But he’s also rich, so I asked Lawrence what the inside of Drake’s mansion is like.

“I don't even know how to describe it. To me it wasn't even a house! It was just like insane. The craziest house I've ever seen. For sure.”

I pressed on for details.

Did you see his pool? Do you think it was bigger than Kanye’s?

“It was insane! I didn’t get a tour of his house, though.”

Hmmm. Weird.

So what did you guys do?

“Did some tricks for a couple of hours. This was at night.”

How was Drake at blowing O’s?

“Yeah. He’s actually pretty good.”

“Austin Lawrence is in rarefied air, joining Nicki Minaj, Barack Obama, and J-Lo as one of the few beautiful living creatures on God’s green Earth to have graced Drake’s Instagram page.”

I wasn’t getting much intel. Maybe the powers of perception are not in the Vape God’s wheelhouse, which is fine. So we switch gears and Lawrence tells me that shortly after Drake posted his video on Instagram, his follower count exploded by 50,000, like, immediately. He had to turn off his notifications due to battery drain. Admittedly, it’s on Drake’s Instagram that I first learned about Lawrence, and where I had to ask myself: Wait, wait, wait. Did Drake just help make doing vape tricks...aspirational?

Here’s one more way to think about this: Austin Lawrence is in rarefied air, joining Nicki Minaj, Barack Obama, and J-Lo as one of the few beautiful living creatures on God’s green Earth to have graced Drake’s Instagram page. What a time.

The first patent for an electronic cigarette was filed in 1963 by a guy named Herbert A. Gilbert, who used an electronic battery to heat tobacco. His idea didn’t really go anywhere; Big Tobacco wanted everyone to keep buying cigarettes. In a cruel bit of irony—or possibly subterfuge—the warehouse where Gilbert kept all his prototypes burned down, and it wasn’t until his patent expired 20 years later that nicotine inhalers began to see some success. In 2003, after his father died of lung cancer, a Chinese pharmacist named Hon Lik saw the first real commercial hit with an electronic cigarette that used ultrasound to transmute liquid to vapor. These days, modern vapes range from sleek pens to mods so ornate they look like what would happen if Mountain Dew sponsored a steampunk orgy and gave away dildos. Even Apple—Apple!...arbiters of painfully trendy, headphone-hole-plugging minimalism—has a vape patent.

A thought crosses my mind that cigarettes could, in the not-too-distant future, be relegated to smaller, niche markets—like vinyl or Rollerblades or something. Twenty years from now, will we view cigarettes the same way we consider bloodletting an appropriate medical treatment for dysentery? What if, as a culture, we’re just a Tim Cook “one more thing…” and an iVape Air away from a cigarette-free tomorrow?

I ask the two Vape Bros what they think the biggest misconception is about vaping.

“A lot of people say vaping's douchey,” says Jared. “The people who are like, ‘Vaping's stupid, vaping’s gay’ are the first ones who are like, ‘Yo, let me hit your mod.’” He estimates 90 percent of his friends who try it end up liking it.

Lawrence perks up and chimes in. “How could you not like blueberry-green apple? You're smoking candy!”

Toward the tail end of our interview, the Vape God hands me one of the mods floating around the shop to try. He asks if I’ve ever hit a vape before. I tell him I did once, drunk, with some pithy variation of “Yo, let me hit that.” He tells me that the flavors are pretty wild now: peanut butter rum; butter and toast; granola bar. The juice he’s loading into the thing is a combination of blueberry and green-apple Fun Dip. A festive treat.

I press a button, inhale, and attempt to blow an O, but the shape that gurgles out of my mouth is feeble and incoherent—a Rorschach O from a Vape Virgin. A part of me wonders what my grandfather would’ve thought about all of it: the combination blueberry and green-apple Fun Dips; the quasi-steampunk thing you have to keep in your back pocket; the tradeoff of rebel cool for a sexless—but allegedly safer—nicotine fix.

After I fail to blow anything that resembles a letter of the English alphabet (maybe Farsi), the Vape God seems to take pity on the Old struggling before him. He tells me I’m not bad, dude, seriously, but the faint wobble in his tone betrays the kindness of his edict.

I...do not feel the least bit cool. I feel ancient and a smidge closer to death, the crushing vastness of what I don’t understand in the universe looming over me like a doomsday asteroid the size of Nebraska. It does taste pretty good, though. Sort of like Fruity Pebbles.