Juul: Blowing Smoke

I would say. They're talking about Jewel, the e cigarette that took the nation by storm just a few years ago and has become ingrained in youth culture, even spawning viral YouTube hits like this, Hey, have you guys seen my jewel? I like literally just had in my hand, Like you gave it back to me? Right? I thought you hit my jewel and then you gave it back to me. You didn't take it, did you. You wouldn't

do that to me. Welcome to Calling Bullshit, the podcast about purpose washing, the gap between what companies say they stand for and what they actually do, and what they would need to change to practice what they preach. I'm your host, Time Montague, and I've spent over a decade helping companies define what they stand for, their purpose and help them to use that purpose to drive transformation throughout their business. Unfortunately, at a lot of organizations today, there's

still a pretty wide gap between word and deed. That gap has a name. We call it bullshit. But, and this is important on this show, we believe that bullshit is a treatable disease. So when the bullshit detector lights up up, we're going to explore things that the company should do to fix it. In this episode, we're going to take a look at Jewel. The company's mission is harm reduction. They want people to stop smoking cigarettes and start using Jewel, which they claim is a potentially life

saving alternative. Here's how co founder Adam Bowen put it in a promotional video. fIF the years from now, nobody's gonna be smoking cigarettes. They're gonna look back and think, oh my god, I can't believe people used to do that, and now I think it's actually gonna happen much faster, in large part because of the progress that we've made.

It sounds revolutionary, but is it actually true. To tell Jewel's story, we have to start with a quick history of the industry that Adam and James wanted to disrupt big tobacco to Bacco used goes back thousands of years. It grows wild in the Americas and has long been valued by indigenous peoples as a sacred and medicinal plant. In the Taino people of the Caribbean gave Christopher Columbus some dried tobacco. Soon, smoking was all the rage with

Europe's elite, who apparently just loved that sweet buzz. In the sixteen hundreds, English colonists set up big tobacco plantations in the southeastern United States, which also fueled the demand for enslaved labor, and by the late eighteen hundreds, big companies like Philip Morris, now Aultria and American Tobacco began to dominate the market. Mass production made cigarettes popular, and so did ads that portrayed smoking as a pleasurable, glamorous habit.

Some of them even featured doctors played by actors in white lab codes. Time out for many men of medicine usually means just long enough to enjoy a cigarette, and because they know what a pleasure it is to smoke a mild, good tasting cigarette, they're particular about the brand they choose. More doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette.

A lot of doctors did smoke back in the forties when this ad was made, but Big Tobacco specifically used this kind of messaging to counter growing concerns around health. By the mid sixties, though the evidence was clear. Tonight's CBS reports begins with this historic announcement by the Surgeon General of the United States on January eleven, nineteen sixty four. It is a judgment of the committee that cigarette smoking contributes substantially to martality from certain specific diseases and to

the overall death rate. Big Tobacco knew this. They'd also discovered that the key ingredient in their product, the thing that gave you that sweet buzz, was nicotine, so they optimized for tobacco plants and cigarettes that delivered more of the drug into the smoker's lungs. And they knew that

it was addictive. Tobacco executives admitted that at least as far back as the early sixties, according to internal company documents, but publicly they claimed otherwise, hoping to steer clear of the f d A. After all, if your product is addictive and it causes cancer, why should regulators allow you to sell it at all. Finally, in the hammer Fell, this is an historic hearing. For the first time ever, the chief executive officers of our nation's tobacco companies are

testifying together before the United States Congress. The truth is that cigarettes are the single most dangerous consumer product ever sold. The Master Settlement Agreement that came out of these hearings put strict limits on the sale, advertising, packaging, and distribution of tobacco products. Some would say Big Tobacco got off easy, but for sure the days of easy money in the

tobacco industry were over. Flash forward to two thousand and five when two young smokers, Adam Bowen and James Monsey's were grad students in Stanford's prestigious product design program and they kind of hatched their idea and became friends over cigarette breaks outside of their classroom at Stanford University. That's lauraenett Or, an investigative reporter who's covered the Jewel story

in depth. So when you're at Stanford, you're always looking for what are the products in the areas that are right for innovation, and the cigarette was right for innovation. It's not the nicotine that kills people, it's the combustion.

So they thought to themselves, if there was a way that we can just get people the nicotine that they want and that they're addicted to, but in a safer way, we should be able to make a huge public health contribution by transitioning people away from the deadly dirty cigarette to a safer, cleaner nicotine. They could save millions of lives and probably make some money doing it. But it turned out that solving this problem was a lot harder

than it looked. James and Adam hammered away at it for a decade until when they finally launched their revolutionary product, Jewel. Jewel delivered the kick that smokers crave, but it was also everything a cigarette wasn't. It was sleek, modern, easy to conceal, It produced no smoke, so it could be used in secret, even indoors, and its pods came in a variety of tasty flavors like mango, mint and krimboulet.

So Adam and James went off to work marketing Jewel to smokers who tend to be older and less affluent. They made it abundantly clear that young people and non smokers should stay away because nicotine in any form is highly addictive, and their goal was getting people to stop smoking. Okay, okay, actually that part is completely made up. They didn't do any of that. In fact, they did exactly the opposite,

and the results are almost comically catastrophic. So get out your BS detectors, folks, and hang on tight, because this one is quite a ride. Jewel says that its mission is harm reduction. Is that true or is it just a bunch of bullshit? To learn more about where Jewel went wrong, I called up Lauren Eder, who you heard earlier. She's a reporter at Bloomberg News and the author of the Devil's playbook, Big Tobacco, Jewel and the Addiction of

a New Generation. I guess I want to start up by asking what was it that initially captured your attention? Why did you write this book? So? I'm always looking for interesting stories about companies that are making an impact

on our lives in one way or another. And as the youth vaping epidemic was skyrocketing, where suddenly all these teenagers started showing up in the emergency room with shortness of breath, would appear to be burns on their lungs, and then it looked like it was tied to vaporing of some kind. I was fascinated that there was a very high flying Silicon Valley start up in the middle of a public health crisis. Can you talk about their pitch to early investors, like, how did they tell the

story of what they were trying to do. It was both an innovation pitch and a public health pitch. On the innovation side, it was, here's this product that one billion people use in the world. Thirty four million Americans smoke cigarettes. So the cigarette is literally the same, essentially as it was a century earlier. It's essentially paper with shredded tobacco leaf rolled up inside of the paper. You

light it on fire, and you inhale the smoke. So if there isn't a product that's right for innovation, I don't know what. The public health pitch was really interesting. They thought to themselves, why are so many people still smoking, and why is it still killing them? And how can this be happening. There's got to be a better way to get people what they really want in a cigarette, which is the nicotine. They sold that story and they

sold it very well. Yeah, and it seems to me that the mission that this company had from the very beginning, it's fundamentally a good one, essentially harm reduction. Right. How serious do you think they really were about that mission. I think that they were very serious about that mission. I think they truly believe that they could have a public health impact. But they also realized that there was

a huge market to be tapped. We'll get to what eventually happened, but I think those balances got a little bit out of whack. So what was the key technical challenge that they had to solve in order to actually achieve this mission to create a safer alternative to smoking. One of the first challenges was very rudimentary, how do we heat up the tobacco? So the first iteration of their product was essentially a little tube that heated up tobacco pods. So it was a very poorly designed device.

It was almost like a lighter. You snap it and it would kick on the butane heater that would heat the tobacco. It was shocking people. It was literally on the lips now and you look for it in a relaxing smoke white, you just get a little joelt. They were presenting it to a potential investors, And there's a couple of scenes in my book where they go to pretty high level people presenting this thing and it like zaps them on the lips, and it's super embarrassing. For

Adam and James, who pride themselves on design. They went to the d School, This is the pre eminent design school in the world. They eventually included a battery, but the challenge with just heating tobacco was that it didn't satisfy smokers in the way that cigarettes did. So, yeah, if you're not getting the nicotine, there's no way you're going to get somebody to quit smoking. I mean, it's all about the nicotine. It's only about the nicotine. It's

all about the nicotine. And let's be clear, high doses of nicotine are not a health treatment. According to the CDC, using nicotine and adolescence can harm the parts of the brain that control attention, learning, mood, and impulse control. However, e cigarettes did have the potential to create a far safer alternative to cigarettes, and the tobacco companies knew this. In fact, because they knew their cigarettes were killing people

and their backs were against the wall. Tobacco companies spent decades and billions of dollars on developing safer products, which included vaporizing technology. This was a huge moment for Adam and James. They realized that there was an archive containing millions of documents that the tobacco industry had made public as a term of their settlement with the Attorney's General and with the Department of Justice, and so they got a lot of their ideas for innovation from these tobacco documents.

They realized that they could use chemistry to create a nicotine solution that was as satisfying as a cigarette. Okay, so these two young kids from Stanford finally build a little machine that looked like a thumb drive that heated nicotine salts or heated nicotine in a way that it could deliver as much or more of a hit than a cigarette. I mean, this is a pretty amazing breakthrough,

isn't it. It was a huge breakthrough. Adam and James now have Jewel all teed up and are ready to go save lives by convincing smokers who are primarily older to switch from smoking cigarettes to using a jewel. But their very first higher was Kurt Sandrager, a marketing guru from Red Bull, a company that pretty clearly targets young people. I really think that they found Kurt because he was kind of in the area and at the time, it wasn't easy to attract people to come work for a

tobacco startup. I think that they just needed somebody who understood marketing, which he did, and I think that they did have this kind of initial idea of like, how can we frame it as a product that will be interesting to people and that might have a little bit of cool factors, and of course, being a Silicon Valley company,

that's a key part of the equation. So Kurt Sandragger left the company pretty early and the founders on their own went out and hired their first outside marketing partner, a company called The Cult Collective run by Chris Neeland, and it seemed like they really seemed to understand this premise that Jewel was on a mission to be a

harm reduction company. You know, I'm a former ad guy myself, and so you know, I was looking at it with my ad guy eyes, and the idea for the first campaign that they showed to James and Adam seemed like at least the right strategy to me. Basically it went directly against cigarettes, comparing cigarettes to old anachronistic technologies boom boxes and atari joy sticks and a position jewel is the modern alternative, and the tagline was the evolution of

smoking with the double like jewel. But basically it went directly at smoking and knocked it as old fashioned. Why didn't James and Adam buy that direction? I don't think Adam and James looked at what Chris Nelan did and said, this is not the direction we want to go. The board of the company at the time was really saying we should probably bring in our own marketing person. They

brought in a new team. This new person Richard Mumby, Right, Richard Mumby joined as the CMO midstream, and he had his own ideas about what direction the marketing should go. So it was evident almost immediately when Richard Mumby came in and he had an art director. He brought with them a guy named Stephen Bailey. They initially just thought that Chris's vision was missing the boat. It wasn't elevating the product enough. Well, it also wasn't very cool, right.

The message I keep getting is these guys somebody somewhere, whether it was James and Adam or the board, somebody wanted this company to be cool. I think Richard Mumby was really driving a lot of that. So Stephen Bailey, who is mostly from the world of fashion, did campaigns

for Gap and hype Beast and Benobo's. He comes up with a campaign that became known as vapor Rised, which is sort of inspired by his buddy Terry Richardson's look that kind of gritty sexy models, jeweling, and it's sophisticated and cool and just perfectly out of reach of teenagers, who of course will want it. And the Vaporized campaign when I look at it today, I look at it and go these are exactly the same marketing techniques that had been used by Big Tobacco for years, this sexy

lifestyle imagery. Now absolutely certainly Adam and James were aware of these marketing kind of strategies and the problems related to them. I don't actually believe that Richard Mumby and Stephen Bailey sat down, looked at the tobacco archives and said, how can we recreate this tobacco industry playbook? I really don't. I don't know how knowledgeable. Richard and Stephen were really of the tobacco stuff. I mean, it was all happening

very fast. They like did the photo shoot and the campaign, the mock up in a very short period of time. So I really believe that the Vaporized campaign was the best work product that Stephen and Richard could come up with. It wasn't necessarily a nefarious way to get young people hooked. It was a way to make their product cool. I agree, And I just think the whole notion of trying to

make the product cool is where they fell down. It was their undoing that was their original sin was the marketing campaign and not reading this highly addictive drug with enough care, which they should have done right. So they do a big launch party at Jack Studio, is a

super cool place in New York. Four young people models and photographers and young fashionistas and punky looking skateboarders, and they hire a bunch of young influencers to push the event and jewel on social media and spoiler alert, it works. Their brand got out there in a very important way where I think people definitely started seeing it as almost this what is this thing? Nothing on their advertising set it was addictive, nothing on their advertising said that it

contained nicotine. It was just this cool, flashy device that you could have as a fashion accessory. So eventually teens started becoming interested. Gas stations start running out of it, people start posting on Twitter desperately, when are you going to restock Jewel? Right, So they can't make them fast enough and they're having scaling problems and then Q Scary music. Parents start to wake up to this growing issue with

their kids and they start to freak out. What were the first signs of that, Like the first sign of oh, Houston, we may have a problem pretty early on I mean principle, as we're finding Jewel and not even knowing what it was, and parents were finding it and backpacks and in bedrooms and stuff like that, and so there's this kind of like percolating kind of controversy, and the Tobacco Control Group

they really started sounding alarm bells. They started calling on Congress to regulate this industry because a key part of this story is that at the time that Jewel launched, there was no regulation on the sale of electronic cigarettes. Regulation or lack thereof, is a key point in fifty two State and territory Attorneys General signed the Master Settlement Agreement with the four largest tobacco companies to settle dozens of state lawsuits and to reduce smoking, especially in youth.

From there on out, tobacco companies have legal marketing obligations. No more obscuring health risks, no more billboards sponsoring team sporting events, cartoons of any kind, and on and on. The Master Settlement Agreement turned out to be incredibly effective in reducing teenage smoking, but when e cigarettes and vaping came onto the market, they were not covered under that agreement, so they were allowed to advertise wherever they wanted, including

homework sites for middle schoolers and even on Nickelodeon. Yeah yeah, so they did advertise on these places. They explain it by saying that they used a third party marketer and they didn't have control over that, but they did. And they actually sent dual representatives into schools to teach about addiction and how you shouldn't use nicotine. It was this crazy, weird reverse psychology that the tobacco industry had used for years. Don't smoke, it's not cool. But then it turns out

that their marketing was actually attractive to youth. You know, Yeah, and at the same time those people went into schools and said, well, you shouldn't use it, but it's perfectly safe. Right. It was really bad look and it was not good. Meanwhile, all the tobacco giant formerly known as Philip Morris had been trying to buy a steak in Jewel, and as the company came increasingly under fire, that offer started to

look a lot more attractive. Altria makes Marlborough cigarettes the number one selling cigarette in America, and inside Jewel they saw it as a way to from the inside take their harm reduction plan and use Altrea to really give them a huge sales advantage and access to customers. So the deal was done in December two thou eighteen, and it was like the worst timing ever. There's new regulations

on the industry, the cigarette industry. At least the pod makers had to take off all of their flavored products. I mean, Jewel kind of did this voluntarily and anticipation of the FDA going in this direction. The FDA is now decided whether or not Jewel will continue to be sold, whether or not will be legal for Jewel to continue selling its product. When do we hear about that? Towards the end of the year. So this is really literally Julius hanging by threat, and the FDA is holding the threat.

They either will get the go ahead to continue selling their product or they won't. This story made me a little sad, I have to say, because it seemed like this is a company that was born with a great quest to take down big tobacco and save the world from cigarettes. They had the breakthrough product to do it. They just spiked the ball on like the five yard line and marketed it to the wrong people, to teenagers. Is that too kind or to mean? Like? Is that fair? Well?

I feel the same way. I mean, I don't think that Adam and James set out to addict five million teenagers on nicotine, right, unintentional? Right, But you really do. As businesses, and particularly in Silicon Valley, I believe you have a responsibility for how your product is marketed and sold. So, Lauren, I have a question that I asked all of our guests, so I will ask it if you are will just a bunch of bullshitters? I don't know. Is there like a scale or something? Well, yes, yes, that's where I

was going. We have a thing called the bullshit scale. So on a scale of zero to one, zero being zero bullshit the company means everything that it says and being just complete bs. Where would you rate Jewel? Well, I think that you can't discount their past and like a set at their original sin. So I think that gives them a lot of points on the bullshit meter. Honestly, Um, so that puts them to fifty. I think that they're trying. I think that they do have a valid harm reduction mission,

but again, the youth threat just lingers out there. So I would say that between zero and a hundred, I would put them at about a sixty. Yeah, that's fair and by the way, that can move. What is the one thing that you think Jewel should have done or still should do to solve their problem? Well, I think that they should have treated their product more carefully. They should have treated it less as a fashion accessory and more as a pharmaceutical grade product that is designed to

help people quit smoking. They should have been more boring. But listen, we all acknowledge and know and realize that in no world in Silicon Valley would a boring company achieve a thirty eight billion dollar valuation. There's some fundamental flaws in the way that Silicon Valley is structure, and I think that that's also a big part of the problem. Very interesting. I completely agree with that. All right, thank you very much for joining us today, Lauren. That was amazing.

Thanks for having me. Fun to talk to you. So is Duel really transitioning the world's billion adults smokers away from combustible cigarettes, eliminating their use and combating underage usage of our ducks? Like they say on their website. Based on what I've heard so far, I'm calling bullshit. But after the break we'll hear some concrete ideas to get Jewel back on track from two more experts on the vaping industry. Welcome back on calling bullshit. We don't just

curse the darkness. We want to light some candles too. So I've asked two vaping industry experts to propose some concrete things that Jewel and their current CEO, Casey Cross the Way could change to actually do their story of harm reduction. First, I'd like to welcome Jamie Douche, arm author and journalist. Thanks so much for having me so. I am a health correspondent at Time Magazine and my

first book is called Big Vape. The incendiary rise of Jewel, and it tracks Jewel from its very origins up until more or less the present day, going into many of the decisions they've made over time and how they got into the hot water that they find themselves in. Now. It's a great book. I enjoyed it a lot. Thank you. We're also joined by Greg Connolly, and Greg, thank you for being here today. Can you tell us a little bit about your background. I run a nonprofit called the

American Vaping Association. It's a five oh one c four. It advocates for pro vaping policies with the end goal of maximizing the number of smokers who use these products to quit smoking and improve their health. Back in law school at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey, I was a dedicated smoker, and in two thousand ten I saw these things called the cigarettes. I quit with them, and I found that there were activists out trying to ban

these products while leaving combustible cigarettes entirely untouched. That didn't set right with me, so I spent about three years as a volunteer consumer advocate with the US's largest consumer association for users of smoke free nicotine products, and the a v A has been going for around eight years and we've been fortunate enough to to do a lot of media, get some attention to this issue, and work with a lot of great public health people who have

come around on this issue as well. Thank you, Greg. So let's get into ideas for positive actions that Jewel could take Jamie in two minutes or less? What is the number one thing that Jewels should do to solve the mess that they're currently in. Basically, what it boils down to for me is that Jewels should just do less. And what I mean by that is throughout the company's history, it has made so many unforced errors that have made

it really difficult to support the company. I think the flashy marketing campaign that they came out with is one great an example. I mean, they didn't have to partner with Instagram influencers and buy a Time Square billboard, but they chose to because at that time they were kind of operating as a trendy start up more than they were as a company that straddles the line between tobacco and public health. They didn't have to go into schools

and pitch schools on an anti vaping curriculum. That they developed. But they did that, they didn't have to just recently buy out an entire issue of a research journal to promote their own research. So really, what I'm getting at is that the problem for Jewel has always been less about its product, which actually is a good product that

works well and can be effective for adults. So, in my opinion, if they just stripped away kind of all of their external activity and paid less attention to marketing and trying to be a thought leader an innovative company, and just sold their product and did the research that they need to do and listen to what the FDA was asking of them, I think they would be in a far better position than they are today. Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense. It's put the shovel down,

just stop digging. Thank you, Jamie, Greg your turn in two minutes or less. What's your idea to get Jewel back on track? There are two different ideas popping around my head. First is rather simple. There's a process at the f d A beyond the pre market tobacco application known as the m r t P process. Yes, there

are a lot of acronyms in this field. M RTP stands for modified risk tobacco product, and there are at least two products, General Snooze, which is a T bag shaped thing of tobacco that goes in your upper lip, as well as a Philip Morris product called KOs that heats tobacco and does not burn it. They have gotten approval through that m R t P process at the FDA.

It allows them to make health based claims in marketing, and I think with so many people in America, the vast majority inaccurately believing vaping could be just as deadly as smoking, going through that m R t P process, I think is going to be essential to regaining public trust and actually correcting misperceptions not only among the general public,

but among doctors, among regulators, among state legislators. And the second is there are still tremendous amounts of knockoffs of Jewel and products that are heavily inspired by Jewel that may not infringe on their patents, but nonetheless are either on the market illegally or on the market to the gray market where it's not technically illegal, but it is something that the government could take action on. Jewel being more aggressive going to more governments and saying look, we

did the right thing. We went through the process. We are regulated by the FDA. These people aren't, and we need your help. That could in some way bring about more legitimacy. But really, this is a multi year fight for Jewel to regain any Lauren puts it in her book Permission to Exist. It's a long fight for them ahead. So in a way, you're advocating for them to become an active this in the space, advocating for saner regulation

and maybe fewer cowboy companies. Not so much with being an advocate for better regulation, but more pointing out that they make products that are tightly regulated by the f d A, presumably they will have authorization from the f d A. And meanwhile, yes, there are these cowboy companies out there, and I think they can be even more aggressive on that point without risking any reputational damage except from people like me who just wants adults to be

able to vape. Yeah, that makes also a ton of sense, Thank you, Greg. Okay, my turn. Now. I think Jewels in a pretty deep ditch, and so I think it's going to take some fairly radical action to get them out of it. But I think that this could actually work. They sold out to big Tobacco by taking a huge investment from all Tria, and so I think the hatred and mistrust that it created really destroyed the brand, and so I think they need to rethink their whole model.

I think Jewels should be a medical device. I think they should go to the pharmaceutical industry instead of the tobacco industry. Go to Fiser or g s K, who both have smoking cessation products in the market, and see if they can get those companies interested in the underlying technology. These are both companies with really deep pockets and the patients to guide a new medical technology through the regulatory process.

They also both have the necessary army of salespeople who know how to sell a new medical technology through to doctors, and so it becomes a prescription medical device that doctors can prescribe to their patients who smoke as a way to reduce harm. And that market is still massive and with some grown ups at the wheel, the former Jewel could finally live up to its true and very positive promise. Any thoughts on that? Is that crazy talk? I don't

think it's crazy talk. I do think the huge benefit of what you've just described is that it would solve a lot of Jewels use issues. I think the drawback, which I'm sure Greg would point out if I didn't, so I'm getting ahead of it, is that if you make something a prescription product, you're guaranteeing that fewer people will have access to it or will choose to seek

out access to it. So I think it's a two sided coin where yes, you'll prevent a lot of teenagers from using it, which is great, but you'll also lose out on some of the adults who might use it. Yes, and as Jamie noted, we live in a country where about of Americans do not have a primary care doctor, and with cigarette smokers being of lower socio economic status on average, you're probably more looking at thirty smokers without a primary care doctor. The prescription model is problematic for

a number of reasons. Visor and g SK both place great value in their relationships with the tobacco control community, with the people who are trying to ban jewel, and the problem is that campaign for tobacco free kids, the American Lung Association American Heart Association. If there's any hint of FISER or GSK partnering with an Altria owned company,

a cigarette company, they won't stand for it. There's a recognition at the FDA that long term usage of smoke free nicotine can be a public health benefit, but under the farmer route, there really is no way to get a product approved for long term nicotine replacement. Smoking cessation is kind of a misnomer. It's really about nicotine cessation. At the f D a center for drug evaluation and research.

So there's a lot of problems with that route. Certainly, Jewel may one day decide we need to do this, especially if FDA denies them. I just don't think it be with Visor or GSK for reputational reasons. Well that makes sense, you know way more about this, not surprisingly, and if they're the wrong partners, then so be it. But one of just to pursue this for a sect.

One of the things that I think got Jewel in trouble was this hurry up offense, like they were in a hurry to get big fast deliver value for their shareholders. And I think some patients is needed, and I completely agree that it would reduce dramatically the sales in the short term to go to a prescription model. And what I'm arguing is that's a good thing. That will give them time to have a business of some kind for a period of time while trust is healed, because trust

has been broken. And so following that threat, I want to go back to a couple of your ideas, I mean, Jamie, the idea of doing less, I think is very interesting. I'm reminded of the story of J and J. I don't know if either of you know this story because it was quite a while, like it was back in the early nineteen eighties, but there was a psycho who

started poisoning Thailand All in the Chicago area. Three people died and Jay and Jay's response was to pull all of the thailand All bottles off every shelf in America. And they did that because they understood that their entire reputation as a business was on the line, and that if they didn't immediately swallow that very bitter pill, no pun intended, they would be deemed to be part of the problem in the court of public opinion. And it's

actions like that that build trust for people. Do you think there's a world in which Jewel would take more dramatic action, Jamie in keeping their product out of the hands of young people. Yeah, I mean, I actually do think it was fairly dramatic for them to take all their flavored products off the market. As I said before, that was a huge part of their revenue stream. So I think that was a dramatic action. But my perception of this company is just that they sort of can't

help themselves. Like at several junctures when I was reporting my book, it seemed like they were on the right track, or they'd gotten the right advice from health experts, they had all of the tools to make good decisions, and then they just veered left and did the complete opposite thing. So in my view, it's maybe at this point less about making further dramatic actions and were just about doing the things that people have told them for years will work.

I mean, they already have market share, they already have name recognition. In my eyes, there's not a whole lot they have to do except stop getting in your own way. Yeah, that's very interesting. I agree Greg your idea about Jewel essentially pivoting to pin a star to their own chest and become the sheriff in the space. I think the idea of pivoting to be a more activist brand that is pro vaping but anti smoking and anti Cowboy eight companies would be another way to potentially heal trust. Do

you think that's something that they have the stomach to do. Absolutely. They have a very large team of attorneys. They have a lot of influence from Altria, which has never shied away from being in the courtroom and going after their competitors with a great deal of fury. So I think that is a potential pathway. Yeah, is the Altria ownership steak a conflict of interest? There? Would they ever say, no, we want to buy ourselves back. We're going to go find a big rich friend, somebody who is not a

tobacco company, and we're going to buy your steak. So I'm sure Altria would be thrilled to be rid of the albatross that has become Jewel. But ultimately, I think Altria wants to stick around. I think they see value in the brand. But you never know. Silicon Valley is a place, as aultre to learn, where you have crazy valuations and people can sometimes bring out the check book

in unexpected ways. The Ultria investment brought so much bad press and just further scrutiny and Jewel, but at this point they have so many lawsuits coming at them that I think they sort of need Aultrea's support at this point. And the FTC is actually trying to unwind ur suing to unwind that investment. So potentially this will be out of their control and will happen whether they like it or not. But I think at this point Jewel is

a little vulnerable and kind of needs that. Jamie brings up a very good point with the lawsuits against Jewel, because what you will likely end up with is you

now have multidistrict litigation. There's already been a settlement in North Carolina, and there's likely to be a very large, substantial settlement with all of the states school districts, local governments that have sued Jewel, And so I think Jewel recognizes that part of their path way forward is to enter into a multidistrict settlement that restricts them in ways

that they are already restricting themselves. So I think part of Jewels strategy is eventually we're gonna have to settle, We're gonna have to cut a big check, and Altree is going to be helpful with that legal strategy, but they see the settlement as their path to that permission to exist in the future. It strikes me that there is more that the company could do to keep its products out of the hands of young people that would

have potentially symbolic value. One is biometric locks. And you know, although the gun industry has its own issues and has been slow to actually implement ideas like this, there are biometric locks that make it impossible for anyone to fire a gun if they're not the owner of that gun. That might be possible in the dual device as well. Do you think about doing something like that. There's great potential in that idea, and Jewel has already explored it.

When they entered the marketing Canada. They attempted to do a system where people would have to log in and upload a copy of their driver's licensibly for their product to be able to work. Then they ran into the problem that the app stores for both Apple and Google, Android, etcetera. They have banned all vaping product apps. But you need to keep in mind with these tech options. The places with the highest smoking rates in America West Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama.

These are states that do not have in some places, consistent internet connection. These are places where some people live without the Internet, without a phone with four G enabled from their home. So you can't forget about the lower socioeconomic smokers who if you make it too techy, they may just decide, you know what's really easy lighting up a Marlborough right? What about treating it like cannabis and making dispensaries. You know that we're just making it harder

to get at. I do think you'd run into some of the same access problems we were talking about with the prescription products. But you know, at the same time, this is the huge issue for both jewel and the vaping industry as a whole. So I do think to your earlier point, dramatic action might be in the long run, a better path for them. It's an interesting idea and maybe something they should think a little more seriously about, a sort of a short term drop in profits in

pursuit of fixing this long standing problem. I would prefer if you're going to do it, you do it legislatively. We're not just vaping products, but cigarettes as well. Get restricted to age restricted stores, and there is some form of geographic limitations where if a population is not X then there are less restrictions. Because we want people. It's not like cannabis, where you go to a store once

every two weeks to get what you need. People are used to going in and buying their pack of cigarettes in the morning, every day or every other day. Okay, is there anything else that you think Jewel ought to consider doing in order to get themselves out of this ditch?

One idea I've heard. I don't know if I necessarily I haven't processed it fully enough to know if I even agree with this, but I'll just throw it out there because it's something i've heard that I find interesting is the idea of actually redesigning what the Jewel device looks like, because a lot of the criticism the company gets is that the product is so techy and looks like a flash drive, and it's easy to conceal um and to use discreetly, like you know, in a classroom

or even in a home, you wouldn't necessarily know that someone's using it. So I have heard it said that potentially, if Jewell wanted to really take a dramatic action which would set off a whole separate process of needing to file new FDA applications, they could think about making the device look less appealing. Yeah, I like that. I think that is interesting, Greg, anything else, I don't think that

is a bad idea at all. Ultimately, to go back to Jamie's earlier point, I think Jewel just needs time not being or not volunteering themselves to be the center of attention. Adult smokers know they exist, the vapors that

are using the product, no, they exist. And I think the farther you get away from the controversies of and twenty nineteen when the company was being run by tech bros in Silicon Valley who actively resisted hiring people from the tobacco industry that knew what this fight was about and how dirty it could get, the better for Jewels. So I think we need, as Jamie said, less big ideas and more just functioning as a company and seeing their youth usage rates drop even lower than they are now.

That's great. So I want to thank you both for being here today. This was a great discussion. To wrap it up, I want to ask each of you to give Jewel a B S score. So on a scale of zero two, one being the worst total b S and zero being the best zero bs, what score would you give Jewel? Jamie, you first, So I think my answer to this question very much depends on the time. I think for many of jewels early years, the score would be pretty close to the top of the scale.

I think now they have made some steps in the right direction. They have basically stopped advertising their behaving more like how you would expect a company in this space to behave. So this is a long way of saying now I would put the score maybe closer to fifty. I think there's definitely room for improvement, that they have also made some positive movements. Fair enough, I I accept that. And Greg, what do you think about this? What's your score?

So similar to Jamie in the early twenty nineteen, it's more of a fifty. Perhaps Ultimately, when you look at the scope bad behavior by American corporations, spilling oil in the ocean, killing people with bad drugs, etcetera. Jewel never did any of that. Jewel has never killed anyone. Jewel

has really never done physical injury to anyone. They had a bunch of very tech minded people that did not think they were in the tobacco industry, that thought everything was gonna be okay, that they could out and grow their problems, and they've failed, so during that time period, maybe about a fifty. Today I would put it more as a twenty because they are being more run like a tobacco company. Their CEO as a former Altrea executive. They know how to stay out of trouble, which is

one important thing for Jewel to rebuild trust. Okay, fair enough, thank you for that. I appreciate you both being here. Sure, thanks so much for having me, absolutely and thanks for having me. Okay, it's time to give Jewel my official BS score. As you've heard from our guest today, this one is complicated. Jewel was definitely a huge bullshitter in the early days because they screwed up their marketing big

time and wound up appealing to young people. But since then they've made some important moves in the right direction. I'm going to give today's Jewel a forty nine. To weigh in with your own score, visit our website Calling Bullshit Podcast dot com. We'll track Jewel's behavior over time to see if they can bring that score down. You'll also be able to see where Jewel ranks on bullshit compared to the other companies we feature on this show.

And if you're running a purpose led business, or you're thinking of beginning the journey of transformation to become one. Here are three things you should take away from this episode. One, your purpose, once you've defined it, should be used to determine all of the actions that you take as a business, including your marketing. Jewel forgot this and paid a steep price for making a product that should have targeted adults and then marketed it to kids. Two. Once you've gotten

off track, all is definitely not lost. You just have to get your actions back in line with your stated purpose. In Jules case, we've heard suggested actions like changing the physical design of the product to be less appealing to young people, or becoming an activist in the vaping space to try to get the whole category realigned toward adults. Your actions would undoubtedly be different, but the key is finding things to do that are iconic, i e. Dramatic

actions that rebuild the trust that's been broken. And Three, there's a huge difference between managing shareholders and managing stakeholders. If your shareholders are happy but your broader stakeholders aren't, you're gonna need to make a change in your approach. In Jewel's case, parents and the FDA were major stakeholders that Jewel did a really poor job of managing and it hurt them badly. And Casey cross the way, CEO Jewel.

If you ever want to come on this show to discuss any aspects of this episode, you have an open invitation. Thanks for joining us today, Lauren Edtter, Jamie Douche, arm and Greg Connolly. You can find their social media handles on our website, Colling Bullshit Podcast dot com. While you're there, check out Lawrence book The Devil's Playbook, Big Tobacco and the Addiction of a New Generation and Jamie's book Big Vague,

The Incendiary Rise of Jewel. I have an idea for a company or organization we should consider for the show. You can submit it on the site too. That's Calling Bullshit Podcast dot com. And if we hooked you today, subscribe to the Calling Bullshit Podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And thanks to our production team, Susie Armitage, Amanda Ginsburg, ds Moss, Andy Kim, Hannah Beale, MICHAELA. Reid, Lena Beck, Silison,

Jess Fenton and Basil Soaper. Calling Bullshit was created by co Collective and is hosted by Me Time Onto You. Thanks for listening, Be and Gree