beginning.
Okay. That's easy. If I can remember it now, it's been so long. I'm just kidding, it's permanently engranded in my mind. Bowen and Moncies had met over a decade earlier in 2003 when they were both enrolled in a master's program at Stanford. The program was a mix of art, mechanical engineering, and industrial design. Traditionally, 90% or so of the people who came out of that program would start companies. People who showed up in this program weren't just in grad school to be in grad school.
They were on a mission. This is Liz Gerber. She attended the program around the same time as Bowen and Moncies. People were talking about the power of technology, the potential of connecting people, the discussion about unintended consequences in the product design world was minimal. Just to place you in this moment in time, 2003 was the year MySpace debuted. Apple introduced the iTunes Music Store, and WordPress helped kick off the blogging era.
We were doing things in a different way at that time. Anything felt possible, and it wasn't commercially driven. It was really let's envision the future in which we want to live. As she hung around Stanford's campus, Gerber became friendly with Bowen and Moncies. She watched that the two started the tinker with various product ideas in the school's legendary design lab.
Ideas like furniture that could be molded into different shapes, as well as high-tech business cards that would transmit your information with a single tap. But Gerber remembers that it wasn't just their work that made Bowen and Moncies stand out. Everybody knew each other, but the smokers definitely knew each other. There were about four students who regularly smoked. By 2003, smoking rates among young people were in free fall.
I remember being very much in the minority in college when I would smoke outside of our dorm. Bowen and Moncies experienced much the same thing. I remember I went, took them to task for smoking right outside the door because I was like, hey guys, this is the way I get in. This is the way everybody has to get in. Fine smoke, but smoke somewhere away from where everybody has to come in and out of the door. Moncies in particular felt shame over his smoking.
His grandfather, a smoker, had died from lung cancer. And growing up, Moncies mom taught him to hate cigarettes. And yet he picked up the habit anyway. And one day, he was having a cigarette with Bowen outside the design lab and a light bulb went off. We just kind of looked at each other and thought, you know, this would be a really interesting space to look at. And then the safety and shelter of academia, right? Why not look at something that's a huge opportunity and a huge social problem?
What they realized was that there were a lot of smokers who wanted to quit and no one had come up with a truly effective way to help them do it. Bowen and Moncies decided this was the problem they wanted to focus on in their master's thesis. So they got to work researching their idea. That was when they discovered a number of earlier attempts by big tobacco companies to create a safer cigarette. Among them was the premiere, which RJ Reynolds released in 1988.
The premiere is the premiere of a cigarette which heats tobacco rather than burns it, thus eliminating most of the smoke, much of the odor, and all of the ash. Under the codename Project Spa, RJ Reynolds spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing the device. The big innovation behind it was that it heated tobacco instead of burning it, thereby removing the most dangerous part of smoking, the combustion that creates tar.
Still, Reynolds was careful not to say that the premiere was safer, just that it was cleaner. We substantially reduced many of the controversial compounds found in the smoke of tobacco burning cigarettes, virtually eliminate side-stream smoke, no ash. There is a cleaner taste. It is a different taste. But that different taste wasn't a hit with early users. It doesn't taste like you're smoking tobacco. What does it taste like? Like you're smoking plastic?
Reynolds gave up on the premiere after a short test period. But as Bowen and Moncees found out, that was not the end of Big Tobacco's efforts to create a safer cigarette. In 1998, Philip Morris released the Accord. Accord is really a smoking system. It includes what would appear to be a traditional cigarette that is inserted into a special lighter. The lighter has sensors in it, and when you take a puff, it burns the tobacco in the cigarette.
Like the premiere, the Accord was designed to vaporize tobacco leaves by gently heating them, which was supposed to prevent users from inhaling deadly chemicals. But also like the premiere, the Accord tasted bad and failed to take off with customers. The timing was also not great. As it happened, the Accord was released just as Philip Morris, along with several other Big Tobacco companies, agreed to pay billions of dollars in a court-ordered settlement.
The Accord is clearly an important step in the right direction for our country. It reflects the first time tobacco companies will be held financially accountable for the damage their product does to our nation's health, and the long struggle to protect our children from tobacco. As part of the settlement, tobacco companies were forced to make millions of internal documents public, including some that showed they had lied about the health risks of smoking.
This database was released just two years before Boeing and Monkeys had their revelation outside the Stanford Design Lab. In fact, it's where they found out about all the early failed attempts at safer cigarettes. Now they could use Big Tobacco's research to beat them at their own game. We got so much information that we wouldn't be able to get in most industries. And we were able to catch up, right, to a huge industry in no time. Soon, Boeing and Monkeys started working on a prototype.
The key innovation they were keen to tinker with was this idea that if you heat tobacco leaves at a lower temperature instead of burning them, you can still get nicotine, but without the deadly tar that leads to lung cancer. The question was how to design a device that could do that in a way that was portable, satisfying for smokers, and hopefully cool to look at. It turned out to be a much bigger challenge than Boeing and Monkeys had anticipated.
By June of 2005, Boeing and Monkeys were ready to present their thesis idea to their classmates. It would, hopefully, be the first step towards securing potential funding and turning their product into something more than just a good idea. Monkeys introduced the device, which they were now calling Plume, the rational future of smoking. So the name of Los Salas adds now, Plume at least to Berlin.
Monkeys quickly ran through what he and Boeing had discovered about Big Tobacco's attempts to make a less deadly cigarette, and explained why he thought all of them were pretty lame. Really, there's no design innovation going on in smoking whatsoever, because Big Tobacco is really interested in not shooting themselves in the owns in their own foot. They sell cigarettes, and that's very much what they do. Then it was Boeing's turn to speak. He made the case for why the Plume would be different.
So our goal was to basically create a whole new experience for people that pertains to the positive aspects of the smoking, like the ritual and everything, but makes it as healthy and socially acceptable as possible. Healthy and socially acceptable. The Plume wouldn't be smelly like a cigarette, nor would it raise the eye of classmates like Liz Gerber. Instead, it would be safe, and maybe even cool.
We feel that we could take tobacco back to being a lunderika, not so much a sort of drug delivery device that cigarettes have become. The Plume looked nothing like existing tobacco products. It was sleek. It had a cartridge system that Boeing compared to the Nespresso, and it came in a variety of flavors. When the presentation was over, the room lit up with applause. They had some beautiful drawings. I remember the look of it being very attractive. To Liz Gerber, the Plume didn't just look good.
There was almost something romantic about it. I also thought the name Plume sounded really beautiful. It made me think of like the 1920s flappers with the long cigarettes and like the wavy smoke coming out. It kind of had this elegant association. I remember also thinking about unintended consequences. What if in addition to helping people quit and reducing secondhand smoke, it also makes smoking sexier? After graduating, Boeing and Moncy's worked on the Plume from a small room in Bowen's house.
Their first challenge was to build the device, but in order to do that, they needed money. The problem was a lot of big venture capital funds were prohibited from investing in the vice space, which included drugs, alcohol, and even supposedly safe cigarettes. So after getting a few rejections, Boeing and Moncy sent a plea to a Stanford email list. Eventually, a few angel investors agreed to take a chance on the company.
By the spring of 2007, Plume raised nearly half a million dollars, and finally, the company was ready to make its first hire. My name is Kurt Sondereger and I was the first employee at Plume, which went on to become dual. In 2007, Kurt Sondereger was a 41-year-old marketing director at Red Bull. He was the kind of person who religiously attended Burning Man and spent his vacation surfing in Bali. He was also a smoker. I was a longtime smoker, heavily conflicted.
I was eating well, exercising a lot, but it was the monkey I couldn't get off my back. One day, Sondereger received a cryptic LinkedIn message about a new company in need of a marketing director. Boeing and Moncy's invited Sondereger to meet them at a posh hotel in San Francisco. I went to sit down and there are these two slightly disheveled graduate student looking guys. We shook hands and I went to take things out of my pocket as we do.
One of the things when I put it on the table, shockingly, I noticed it was a pack of cigarettes. I was very ashamed of smoking and it sounds something I was proud of, certainly not in a first interview with a company I knew nothing about. Them and James kind of looked at each other and smiled slightly. As the meeting went on, Sondereger realized why Boeing and Moncy's were pleased to find out he was a smoker. They told him about plume and described how vaporization worked.
One of the things they made very clear was they didn't want it to look like a cigarette. They wanted it to be its own thing that they weren't trying to replicate the cigarette paradigm. They were going to change that paradigm. The plume was still just a prototype, but Sondereger totally bought into the vision. We had Nicorette, GOM, we have patches, we have all kinds of tools that people could use to stop smoking, but it wasn't working.
So clearly there's something to the ritual of smoking that smokers really can't let go of and I bought into that 100%. I'm one of them. Sondereger started at plume in September of 2007. He likes to tell a story about his first day when he showed up to find the office had no desks. So he ran out to Home Depot to buy some supplies to make some. And yet, Boeing and Moncy's told Sondereger they were planning to launch plume in just a few months. That was not easy.
There was certainly a lot to do, but as a marketing person and not as an engineer, I couldn't really jump in with them on a lot of the things. The only thing I could help out with other than branding and website and social media and all that stuff was the flavor development. The plume used a butane flame to heat a tiny metal cup, kind of like a nispresso pod, filled with tobacco leaves and mixed with commercial food flavoring.
The heat produced a vapor which would then be inhaled through a mouthpiece. Overall it resembled a large chunky pen. Sondereger said he always thought about it as a portable hukka. Kind of a hukka in your pocket. So there were these little pods that had tobacco in them and we didn't want to just vape the straight tobacco. It's a little bit boring. It doesn't have that much flavor.
So following the hukka bottle, we started with adding different flavors and mixing it with the tobacco before filling these little pods. Boeing and Moncy's had always imagined the plume as a flavored product. Boeing in particular was often experimenting by combining tobacco leaves with various flavors in big mixing bowls. Some early flavors included cinnamon and butter. Boeing would leave pods on Sondereger's desk for him to sample and eventually they settled on six flavors.
The peach was called orchard, cafe noir gold, which is like a more traditional tobacco flavor, a rocket, which was like a pretty strong flavor and the two herbal flavors were blue tea and kickass mint. As fun as it was to try out flavors, getting the plume ready for market was taking way longer than the founders and Sondereger had hoped. All of a sudden it was 2009. The original launch date had come and gone and they were still testing the plume to mixed reviews.
At one point Sondereger lent a plume to a friend to take to Burning Man. Afterwards the friend reported that, quote, the harsh playa conditions did not mix well with plume. There are too many working pieces and too many steps in the plume process. Sondereger's friends said that by comparison, siggies are simple. We pushed ahead anyway because we needed to get something to market. The founders were getting a little bit antsy and we needed to show some results.
At the same time they knew that they would fail small, fail early and keep iterating on the design. Finally, in late 2009, so five years after Bowen and Monkeys came up with the idea, they soft-launched the plume. Sondereger put an image on their website of the Black Model 1 with the words small, dark and handsome. He also posted on a few message boards that the plume was hitting the market soon. Hundreds of pre-orders came rolling in.
A camera crew from a news website paid a visit to their office and Monkeys demonstrated the Model 1 for the reporter. So I'm pluming this device because I'm not smoking. So then when you inhale, you get this vapor but it's not smoke, it's just vapor. Monkeys went on to compare the process to steeping tea. When you put a tea bag into hot water, you're extracting the aroma, you're extracting the caffeine.
So we've found a new way to make tea and have a very different experience that's more suited to people who are smokers. So you get the nicotine, you get the flavor, but you don't actually burn the tobacco. The reporter points out that Bowen and Monkeys are steering clear of claiming that the plume is safer than a regular cigarette. Instead, Bowen used a familiar word, cleaners.
We believe that it is a cleaner ritual and alleviates a lot of the social and environmental concerns, otherwise, ascribed to smoking. And Monkeys finished by further distancing the product from cigarettes. What we've tried to do is create a new paradigm, something that doesn't look like a cigarette, it doesn't feel or taste like a cigarette, it's different. The media interest suggested there was some momentum, but not enough. Like its big tobacco predecessors, the plume model one was a flop.
For one thing, it wasn't satisfying as a nicotine delivery system. Sondereger would often plume all morning and then go downstairs and have a cigarette. But also, often the device just didn't work. Sondereger had a hard time communicating that to the founders. He remembered one instance in particular when Bowen just wasn't accepting the flaws he was telling him about. I said, look Adam, just come with me. Let's make the rounds and let's see how this goes.
We went to like five head shops that day. And I remember one of the shops in particular, we went in there cold and presented the device to the guy. I just put it down on the table, explained how it worked and the guy, everything that could have gone wrong did wrong. He couldn't get the butane in it when he went to start it, he shocked his finger. He used it for a little bit, the mouthpiece fell off and he broke his lip.
And I remember seeing Adam's face, just like he knew that these were problems, but when he saw it, like in five minutes, how all the major flaws came to light with one user in one interaction, I think that was the beginning of the end of, okay, we need to recalibrate, go back to the John board, fix this thing, it's not ready for prime time. Something had to change, but it wasn't obvious what should be fixed first out of the plumes many, many problems.
You're listening to Backfire Don 99% invisible. More, after this. According to emails we've seen from December of 2010, tension started to emerge between Bowen and Montsies. Bowen felt the company's number one goal should be pursuing deep lung nicotine delivery. The thing that as he put it in one email, literally keep smokers coming back for more. Montsies worried that would essentially mean they were trying to make their device as addictive as possible.
He replied, if deep lung makes the product more enjoyable, then great. If the purpose is to keep people coming back for more, then I'm not sure I'm on board. Montsies wanted people to plume because they enjoyed pluming, not because they were chemically addicted to it. Eventually they settled on a compromise. They would focus on a new version of the plume that solved what Montsies you've mystically called its user interaction issues. I'll also researching improvements to nicotine delivery.
But doing both of these things would require money. Money the company didn't have. In fact, early investors had seen the failure of the plume model one and assumed that Bowen and Montsies would give up that the future of smoking had been just another promising idea from Silicon Valley that ended up amounting to nothing much. But Bowen and Montsies weren't ready to fold. Instead they agreed to accept millions of dollars in investment capital from a Japanese tobacco company.
Exactly the type of company they had set out to disrupt and frankly destroy. The Kurt Sonderiger initially seemed like a deal with the devil. I was a little conflicted about it but I also realized that why Japan tobacco was doing it because they weren't doing it to kill the technology. Sometimes happens with tech companies. They buy a potential competitor and just kill it and wipe it out. They saw this also as the future.
So if a big tobacco company in a smoking crazy country like Japan could come in and say, this is the future of smoking. Great. Keep going guys. Keep innovating until you get it right. Plus for Sonderiger, it helped that Japan tobacco was Japanese. It didn't feel as bad as like Altria of Philip Morris. Do you know what I mean? It's Japan tobacco. It's all the way on the other side of the world.
With the investment in hand, the new plan was to have a revamped product on the market hopefully within a year or so. But Sonderiger didn't want to wait that long and decided to move on from the company. So I departed. What happened was instead of fixing the plume right away, they actually came out with the packs. The packs was Bowen and Monsey's solution to their cash flow problem. Officially, it was a loose leaf vaporizer. Unefficiently, it was a weed vape.
It was funny because with the many investors that we talked to about this, quite often the first thing they would say under their breath, they would say, yeah, this is cool. Does it work for weed? You know? So when enough people ask you if it works for weed, you have to ask yourself, like, no, but we can make one that really works well for weed. So I think that's what they did. Using their vaporization technology to help stoners wasn't exactly Bowen and Monsey's primary mission.
But it was another compromise they were willing to make in order to keep the company afloat. And to their credit, they really didn't have acid. The packs was born of a collaboration with Eve Bayhar, the Swiss designer best known for the soda stream bottle and the jawbone Bluetooth headset. It was like a two or three hundred dollar vaporizer and they sold hundreds of thousands of them. It was like the best selling vaporizer in the country for weed and it gave them what they needed.
Finally, Bowen and Monsey's had a best selling product. And with the new influx of cash, they continued to refine the plume. They also hired more employees. All I remember is going into then where the customer service representatives worked, which was out of like a supply closet with like some retrofitted bathroom. And I thought, this is it. This is the dream. Like I was so pumped to be there.
Lorenzo Castillo was still in college when he joined plume to work part time as a customer service representative. It was exactly what he hoped for. The company was still small but growing. It had a strong happy hour culture, no rules against vaping in the office, and his team had a habit of dressing up in suits and ties on Fridays, since every other day people wore t-shirts and jeans. In other words, it was a lot of fun. We would wait for the leadership team to come back from lunch.
And when they would, we would shoot foam darts at them. And this is one of the videos where we're just barrage them with foam darts as they walk in. You can see James catch one and shoot it back at us. And that was kind of, you sat right next to us. That was like part of what enabled us to have that fun atmosphere that he wasn't beyond having a little fun in situations like that. Castillo loved the packs, as did all of his friends.
When it came to like secret Santa for the couple of years that I worked there, I would bring a pack and that was always a big hit. I mean, in my mind, right, this is it. This is the product, right, a discreet way to smoke pot where you don't have to burn anything. But he also understood that the device wasn't the company's main ambition. I always saw the packs as a pleasant diversion from the mission that James and Adam had initially set out on.
I think they really wanted to reinvent tobacco and how it was consumed as opposed to creating a discreet way for people to vaporize pot. Even as sales of the packs took off, Bowen and Mon sees were still focused on improving the design of the next version of the plume, the model 2. Crucially, they switched from a butane heat source to a USB rechargeable battery. No more unpleasant shocks. And I actually have one. I have a model 2. I brought it in. You have one in your pocket right now.
Yeah. It's funny. You look on this and it's fairly discreet, of course, it's dead as hell. But it's still got, this is probably my favorite thing. It's still got a rocket pod in it. If you want, you can smell it and you can still smell the rocket pod if you twist it out. Wow. That was my favorite flavor, rocket. I don't even know how I would describe this flavor. It doesn't smell like something that exists in nature. Some people, including myself, say Christmas, but yeah, no, I area.
I think it's got like a cinnamon hit to it. It just, you know, they say smell is like the biggest hit of nostalgia. I think that brings me back to those times. The Plume Model 2 was launched in 2013 with a swanky party in San Francisco. The company also co-sponsored a New York Fashion Week album release party for Robin Thick. According to The New York Times, most attendees were a bit confused by the Plume. A brand ambassador had to explain to users, they're very popular, very international.
They smell like cookies. Glitz and confusion aside, the hope was that finally the company could build on the success of the Pax with an East cigarette that actually worked. Anything model to that came in was treated with Wycle of Service. We were told to escalate that to our more senior customer service representatives and to really, thoroughly work with those customers. In terms of what's wrong, how can we help you?
I think that really showed where the priorities were for that company at that time. Bowen and Mon sees were eager to get feedback from customers about the new and improved version of their device. The problem was there weren't that many Model 2 customers to learn from. I remember we had in all hands and during that all hands, an engineer who was, I'm not going to name names, but was known to be vocal, Rose's hand and said exactly how many Model 2s have been sold.
I remember that being a palpably awkward moment where it was clear that it wasn't the hit that I think we wanted it to be as a company. The Plume Model 2 had been an improvement on the Model 1, but it still had many of the same problems. The mouthpiece felt fragile and it had to be recharged every three or four uses. Crucially, it didn't solve the problem Bowen had now been highlighting for years. It still didn't deliver enough nicotine to satisfy smokers. Keating was a problem with the Model 2.
There was like some inconsistencies with the mixtures because it was still like a leaf-based product with the pods. And I think that led to like a less than desired user experience. It was clear the entire way the Model 2 worked by vaporizing tobacco leaves just wasn't delivering a satisfying amount of nicotine. So Bowen and Monkeys went back to the tobacco documents they had first discovered while they were at Stanford.
That was where they hit upon secret research from RJ Reynolds into something called nicotine salts. The documents show that in the 1980s, scientists at the company reported that combining pure nicotine with an acid would create a special kind of salt. This salt eliminated the unpleasant effects that came with increasing the concentration of nicotine. But RJ Reynolds had never commercialized this breakthrough.
Apparently they were concerned that it would produce such a smooth cigarette that people wouldn't realize they were smoking way too much and that they would just keep smoking until they accidentally overdosed on nicotine. This seemed like a really promising potential solution. But only if Bowen and Monkeys were willing to completely redesign how their nicotine vape worked.
Instead of vaporizing tobacco leaves like the Model 2, a new device would need to mix nicotine in a liquid that would then be heated as an aerosol. This would require expertise that went far beyond Bowen and Monkeys Stanford design credentials. So they hired a chemist to help. Her name was Chen Wei-Shing. They were a strong team with mechanical engineering background and product design but they didn't have anybody with chemistry training and that's why they had this opening.
Xing had a PhD in chemical engineering. She'd worked for big pharmaceutical companies on things like asthma inhalers and an inhalable migraine drug. Xing did not respond to our request to speak with her. So what you're hearing is an interview she did with Bloomberg in 2019. I told specifically to the recruiter in the beginning that I was not a smoker and I don't plan to start smoking and then they said it's not a requirement even though many of their team they are smokers.
Xing recalled that Bowen and Monkeys were actually pluming during her job interview. It was not as annoying as somebody smoking next to you. She also recalled that they seemed aware that some scientists in the field of healthcare might be hesitant to work on a tobacco-related product. But I actually hold different views on that because I think being somebody develops medications right, their drugs, it's actually to treat sickness.
But I do see smoking as a behavior causing a lot of health problem and then causing a lot of stress on public health space in general. Xing took the job in 2013 and set about trying to figure out how to deliver a nicotine hit that would convert serious smokers. It would need to have just enough burn and a little hit to the back of the throat but it couldn't be too harsh to handle. Xing conducted her research into a lab that was set apart from the rest of the office.
Lorenzo Castillo, the customer service rep, thinks that was not an accident. I remember being like how they're really putting research under lock and key. You don't walk by engineering anymore. Engineering is on the far side of the building and that to me was like there's definitely like a different part of the building for them. They were really working on something special back there and they wanted to limit distractions.
Working closely with Boeing, Xing mixed different formulas of e-liquids and recruited co-workers to give feedback on the flavor and the nicotine hit. They called this buzz testing. Castillo remembered that his boss was one of the people who opted in to trying the new technology. She was a cigarette smoker and she volunteered. Xing documented her test subjects' reactions to the new formulation. She wanted to know did their heart rate increase? Did they get a throat hit? Did they feel a buzz?
I remember being like whoa that's new. That's they're doing something that is a lot more data intensive than anything we've done in the past. Eventually it became clear that nicotine salts were delivering a hit that was way, way stronger than anything. Plume 1 or 2 could give you. Xing had cracked the code. When those volunteers came to you and say that they haven't touched their cigarette pack for a while. I do think that we have a great product and we should let more people try it.
On October 10, 2014, Bowen and Xing filed a patent to protect their innovation. In their application, they reported having quote unexpectedly discovered that certain nicotine liquid formulations provide satisfaction that was similar to smoking a traditional cigarette. In fact, their formulation was so strong that it made users heart rates skyrocket higher and faster than if they just smoked. In other words, it had the potential to be even more addictive.
While Bowen and Xing were at work on the nicotine formula, Moncy started thinking about a new design for their new device. He wanted it to be more like the packs. This was that aesthetic was born out of everybody on the team's immediate, you know, instinctual distaste for this 420 aesthetic. Josh Morinstein was a designer at the firm that worked on the packs. He remembers one detail in particular from his early interactions with Bowen and Moncy's.
The main thing I remember was that they were constantly, constantly vaping, constantly. And there was a giant bowl, like a salad bowl, that had hundreds of multicolored plume pods, those were the little nespresso guys. And then there was another bowl that had hundreds of used pods and they would go through them constantly, they were constantly sucking on these things.
Moncy's wanted their new device to be easier to use than the plume, something that people would want to keep in their pocket and something they'd want to show off. The main component of the brief was let's design something that has permanence to use this words. And the idea was to create something that was reusable and rechargeable and refillable. People have to want this thing that has to feel special.
Moncy's offered Morinstein and his partner a contract for a few weeks of design work on this new concept. They agreed to take on the project and came up with a whole host of designs. Finally, when they felt they were almost tapped out. We said, has there anything that we've kind of left undiscovered? And I think I said, what would it be like to smoke in the future? Would you really use a cylinder?
This is all based off of the way that traditional tobacco is manufactured and processed and rolled, and I had a USB key on my keychain, which was a tiny little rectilinear form and it was cheap metal, it was rolled and those are pretty inexpensive. And I said, what if it was like this? Like a USB stick. He put the one on his keychain up to his lips. And it felt better than trying to wrap your mouth around a circular shape.
Morinstein and his partner dubbed this version, the slab, and they got to work drawing up the concept. They decided that you should be able to charge the device by sticking it into your computer, just like a USB stick. In June of 2013, they presented the slab to Bowen and Moncy's. We have the original presentation here that we shared with the team at Joule. The PowerPoint shows the product already named Joule.
Morinstein didn't know when or how that name had been decided, but he recalled Bowen and Moncy's already having settled on it before he was hired. Bowen would later clarify that the name was inspired by Joules, like Gems, and Joule, the scientific unit of energy. It fits into your hand and you can see in this image here, when you're holding it, almost in a traditional cigarette format, it kind of sits between the fingers in a slim way. It's actually more comfortable than a cylinder would be.
They were just immediately like, this is the one where you're... There's no question, this is the one. At this point in our interview, Morinstein put away the PowerPoint and pulled out one of the early prototypes of the Joule. Can I hold this Joule prototype? It's remarkably similar to the Joule we know and love today. It's probably the most famous thing I've ever designed, for sure. At the end, I think we've made $16,000 on it.
Morinstein went on to design the fellow Gooseneck Kettle, the open spaces shoe rack and Athena club razors. But the Joule is far and away the most recognizable product he's ever designed. It's because it's one of the most recognizable products of the 21st century, like the iPhone and the Tesla Model 3. Like smartphones and cars, e-cigarettes had existed long before the Joule came along. But it was Morinstein's design that made the Joule stand out. Frankly, I think we did a good job.
You know what I mean? Like, I still have... I'm like, oh, we kind of nailed it. Yeah, it's iconic. Yeah. And that's what we were hard to do. By early 2015, Adam Bowen and James Monci's were finally ready to release the Joule into the world. Ten years after first presenting their idea to their classmates at Stanford, they started agreeing to interviews, like the one you heard at the beginning of this episode, where Monci's teased their upcoming product launch. So, let's talk about this here.
What is next? What's in store for you guys? Oh, I'm a lot of great stuff. It's all a top secret. Yeah, we'll have more than one really awesome new product out this year. One really awesome new product. When Kurt Sonderiger got his hands on the Joule, he was really impressed with how far Bowen and Monci's had come from the prototype they showed him back in 2007. What did you think? You know, they definitely fixed the product. In every sense of the word, it was super easy.
There were no pain points. There was no butane. There was no shock. It was easy to put a pod in and take a pod out. So I knew it was going to be pretty big. I didn't have any idea how big it actually got. He only had one concern. What if Bowen and Monci's had made their product a little too good? I gave it to one of my buddy's owns a bar here in Encinitas. And he was a heavy smoker. And he finally completely gave up on cigarettes.
And when I gave him his Joule, he told me, said, shit, I feel like I'm addicted again. This season on Backfire, we'll take you inside Joules Rides. And it's precipitous fall. And understand until it clicked, you can smoke the Joule wherever you want. New craze and cigarettes, it's called Joule. And it is flying off the shelves. This thing is really sexy and disruptive. There is such a thing as a company growing too fast. Joule grew too fast.
I'm going to go over a couple different ways to hit your Joule while you're in school and not get caught. We literally called our bathroom the Joule room. Tonight, authorities investigating what could be the country's first death linked to vaping. I think it was the beginning of the end for Joule. We'll also hear from the co-founder of Joule, James Moncies, who has not spoken publicly about the company in nearly half a decade.
We could have done a lot better job collectively of dealing with this if we hadn't been so focused on finding a new enamase quickly. We'll meet the new owners of the next generation of vape companies and the frustrated authorities who have been powerless to rein them in. We invested about $2 million and we blew it up immediately into multi-million dollar company within 90 days. It's like imagining you're walking down the street and someone's like, you're taking this like 500 bucks.
Run, run, run, run. We didn't predict what I now believe is an epidemic of these cigarette use among teenagers. It was a witch's brew of public health concerns. The teens are very clever. They seem to invade where the regulations go. The US agents recently seized more than 1.4 million illegal e-cigarettes. It can almost feel like a game of, you know, whack them all. And finally, I'll try to figure out how to end my own personal vaping war, where at least come to some sort of truce.
My mom doesn't really know about any of this. Some contemplating how I will talk about it on the podcast. If I were. I feel like a great way to tell your parents about your nicotine addiction is to launch a podcast series. Backfire is presented by Audible originals and prologue projects. The show is hosted by Leon Nefak and me, R.A.L. Part S. Our senior producer was Sam Lee. Our editor was Kim Giddelsen. Our producers were Dustin DeSoto and Catherine Sullivan.
Our assistant producer was Arlene Aurevalo. Sound design by Andrew Parsons. Archival research and fact checking by Francis Carr. Our theme song and score were composed by Emma Munger. Audio mix by Erica Wong. Copyright counsel provided by Peter Yassey and Brandon Butler at Yassey Butler, PLLC. Heather Juan Tesserero is our executive producer at Audible originals. Mike Charsack is the head of production at Audible Studios. Rachel Giazza is Audible's chief content officer.
Special thanks to Gabriel Montoya and Thomas Perfetti. Backfire was co-created by Kim Giddelsen for prologue projects. Sound recording copyright 2024 by prologue projects. You can find the full season of Backfire for free if you're an Audible subscriber. It's created by the team at Prologue Projects, which has produced many excellent podcast documentaries hosted by Leon Nayfok, including many seasons of Fiasco and think twice. Michael Jackson.