The Future of Vaping After the Fall of Juul

Even if you’ve never taken a puff from a vape, you know about Juul. At the company’s peak in 2018, its e-cigarette was one of the most recognizable consumer devices on the planet, and Juul Labs was valued at $38 billion. Just a few short years later, after being squeezed by government regulators and prohibition-minded anti-tobacco advocates, Juul’s valuation plummeted and its market share vaporized.

The story of Juul—and its thousands of imitators—is outlined in Backfired: The Vaping Wars, a new nine-part podcast from Prologue Projects. The show traces the history of e-cigarettes, nicotine vaporizers, and synthetic nicotine by following the paths of Juul and its thousands of competitors as the vape companies gain public acceptance, fight for market share, and butt heads with government agencies. It’s a fascinating ride filled with new reporting, so even if you’ve read and listened to everything about Juul and vaping, you’ll hear some shocking new information in this series.

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with Backfired’s hosts, Arielle Pardes and Leon Neyfakh.

Show Notes

Backfired is an Audible original, so go to audible.com/backfired to listen. Also check out Louise Matsakis’ story about the next generation of cheap, illegal vapes coming from China.

Recommendations

Arielle recommends Timeshifter’s Jet Lag App. Leon recommends the Yoto Player for getting kids into podcasts. Lauren recommends The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray. Mike recommends Subpar Pool, a game by Holedown creator Martin Jonasson.

Arielle Pardes can be found on social media @pardesoteric. Leon Neyfakh is @leoncrawl. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

How to Listen

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: Lauren.

Lauren Goode: Mike.

Michael Calore: Do you vape?

Lauren Goode: You know me. No, I don't vape. I've never vaped. Do you?

Michael Calore: I have vaped. Yeah. About 10 years ago I vaped for a little while. It helped me get off of cigarettes.

Lauren Goode: You smoked cigarettes?

Michael Calore: I did. Yeah.

Lauren Goode: For how long?

Michael Calore: For like 20 years probably.

Lauren Goode: Is that because you're Gen X?

Michael Calore: Yes, and I'm a nihilist.

Lauren Goode: Wait. Wow. And vapes actually helped you kick cigs?

Michael Calore: Yes. Which is part of the reason why they were so popular for so long and why they're still popular, right? Because they can help people get off of cigarettes. At least that's what we're told.

Lauren Goode: Right. Were they popular because they actually did that, or were they a panacea?

Michael Calore: I think people just like to get buzzed.

Lauren Goode: So, whatever happened to vapes? It felt like they were everywhere for a while and now I don't see them as much.

Michael Calore: Well, we should talk about that.

Lauren Goode: All right, let's do it.

[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]

Michael Calore: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore, WIRED's director of consumer tech and Culture.

Lauren Goode: And I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: We are also joined this week by the hosts of a new podcast from Prologue Projects called Backfired: The Vaping Wars. Please welcome to the show Leon Neyfakh and Arielle Pardes.

Leon Neyfakh: Hello.

Arielle Pardes: Hello. It's so good to be back with you guys.

Lauren Goode: It's so great to have you all back. This is kind of a reunion.

Michael Calore: It is like a reunion. Those of you who recognize Arielle's voice might be recognizing it because she used to be the cohost of Gadget Lab just a few years ago. So, welcome back, Arielle.

Arielle Pardes: It's delightful to be here.

Michael Calore: And you may also know Leon from podcasts like Slow Burn, and he's also been involved in some of WIRED’s audio projects recently. He worked with Lauren here on a show. Yay.

Lauren Goode: Right. So, we determined earlier this is like a supergroup band. It's not the band getting back together. It's all these different players coming together to form. This is the album, folks. So, everyone should listen to today's show.

Leon Neyfakh: One time only.

Michael Calore: It does feel like a nice reunion. So, congratulations to the two of you for the launch of your brand-new podcast. It is an Audible Original. So, if people are interested in finding it, we'll put a link in the show notes. The show is a nine-part production that traces the history of e-cigarettes, nicotine vaporizers, and synthetic nicotine.

And it follows the paths of companies like Juul and its thousands of competitors as they gain public acceptance, fight for market share, and butt heads with government regulators. It's a fascinating ride with a whole bunch of new reporting in it. So, even if you've read and listened to everything about Juul and vaping, you'll be delighted to find new reported material in the show.

Also, a big part of this show's success hinges on your personal story, Leon, how you got into vaping and your struggle to break your nicotine addiction. So, to start our conversation today, I have to ask, how is that going? Do you vape much these days?

Leon Neyfakh: I am just going to say I'm locked in a cycle and I haven't broken it yet because, as Arielle will tell you, I've said before that I'm done vaping. And then, not long after, she will see me or hear me vaping in the studio while we're working on something. It happened so many times that she really stopped taking anything I said seriously.

But at this point, the fact of the matter seems to be that if I'm vaping, it means I'm not smoking. And if I'm not vaping, that means I'm smoking at least a little bit. And that's been my struggle is starting one thing again after stopping the other and then stopping the second thing and starting the first one.

And I think it would've been nice if we had reached the end of this podcast then I could have said proudly and honestly that I'm now a nicotine-free and living the rest of my life. I will not be so bold as to say that.

Lauren Goode: Leon, I have such a clear memory of hanging out in the hallway of your podcast studios in Brooklyn when we were working on the WIRED podcast together and you just guiltily snuck a sip of a vape in there and then shoved it back into your pocket. Why do you think there is such shame around vaping even though it's not cigarettes?

Leon Neyfakh: Well, I mean, first of all, I don't know that everyone's ashamed. I find it shameful because it just looks stupid and it makes you look like a fiend who can't control his impulses in a professional setting like we were in, Lauren. I should be able to wait for a break or I should be able to resist the temptation. And I think it was the fact that I couldn't that made me so ashamed and continues to. But there's another answer that goes beyond my personal experience, which is we have been told pretty much since vaping became mainstream that it's a really bad idea to vape.

When Juul got popular, this was around 2016, 2017, 2018, that's when Juul use reached critical mass and you started to see people doing it walking down the street or you would see people at parties with their Juul became a real cultural phenomenon. And I think people who took it up even at the time, I think we all had this thought, "Surely they're going to figure out this is really bad for you." Maybe we don't know yet exactly how, but they're going to find something and there's no such thing as a free lunch in this world.

Nothing comes for free. I guess that's really two ways of saying the same platitude. But I think we all had this suspicion that it was going to turn out to be no better than cigarettes. And I think a of people still think that, and so there is this sense that it's no better than smoking. And the truth is that anyone who does smoke would be, I think, absolutely better off if they vaped instead.

Lauren Goode: Can we go back to the beginning of Juul quickly, because you guys get into this in your podcast Backfired. It's fantastic. Everyone should listen. We're going to say that about five more times throughout this episode, but it was interesting for me to learn that decades before Juul, Big Tobacco tried to launch its own e-cigarette but was very careful to say in its pitch that it wasn't necessarily safer. It was “cleaner,” right? The way that it burned off the nicotine was "cleaner."

Fast forward to the early 2000s, two Stanford students are essentially trying to learn from the tobacco industry stumbles, and they launched the Juul. Were they ever actually claiming that Juul was safer or healthier than smoking? What was the original positioning?

Arielle Pardes: It's a great point. In the original Stanford presentation about what became later the Juul, it was originally called the Plume. One of the cofounders Adam Bowen uses the exact same language as tobacco executives in describing e-cigarettes. He calls them cleaner, and I think that's for two reasons. One is that nobody really knew, right?

These were completely nascent devices that hadn't really been tested. But secondly, if you call a tobacco product safer or if you make claims about how it can help people get off cigarettes, you run into a lot of regulatory issues. And so, from the very beginning, e-cigarette development was in this weird liminal state where if you didn't make claims about what it was going to do in terms of health, you actually weren't regulated. And that's a pretty important point in how companies like Juul got so successful. It wasn't until 2016 that the FDA had regulatory oversight over e-cigarettes.

Juul came out in 2015, and many other e-cigarette companies proceeded it. And so, there was a relatively long time period in which there was zero regulatory oversight because of the ways that these companies were positioning their products.

Leon Neyfakh: Because they were consumer products, right? That was the key distinction I think even from the perspective of the Juul founders. They wanted this thing to be a consumer product, not something that would stand on a shelf next to the patch or the gum that you buy at a pharmacy. They wanted this to be a consumer product, and they talked about it in terms of “we just want people to enjoy it and we want people to get the pleasures of going out for a cigarette with their friends without”… they often talked about the social cost of smoking.

They were like, “You stink when you smoke, you piss people off.” And with the Juul, it's discreet, doesn't have a smell really, it's not offensive to other people. That's what they focused on, because they didn't want to be positioning themselves as a smoking-cessation medical tool basically.

Michael Calore: A big part of that consumer journey and also a big part of the regulatory journey for Juul and for other e-cigarette manufacturers is that a lot of the conversation is around flavors.

Lauren Goode: Flavor pods.

Michael Calore: Can you tell us how flavors came into play and what they did to the e-cig industry?

Lauren Goode: Should flavor pods be the name of our supergroup album, by the way?

Leon Neyfakh: Maybe just flavor pod, singular.

Arielle Pardes: Yeah. I think flavors were always a big part of the promise of e-cigarettes. If you go all the way back to those very early experiments from tobacco companies that you just mentioned, Lauren, one of the big problems was that they tasted awful. There are a bunch of consumer reviews that we read about from the early RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris experiments into vapes. And consumers are like, "It tastes like shit. I'm not going to vape this."

Leon Neyfakh: It smells like farts.

Arielle Pardes: Yeah, that's a literal piece of feedback. And so I think the first successes that you start to see are products that, one, have a satisfying amount of nicotine but, two, have a flavor experience that is attractive. People are not going to give up their cigarettes for something that smells like farts and tastes like shit. So, I think it's a big part of why consumers would adopt them. I mean, the early Juul had just a handful of flavors, and they were pretty basic, right? It was like cucumber, mango.

Leon Neyfakh: You weren't there. They weren't basic. They were amazing. Let me put this another way. They had cucumber, they had mango, they had fruit.

They were amazing. I remember the mango like a Madeleine. I remember the first time I had one. It's just that I tried remember the first time I had one. But I remember having them and I remember being really sad when I stopped being able to taste them.

Lauren Goode: Wait, what do you mean when you stopped being able to taste them?

Leon Neyfakh: Because you start Juuling all the time and eventually you become desensitized to the flavor pretty quickly actually.

Arielle Pardes: But this happened to a lot of kids. Leon, I don't think you were a kid when this was happening, but this is what was happening to the kids and what made regulators take notice was the fact that they were so tasty and so addictive, if that's the right word.

Leon Neyfakh: It's the right word.

Arielle Pardes: That there was a huge uptick in adoption, a really rapid uptick in adoption.

Leon Neyfakh: Yeah, they became an accessory that teenagers wanted and frankly that adults wanted too. Like I said before, you'd start seeing them at parties and people would try each other's, "Let me hit your Juul." It became in part through Juul's efforts at marketing, they famously or infamously mounted this early marketing campaign that was called Vaporized, where they showed attractive young people dancing around with the Juul as if it was almost like an Apple commercial or something.

And there's a billboard in Times Square. There was a print ad in VICE, and so they got a lot of heat, and I would say it was almost like a fatal mistake perhaps looking back, for seemingly targeting teenagers. But whether it was because of that campaign that teenagers started using the Juul or if it was primarily a function of the fact that once you tried it, you kept doing it because it's nicotine.

They got really popular with teenagers, and you started to see videos on YouTube of teen influencers being like, "Here's how you hide your Juul in your pocket or in your socks when you're at school. Here's how you can hit your Juul without your teacher knowing." And that got the attention of parents and regulators and politicians.

Lauren Goode: And so, then, in turn, regulators didn't initially crack down on the vapes themselves as much as the flavors. They said, "You can still sell the vapes, but you can't get certain pods?"

Arielle Pardes: Yeah, there's a massive regulatory fumble that happens in 2019. So, basically, Juul gained massive popularity among all kinds of different people in the years after it launched, and it really hits a crescendo in 2018, which is the year that the FDA gets these numbers about teen use. And it finds that the numbers of teens using nicotine products, which had been going down, down, down, down, down for decades has suddenly started to spike up, and it's all because of Juul.

So, this catches the attention of not just the FDA but also President Trump, who starts to get really concerned and sees basically like an easy win. If you can get rid of vapes and you can solve this teen nicotine epidemic, everyone will be happy. And pretty quickly flavors become the scapegoat. It's like teens are using this because they love mango.

Mango is bad. If we just get rid of the flavors, this problem will be solved. But it turns out to be misleading, because adults who are former smokers also really like flavors. Like Leon was a huge Juul mango head, and there are so many people who complain about this proposed policy to ban flavored vapes that it spooks the Trump administration, who decides, "Actually maybe this isn't going to be such an easy win." And so, you get this really weird regulatory compromise in 2019, which is that the Trump administration gets the FDA to write this policy that bans flavored nicotine pods that applies to companies like Juul, which you buy the Juul device and then you buy these pods as often as you want.

It didn't apply to this other category of vapes called disposables, which are the kinds that you now see everywhere where you walk into a bodega, you pick up an Elf Bar, and then when it's done, you throw it in the trash. And so, obviously in hindsight, what you see is that companies like Juul took a huge hit, but then other companies that weren't such big players start to become billion-dollar businesses.

Michael Calore: And that's what I want to talk about next, but we do have to take a break. The vaping story goes far beyond Juul. So, let's take a pause right now and we'll come right back.

[Break]

Michael Calore: OK. So, you mentioned many times in the show, which again is called Backfired, and it's an Audible Original.

You mentioned many times in the show that when you told people you're doing a podcast about vaping, they would inevitably ask the same question, which is, is vaping safe? Now, you take this question into a literal doctor's office on the show. So, please tell us the answer, is vaping safe?

Leon Neyfakh: I will punt on that for a second by telling you that actually we would tell people that we were making a podcast about Juul and they would be like, "Oh, really? What about her?" without fail.

Lauren Goode: What about her? The singer.

Leon Neyfakh: I had no idea the singer Jewel was so famous.

Lauren Goode: The Alaskan singer. Wow.

Leon Neyfakh: Yeah, she apparently has such a high salience, way higher apparently than Juul with two U's. It would shock me every time. I'd be like, "Really? Why would you think I would make a podcast about Jewel, the singer?"

Lauren Goode: Wow. As a follow-up question to that, who will save your soul?

Leon Neyfakh: Or will Juul save your soul with Juul with two U's or maybe at least your lungs. So, is it safe, is that the question?

Michael Calore: Mm-hmm.

Leon Neyfakh: Is it safe?

Lauren Goode: Yeah. We have a lot of questions for you this segment, but let's start with that.

Leon Neyfakh: Is it safe? OK, look, I don't know for sure is the short answer. The longer, truer answer is that what we do know is that vaping is not nearly as bad for you as smoking, which is just like the worst thing you can do to your body. It is so destructive on so many levels, and for the most part, the thing that makes cigarettes so bad is not the nicotine in them. It's all the stuff that goes into your lungs when you light tobacco on fire, like that's the stuff that causes cancer.

The nicotine, which is what cigarettes have in common with vapes. Sure. In the same way that too much caffeine can be bad for you. People I think can plausibly say that too much nicotine is not good, but it's not the thing that makes cigarettes deadly. And so, when you ask the question, are vapes safe?

It's like, well, they're not so safe that someone who doesn't smoke should do it. If you don't smoke, you shouldn't vape, period. No question about it. But if you do smoke, the people that we found most credible in our reporting said that whatever you think it is, 95 percent healthier, which is a claim that gets thrown around a lot, 90 percent healthier, 50 percent healthier. We don't know for sure.

And we don't know the long-term effects because the longitudinal studies just haven't been done yet. But if you're a smoker, the bottom line is, vaping is better.

Arielle Pardes: I think one of the other reasons that people are concerned about the safety of vapes right now is because we're operating in a market where almost every vape on shelves is illegal and therefore unregulated. The FDA has only authorized 23 e-cigarette products for legal sale in the United States, and they're all tobacco flavored.

Leon Neyfakh: It's actually 26 now, I think, because they just approved the menthol NJOYs yesterday.

Arielle Pardes: Well, there you go. There you go, 26. But that's to say, if you're going to the store and you're picking up a banana flavored air bar, that product has not been tested or authorized by our government. And so, we were pretty curious what is in there. We know that you're not heating up tobacco and creating tar, but you are heating up some combination of chemicals and a battery and then inhaling in the vapor from that.

So, one of the things that we did in the show is we took five different disposable vape products to a lab in Los Angeles, and we said, "Can you just test not just what's in these vapes but also what is coming out of them when you're inhaling the vapor?" And Leon and I had really different reactions to what they found, which was trace amounts of chemicals like formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, which are both known carcinogens—

Leon Neyfakh: There was a little arsenic in there too.

Arielle Pardes: —in very, very small amounts. What's that?

Leon Neyfakh: There was a little arsenic in there too.

Arielle Pardes: There was a little arsenic in them too. And I think the conclusion of the person who tested the vapes was that these chemicals were in such small amounts that it was negligible. There's also formaldehyde and arsenic in the air apparently. But to me it was like, "OK, this is a good argument as to why we should have better regulation on what's in these things." Because at this point it's like, who knows?

Lauren Goode: Right? In the first half of the show, when you started to describe how now the market is not just cornered by Juul, there are all these disposable options. Am I crazy in thinking that just sounds one, completely unsustainable from an environmental perspective?

Leon Neyfakh: Oh, yeah, it's horrible for the environment.

Lauren Goode: It's just tossing vapes everywhere.

Leon Neyfakh: Yeah. Horrible.

Lauren Goode: And then, yeah, two, it also seems like it would be harder to substantiate health claims for RandM vapes that are just—

Arielle Pardes: They don't even make health claims. These companies are so different from Juul or NJOY, which is another very early vape company that still exists today. What's so interesting is that Juul was actually founded by people who were smokers themselves and who had suffered the consequences of smoking in their own lives and their family's lives. The people who started these new vape companies, and we interview several of the CEOs in the show, I'm including the CEOs of Puff Bar, which was at one point the most popular disposable in America, and Escobar. They're in it to meet market demand.

And so, none of these companies are making claims that if you're a smoker, this would be a preferable alternative. They're making claims that, like, banana-ice-flavored vape is cool.

Lauren Goode: Leon, do you agree as the taste tester here?

Leon Neyfakh: Do I agree? Do I agree that banana ice is cool, but actually I don't know that I've tasted a banana-flavored vape. There's strawberry mango, there's watermelon ice, there's raspberry ice, there's literally thousands. We talk about one on the show called Beach Day that we speculated was meant to, um—

Arielle Pardes: Evoke the ocean, you said.

Leon Neyfakh: There you go. Yes.

Arielle Pardes: Yeah, I think I even picture Malibu rum when I hear that.

Leon Neyfakh: Surf wax.

Arielle Pardes: Leon did a—

Lauren Goode: Surf wax.

Arielle Pardes: Leon did a lot of really brave reporting for this show that involved sampling all of these products himself.

Michael Calore: To be clear, when you're buying these things online and when you're acquiring them in bodegas around Los Angeles or New York, you're buying illegal products, right? They are all illegal, is that right?

Leon Neyfakh: Yeah. Basically, anyone who started selling nicotine vapes after 2016 had to first get authorized by the FDA. People who had already started selling them like Juul were allowed to continue doing business while their applications were processed. Newcomers by default are selling illegal products if they don't have authorization from the FDA. And the FDA, as Arielle mentioned, has only given out a handful of these authorizations, none until just the other day actually to anyone making flavored vapes. So, all the vapes that the FDA has approved have been tobacco flavored, which are thought to be less appealing to kids.

The other day, it was very controversial when they announced this, they approved menthol-flavored e-cigarettes from this one company NJOY. And a lot of people, including parent organizations, think that's a huge mistake, while others cheered on and say it's a step forward for the FDA towards embracing e-cigarettes as a harm-reduction tool.

Lauren Goode: Right? Another sign that the ’90s are back: Menthol is being approved again. So, in episode seven of your series, this episode is called the “Crackdown.” Arielle, in the beginning, you talk to a business owner who is pushing vapes and is really feeling the heat of all the regulations and laws that are coming out against vapes.

Then, later on in the episode, Leon, you went on a ride along with New York City police as they cracked down on the "nicotine pushers." What was it like witnessing this both as a vaper and as a reporter who at this point was very deep in the story?

Leon Neyfakh: Yeah. So, I actually went with the other member of our supergroup, Lauren, Kim Gittleson, who worked with us on the WIRED show. She was one of the driving forces behind Backfired, working with Arielle and I. So, the two of us, plus our other colleague Andrew, who also worked on the WIRED show, we went to the Bronx with the New York City Sheriff's Department. And we watched them basically bust a smoke shop called the Evil Ghost Smoke Shop, which if that's not crying out for a bust, then I don't know what is.

But I remember standing there outside with Kim and with Andrew and trying to reflect on what I had just seen, and the overwhelming feeling was like, wow, this is so pointless. This shop is one of thousands in New York City where you can buy this stuff. Cool. They put a bunch of it in plastic bags and took it back to the station. This place is going to be open again in a week, and if it's not, you can walk down the street and go around the corner and buy the same stuff somewhere else. And so, I just remember standing there and wondering, how do they motivate themselves to just do this over and over again?

Michael Calore: So, the whole vape industry right now is the stew of regulation and quasi-legality and cat-and-mouse enforcement. What does the future of vaping look like in this country, in the UK, around the world?

Arielle Pardes: What an amazing question. I think the answer to that depends on whose vantage point you're looking through. So, if you are looking from the vantage point of the FDA, I think the future of vaping looks like a very, very tightly regulated market in which a handful of products are approved for harm-reduction purposes, and the rest are wiped clean.

That's what I think Brian King, who currently runs the Center for Tobacco Products at the FDA, is hopeful about. But we also interviewed him, and he was very candid about the fact that regulation and enforcement is really hard, especially for an agency that is extremely small and under-resourced. But I think in the United States, that's the goal, is to have a very tightly regulated industry in which smokers have very limited access to products, but kids have none.

In other countries like the UK, I think it's a much wider lens. So, the number of products that are available for harm-reduction purposes is a little bit bigger. The government is much more supportive of former smokers getting on vapes. They actually provide them for free in some cases. But there is this kind of interesting balance between how do you serve the needs of smokers versus the needs of parents who are trying to prevent their kids from getting addicted to nicotine.

The future of vaping from an industry perspective is really interesting because I think the rates of vaping are actually a little bit down in the United States, but so many companies have made so much money on selling vapes that they are desperate to find new ways to get consumers back on vapes. And so, we're seeing now all of these different types of designs. Some of them have screens, most of them coming out of China, and they look totally different from any vape products I've ever seen before.

Louise Matsakis has a great investigation actually on WIRED.com this week about this wild screen-enabled, Bluetooth-enabled vape market that is coming out of China, and I think that will be really interesting to watch as the industry evolves.

Leon Neyfakh: I will say there's a Juul 2 in the UK. I went to—

Arielle Pardes: Oh, yeah, we should mention that. Yeah.

Leon Neyfakh: I went to London for a wedding, and I was flabbergasted to see ads for Juul 2.

Michael Calore: Huh? Just like Juul with the number two?

Lauren Goode: With the number two.

Leon Neyfakh: Correct.

Arielle Pardes: Yes.

Lauren Goode: Wow.

Michael Calore: Really?

Leon Neyfakh: I did not unfortunately try one, because I wasn't supposed to.

Michael Calore: Because they didn't have mango?

Leon Neyfakh: No.

Lauren Goode: You weren't supposed to—explain this more. Why.

Leon Neyfakh: I was with my wife, and my wife hates that I have this addiction. Whatever, I'm just going to say this. She also likes to Juul and vape, but she is able to—

Lauren Goode: Drag her.

Leon Neyfakh: She is able to not do it if it's not around her, whereas I—

Lauren Goode: We have to get consent from Alice before we run this segment.

Leon Neyfakh: Hey, you're the one who named her.

Lauren Goode: We know this, right? OK.

Leon Neyfakh: No, no. I mean she knows the truth, which is that she's lucky to not have the, I guess, addictive personality that I do, where if there's not a Juul or a vape around, she doesn't even occur to her to want one, whereas I'm not like that. And so, anyway, I was with Alice, weren't vaping, wasn't allowed to try Juul 2. And my understanding is that there is a component to the Juul 2 that allows you to monitor your nicotine intake through an app, I think, or through a website or something.

Arielle Pardes: Yeah, it's Bluetooth connected.

Leon Neyfakh: Yeah. Which is interesting, because it suggests that they're trying to position it as not only a smoking-cessation tool, but also as a—

Lauren Goode: But as a Fitbit.

Leon Neyfakh: It's funny. No, it's a—

Lauren Goode: It's like a Fitbit for smoking. OK. Please continue.

Leon Neyfakh: They're presenting it as something that has an off-ramp. They're saying you can turn down your nicotine intake gradually and then eventually, hopefully, not vape at all. Whereas one thing that I realized for the first time reporting this podcast is that Juul’s promise was never like, "We're going to break your nicotine habit."

It was like, "No, we're going to break your cigarette habit, but we're going to give you a different one." And you may be unaddicted to cigarettes, but you're going to be damn well addicted to Juuls. And so, it seems like with the Juul 2, there's a thought to how you can eventually stop being addicted to nicotine altogether.

Michael Calore: What a wonderful day that will be. Thanks to both of you for being here and talking about your new show. It is called Backfired. It's an Audible Original. We'll have a link in the show notes so people can find it.

But stick around because we're going to take a break and we're going to come right back with recommendations.

[Break]

Michael Calore: OK. This is the last part of our show, where we go around the room and everybody gets to recommend a thing that our listeners might enjoy. Arielle, you go first. What's your recommendation?

Arielle Pardes: I would like to recommend something that I actually wrote about for WIRED in 2019. It is the Timeshifter app.

Michael Calore: Oh boy.

Arielle Pardes: Why do you say, "Oh boy?"

Michael Calore: Oh, I remember this story.

Lauren Goode: I don't. Tell me more.

Arielle Pardes: So, Timeshifter is an app that's designed to relieve you of jet lag when you are on long flights going elsewhere in the world. It was developed based on this science actually used by NASA to help astronauts reset their circadian rhythm when they're in space. And the normal rules of sunrises and sunsets don't apply. And the way it works is that you basically plug your flight details into the app and it tells you when you're supposed to avoid light, get bright light, take melatonin or take caffeine in the days leading up to and after your flight. I loved this when I tried it back in 2019.

I have used it since. I just was on a very, very long flight from California to Tanzania because I just hiked Mount Kilimanjaro. And this was a trip where just like any other trip, I was like, "I do not want to land in Tanzania and be jet-lagged, because I'm about to do something really hard and I do not have the time to be sleepy."

And so, I used the Timeshifter app, landed in Africa and was fresh as a daisy for my hike, was sleeping normally from day one. It is the strongest endorsement I can give. I just have no time for jet lag and really neither does anyone, so Timeshifter.

Michael Calore: But you do have time for an epic flex.

Lauren Goode: Oh, my goodness. That was the most … you know what? That's only slightly less of a flex than the guy from Forbes who came on a couple of weeks ago and said he owns a horse racing team.

Arielle Pardes: Wow.

Lauren Goode: Arielle, that's incredible. Also, in the time that you were describing the app, I just downloaded it. Look at this.

Arielle Pardes: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: I just had some international travel and I was super jet-lagged and now I am about to embark on some more. And this is going to be great, so thank you.

Arielle Pardes: It's really good. I used it once when my husband John and I flew to Lisbon, which is another pretty long flight from San Francisco. And the first day he was super jet-lagged, couldn't sleep at night, slept during the day, and then I just went out to a caf´ and got some pastel de nata and was like, you snooze, you lose. Timeshifter, you got to use it.

Michael Calore: Or if you don't snooze, you lose.

Lauren Goode: That's incredible.

Michael Calore: Leon, what mountain did you climb to find your recommendation for us?

Leon Neyfakh: I have climbed no mountains, but I do want to … so can I ask permission? I want to recommend something that I haven't actually tried myself, but it sounds amazing.

Michael Calore: Sure.

Leon Neyfakh: And I want to recommend the version of it that I imagine that it is and hope it is.

Arielle Pardes: Is it quitting nicotine?

Leon Neyfakh: No, no. It is something called the Yoto spelled Y-O-T-O. Have you guys heard about this?

Lauren Goode: No. Say more. Mike is nodding.

Leon Neyfakh: You have? OK. So, the Yoto is basically like a podcast player for little kids, like a physical device that you buy for whatever, a hundred bucks, and then you can buy cards that contain children's books on tape and podcasts for kids. And it seems like they have hundreds of different cards you can buy and your kid just has a collection of Yoto cards and plays them in their Yoto player. And I love this because, A, I'm in the podcast business. I'm very curious if I can get in on this somehow.

But also, I have a kid who's about to be 11 months, and one of the things that I've pictured in terms of imagining her get older is how will she interact with things she likes? I had tapes as a kid, I had CDs, I had records even. She's going to have everything on her devices, and this feels like an amazing way to give a child the gift of physical media, and I'm very excited too to get one. And if it's not all that, if it's not all that, if it's not all I'm imagining, I'll be very disappointed.

Lauren Goode: Leon, do you have a sense of how future-proof it is? Like if you buy one now, will your daughter be able to use it five years from now?

Leon Neyfakh: It seems like it. The cards that they produce go with the device, so it seems like pretty self-contained. It doesn't seem to require you to connect to something that will no longer exist. It's just like a boombox, but for podcast cards, how cool is that?

Lauren Goode: That's very cool.

Michael Calore: It's pretty cool.

Leon Neyfakh: We got to release Backfired as a Yoto card, a children's edition.

Arielle Pardes: Yes. Stay away from—

Lauren Goode: It'll be, yes. It'll stay away from the nicotine kids.

Michael Calore: Lauren, what is your recommendation?

Lauren Goode: My recommendation is not as cool as either of those, but I have to give a shout-out to our WIRED colleagues, Kate Knibbs and Brian Barrett, because on separate episodes of this podcast within the past year, they have joined us and recommended a book by Paul Murray called The Bee Sting. Now, I'm going to hop on Leon's recommendation a little bit and say I haven't actually finished the book yet. I'm about a hundred pages in.

And it's a long book, so that means I'm about one-seventh of the way into it. But it's great. I picked it up because I'm traveling to Ireland soon and it's based in Ireland. It's about an Irish family in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and its fiction. I'm totally engrossed in it.

I know it's a big, hefty book, but I'm going to take it on the plane, provided that the plane takes off, because there's a strike happening. But go pilots, I support you, and I plan to finish it while I'm in Ireland. So, yeah, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray.

Michael Calore: Nice.

Lauren Goode: If you don't trust me, at least, trust Kate and Brian who recommended it for me.

Michael Calore: On separate episodes?

Lauren Goode: Yes.

Michael Calore: I look forward to me reading it in about five years and then recommending it on this show.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, if you're done with your … what's his name? Karl Snarsgard or whatever. What's his name?

Michael Calore: Karl Ove Knausgard.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. That guy, yeah. Whenever you’re done with his books.

Michael Calore: Yes.

Arielle Pardes: That's a lifetime of reading.

Michael Calore: He really is.

Lauren Goode: Mike is super into him.

Michael Calore: Lauren Goode: Yes, I hear about him all the time.

Michael Calore: I'm working my way through it.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, Mike is struggling to get through it.

Leon Neyfakh: He should take up vaping, for sure. We should get him to write about vaping for the New York Times Magazine. That would be great.

Arielle Pardes: Oh my God, we really should. We should get him to be our co-host.

Lauren Goode: It's a great idea.

Michael Calore: I can't imagine anything that he would rather do less.

Lauren Goode: Add him to the super pod. What do we call the flavor pod. Mike, what's your recommendation?

Michael Calore: I'm going to recommend a game. It's a mobile game. You can play it on your phone, you can play it on your Switch, you can play it on your steam deck. It's called Subpar Pool, and that's two words, subpar and pool. It's a billiards game, and it's a billiards game with portals that transport your ball into another dimension.

It's a billiards game where the holes that you knock the balls into can be either very large or very small. It's a lot of fun. It's totally chaotic and it's very cute. It's a game by a developer named Martin Jonasson who did Holedown. And if you remember Holedown, it's like a mining game that is super fun and super addictive.

Speaking of addictive things, Subpar Pool is also super addictive. It's the kind of game that you can play for about 90 seconds, or you can play it for 90 minutes, and it always delivers. The levels get harder as you go, and then there are side games that are not as difficult, so if you get stumped, there's always something else to do. I really love it. I think it's like $5 for mobile and maybe $10 for portable platforms, so check it out.

Arielle Pardes: That sounds delightful. I would love to be playing pool and then go to another dimension.

Lauren Goode: Now we know what your next podcast is about.

Michael Calore: All right, well that is our show for this week. Thank you, Arielle and Leon for joining us.

Arielle Pardes: Thank you for having us.

Leon Neyfakh: Thank you so much for having us.

Michael Calore: Thanks to both of you for being here. Once again, you should check out their new show. It's called Backfired: The Vaping Wars, and it's an Audible Original. You can go to audible.com/backfired and find it there. And thank you all for listening.

If you have feedback, you can find all of us on the various social media platforms. Just check the show notes. Our producer is the excellent Boone Ashworth. And until next time, goodbye.

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