Event Recap:World Premiere of Audible Original Backfired: The Vaping Wars’ at Tribeca Festival
On June 11, 2024 at Tribeca Festival, Audible, the festival’s exclusive audio entertainment sponsor, hosted the world premiere of Audible Original, Backfired: The Vaping Wars. The premiere event, held at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City, featured an intimate discussion with the series’ creator and creative industry leaders.
The nine-episode investigative series, Backfired: The Vaping Wars, delves into the polarizing story of Juul, the emergence of a massive illegal market for flavored nicotine vapes, and the ongoing debate over the public health impact of vaping.
The world premiere event featured a distinguished panel including Leon Neyfakh, co-host and co-creator of Backfired: The Vaping Wars, Jake Williams, creator of Bright Sun Films, Kate Navin, Audible’s Head of Creative Development for North America, and moderator Avery Trufelman, creator of Articles of Interest podcast.
During the discussion, the panelists and moderator provided insightful commentary and analysis on the e-cigarette industry and the profound impact of Juul Labs on the vaping epidemic, as well as the power of audio journalism and the origin of the new podcast series.
Leon Neyfakh on the various perspectives explored in the Audible Original series: “We’re trying to explain where everyone is coming from and explain their motivations. That doesn’t mean you have to believe them. We’re trying to elicit their theory of the case – there’s a lot of argument in the show. There’s no shortage of people who are saying vaping is a dangerous invention. I definitely feel like we have a point of view on it, but I hope people find their way to it.”
Kate Navin on the importance of connecting different storytelling threads into one compelling narrative: “One of the things I think Leon does incredibly well is he connects so many different pieces of our world on a topic; Backfired: The Vaping Wars is a business story, it is about vaping, there is stuff in it about health – it covers so much ground.”
Photos by: Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for Audible
About Backfired: The Vaping Wars
When two Stanford graduate students set out to create a new kind of cigarette that wouldn’t kill them, they didn’t foresee all the obstacles that lay ahead — or the powerful forces their invention would unleash. More than 10 years after the launch of the JUUL, Backfired: The Vaping Wars asks: Could e-cigarettes have been the solution to one of the world’s most pressing public health problems – or was this technology doomed to introduce a whole new generation to nicotine, and end up perpetuating an intractable addiction? Backfired is the latest podcast from Prologue Projects, the award-winning team behind Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Think Twice: Michael Jackson. Backfired is a show about the business of unintended consequences – what happens when solving one problem inadvertently leads to a host of new ones?
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