I listened to the entirety of this podcast and felt it to be friendly to Juul to the extent of being sort of bizarre. The host routinely brought up criticisms of Juul but then immediately dismissed them and moved on without further analysis---seemingly never even entertaining the idea that Monsees and Bowen could have been complicit in their ignorance of underage abuse, and much less that they might have been intentionally deceptive (which seems, to me, like a pretty strong possibility). Juul was repeatedly depicted as the victim in the whole thing.

Even odder, the podcast makes it sound like Monsees and Bowen invented the concept of the electronic cigarette completely from scratch, making no mention of the decades-long history they have in China. It's completely possible that they were unaware of the Chinese precedent and working independently (I feel like e-cigarettes in the Chinese style had started to appear in the US, although not yet taken off, by 2007 when they launched Pax but I could be remembering this wrong), but the host not mentioning it at all was another factor that made the podcast feel very shallowly researched and, in general, like a puff piece for Juul.

Further, the podcast makes it sound like the popularity of Pax for cannabis, which was not yet legal anywhere at the time, was unforeseen and unintentional. Maybe this is true, but it strikes me as a bit odd as I have never known the Pax brand to be associated with anything but cannabis, and my first exposure to it was around 2009. I would be very interested in digging into old Ploom/Pax advertising around this point. I don't begrudge Pax as a cannabis product but this just felt like another questionable and self-advantageous claim by Pax/Juul that the podcast just took for granted.

I don't necessarily know that I'd allege the podcast to have been bought off by Juul or something, but it very much had the feeling of a newspaper article about a company with that company's own press release as the sole source. I think it may have just been lazy rather than malicious per se.

Yeah the Pax was obviously for cannabis and the wink wink copy on the website about tobacco or “herbs” was just what everyone did back then prior to recreational legalization. If they’re not acknowledging that in the podcast I’d have little trust in the rest of it.

Yes, it was made by the same people who invented the Pax. I don't think they'd ever come out and say it but I would fully believe they were just looking for a better way to consume nicotine, in that the Pax was supposed to be a better way to consume THC. I think they probably just wanted to make a better cigarette using technology. Whether it was used by people trying to quit or people who had never tried before, I suspect was orthogonal to their cause, though I believe they were themselves smokers.