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Why is Juul worth $16B? It’s more like a cigarette than you think
- arthurcolle 8y agoHaha what a joke
- newfocogi 8y agoDoes Juul do any advertising? One of the biggest problems I see in the historical tobacco industry was how subversive the advertising was. I wonder if Juul goes down a similar path.
- marpstar 8y agoThey are HUGE with the Instagram influencers, and therefore the younger audiences.
- cannabisceo 8y agoNo, they avoid it because they know they're a target.
- true_religion 8y agoJuul advertises, as a vaper, I see their ads thanks to ad personalization.
- mchahn 8y agoI'm not sure why it is called vaping. You can see smoke come out. It uses a heater to burn the juice.
- jasongill 8y agoIt's called vaping because the carrier liquid (propylene glycol) is being vaporized. There isn't supposed to be any smoke - if so, something is wrong.
- colanderman 8y agoI think the GP is confusing smoke with vapor.
- mchahn 8y agoTo be honest I've only seen pot vapes. And I do see smoke, not vapor.
- colanderman 8y agoI've never seen the pot type, but the propylene glycol type are all over Boston. What they release is definitely vapor, not smoke. (The vapor clouds act very differently than smoke clouds. They look and act like the steam clouds which emanate from manhole covers in cities, or from dry ice.)
- phnofive 8y agoYou are seeing vapor, not smoke.
- ryanlol 8y agoPot vapes definitely aren't supposed to put out smoke. With some vapes you could achieve this by cranking the heat all the way up, but it'd be a far worse experience than just smoking. I guess some of the cheap $20 chinese ones like the "gpen" might not actually vaporize though.
- blairbeckwith 8y agoThat’s... not true. On every level.
- gwbas1c 8y agoThat's steam, no combustion happens
- cjmoran 8y agoIt's not steam, it's a vapor composed of propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin (plus optional flavorings and nicotine). It's not "water vapor" as many seem to be spouting.
- __blockcipher__ 8y agoSpecifically, it’s an aerosol. (Everything you said was correct, just expanding)
- hymen0ptera 8y agoIt feels like there's a premeditated process, here, in terms of timing. 1. Tobacco Cigarettes emerge as public health scare in the late 1990's. 2. McDonaldsization of Coffee via Starbucks in the late 1990's. 3. Cigarettes taxed and regulated with punishing costs and counter-media-manipulation. 4. Bindings introduced to market coffee with free wi-fi, boosting high-end coffee's incidental exposure to novice internet users at a time when caffeine is very-nearly required to negotiate the ever-expanding terrain of new technologies. (it's just good business, of course) 5. Millions of former nicotine addicts herded away from nicotine to expensive, premium high dose caffeine alternatives, serving as stimulant to wean many down off of nicotine cravings with new habits. 6. 20 years later, with ordinary tobacco cigarettes habits all-but-destroyed, across two generations of former users, and new technologies now well established, coffee habits can wind down. A mild campaign against coffee is introduced. See: acrylamide, poor stock performance, racial sensitivity incidents in liminal zones of large franchise chain restaurants. 7. Emerging technologies, now ready for maturity may be re-introduced with new players. These entities work to re-normalize a newly engineered and tested concept in managed synthetic addiction, with status symbol oriented marketing plays. Why vaping is anything is beyond me, but I feel like this represents the fundamentals of a broader subversive program to phase out agricultural-plantation-oriented modes of daily-use otc psychoactives that play vital roles in common universal social norms that cut across a wide array of global cultural customs.
- scythe 8y agoIf you've ever tried nicotine you'll quickly understand why caffeine could never substitute for it. Sure, they're both stimulants. But nicotine decreases anxiety. Caffeine increases it.
- itronitron 8y ago>> nicotine decreases anxiety decreases intensity of the anxiety and duration as well, when measured in years.
- hymen0ptera 8y agoActually, they both do the same thing, but attack different sides of the mood slope. Which you'd know, if you ever stopped to consider how to adjust your mood with either. Caffeine introduces anxiety and irritability on downslope, after about two half-lives, or 12-ish hours (6 hour half life). On the up slope, caffeine provides a long slowly declining period of alertness and performance. The initial buzz comes on strong and tapers off over time. People seek caffeine to perform. But a slow sinking feeling appears near the end of the day. Nicotine modifies mood on the other side of the bend, with it's presence evening out irritability with immediate relief. The trail off goes unnoticed until a sudden urge kicks in, to bump one's self back up onto the plateau. Nicotine is sought to cure or cool an immediate pang, which leaves the impression of easing into relaxation, which degrades silently until suddenly noticed as an urge to re-up. The perception of nicotine is downtime, even though the dosage process and serum curve is the usual spike and tapered downslope, people learn modify the nicotine downslope differently, by catching the drop-off before cravings become desperate. Which is why cigarettes are designed as they are, and achieve product success the way they do. Metering doses at an almost hourly rate, with twenty dose packs marketed to afford exactly that behavior. Coffee, as a liquid, is readily either sipped or chugged as needed, and has different preparation and consumption habits, so its marketing is different. Caffeine's downslope is handled differently, since the withdrawal effects, are separated by longer distances of up to 48 hours, and because circadian rhythms are more drastically effected. Consuming in the late afternoon results in insomnia, so the better choice is to cure the anxious late day mood disruptions with food and alcohol, and stave off withdrawal (vasodilation migraines, etc) the next morning.
- jeffdavis 8y agoCigarettes have all the right metrics for a startup: great user engagement, network effects, negligible per-user costs, sticky and hard to leave. The big invention here is a one-liner: s/smoking/vaping/g.
- 8bitsrule 8y agoVery much like social media, porn, automobiles and sex.
- dizzystar 8y agoSpourious claims about the chemical makeup of vapor? Check. Misinformed statements about what science found about the dangers of vaping vs cigarettes? Check. Citations of studies with no peer review, that likely don't say what the article claims? Check. Wrong information about the mechanics of vaping? Check. Boogyman chemistry? Check. No indicative knowledge about how people actually use these devices? Check. What about the children-isms? Double check. Look, I get it. As someone who vapes, I truly do my best to treat it like smoking, which is saying I do my darndest to respect those around me. I don't know what to think of Juul. I was told it has 50 mil nic and my jaw hit the floor. Those that vape knows that's a crazy number, and obviously these are incredibly low powered devices. People do move from Juul to more advanced setups, and yes, they step all the way down to 12 or 6 mil (nicotine) off the bat and likely go down to 3 mil after a few months.
- paulwithap 8y agoOne thing to keep in mind is that you’re inhaling significantly less vapor per hit with a Juul, than a “mod”.
- handsomechad 8y agoWhy do you go down mil(lileter?) nicotine as you progress? pardon my ignorance i have only vaped a few times. Why did your jaw hit the floor for JUUL?
- pandaman 8y agoMost vaping devices (mods) produce much denser vapor and doing 50 mg/ml nicotine with them would not be pleasant even for an experienced smoker. People who use vaping to quit smoking gradually decrease nicotine concentration to wean themselves off nicotine.
- LyndsySimon 8y agoIt wouldn’t even be safe, much less pleasant. In my experience, 50mg/ml in a low power device like a July is about equal to 9mg/ml in a sub-ohm device.
- Lazare 8y agoSomething to keep in mind is that the tobacco industry has a ton of money, a demonstrated willingness to play dirty if needed, and a deeply vested interest in undermining companies like Juul. I'm not saying that the The Verge or Rachel Becker have any intention of defending the tobacco industry from disruptive startups, not am I suggesting that vaping in general or Juul in specific aren't be problematic. What I am saying is that there's an immense amount of money and effort is being deployed to ensure that people will defend the tobacco industry and will attack vaping, and it's always worth being extra cautious. "Where there's smoke, there's fire" is rarely a useful heuristic, but it's extra useless when you know there's a guy with a smoke machine around the corner. :)
- paulwithap 8y agoThere has certainly been a lot of anti-vaping money backing ballot measures like the recent one in SF. I’ve been meaning to look into who is actually funding this. The tobacco companies seem to be on board with the trend and many are manufacturing their own devices. What’s bad for Juul would likely be bad for them too.
- UnderProtest 8y agoTo some extent for Big Tobacco this might be like BP hedging on solar power. Nicotine is still best extracted from the tobacco plant. I doubt they'll fight vaping forever. What I see is people foolishly fighting the last war. Today's adults have been trained since early life on the evils of smoking and nicotine addiction and vice. We have this narrative of Big Tobacco pushing a product they claimed was safe and which was not. There are all these programmed mental circuits saying "if you don't like smoking, you should be suspicious of vaping." And so at the beginning of vaping there was a lot of FUD about popcorn lung. Now there's FUD about kids getting hooked on Juul. Everybody's looking for the catch because last time there was a catch. A future in which 20% of the population is forever hooked on vaping nicotine and no cigarettes are sold is a utopia compared to what we have now. Instead of embracing that future we have the anti-tobacco activists spreading alarm about vaping and all the old smoking laws being expanded to cover an activity that doesn't justify the ostracism. I've never smoked or vaped and the laws have no effect on me. For a brief period I saw smokers switching when they could vape indoors. That advantage is disappearing. We're missing a chance to kill cigarettes in the developed world. We should embrace the viral appeal of the vape fad before they become just another nicotine delivery device. We could save millions of lives.
- bra-ket 8y agoThe great thing about Juul is the lack of chemical aftertaste
- danpalmer 8y agoIt’s interesting how the messaging has shifted over the past ~4 years from vaping being a way to quit nicotine addiction, to vaping being a way to stop smoking cigarettes. I’ve often heard the former from people, but the latter from companies. With the low nicotine liquids coming out, I bet they are low enough that you can’t smoothly transition from higher nicotine content to lower nicotine content. I’m sure they won’t sell a smooth gradient of nicotine levels that help people quit, instead it will just be marketed as “diet vaping” and will be a huge marketing effort that will pain then in a much more positive light without any real loss of lock-in.
- creep 8y ago>With the low nicotine liquids coming out, I bet they are low enough that you can’t smoothly transition from higher nicotine content to lower nicotine content. There's a funny little "vape van" in back of a strip mall where I live. They make their own vape juice (with a permit, of course) in-house right in front of you. They measure the nicotine themselves, so theoretically I could get as much or as little nicotine as I wanted in 240 mLs at $80. They also label the bottles if there are any controversial flavorings. There are more than a handful of vape shops in my city like this, who can mix their own and who care about what happens with their customers. It's actually like a little community sometimes. I think as long as the gourmet vape juice business survives, there won't be the problems you talk about. Kids want the Juul convenience, but adults trying to quit smoking usually want to do it the best way-- ie. not with salted nicotine, or disposable juice pods, etc. It's kind of like coffee or chocolate in that way, where it's easy and fun to become sort of a connoisseur and buy all the best and interesting flavors and smoke them in the perfect vape.
- akeck 8y agoIt’s essentially a drug delivery device. I don’t understand how it’s not regulated by FDA.