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.
“The brand marketer person [is] doing a hell of a job,” says Campbell, who has slicked-back dark hair and usually wears plain T-shirts in black, white, or gray. He also has ADHD and sold a sales recruitment company last year for a “good chunk of change.”
He swaps his pouches out after around three hours once they have entirely lost their flavor, saying that being constantly wired on the stimulant helps ensure he picks up on every microexpression during sales calls, giving him a psychological edge. “I just view it as, does this help me make more money and work more efficiently or not?” he says. “It’s a really weird blend of being stimulating and good for focus, but it’s also relaxing. It keeps you in this cool, calm, and collected feeling.”
Buzz Glut
Hockey-puck-shaped tins containing nicotine pouches—typically made up of tobacco-free nicotine salt along with artificial sweeteners and synthetic fibers—have become increasingly ubiquitous in the so-called manosphere in the past few years. There is a fist-pumping camaraderie among men who use Zyns; a sense that they have all discovered a skeleton key to an omnipotent existence. As I reported this piece, ads for an array of nicotine pouch brands via the UK-based distributor Snusvikings began following me around the internet.
Used for well over a decade by sports stars, nicotine pouches are used regularly by as many as a fifth of footballers in the UK. Only more recently did they take Silicon Valley by storm. They are now offered for free in the offices of the AI tech company Palantir, marking an industrial-relations milestone for nicotine akin to when 19th century factory owners first permitted workers to take smoke breaks. Just like the cigarettes of decades past, nicotine pouches—from “lip cushies” and “upper deckys”—have seeped into the bloodstream of American industry and power.
US Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called pouches a safe alternative to smoking and appeared to furtively use them to get through his Senate confirmation meeting. Leonardo DiCaprio had a pouch under his lip on the Golden Globes red carpet. Fellow actor Josh Brolin pops pouches “24 hours a day,” even while he is asleep. Predictably, podcaster Joe Rogan poses with his tin of pouches on his show.
To furnish the rapidly growing multibillion-dollar industry amid the current gold rush, partnerships are expanding the products’ reach, and new brands are launching regularly, often with backing from manosphere-adjacent celebrities. In April, the UFC partnered with pouch brand Fre, with an executive of Fre’s parent company using language like “bold” and “performance-driven” to describe the companies’ shared values in a press release.
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.” He also admitted to Men’s Health in January: “Is ALP addictive? Fuck yeah, it’s addictive!” (Carlson, 56, reportedly told podcaster Lex Fridman that nicotine “literally … makes my dick super hard.”)
Brain Power
Nicotine’s core mechanism hasn’t changed in the journey from puff to pouch; the compound still floods the brain with dopamine. Dependence develops quickly, but for some users in the tech sector, the rush of productivity balances out the risk of dependency.
“I almost become addicted to the amount of output that I can achieve by using it,” says Cory Firth, an entrepreneur and flow-state coach who swears by a brand called Sonic. The former smoker abides by a system of four-week cycles, which he punctuates with a week or two of abstinence. “When I notice that I need it to feel normal, that's when I know I'm in trouble and I need to take a break,” he says. “The first couple of days can be difficult, because you’re messing with your baseline of the neurochemical that helps you focus.”
Nick Bostrom, the author of a bestselling book about AI called Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, prefers his method of ingestion, a nicotine-coated toothpick, to profit from the drug’s “nootropic benefits for memory and concentration.” The nicotine pouches revolutionizing daily work for many tech workers “seem a bit yucky,” he says, brandishing his toothpick during our Zoom call.
The 53-year-old Bostrom ditched nicotine gum, which he chewed for many years after discovering the products contain “a bunch of gunk that seemed of dubious healthiness.” The pouches, it seems, might follow a similar trajectory—vaunted until somebody closely checks the small print. With an unflavored toothpick, by contrast, the nicotine is as clean as it can be, Bostrom says: “If you’re trying to be health-conscious and then exposing yourself to a whole bunch of substances continuously … then I feel it’s better to do it in a pure form.” He acknowledges with a hint of sarcasm, “There’s a kind of coolness in being like, ‘Yes, I’m a machine.’”
When I speak to Brian Erkkila, a neuroscientist and head of executive affairs at Philip Morris, he would not be drawn into a discussion about whether smokeless nicotine is cool. But he did suggest that cigarettes are passé, calling them “a 20th century nicotine-delivery way of doing things.” He also poured cold water on some of the biohackers’ claims, with the science “not solid enough to say that there is a cognitive benefit.” And Erkkila swats away criticism of Zyn pouches’ makeup: “All of those things are food-grade ingredients that you would find in the grocery store.”
Ups and Downs
But how “clean” really are the pouches? A gulf is swiftly emerging between nicotine advocates who use the pouches and those who use toothpicks, lozenges, pills, patches, or sprays. Biohacking guru and author Dave Asprey describes nicotine as being close to a perfect psychotropic. “If you're under-aroused, it brings you up; over-aroused, it brings you down,” he says.
But Asprey is equally critical of pouch brands that use artificial additives and synthetic fibers, which he claims include microplastics, and has invested in the brand Lucy, which he says is healthier than its competitors. “Pouches might fall out of favor, but clean nicotine will likely be here to stay, especially as more and more research comes out on the brain benefits,” Asprey adds.
Nicotine is perhaps the only “biohacking tool” that encounters such strident opposition in other circles. Fellow biohacker Bryan Johnson is against nicotine entirely, and not only due to his claims that the pouches can cause gum recession, oral lesions, and irritation.
“Nicotine is not some harmless productivity hack,” he said in a January video. “It is a highly addictive chemical. It acts quickly on the brain’s reward system and creates a short-term boost in focus and also has a calming effect. But the trade-off is addiction, and you lose your autonomy. Don’t do it, friends.”
Campbell, the entrepreneur, is relaxed about whether nicotine pouches will go the way of vapes, which are now widely understood to be harmful: “I mean, maybe these are good now, and then we’ll see some articles about bad things happening. It’ll be like, ‘Oh no, that was a mistake!’”
For now, he’s clocking up epic workdays that he could not imagine enduring without nicotine—and that, for him and his fellow founders, is worth the cravings. “I can't lie and say that I don't want to reach for it on certain days when I'm off,” he says.
