What the Future of Nicotine Looks Like – with John Coogan

The science behind how your brain absorbs nicotine is kind of encapsulated in this chart called the pharmacokinetic curve. And you can derive this curve through blood testing, usually for nearly any product. And if you've ever heard about like caffeine having a long half life, and that's why for some people who are caffeine sensitive, if they have caffeine at 3pm, they might not be able to sleep. It's because caffeine has a long half life. Meaning? Meaning you take the caffeine, it comes up and then it stays in your system. And that's a big benefit for a lot of people because it means I have my morning coffee and I get through a whole eight hour workday. That's great. Nicotine has a very short half life, gets out of your system in 45 minutes. And cigarettes in particular. Going back to that pharmacokinetic curve, which is the amount of the. It's the concentration in the blood mostly in the brain over time. So with something like cigarettes, you have a very sharp spike and then a crash. But with nicotine gum, you have a more shallow rise and then it leaves your system.

That voice sound familiar? That's because if you listen to our previous episode, we had John Cooganon, co founder of Soylent. In this episode we go into his newest venture, Lucy, a nicotine enjoyment company. They have products like nicotine gum and nicotine lozenges, which actually qualifies as a nicotine sensation product. Learn more about what John's up to next and about his favorite sci fi dystopian future.

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So there were four Soylent founders and after we brought on an executive team and this $50 million Series B and really started pushing the company into retail, we had all brought on, you know, executives to really work alongside of us. In some cases they reported to us. In some cases that we reported to them, we were still on the board. So there was, was always kind of like a, you know, a different dynamic there. But we wanted to be able to step back and really let the executives run with the company. And simultaneously David, who I started the first company with, was trying to quit smoking and he noticed that he, you know, when he would go out and have a few Drinks with people. He would also have a few cigarettes, started adding it up and realized that, you know, this could have a profound effect on his life if he didn't. You didn't stop. So he started looking at the science behind nicotine, the science behind smoking, and found that it's really not the nicotine that gives you the lung cancer that kills you. It's the tar and the tobacco smoke. And it's really the fact that you're inhaling burning ash. And even if you had a cigarette with no nicotine in it and you smoked that every day, you would still get lung cancer. So he said, well, I don't smoke for the feeling of fire in my lungs. I smoke for the nicotine because I like the, you know, the nootropic aspect of that. The fact that it stimulates a certain receptor in your brain and gives you a, you know, a slight buzz. It gives you some calm. Sometimes it can be a little bit of an energy boost. So he started looking into that and saw that nicotine gum had been on the market in the form, you know, in major brands for 40 years. It was introduced in the 70s. So he looked at, he looked at nicotine gum and he started using it and just. And you know, it did work. And he did get the nicotine that he was looking for. And he was very, very satisfied with the, with the scientific data around nicotine gum. People had been using it for decades. They didn't have any, any negative outcomes, no cancer. Some of the studies, the worst side effects were hiccups, which is a very easy thing to deal with. So, so, but then when he looked at the brand and how the product was messaged and, and how the product was developed and how it tasted, all the things that were more aesthetic around it, it felt very ripe for kind of that Soylent formula. So, you know, Soylent, in a sense, we were unaware of this at the time, but ensure, you know, and meal replacements did exist. We just kind of rethought them from the ground up and developed them with a more modern consumer in mind. So the vegan idea, the branding, the director, the direct to consumer channel, the ingredients and the transparency, all these different things helped us differentiate in a category that did exist, but it wasn't necessarily crowded in the sense that if you were to launch a shaving startup in 2015, it would be a crowded market. Like, there were no startups doing this. And at the time that he started thinking about Lucy, there were no nicotine gum startups. Mostly because it was a very. It's a heavily regulated industry, and it takes a, you know, a little bit more of an experienced team to develop that type of product than a powdered product, which we were able to do in our kitchen. So. So as we transitioned out of, out of Soylent, we're able to get the executive team running there. We were able to start working on this new company, Lucy, and worked on developing a new nicotine gum brand and product that could a, hopefully taste better, have, you know, a better nicotine release profile to really satisfy the customer and better branding and better messaging to kind of reposition this again as from a medicine, which is how a lot of people think about it. They think, I'm smoking. That's bad. I have a problem. I have an illness. My illness is cigarette addiction, and I need nicotine gum to cure me of that. Cigarette addiction. Whereas we thought of it as you are trying to get nicotine, you enjoy that specific chemical. And there are a number of products that could deliver that you happen to be using the worst product, the one that kills you and is awful. Cigarettes kill 50% of people that use them over their lifetime. So we were like, this is just a classic case of people using the wrong product. So the fact this, that this product exists already, it just means that it's been marketed to them improperly and that there's something, you know, underlying. There's some underlying problem with the, with the formulation. So that's why we set out to, again, try and make it easy for people to use this product and not have to go through that. That mental idea of, okay, I need to cure myself of an illness. Instead, we market our products just as direct competitors to cigarettes. You should think about them as just, you know, a better version, essentially.

Yeah. I was, I was looking at the website and it had almost all of the aspects that Soylent has. It has a clean design.

Yeah.

Simple, very transparent, has all the ingredients listed. It is direct to the consumer. They can order it. There's a subscription, so you get some discounts if you order them regularly. And, and yeah, it's, it's, it's very, a very simple formula, but executed very similarly to Soylent. When I was looking at different. Because like you mentioned, nicotine gum has been around since the 70s. I think the first one that was created was in, like 1971. So they've been around for a long, long time. Why, why is. Why does nicotine gum have 4 milligrams in it? Because I know there's two strengths, typically two. Typically they have 2 milligrams or 4 milligrams, is it typically the equivalent to a cigarette? Why? What's the science behind how nicotine gum is built up?

There are actually many strengths of nicotine gum. The main ones that are sold in the United States are 2 milligram and 4 milligram. And the science behind how your brain absorbs nicotine is kind of encapsulated in this chart called the pharmacokinetic curve. And you can, you can derive this curve through blood testing, usually for nearly any product. And if you've ever heard about like, caffeine having a long half life, and that's why for some people who are caffeine sensitive, if they have caffeine at 3pm they might not be able to sleep. It's because caffeine has a long half life. Meaning. Meaning you take the caffeine, it comes up, and then it stays in your system. And that's a big benefit for a lot of people because it means I have my morning coffee and I get through a whole eight hour workday. That's great. Nicotine has a very short half life. It gets out of your system in 45 minutes. And cigarettes in particular, going back to that pharmacokinetic curve, which is the amount of, it's the concentration in the blood mostly in the brain over time. So with something like cigarettes, you have a very sharp spike and then a crash. But with nicotine gum, you have a more shallow rise and then it leaves your system. So we actually think of that as a benefit. We prefer a smoother pharmacokinetic curve. For a lot of cigarette users, they prefer that spiky nature, and that's why they're going out for new cigarette breaks every, you know, every hour. And that was a lot of the innovation that happened in the E cigarette and vape space was a move away from freebase nicotine to salt nicotine. That allowed the, the hits to be harsher and actually absorb more nicotine faster. So it was a better substitute for cigarettes. We, you know, we have, I would love to be able to say that our product can just immediately substitute for cigarettes for people. But a lot of smokers, you know, they do want that really, really fast hit. And so it requires a little bit of behavior change and a little bit of understanding the, the way this product will absorb. And that's why a lot of these products have been traditionally marketed as craving abatement in the sense that they never, some of them are so weak. And if you're, if you're a heavy smoker, you're consuming 20 cigarettes a day. You might be, you might be so. So like used to nicotine in your brain, you might have such a high tolerance that you actually never feel this curve. You only feel the little spikes and the sharp spikes. So the, this might just get you to stop going for the spike, but you never actually feel it. For someone who's never taken nicotine, if they take a 4 milligram piece of gum and they say are 150 pounds, it might be very, very strong for them and it might be a very intense rush. So there are a number of different factors that go into how the product is perceived and received by the brain, the effect that it has on you. So those are all things that we need to consider. Now when we looked at the data, we saw that 4 milligram was generally better received than 2 milligram. And a lot of the professors and doctors that we consulted with advised us to stay away from the 2 milligram because they thought that it was ineffective. Of course, there are plenty of studies that say other things, but we actually were sampling a product that's approved in New Zealand, that is a 6 milligram piece of gum. And we found that that was very effective and was better received by heavy nicotine users, which of course are the users that are at the most risk of negative health outcomes. So from a business perspective, we wanted to be able to satisfy those customers more than get people who aren't nicotine users into the space. That's not really a goal of the company because there's already a trillion dollars of nicotine that's sold globally. It's a hundred billion dollar business. It's, you know, in the States alone, there's multiple trillion, multiple, you know, many billion dollar companies. So we, you know, we don't want to bring people into the space. We want to move people who are on, who are on other products onto.

Our product and on in, in regards to that, we've all heard of Juul and how they were killing it for so long. They, they were coming out with all these flavors. They had crazy valuations. Investors were just trying to get a piece of it. And then all of a sudden the media comes in and they start reporting these articles on high schoolers and how bad it is that all these high schoolers are doing these mango, vanilla, these flavors that have never even had any exposure to smoking. But now it's cool, it's easy. It's, it's in the accent, in the ease of putting in your pocket, taking it out and Just sucking on it and it's, it's changed the whole, the whole, I don't know, process of smoking. It used to be you go out, you have to go 20ft away from the building, light up, and you have your smoke break with your boss and you talk about whatever, whatever's going on at work or getting away from work.

That'S just you, dude.

I'm just thinking of like Mad Men, you know, back in the day. What, what, what it was like so, so you guys have different flavors. How, how do you kind of cater towards having flavors and different types of gum that people can choose from while also keeping away from young, young adults or people that aren't smokers? Thinking about, oh, that's cinnamon flavored gum or mint flavored or something.

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple things. First is just really aggressive age verification technology. So again, I'm in this company, I'm the cmo, but I still do all the CTO responsibilities. And we, we have spent a lot of time and money and engineering cycles on building a really solid age verification system that when you come in and you try and purchase on the site, we take your information, we run it through databases that have age, age verification data. And then if we have any worry about you being under 21, we send you a request to upload a government ID. You have to upload a photo of that as well as a selfie so that it does a liveliness check and it sees that you're not just taking a picture of your dad or like while he's sleeping.

That's good.

So, you know, we invest in that very, very seriously. And honestly, it's one of the competitive advantages for us ultimately. And then in terms of flavors, you know, flavored nicotine gum has existed for a long time while E cigarettes and tobacco products cannot be sold under 21 to under 21 individuals. Nicotine replacement therapy products, it's just a recommendation. And they've run studies that show that many, many kids who are under 18 can go in and buy those without being carded. So we actually have a more rigorous process than maybe our competitors. And then lastly, you know, these products have been on the market for 40 years, 50 years again, and there hasn't been a youth epidemic. So, you know, I think we have a little bit more data to go off of. So we're obviously submitting a lot of data to the FDA to get our products approved and get our products validated and we're working very hard on that. And then in terms of flavors, you Know, we didn't go crazy with the flavor names. The ones that were really highlighted were the things like unicorn puke and cotton candy and we just have fruit, mint, cinnamon. It's pretty standard. Yeah, I mean juul obviously attracted a ton of attention and they pulled back on the flavor front as well. And you know, that's definitely something that we inform. We don't want to cater to kids. It's not in our mission and it's not economically aligned with our goals. Like if we can get a, a pack a day smoker to switch to this, that is an incredible, you know, opportunity both economically and morally. Like we have the, we have the, we have the opportunity to really help them and we also have the, you know, the, the economic incentive too because if they switch they, you know, they spend a lot more.

You mentioned, you know, FDA and interacting with that. How has that been? Because I worked within the medical device space and I really interacted with the FDA on quite a bit on quite a few projects and getting documentation and validation and qualification. There are so many different aspects to getting like a FDA approval and they come and audit certain times of the year. So how has that process been going? Coming from like I guess first a software background to Silent web to Soylent where the FDA isn't as hands on to now this industry with tobacco where it is heavily regulated and a lot of press on it.

It's been interesting. I am not the lead on the FDA side. That's my co founder Sami, who has a PhD in bio and has taken drugs through FDA processes before. And then we also have a whole team of consultants working on our FDA applications. Um, but in general the laws have been written in a really reasonable way and we, you know, we definitely feel like we've been abiding by not only the, the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law. And we, we, we welcome the new regulation. We were, we were 21 plus before it went 21 plus nationally. We generally think that the, the approval processes that are in place are very, very good. There were a lot of, it was kind of a wild west a while ago. My, you know, I haven't studied it too much but a lot of the vape crisis and a lot of the negative press was, you know, very much focused on the big companies, but also focused on the health outcomes that were associated with adulterated products that were maybe coming from smaller manufacturers or at home manufacturers. This is not a, an industry where I think you should be making a sample in your kitchen and testing it. I think I think you need to be working with really talented manufacturers from very early on. Granted, I say that as someone who is able to raise money for the company and be able to kind of do it the right way. But I do think that this is an industry where thinking about the FDA and thinking about the manufacturing processes early and if that slows down the pace of iteration or it slows down the agileness. This is not a move fast and break things industry. You know, this is a, this is a really. Know what you're doing, really get approval from the fda, make sure you have an open dialogue with them. And yeah, I mean, in general, things have been really great with them.

I remember I actually interviewed for Jewel for like a supply. Yeah, you know, on a supply. Supply chain, manager, whatever. And no, I'm not solidly. It's, it's the way they put it forward. So they pitched me because I was in medical devices. I was in drug device combination products. That's what it's called. So they pitched it to me like the juul is a medical device. So I guess that's the classification and.

Not yet, but I think that they are working on those.

Yeah. So they were kind of pitching on that angle being like, okay, this is a medical device. And your medical device experience with the FDA can help us kind of, I guess get through the paperwork, get through all of that documentation side of things. But it's very interesting how they put it. They're like, you know, you can save millions of lives with this new medical device. You work on pacemakers, but now you're going to work on a Juul. I was like, okay, that's an interesting way of putting it.

It's a very interesting industry. I mean, there are a number of different kind of tiers of regulation. And nicotine is interesting because it's, it's one of the few that's sold in multiple tiers. So there are drug products like, like, you know, nicotine gum. We sell ours as a tobacco product, which is an entirely different arm of the fda, which means we don't make medical claims. We don't say, this helps you quit smoking. We are all about, you know, this is more convenient than cigarettes. This, this, you know, the experience is better. It's more, it's more efficient. So we, so. And then there are, there are other tiers within there. So you can be a. Right now the approval process is happening for the first round of, of. Of tobacco products. So all the, Any company that sells tobacco products or products that have nicotine in them, that are regulated as tobacco products are now just submitting paperwork to the fda. These, these massive research reports. And, and then once you get through that, you can go for something called a modified risk tobacco product. So if you've ever seen a snus product or a smokeless tobacco product, they have a different category and they can say that it's less harmful than smoking in some way and they have some specific language, but they have to provide extra evidence to make that claim. And then you can go up to, to approved drug and then you can say, this is, we ran a study. This helps you quit smoking. And Juul, they want to move up. All these companies want to move up the ranks and get to that higher tier and eventually launch products that are fully approved for smoking cessation. Or maybe they want to eventually launch something that could be paid for by insurance. But it requires a lot of data. And part of the thing that I think Jewel might be struggling with is there's already a youth epidemic. So the, it's hard to provide data that suggests that the, that the risk of abuse by, by youth is low because we already have data out in the world that shows that people under the age of 21 use this product. So, so there's definitely a challenge there. But I mean, I do, I do think that like a lot of the, the Juul debate, you know, there's, there's, there's like clear narratives on both sides. One, you know, oh, they're profiteering, they're selling an addictive chemical. They, you know, they're just profit maximizing. The other one is like, is like, no, they're trying to get people off smoking. And, and you know, they're, they're doing the great thing. They're going to save millions of lives. The, the, the more nuanced debate is around a topic called harm reduction. And that's the idea that, that if you can get someone to move from a product that kills 50% to a product that kills 10% of users, would you do that? And that's a very tough pill to swallow. And it's something that does not resonate in the press. It's too nuanced, but that's the way a lot of people think about it. So then the question becomes, okay, if we get really solid data on Juul that suggests that it's vastly safer than cigarettes, but it's not better than doing nothing, how do we regulate that or how do we, how do we restrict that or how do we encourage that? And that's very interesting because then it be this happened in Sweden, famously, with smokeless tobacco. So there's a company called Swedish Match, they sell a product called Snus, and they came out with this great new product. It's. It's a pouch. You put it in your mouth, it absorbs nicotine through your. Through your gum line. It's very similar to the product that we sell and the product that you buy when you buy nicotine gum, similar oral absorption mechanism. But while they were marketing that product, the European Union was undergoing a crisis, or actually just Europe broadly was undergoing a crisis of smoking. And they were like, no, no, no. This new technology, not for us. We don't trust you. You say it's good, but we're on the fence. You can't import it, you can't sell it here. And so now we have a really, really great controlled trial because smokeless tobacco took off in Sweden and it wasn't allowed to take off anywhere else. And when you look at the smoking rates and you look at the lung cancer rates, it really does suggest that this Snus product had a great impact. Now, if you study Snus across millions and millions of people and you discover that it has a small chance of giving someone gum cancer because it does have tobacco leaf in it, and tobacco has nitrosamines all of a sudden. Now, how do you deal with that? Is it bad? Are you better off if you kind of tally the lives lost, it seems like it's a net gain, but people don't really want to talk about net gains. I mean, we're going through the same thing right now with the COVID virus. If people lose their jobs and commit suicide or can't afford to buy food and they die from that, is that death less valid than someone who died from the COVID outright? So anytime you get into these weighing human lives discussions.

Possible super gray area.

Yeah, super. It's super difficult to have that nuanced discussion in a headline on an article that's going to be posted to Facebook. And. And it's also just like, who. Who has the right to be the arbiter of that type of thing? Like the government, like ethicists, professors, doctors, like, it's very hard to say this is the person that we trust to make the. The right decision and they have no vested interests. We know that they don't own a single share of tobacco stock or they don't own a single share of. Of snus stock or something like that. So it's a very complex issue. But I mean, in general, I hope that all these new products help people quit smoking because we know smoking is bad. And, and I, and I want people to, I want people to stop smoking. It's a, it's an issue that's very near and dear to my heart. So anything that we can do to get people off of that is, is something that I support. But obviously I want, you know, everything to be tested and, and the science to really support the decisions that are being made. But so far, I mean, the FDA has been, has been incredible. I mean, they've been led up until recently by Scott Gottlieb, who's extremely talented, and he's actually been posting some really, really great context around Covid on Twitter. And I have a lot of respect for him. So I think that they've been doing everything right.

Lucy's, your tagline is made for people, not patients. I wanted to learn more about. What does that mean? Is that kind of what you were mentioning? That you weren't really regarded as a medical product. It was more of a tobacco alternative. And you're trying to help people basically deal with this issue that even secondhand smoke is such a big common issue that people are dealing with the consequences of not directly smoking, but having to inhale and be in the presence of a smoker and affect so many people. Like I've, my grandma, she was a heavy smoker. I think everyone's been impacted in some way. Can you talk about a little bit what that means?

Yeah, I mean, the idea is simple. You know, if you are truly struggling with cigarette addiction, you should talk to a doctor and you should go through a treatment plan and they can prescribe a whole bunch of things. There are drugs, there are patches, there's a whole variety of options. But for the more casual consumer who's maybe dual using a few products, they're juuling every once in a while and then they're using a smokeless tobacco product. Bringing our product in can give them a really great benefit. It's discreet. I have some in now and it's completely non noticeable. You, you can use it anywhere. I mean, this is less relevant now that we're all at home. You know, you could use this on a plane, you could use this at work without any, without bothering anyone. And you know, we think that, that, that, that different PK curve, that pharmacokinetic curve that gives a, you know, a longer sustained nicotine release is a benefit and something that nicotine consumers should consider using. But in terms of, in terms of, you know, actually putting together a plan to quit smoking, that's not something that our product is, is designed to do. We might work on that. Another product, a nicotine lozenge product that is approved for smoking cessation. And so for the customers who are very seriously thinking about quitting smoking specifically, that product is designed with a treatment plan to get them off entirely. But our first, our first product that we developed ourselves is, is just a tobacco product. So it's just, it's regulated the same as any E cigarette or smokeless tobacco product. And it's meant to compete with those. We just want to be the best product available.

Well, you've built great companies in the past. Like our previous episode on Soylent. I'm sure you can build another great product now. I also want to spend time getting to know you. What is your favorite dystopian future sci fi movie?

I mean, Gattaca is a classic. I mean, I was just talking today about Demolition Man. I don't know if you've seen that movie with, with Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes, I think. Yeah. So it's about a guy who gets frozen in like cryostasis and then wakes up and it's like 30 years later and the movie's kind of hokey and, and it's just kind of like an action movie. But the predictions are so accurate. They predict like tablets and iPads, they predict voice interfaces, level three driving cars, VR. And all of the things are just like spot on. And it's this like kind of ridiculous movie. It doesn't, it doesn't have the same kind of weight, that saying, like, like an interstellar does or something like that, you know, but, and it's not, it's not meant to be like a scientifically accurate movie, but they just nailed it. And you watch it and you're just like, this is exactly how things turned out. So I don't know. That's just one. I've been.

I got to rewatch that, watching that shit tonight. So it sounds like you spend a lot of time reinventing shit and creating great products. What do you like to do in your free time? What is John Coogan? Outside of Sorlent and outside of Lucy.

There'S a bunch of things. I mean, I'm married. I live in Pasadena. I love just hanging out with my wife, walking our dogs. We have two enormous Newfoundlands. One's 150 pounds, the other is 120 pounds. And the smaller one, talk about a food shot. She like will run up on the hill and jump on top of our house and then run around on the roof and it, it's, it sounds like there's an earthquake. It's so funny. So we have a lot of fun with them. I like video games. I play a lot of games with people. Especially now. I.

Sorry, have you seen that? Unreal Engine 5. Unbelievable, bro. Unbelievable.

Billions of triangles.

So crazy. Yeah, I do a ton of like 3D software, like motion graphics using Cinema 4D and Houdini and a couple other tools. And all of that stuff is. It takes like minutes to render a single frame, even on graphics cards. And they just do it in real time. It's pretty crazy. So, yeah, I'm excited for that. There's going to be a big wave of that.

It's been super fun. Just wanted to give you the ball. I mean, if for our listeners, how do they reach out to you? How do they read more about the stuff that you write about, Learn more about Lucy, learn more about Sarah Island. Is that like.

Yeah, I mean, I, I'm happy to answer emails. My email is john coogan.com. if people want to reach out, it's easy. If they got this far, I figure they're dedicated, they're not going to spam me. But yeah, I mean, I haven't been blogging or doing anything much because everything's just focused on the company. So, yeah, just go to Lucy Co, check out the website. If you're a nicotine user and you want to, you know, change what product you're using, check it out.

John, this was an amazing conversation.

I had so much fun, to be honest. I learned so much, dude. Cool.

I learned so much. So excited to see more great products and cool companies. Thanks for your time and for hanging out with Things have Changed.

John, thanks for listening to Things have Changed.

Be sure to subscribe to never miss an episode and follow us on our Instagram @thc_pod.

We're going to see you next time.