https://www.wired.com/story/tech-bros-are-all-in-on-zyn/
ENTREPRENEUR GARRETT CAMPBELL has a 6-mg “cool mint” Zyn tucked under his lip at all times during his mammoth 15-hour workdays, aside from when he is eating.
“I was always very against nicotine,” says the software company founder. The 26-year-old saw his peers using nicotine pouches at college, when they first emerged as a potential productivity-boosting hack, and considered it a “degenerate thing to do.”
But then all of his fellow founders started fueling themselves with nicotine pouches, of which the Philip Morris International–owned Zyn is the market leader. The company distributed 794 million cans in the US in the last financial year, a 37 percent increase over the previous year. Now, Campbell says “every single one” of his friends that runs a company does so with a nicotine pouch in their mouth.
Tech workers are increasingly attacking their marathon workdays like “racehorses” dosed with significant quantities of purportedly performance-maximizing nicotine, with each 6-mg pouch containing the nicotine of several cigarettes. Stripped of the smoke, smell, and stigma of cigarettes and vapes, nicotine pouches are being quietly rebranded in Silicon Valley as a clean, nootropic stimulant rather than a dirty habit.
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Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson launched his own brand, ALP, short for American Lip Pillow, in 2024. “Nicotine’s super important,” the ex-smoker told podcaster Theo Von in December, embodying a plump Marlboro Man for the smoke-free age. “This country’s gotten far sadder and less healthy since it was discouraged, and it's coming back and it shows: People are just happier.”
