How He Finally Quit Nicotine After 30 Years (And Built a Solution) | Jeromy Carssow

Welcome to the Legacy All-Stars Podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others. Here is your host, Alan Pavlosky.

All right. Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Legacy All-Stars Podcast, where we celebrate athletes, leaders, changemakers who are using their talents, influence, and experience to make the world a better place. My guest today is no exception to that rule. He brings a powerful combination of high-level business leadership and deeply personal transformation. Jeremy Carsow is a seasoned revenue and sales executive who has built and led a high-performance team at companies like Google, Joule Labs, and LiveRamp. But what makes his story truly compelling is the journey behind the resume. After more than 30 years of battling nicotine addiction, Jeremy made a decision to not only change his life but to help others do the same. That decision led him to found GUTS, that's G-U-T-S-Z with a Z at the end, Flavored Air, a groundbreaking company creating nicotine-free alternatives that preserve the ritual of smoking without the harmful effects. Jeremy is now on a mission to redefine harm reduction, challenge an entire industry, and help people reclaim control of their habits and their lives. I personally met Jeremy at Super Bowl in San Francisco recently, and I tried the product myself. I'm not a smoker, but it was remarkable how pleasant it was to participate in that product. And I heard from smokers when I was there that really enjoyed it and thought, wow, this is really a really good way where I could reduce my intake. I'm really excited to introduce Jeremy. Welcome to Legacy All-Stars.

Hey, thank you so much, Alan. Well, you're hired. That was a great intro.

I mean, I'm just, I'm a fan. I love what you're doing. I think it's really thoughtful. And, uh, let's get right to the questions.

Yeah, absolutely.

Take us back to when nicotine first entered your life and what kept you in that cycle for over 30 years.

Yeah, my journey with nicotine probably started right around that 14-year-old sneaking my dad's cigarettes with my cousin. Yeah, we just went into his bedroom, grabbed some cigarettes, coughed our way through probably the first one or two. And within the week, I went back to it just because of that immediate dopamine, the quick high that kind of happens, the head spinning. And then I would say by the age of 15, I was completely hooked. So I was a customer of Big Tobacco by that point.

So if that was the point where you realized it had control over you at that point, It did.

It was definitely a different climate back then than it is now. So it was pretty common to go out and hang in a parking lot of a grocery store or a mall and smoke with other teenagers at that point. But it really started taking a grip, I would say, 17, 18, 19, as I got more autonomy in my life. So it was very hidden at the 15, 16-year-old stage.

Got it. Got it. Let's talk about the turning point. What was the catalyst that pushed you to change?

Oh, just walking up staircases and losing my breath was really the first time. And I tried to quit smoking, like, wholeheartedly, probably 8 different times. And I tried everything— the patches, the gums, the lozenges. A friend of mine and I did it together. Every time we craved it, we had to drop and do 25 push-ups. And I really didn't quit. And the first time I didn't quit until I was 24, 25. And the reward at the end of that was to buy myself a new set of golf clubs. So I successfully quit for around 2 years.

And then what happened after 2 years? Give me the rest of the details.

It's events. Like, if you talk to smokers or people that are addicted to nicotine, it's events that really happen. So my best friend came up and we went to just a dance party, like it was a street dance party that we went to, and we were drinking and pretending like we were Australian for the night. And then cigarettes came into the mix, probably a few drinks in. And then you have that choice that next day. Do I pick that up again and smoke one, or do I just let it be that night? And I started again, like almost immediately, it just grabbed ahold of me by the scruff of the neck. And yeah.

Have you had frequent recurrences of that process or that pattern?

I did. Yeah. Like to completely get off of cigarettes, it wasn't until 2008 that I broke. And that's when I, when we were expecting, I did not want to go into the world being a father and be a smoker at the same time. So when my son was on the way, I quit smoking and haven't picked up a cigarette since 2008. But I did, as you mentioned before, work at Juul. And after a couple of months of being there, I went and tried my first— I think the flavor was cucumber at that particular time. And Juul was even more addicting and easier to hide and didn't have all the downside of the, the smelly clothes and the smelly breath. And then immediately started on the Jewel journey.

Got it. Let's talk about how you went from executive to founder. And again, you've been in various different high-power companies. What made you step away from a successful corporate career?

I've always been an explorer, so I'm super curious about that startup life. So even looking at my career, you'll see startups that led to something else. So even my trek into Google was through an acquisition of a startup called Wildfire. And within Google, we were still acting like a startup for the first year, year and a half. And then you just keep getting to these same corporate roadblocks of moving slower and, you know, just constantly optimizing, you know, a half a percent, a quarter of a percent, an eighth of a percent. As opposed to the big changes and the excitement that are part of startup. But it was really with Gutsy that I found my break. Like, it just felt like with everything that I had done in my career, my own personal journey, that it was time to go out on my own. I had the knowledge, I had the background. I still have imposter syndrome, especially after this last month. I would be what? You would call a reluctant CEO. It was never my dream to become a CEO. I just, I know what it takes to build teams. I know what it takes to build systems. I know what it takes to build revenue operations in systems. So I just put that power to myself and really wanted to explore a product that the more successful we are as a company, that directly relates to how many people we're helping. And that is just an amazing opportunity for me and my co-founders and the startups that I have. So yeah.

What was the initial idea for Gutsy and how did it first click?

Yeah, it started with a dry January. So my co-founder and I were doing a dry January like we did every year, and it kind of bled into February and then we wanted to see how far we could go. At that same time, I also quit Juul, Juuling, and watching news in the morning. So I really had like kind of a three-prong approach. With quitting the alcohol, it was incredibly easy to maintain my routines. Like there's so many non-alcoholic beverages out there, so we could still go to the brewery and enjoy a cold brew while playing pickleball in the sun setting where my son is a busboy. And it really didn't change. And the idea for gutsy is how can we make a nonalcoholic version or a non-nicotine version of the same habit? Because when you're quitting nicotine, you're asked to quit all of the habits that go along with it. So if you think about people do it in stressful situations or it's time for a break or the first thing you do in the morning or the last thing you do at night, there's just so many habits besides the nicotine itself that were just completely abandoned. You're throwing a patch on and having like crazy dreams throughout the night, or you're throwing a lozenge in your mouth, which isn't at all the exact same experience. So that's where Gutsy came from. It's just, how do we replicate this without the harm that is associated with both tobacco cigarette usage as well as vaping?

Yeah, I guess that the ritual part of it is really explained by that and the fact that you could still have the kind of ritual that you have, that you are when you're smoking.

It's crazy. It's, it's crazy. Like, just even how you hold things and fidget with it, especially in the vape, was a very different— like, cigarettes, you break them, so you're just leaving them in the pack. So the ritual is really just that hand-to-mouth and taking that break. But with vaping, it just is part of you, like Every time I left the house, I'd make sure that I had the right amount of pods. Was it charged up? Was it with me? Was it in my pocket? So you're not checking just the keys and wallet, you're checking keys, wallet, and the Juul with you. So there's just a completely different ritual that goes on with that.

Yeah. What makes flavored air a real solution?

Flavored air, it's only real if you can bring forward the flavors. So if it is just flavored air, you can go out into a forest and take a bunch of deep breaths and and kind of capture that same thing. But having that device, that grounding mechanism in your hand with good flavors that people enjoy is really what's making it successful and then showing it. So we have a lot of uphill battles creating a new category, especially with advertising. You have to kind of follow the adjacent categories guidelines because flavored air, if you look like a vape and you act like a vape, then you're most likely a vape. Mm-hmm. So making it a real category is not only creating vape flavors, but we also have to create tobacco-like flavors or umami flavors or more savory side of the business. So introducing a Nobacco line within Gutsy is huge because we can attract vapers just by getting great powerful tastes of throat hit, iciness in your mouth. You know, kind of recreating all of that. But the tobaccos, we really had to go back to chemistry and pull that apart, you know, that leathery, earthy spice that kind of goes along with those tobaccos as well as pipe. And then we found accidentally that there are people who use cannabis products, cannabis vapes, that love the flavor but don't want to be affected all day long. So at work or on their breaks or with their friends or with their kids. So developing flavor that is cannabis flavor without any of the effects in it as well. Right.

That makes sense. So you talked about the challenge in creating a new category. How do you educate skeptical consumers?

It's getting it into people's hands. So the most successful thing that we do is go out on the street. So luckily we live here in Austin, Texas, so we were able to go to South by Southwest and get some street feedback directly of it, of them opening the package and experiencing it for the first time. Going to parks, going to— we're going to be going to a birthday party this weekend that allows us to kind of get indoors. Airports. I mean, when you're talking about just air going into your lungs and coming out of your lungs, all of these forbidden places that you can't do your habits on a long flight, in an airport, you know, in football stadiums.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Just being able to do it, which is why Meeting at the Super Bowl was so perfect because that's what we were there. We were inside a building in San Francisco, just breathing air that just happens to be flavored with all-natural flavors coming from plants.

Yeah, I witnessed it myself. But in your view, how was the initial feedback been? What have you heard from consumers or potential consumers?

Yeah, we launched with 4 flavors and we did some testing in Florida, Michigan, and here in Texas., and we actually pulled two of the flavors. They just weren't— the two initial flavors needed to go back and add something to them. So it wasn't either sweet enough or it didn't have a throat hit or it didn't have that cool component that they were expecting in the vape. So we actually had to pull those off and re-engineer those and introduce some new flavors. So it really is getting in front of the customer and figuring out what it is that they're connecting with. Even with our first Novako, It had a really clovey forward sense, which gives you a throat hit and a mouthfeel to it. But either you love cloves or you don't. And so it was kind of that, that mixed bag. So really kind of pulling that back and figuring out how to neutralize the clove flavor, but still keep the effect in there.

Yeah. I'm gonna diverge from that process a little bit, or that question a little bit and say, is there a process you go through as a company that helps you receive feedback, and then make modifications to improve the product?

Oh, it's a constant thing. So our manufacturing is out of Portland, Oregon. So there's a lot of conversations that are happening with our flavorist going into specific smoke shops and getting direct feedback. We set up tables in some of our early retail partners to get direct feedback from customers that are walking into that store and trying the flavors. And then it's all the social comments that are coming back to us that are asking those questions that we're getting feedback from. We send surveys out, we have a review process so that people can go in and give us direct feedback around the reviews. We had a packaging problem with our orange creamsicle, um, that then if it's even slightly open and you're not capturing that, it's eventually going to fade over time because there is no ignition that's happening in our product. There's no combustion. Whatsoever. So it's gonna fade over time. That's how it runs out. It just gradually fades. So more of a packaging problem than it was a flavor problem to make sure that it's completely sealed and gets to the customer as fresh as possible.

Got it. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the bigger mission. How do you see Gutsy impacting global health?

It's an incredible question. Like there's 1.3 billion smokers on this earth and It's really just getting out there, and from country to country it's different. Like, each distribution model is different, each wholesale model is different. Right now here in the US, we're starting at the D2C model because it serves two purposes. It, it gets our product out there and gets it known. We need to get the name Gutsy out there and as many people as possible, but we're already starting to get some inquiries for retailers across the nation that are like, oh, This is something because I'm losing revenue based off of high taxes happening on anything that contains nicotine or it's straight up banned in this city. So it's really just tackling the little problems before you start launching into new countries, which brings a whole new set of laws, regulations, advertising restrictions, distribution networks are different. But that's really what I did at Google. I was part of the global expansion team and help advertisers go into new countries, cultures, and languages. And then again with Juul, I was part of the global sales and strategy team. So finding those new ways to get in there, but it's, it's not for me to solve the problem. It's for me to offer a product that fits into people's lives the way that they want it to. And we're not even asking people to quit. We're asking them to have it differently. So even if you want to reduce something, you know, this is the option for you that you can start having that replacement and go on your journey because the average smoker tries to quit 33 different times throughout their life and 92% of quit attempts fail, which is incredible. So finding something that really helps them.

It's the old joke about how many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one. But the light bulb has to want to change.

Right.

Exactly. So I think that definitely seems to apply in your business as well.

Exactly. It's exactly that. Cigarettes, I think, were a lot clearer of a case, like walking up 3 flights of stairs. You could feel the pressure in the lungs, but more and more health risks are coming out around vaping. There was a huge article that just came out earlier this week just about the link to cancer cells within the lungs associated with vaping, because there are heavy metals when you're heating a liquid and changing that into a vaporization. You're changing the chemical components within that liquid itself. So there's just inherent health risks that need long-term studies for that because the combustion is, is what's called a deep lung pull. So you're pulling that all the way into your lungs because it's lighter than air. That's why it's, it's floating. Whereas flavored air, we're pulling across your tongue. So you're just getting the flavor palette, but it is air that's going in.

Yeah, sure. Where's the movement heading in your view, and where do you want it to go?

The movement is my main focus, and this is probably coming from my Juul days, is getting incredibly realistic flavors out there so that people can attach themselves to what they like. And it could be different throughout the day, like a flavor in the morning. People have coffee, but you're not drinking, well, Some people are, but the large portion of people aren't drinking coffee late at night. So what is that flavor at night? So looking at some of the flavor-forward things like how do we bring those dessert flavors, those tea-like flavors, those spa water type flavors into flavored air so that people can use this in different ways. So when they're out, you know, doing yoga and living their best lives, like what are those deep breath moments that they want to have? Because vaping brought on a whole new generation of people onto nicotine. So it's a massive problem and it's growing. So as we see cigarette sales decline, you're seeing vape sales continue to increase year over year.

Right. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about mental wellness. How important is mental wellness in breaking habits?

It's actually part of the journey. We look for partners in a beverage space because they just inherently go together. So you can hear moms, grandmas say, "Well, I only smoke when I drink," or "I only vape when I go out there drinking." So mental health is a huge part of this and the receiving of dopamine. That's why it's just so criminal to hook teenagers because as they're looking for that dopamine, The high is never going to be that high, and the low is insane when you get off of nicotine, especially for those younger generation. Sometimes it's the lowest that they ever felt, just having those, those cravings and those urges around that nicotine addiction. So offering them something that helps them go through that, especially as they become young adults, and giving them an off-ramp is incredibly important. It's a beast of a habit. It is. And I, I know how hard it was. I just spent the weekend with some high school friends celebrating one of our teachers' 75th birthday and just going back to those days and just thinking about what we were doing and why in the, you know, late '80s and '90s, it was just the norm. Like it was more often the groups that we hung around, you're seeing kids smoke cloves or nicotine. Than not.

Yeah. What keeps you grounded today?

It takes a lot to start a company. The stress that's involved, the new problems every single day, the number of hats that I put on throughout the day. So it really is keeping up my personal rituals, my exercise routine, my dog walking, you know, twice a day with my two German Shepherds and then spending time with my son, getting my face out of the phone and the emails and the responses to Instagram questions or Facebook questions. It really is just trying to— I love the new thing that's going around where it's like, let's live like we're in the '90s. Like, you can't have a phone from this period to this period. You can only watch these three TV stations and you can't binge watch an entire season of anything. You have to watch one program at a time. So I love this new thing going around, but it really is just pulling myself out of it and knowing when to shut down. Because sleeping, like, if you're answering emails at 10 o'clock at night, it's directly going into my subconscious. And I'm not having stress dreams, but just the weird dreams that are completely associated with, oh, did I respond back to that customer? Did I, you know, get all of the orders out? You know, one just came in at 11 o'clock at night. So yeah.

What would you say to entrepreneurs with a calling? What would you say to them if they want to pursue something that's really meaningful for them?

Build your core team around you. So ask for help, be vulnerable, make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. Don't beat yourself up for them. And if you truly have a calling, then, then there is a way out there for you to do it. I've never been more financially unstable and happy with a career in my entire life. Like, just the amount of personal money that has gone into getting this off the ground and getting the flavors right. But the satisfaction and my core team, like the founding members of this team, keep me grounded. But also, I'm doing it for them. I, I'm a leader that approaches leading with kindness. It's not that I can't have hard conversations, but getting that team around you. So who is going to be supporting you at those times? Who is going to be your gut check? Like when you're, when you're going and asking questions about yourself and is this real? Like we're currently growing, we're doubling month over month just in sales without a huge increase in ad spend right now, which is why we're currently seeking investment. So it's really bouncing those ideas off others. Like, is this real? Did we create a product that now like at 12 o'clock at night, you know, there's this many people on our website looking through our products and then you see orders start coming in shortly after. So it's keeping yourself grounded, keeping the eye on the vision, which is why the customer feedback is so incredibly important to us. Probably the biggest smile that's ever been on my face at a professional level is somebody who had been smoking for 65 years tell me that they've gone 30 days without a cigarette in their mouth. And that, that's it. That is everything. That is absolutely everything for me, to give somebody that, the ability to do that, the, the tool that they needed to do that is incredibly rewarding for me.

Yeah, you probably just answered my next question, but what do you hope your legacy is?

I grew up in a farm town in Oregon, and my dad raised me that, you know, you work hard, but you also play hard. I want my legacy to be that I was a kind leader that gave people the ability to make choices in their life, especially when it comes to addiction. Nicotine addiction is incredibly hard. So me going for that goal of helping, you know, 10 million people habit differently in whatever definition that is for them, I would love that to be my legacy. And then my son to think I'm cool. Which is a constant battle for a teenage.

Yeah, good luck with that. Been there. Jeremy, what would you tell your younger self if you were kind of looking back and observing yourself? What would you tell yourself?

I went back for a 75-year-old birthday party for my music director, who was just an incredible man, especially at that time in my life. My parents were going through a divorce and just having like the stability that was provided by this, this human in my school. And he always said to me, argue for your limitations and sure enough, you'll achieve them. And what I would tell my younger self is go for it. Yeah. And I have in my life, I've had a lot of incredible experiences just, just going for it. But I wish I would have started earlier. Like, I didn't know how to go to college directly out of high school. It wasn't until my mid-20s that I saw two of my roommates doing it, putting themselves through chiropractic school. So it's really go for it earlier and don't, don't sneak into your dad's room and pick up that pack of Winstons and—

right, right—

and put that into your, your mouth. Like, definitely Definitely would have said that. See, but it was for a reason because I'm here.

Yeah, seize the day. That's funny that you had that impact from your music teacher because I had a similar experience. And Steve Dvorak, if you're listening, you're the man. That was my favorite teacher ever. I probably need to reach out to him and say hello.

But, uh, it was amazing. It was amazing this weekend. Yeah, Gene Newton was such a huge impact on my life. And, you know, he was firm and strong and fun and caring. And just the teachers, just unsung heroes throughout the nation. So no doubt.

Well, Jeremy, we've come to the end. I want to acknowledge you not just for what you're building, but for the honesty and courage it takes to turn a personal struggle into something that can help millions. And I really believe that you can help millions. Like, I've seen the reaction to people, to your product, to Gutsy, and how it works for them. Thank you for sharing your story and your mission with us today.

Absolutely.

Appreciate it.

It was absolutely my pleasure. So we should talk again.

Yeah, we definitely will. To my audience, thank you for joining us on Legacy All-Stars, where we celebrate individuals using their platform and purpose to make a lasting impact. I want to remind you that your legacy is not what you leave behind. It's how you invest in others every single day. See you next time. And don't forget to subscribe and be notified of new episodes. I'm Alan Pavlosky, signing off for Legacy All-Stars.