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this is 99 percent invisible im romanmars for decades people havent 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 tore the carcinogenes and all that stuff secret companies try to create quodonquota safe combustion free smoking devices as far back as the 1980 they were all huge flops then in the two thousands esecrets first hit the market these earlymodels looked almost like secrets， but they gave themselves away and subtle ways if you look really closely， you could see that they were made a plastic or metal and they had a little glowing light on the tip mint resemble the Cherry at the end of a lite cigarette or you might remember the big clunky vaborizers that resembled walkie talkeys and required users to tinker with battery coils in poor socalled e Liquid into them by hand none of these ended up breaking into the mainstring until in 2015， a company called Jule labs rolled out a new nicketing vape that caught fire both with adult smokers who used them to kick their old fashionsmoking habit and with young people children who just thought they were cool the jewel became a phenomenon not strictly speaking as a smoking sisation device， but as an entirely new habit July in addition to limiting some of the harm of smoking， it seemed to threaten an entire generation with nicket addiction the new poncast backfired the vapine wars divesandthestories， behind the dual success and its failures listing to the show its clear that what began as an arguly promising innovation in harm reduction， inspired a backlash that intern open the door to available wildwest avaping products today were going to present you with first episode in which hostly on namefoc and r l partiss track how Jules founders figured out that the right combination of chemistry and design could unlock their products， potential and enhanceits addictive qualities its really fastname stuff check it out！
one afternoon last fall i sent a slackmessagetorel pardas my cohost 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 not good i generally not good， but this one could be good i dont know im gonna！
optimistic Ariel and i had spent months reporting on vaping trying to figure out how it had gone from a nishhobby 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 are all about it sometimes yesterday only can probably play this clip im completely sure were oh， no one point you were like！
biang was out of ap no！
that did really sound like a vape i dont i dont vape anymore what was that soft i dont know yeah was my phone for second dont lie to us Lyon im not loading tip im not line the phone makes weird sound sometimes i just flatly alive being like its not and we moved on but it was a vape！
why did you like cuz i really thought it was gonna be my own little secret until i throwed away later in the day and it was if literally only i knew it would be like never happened thats why i like but its literally on tape we all knew it happened and now theres concrete proof of it dan Dam well thank you for your um delayed honesty and um sorry i like sorry i like you my 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 thats what i thought webemaking this podcast about jule， but once we dug into it， we discovered there are now literally thousands of vae brands on the market in flavors like luscious， lemon and watermelon， ice and cheese cake you know the camera and explosion thats responsible for all the worlds biodiversity thats kind of were were at with nicketeenvates right now and i unfortunately have sampled a lot of them iftry the airbar， iftry elf bars， ivetry， asco bars， itry milees and i like some 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 airbar？
this morning cause my airbar died last night you know thats not what i man， watchingleon grapple with his addiction was pretty eye opening for me i didngrow up around anyone who smoked cigarads and as an adult in the bay area i didnknow many people who vaped either in fact in 2019， i voted to ban the sale of nicketing 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 parent， smoked cigarettes and i picked up the habit when i got to college， then during my senior year， my dad died of long cancer he was just 47 years old and yet even after that i had a really hard time quitting i died nicket patches and gumb an even hipnosis 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 didnt smokecigarits or even think about them but at the same time because i juled all day including inside by desk i became way more addicted the nicketing than i ever was as a smoker all of this is why when we first started our reporting we werent sure how to feel about juel and all of the vape companies that have come since were they saving peoples lives for profiting off of their weaknesses its safe to say weve both been shocked by what weve learned as you spent the past year trying to get to the bottom of who is winning and who is losing what weve come to think of as the vapors！
because its not just one war theres the war for dominance in the market sendthe logo and the flavor you want and these Chinese manufacturers will send you tens of thousands of them Joel is like not call anymore its the puff bar！
elf bar and esco bar have not received FTA authorization thousands of unauthorized vapse are pouring into the United States from China its almost like we just cant stop this we are at the cusp of something that could be a catasterfy， and theres also a war between two bitally opposed camps one focused on preventing a new generation from getting addicted to nicket they came into a kids school this is predatory behavior and the other focused on the potential avaipes to save millions of lives first puff i knew that i was gonna quit smoking， but beforeall that there was first Jules war on Bigtobacco！
which began its Standford university before the first vape had even hit the market thatswhere were 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 cigarads， i rememberbeing like this is it this is the dream i Marl Pardas ive been a reporter covering Silicon valley for publications like wired and the information for the last eight years。
an imely on mayfoc host of the podcast。
fiasco and the co creator of slow burn from audible originals and prologged projects this is backfired apodcast about the business of unintended consequences episode one smoking gun！
injanuary of 2015A 3 十 somethingentreperneurnamed James monsysatdownforan interview with a journalist it was just a few months before the Jewel would be released admin started this in grad school and at Stanford and we didnt really have flicka hard set goal on starting a company out of it certainly the past decade had been a struggled right but monsees felt like the company he had cofounded with his classmate Adam Boehm was finally on the cusp of revolution izing the world of nicket no so he was ready to tell their origin story yeah！
so you want to start the bmq i was first beginning OK um thats easy i can remember it now its been so warm so and just kidding its permanently grand of my mind and Bowen and monsys had met over a decade earlier in 203 they were both enrolled a masters program at Stanford the program was a mix of art。
mechanical engineering and industrial design traditionally 90 percent to serve the people on the program would start companies people who showed up in this program werent just in grask to be in grazzcle they were on a mission this is lisgerber she attended the program around the same time as boein and monsees people were talking about the power of technology， the the potential of connecting people the discussion about unintended consequences in the product design world was minimal just a place you in this moment in time 203 was the year my space day build apple introduce the iTunes music store and WordPress helped kick off the blogingerror we were doing things in a different way at that time anything felt possible and it wasnt commercially driven it was really lets invision the future in which we want to live as she hung around stanfordscampus gerber became friendly with boeen and monces she watched the two started the tinker with various product ideas in the schools， legendary design lab ideaslike 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 wasnt just their work that made boeen and monsys stand out everybodynew each other， but the smoker is definitely new each other thereabout for students who regularly smote by two threesmoking rates among young people were in free fall irememberbeing very much in the minority in college when i would smoke outside of our dorm bone and monsys experienced much the same thing i remember i want took them to task for smoking right outside the door cause i was like hey guys like this is the way i get it this is why everybody has to get it like find smoke but smokesomewhere away from where everybody has to you know comment and out of the door monseesin particular felt shame over his smoking his grandfather smoker had died from longcancer and growing up monsys mom taught him to hate cigarettes and yet he picked up the habit anyway， one day whoshavinga cigarette with bone outside the design lab and a late ball winoff。
we just kind of look at each other and that you know this would be a really understanding space to look at then the safety in shelter of academia right at why not look at something thats a huge opportunity and a huge sort of 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 monsees decided this was the problem they wanted to focus on in their masterstasis。
so they got to work researching their idea that was when they discovered a number of earlier attempts by bigtobacco companies to create a safer cigarette among them was the premiere， which rj realds released in 1988 premiere is the premiere of a cigarette。
which heats tobacco rather than burns of the soliminating most of the smoke。
much of the oder and all of the ash under the codename projectspa rj reald spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing the device the biginnovation behind it was that it heated tobacco instead of burning it thereby removingthemost dangerous part of smoking the combustion the creates tar still reynold was careful！
not to say that the premiere was safer just that it was cleaner we substantially reduce many of the controversial compounds found in the smokeof tobacco burning secrets virtually eliminate sidestream smoke there wash there is a cleaner taste it is a different taste！
but that different taste wasnt a hit with earlyusers it doesnt taste like your smoggingtobackup what does your taste like like your smoking fassed？
it realds gave up on the premiere after a short test period， but as boeen and monsysfound out that was not the end of big tobaccos effords to create a safer cigarette in 998！
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 dedly chemicals but also， like the premiere， the accord tasted bad and failed to take off with customers thetiming was also not great as it happened the accord was released just as Philip Morris along with several other bigtobacco companies agreed to pay billions of dollars in a court ordered settlement。
this settlement is clearly an important step in the right direction for our country it reflects the first time tobacco companies will be help financially accountable for the damage their product， those who are nations health and the longstruggled 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 show they had lied， but the health risks of smoking this database was released just two years before， boenand monsysed had their revelation outsigh the stanforddesignlab in fact its where they found out about all the earlyfaildetemps at safecigrants now they could use bigtobaccos research to beat them at their own game we get so much information right they would be able to get in most industries have and were able to catch up right to。
but huge too huge industry am in no time soon。
Bowen and monsystarted working on a prototype the keyinnovation they were keen to tinker with was this idea that if you heed tobacco leaves at a lower temperature instead of burning them you can still get nicket but without the deadly tarr that leads to long 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 the lookout it turned out to be a much bigger challenged than Bowen and monthes had anticipated， byjune of 2005， Boenand monsyeswere ready to present their thesis ideato their classmates it would hopefully be the first step toward securing potential funding and turning their product into something more than just a good idea monsees introduce the device， which they were now calling plume the rational future of smoking， so the name was south as now flume of this coverage late monseesquickly ran through what he and boeen had discovered about bigtobackers attempts to make a less deadly cigarette and explained why he thought all of them were pretty lame really theres no design innovation going on in smoking whatsoever， because uh big two back is really interested in not shooting themselves in the ones in their own footlike they they sell secrets and thats fairly much of the two then it was bowens turned to speak he made the case for why the bloom would be different so our goal was to basically create a whole new experience for people that routines the positive aspects of suial game like the visual everything but makes it as healthy and socially acceptable is possible healthy and socially acceptable the plume wouldnt be smelly like a cigarette nor would it raised the iron of classmates like gerber instead it would be safe and maybe even cool yes， we feel that we could take tobacgo back to being a luxury good and not so much a sort of druck delivery device that the cigarette safecount the plume looked nothing like existing tobacco products it was sleek it had a cartridge system that Bowen compared the express o 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 lisgerber the plume didnjust 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 nineteen 20 flappers with the long cigarettes and like the um wavy smote coming out and it kind of had this um elegant association i remember， also thinking about unintending consequences like what if in addition to helping people quit and reducing second hand smoke。
it also makes smoking sexyear aftergraduating Bowen and monsysworked on the plume from a small room in bowens 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 cigarads so after getting a few rejections， boein and monthes sent a plea to a standford 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 higher my name is curtsondarricker and i was the first employee at plume， which went on to become jule in 207 curtsondereger was a 41 year old marketing director at red ball he was the kind of person who religiouslyattended burning man and spent his vacations surfing in Bali he was also a smoker i was a long time smoker heavily conflicted i was eating well exercising a lot but i it was the monkey i couldnget off my back one day sondereger received a Cryptic LinkedIn message about a new company in need of a marketing director Boein and Monsys invited Sanderager to meet them at a pashhotel in San Francisco went to sit down and there are this two kind of slightly disheveled you know graduate student looking guys and you know we show cans and i want to take things out of my pocket as we do you know one of the things when i put it on the table kind of shockingly i noticed it was a pack of cigareates i was very ashamed of smoking and its something i was proud of a certainly not an a first interview with a company i knew nothing about and Adam and James kind of look at each other and smiles lately as the meeting went on soundarrayger realized why bone and monsyeswere pleased to find out he was a smoker they told him about bloom and described how vaporization worked one of the things they made very clear was they didnt want it to look like a cigarette they wanted it to be its own thing that they werent trying to replicate the cigarette paradigthey were gonna change that paradigm the plum was still just a prototype， but soundareger totally bought into the vision we had nikarat gon we have patches we have all kinds of tools that people could use to stop smoking but it wasnworking so clearly theres something to the ritual of smoking that smokers really cant let go of an i i bought into that a hundred percent im um！
im one of them soundarrayger started at plume in September of 27 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 deboe to buy some supplies to make some and yet boeen and monthes told sonderrager they were planning to launch bloom in just a few months that was not easy there were certainly a lot to do but as a marketing person and not as an engineer i couldnreally jump in with them on a lot of the things the only thing i could kind of helpoutwithotherthan branding in website in social media all that stuff was the flavor development the plume used a butain flame to heat a tiny metal cup kind of like an Espresso pod filled with tobacco leaves and mixed with commercial food flavouring the heat produced a vapor， which would then be inhaled through a mouth piece overall it resembled a large chunky。
pen soundareger said he always thought about it as a portable who ga kind about who ca in your pocket so there were these little pods that had tobacco in them and we didnt want to just vape the straight tobacco its a little bit boring it doesnt have that much flavor so following the hooka bottle， we started with adding different flavors in mixing it with a tobacco before filling these little pods。
Bowen and monthes had always imagined the bloom as a flavoured product boeen in particular was often experimenting by combining tobacco leaves with various flavors in big mixing boss， some earlyflavors included cinnamon and butter Bowen would leave pods on soundarykers desk for him to sample and eventually they settled on six flavors peach the peach is called Orchard cafe door gold！
which is like a more a traditional tobacco flavor oh rocket！
which is like a um pretty strong flavor and a two urbal flavors were blue tea and kickasmint as fun as it was to try out flavors getting the bloom ready for market was taking way longer than the founders and soundarrayger had hoped all of a sudden it was 209 the original launch date had come and gone and they were still testing the plume to mixed reviews at onepoint， soundarrayger lentapploom to a friend to take to burning man afterwards the friend reported that quote the harsh plya conditions did not mix well with pluming there are too many workingpieces and too many steps in the pluming process， sand riggers friend said that by comparison sigies are simple we pushed ahead anyway。
because we needed to get something to market， investors were getting a little， bit and see， and we needed to show some results it of the same time they knew that they would you know fail， small， fail， early？
and um keep iterating on the design finally in late 2009， so five years after Bowen and monsys came up with the idea they soft launched the plume sanderager put an image on their website of the black model one withthewords small， dark enandsome he also posted on a few messageboards that the plume was hitting the market soon hundreds of preorders came rolling in a camera crew from a news website paid a visit to their office and monsys demonstrated the model one for the reporter so unpluming this device because im not smoking。
so then when you inhell you get this vapor， but its not smoke its just vapor monthly is went on to compare the process to stepping tea when you put a tea bag into hot water， youextracting the roman youre extracting the caffeine so weve found a new way to make tea and have a very different experience that more suded to people who are smokers so you get the nicketing， you get the flavor。
but you dont actually burn the tobacco the reporter points out that boeen and monsys are steering clear of claiming that the bloom is seafer than a regular cigarette instead Bowen used a familiar word cleaners we believe that it is a cleaner visual and alleviates a lot of the social environmental concerns otherwise scribe dismoking and monthes finished by further distancing the product from cigarats what web try to do is create a new paradime something that doesnt look like a cigarette， doesnt feel or taste like a cigarette um its different the media interests suggested there was some momentum but not enough like its big tobacco predecessors the plugmodel 一 was a flop for one thing， it wasnt satisfying as a nigating delivery system， dareger would often plume all morning and then go downstairs and have a cigarette but also often the device just didnt work soundarrayger had a hard time communicating that to the founders he remembered one instance in particular when boeen just wasnt accepting the flaws he was telling him about。
i said look， Adam just come with me， lets make the rounds and lets see how this goes so we went to like five headshops that day and i remember one of the shops in particular we went in there， cold and presented the device to the guide i just put it down on the team while explains how it work in the guy he everything that could have gone wrong did wrong he he couldnget the boutine in it when he went to started， he shocked his finger he used it for a little bit the mouth these fell off any Bert the slip and i i remember seeing Adams face just like he knew that these were problems but when he saw， it like in 5 minuteshowall the themeasure flaws came to light with one user in one interaction i think that was the beginning of the end of OK， we need to recalibrate go back to the job board fix this thing its not ready for for prient time somethinghadtochange。
but it wasnt obviouswhat should be fixed first， out of the plumes many many problems。
youlistingthebackfired on 99 percent invisible more after this。
according to emails。
weve seen from December of 210 tensions started to emerge between Bowen and monthes boeen felt the companies number one goal should be pursuing deep long nicketing delivery the thing that as he putted in one email literally keep smokers coming back for more monsysworid that would essentially mean they were trying to make their device as addictive as possible he replied if deep long makes the product more enjoyable than grade if the purpose is to keep people coming back for more than im not sure im on board monthes 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 bloom that solved what monsyslowstically called its userinteraction issues are also researching improvements to nicket delivery doing both of these things would require money money the company didnt have in fact。
early investors had seen the failure of the plume model one and assumed that boeen and monsys would give up that the future of smoking had been just another promising idea from silicon value that ended up amounting to nothing much but boeen and monsyeswert ready to fold instead。
they agree to accept millions of dollars investment capital from a Japanese tobacco company exactly， the type of company they had set out to disrupt and frankly destroy decurt sandareger it 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 werent doing it to to kill the technology is of sometimes happens with tech companies right they buy a potential competitor and just kill it wipe it out they saw this also as the future so if a big tobacco company in a in a smoking crazy country， like Japan could come in and say hey， this is a future of smoking great keep going guys keep innovating um into to you get it right plus for soundareger it helps the Japan tobacco was Japanese it didnt feel as bad as like altery our Philip Morris did our name is Japan tobacco its 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 soundarrayger didnt want to wake that long and decided to move on from the company so i departed and what happened was instead of fixing the plume right away！
they actually came out with the packs the packs was boeen in monsys solution to their cashflowproblem officially， it was a loose sleep vaperiser on officially？
he was a weed vape it was funny because with the many investors that we talk to about this quite off of the first thing they would say i like under their breath they would say yeah this is cool does he work for weed you know so what enough people ask you if it works for weed， you have to ask yourself like no。
but we could make one that really works well for weed so i think thats what they did using their vaporization technology to help stoners wasnt exactly bone in monsys primary mission， but it was another compromised they were willing to make in order to keep the company afloat and to their credit they really didnt have asset the packs was born of a collaboration with Eve bahar the Swisse designer bestknownforthesota string 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 that best selling vaporizer in the country for we and a gave them what they needed finally boeen and monsys had a best selling product and with the new influxof cache they continued to refine the plume they also hired more employees all i remember is going into then were the customer service representatives worked。
which was out of like a supply closet with like some retrofitedbathrem and i thought this is it？
this is the dream like i was so pumped to be there laurenzo kistio was still in college when he joined bloom 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 beeping in the office and his team had a habit of dressing up in suits in ties on Fridays since every other day。
people were t shirts in 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 um shoot foam darts at them and this is one of the videos where were just barrashing them with foam darts as they walk in undersea you can see James catch one and shoot a back at us right and that was kind of you sat right next was that was like part of what enables have that fun atmosphere that he wasnbeyond have a little fine in situation like that castio loved the packs as did all of his friends when it came to like secret sana for the couple years that i work there i would bring a path and i was always a big hit i mean in my mind right this is it this is the product right a discreet way to smokepart where you dont have to burn anything but he also understood that the device wasnt the companies main ambition i always saw the packs as a pleasant diversion from the mission that jamesnatom 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 pay prisepot even as sales of the packs took off boein and monthes were still focused on improving the design of the next version of the plume the model to crucially they switched from a butane heat source to a usb rechargeable battery so no more unpleasant shocks and i actually have one i have a model to i brought it in you have one on your pocket right now yeah， yeah and no its funny like its the at you know you look on this its fairly established um but its still got this is probably my favorite thing its still got a rocketpod in it and if you want you can smell it and you could still smell the rocketpod if you twist it out well！
thats my favorite flavor rocket i dont even know how i would describe this flavor it doesnt smell like something that exists in nature！
some people including myself say Christmas but yeah now i area i think its got like a sentiment hit to it hit just he know how they say smell is like the biggest hit of nostalgia smelling that brings me back to those times。
the Plume model 2 was launched in 2013， with a Swinky party in San Francisco the company also cosponsored a New York fashion week album release party for Robin faq， according to the New York times most attendies were a bit confused by the bloom a brand ambassador had to explain to users theyre 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 packs with an east cigarette that actually worked anything model to that came and was treated with white love service we were tool to escalate that to our more senior customer service representers and to really thoroughly work with those customers in terms of whats wrong how can we help you？
i think that really showed where the priorities were for that company at that time boein and monsees were eager to get feedback from customers about the new unimproved version of their device the problem was there？
werenthat many model to customers to learn from i remember we had an allhands and during that all hands an engineer who was a marketing name names but was known to be vocal rose his hand and said exactly， how many model tools have been sold i remember that being a palpably awkward moment where it was clear that it wasnt the hit that i think we wanted it to be as a company the plume models had been an improvement on the model one。
but it still had many of the same problems the mouth piece felt fragile。
and it had to be recharged every three or four uses crucially it didnt solve the problem Bowen had now been highlating for years it still didnt deliver enough nicketing to satisfy smokers heating was a problem with the model to 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 last undesired userrence it was clear the entire way the model to work by vaporizing tobacco leaves just wasnt delivering a satisfying amount of nicket。
so Bowen and monsys went back to the tobacco document theyd first discovered， while they were at Stanford that was where they hit upon secret researed from rj realds into somethingcalled nickatine salts the documents showed that in the nineteen eighties scientist， the company reported that combining pure nicket with an acid would create a special kind of salt this salt eliminated the unpleasant effects the camewith increasing the concentration of nicket， but rj renels had never commercialized this breakthrough apparently they were concerned that it would produce such a smooth cigarette that people wouldnt realize they were smoking way too much and they would just keep smoking until they accidentally overdowsed on nicket this seemlike a really promising potential solution， but only if bone and moncies were willing to completely redesign how their nicketeenvape work instead of vaporizing tobacco leaves like the model to a new device would need to mix nicketing in a liquid that would then be heated as an aerosol this would require experchiefthat went far beyond bone and monsys stanfordesign credentials so they hired a chemist to help her name with Chen washing they were a strong team with mechanic engineering， background and product design but they didnt have anybody with chemistry training and thats why they had this opening Shangg had a PhD in chemical engineering sheet worked for big pharmaceutical companies on things like asmanhailers and inhalablemigraindrug Shane did not respond to request to speak with her so what you hearing is an interviewshedid with blueberg in 2019， i told specifically to the recruiter in the beginning that i was not a smoker and i dont plan to start smoking um and then they said this not a requirement even though even though um many of their team um they are smokers when she recall the boon and monsys were actually pluming during her job interview it was not as annoying at all as um somebodysmoking next to you she also recalled 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 uh being somebody develops medications right the drugs is actually to treat sickness but i do see um smoking as a behavior causing a lot of um health problem and then causing a lot of stress on public health space in general shingtook the job in 2013 and set about trying to figure out how to deliver a nicket hit that would convert serious smokers they would need to have just enough burn and a little hit to the back of the throat but it couldnt be too harsh to handle shing conducted her research in a lab that was set apart from the rest of the office the renzo castio the customer service wrap thinks that was not an accident remember like being like how theyre really put research under locking key like you dont walk by engineering anymore engineering is on the far side of the building and that to me was like theres theres definantly 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 bone shang mix different formulas of e liquids and recruited co workers to give feedback on the flavor and the nicket hit they called this buzztesting castio remembered that is boss was one of the people who opted in to trying the new technology she was a cigarette smoker and she volunteered sheen documentedher testsubjectsreactions to the new formulation she wanted to know did their heart rate increase do they get a throat hit do they feel a buzz remember being like wow thats no thats theydoing something that is a lot more data intensive than anything weve done in the past eventually， it became clear that nicket insults were delivering a hit that was way way stronger than anything plume one or two could give you shang had cracked the code when those volunteers um came to you and say that they havent touched they are a secret pack for a while i i do think that we have a great product and we should let more people Tria on October tentth 2014， Bolin and Shangfiled a patent to protect the Innovation in the application there reported having quote unexpectedly discovered that certain nicket Liquid formulations provides 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 a potential to be even more addictive。
while boein and shangware at work on the nicket formula monsya started thinking about a new design for their new device he wanted it to be more like the packs x was that a static was born out of everybodyon the teams immediate you know instinctual distased for this for 20 static joshmoreinstein was a designer at the firm that worked on the path he remembers one detail in particular from his earlyinteractions with boeen and monces the main thing i remember was that they were constantly！
constantly vaping constantly there was a giant ball like a solid ball that had hundreds of multicolored plume pods those were the longexpress o guys and then there was another ball that had hundreds of used pods and they would go through them constantly， reconstantly sucking on these things monseeswantedtheirnew device to be easier to use than the bloom something that people would want to keep in their pocket and something theyd wanna show off the main component the brief was lets designed 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 monthes offered more instein in his partner。
a contract for a few weeks of designwork on this new concept they agree to take on the project and came up with a whole host of designs finally， when they felt， they were almost stopped out。
we said as are anything that weve kind of left undiscovered and i think i said what would be like to smoke in the future， would you really use a cylinder and this is all based off of the way that traditional tobacco was manufactured and processed and rolled， and i had a usbkey on my keychain， which was a tiny little rectiliner form and it was sheet metal it was rolled and rose are pretty inexpensive and i said what if it was like that？
likea usbstick he put the one on his keychain up to his lips and have felt better then trying to wrap your mouth around a circular shape moreinstine in 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 usbstick in June of 2013， they presented the slab to boein and moncies we have the original presentation here that we shared uh with the team at geole the powerpoint shows the product already named jule moreinstein didnt know when or how that name had been decided but he recalled Bowen and monsys already having settled on it before he was hired。
Bowen would leader clarify that the name was inspired by jewels like jams and Jule the scientific unit of energy fitsend your hand and you could see in this image here when youre holding it almost in a traditional cigarette format you know it kind of sits between the fingers in a slim way and its actually more comfortable than a cylinder would be and they were just immediately like this is it this is the one yeah！
theres no question this is the one at this point in our interview moreinstine put away the powerpoint and pulled out one of the earlyprototypes of the jewel can i hold this dual product type yeah！
its remarkably similar to the jewel we know in love today its probably the most famous thing ive ever design for sure at the end i think we made sixteen thousand dollars on it！
moreinstein went on to design the fellow goose net cattle the open spaces， Shurac and Athena club razers but the jewel is far anyway， the most recognizable product hes ever designed thats because its one of the most recognizable products of the twenty first century like the iPhone and the Tesla model three like smartphones in cars e cigarette had existed long before the jewel came along but it was more instines design that made the jeols stand out frankly i think we did a good job he there to be like i still have im like oh we cant we cant nailed it he has iconic yeah and thats what we were hard to do？
byearly 2015 Adam Bowen and James Monsyeswere finally ready to release the jewel into the world ten years after firstpresenting their idea their classmates at Stanford they started agreeing to interviews like the one you heard at the beginning of this episode were monthys teased there upcoming product launch so what sug what this year what is what is next whats whats since store for you guys um and a lot of great stuff its all top secret they will have more than one really awesome new product that this year one really awesome new product when curt sondereger got his hands on the jewel he was really impressed with how far bone and monthes had come from the prototype they showed him back in 2007 what did you think you know they definitely fix the produtch in every sense of the word it was super easy there were no painpoints there was no mutane 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 didnt have any idea how big it actually got he only had one concern what if boeen and monsees had made their product a little too good i gave it to one of my buddies owns！
a bar here and senieda send he was a heavy spoker and he finally completely gave up on cigareates and when i gave this jeo， he he told me said shit i feel like im addicted again！
this season on backfired will take you inside Jules rise and its precipitous fall and understand until it clicked you can smokethe juile wherever you want new crazy sugars its called juile and it is plying off the shows this thing is really sexy and disruptive！
there is such a thing as a company growing too fast！
jule grew too fast im gonna go over a couple different ways to hit your jeo while youre in school and not get caught we literally call our bathroom the jeolroom tonight authorities investigating what could be the countries first death link to vaping i think it was the beginning of the end for Jewel will also hear from the cofounder of Jule James Monsees who is not spoken publie about the company in nearly half a decade。
we could have done a lot better job collectively of dealing with this if we hadnbeen so focused on finding a new animation。
quickly well meet the new owners of the next generation of vip companies and the frustrated authorities who have been powerless to range them in we invested about two million dollars and we bleu it up immediately into multimillion dollar company within 九十 days its like imagine you walking out the string someones like here take this like five hundred box like her run！
run！
run！
we didnpredict what i now believes an epidemic of e cigarators among teenagers it was a whichisbrew of public health concerns the teens are very clever they seem to evade where the regulations go the us agents recently sees more than one point for million a legal ease cigarettes it can almost feel like a game of you know wackamall and finally ill try to figure out how to end my own personal vaping war or at least come to some sort of truth my mom doesnt really know about any of this some contemplating how i will talk about it not on the podcast if i yeah！
i feel like a great way to tell your parents about your nicketing addiction as to launch a hot test series， backfire is presented by audible originals and prologged projects the show is hosted by Leon nei foc and me are lpartiz our senior producer was Sam we。
our editor was kimgiolson our producerswere Dustin the sodo and Catherine Sullivan our assistanproducer was our lean arevel sounddesign by Andrew Parsons。
archival research and facchecking by Frances car our theme song and score were composed by Amager Audio mix by Eric a Wang copyright council provided by Peter Yachi and Brandon Butler at Yachi Butler PLC Heather one Tesserrero is our executive producer at audible originals Mike Charsec is the head of production at audiblestudios Rachel Giotsi is audibleschief content officer specialthankstogabriomontoia and Thomas Perfetti backfired was cocreated by Kim giddlesen for prologprojects soundrecordingcopyright 2024 byprologprojects。
you can find the full season of backfired for free if youre an audible subscriber is created by the team at prologprojects， which has produced many excellent podcast documen areas hosted by Leon neefoc， including many seasons of fiasco and thinktwice Michael Jackson。
