Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. How much one could
Speaker 1: woodchuck chuck if Woodchuck could rip upper deckisin.
Speaker 2: He's upper deckye lip pillows food.
Speaker 1: Max vander Art's TikTok videos might sound like he's speaking
Speaker 1: in obscure language. Online, he adopts this persona known as
Speaker 1: Chetty or freezer Tarps. He graduated from the University of
Speaker 1: Tampa and he's into golf, drinking and sports bedding. But
Speaker 1: these made up sounding terms he's using upper decky lip pillows,
Speaker 1: they're describing something real. It's the slang around a rapidly
Speaker 1: growing nicotine product, one that Max and influencers like him
Speaker 1: have helped popularize. Zin.
Speaker 2: I call it a little tea bag. It's like the
Speaker 2: size of a long dime, and it is paper wrapped
Speaker 2: around plant fiber and nicotine salt.
Speaker 1: That's Ellen Hewitt, a writer for Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Speaker 2: So basically, if you put this pouch in between your
Speaker 2: gum and lip, you could do upper lip or lower
Speaker 2: lip however you like, and wait thirty minutes, you will
Speaker 2: slowly get a stream of nicotine into your bloodstream via
Speaker 2: the mutus memorane of your mouth, and you'll.
Speaker 1: Get buzzed like nicotine gum or a nicotine patch. Zin
Speaker 1: is part of a long line of tobacco alternatives, but
Speaker 1: the product has completely outperformed its competition, and just this
Speaker 1: month became the first nicotine pouch to be authorized for
Speaker 1: marketing by the FDA. Ellen's been charting Zin's unique rise
Speaker 1: and how a lot of its success could be thanks
Speaker 1: to an army of social media users like Max.
Speaker 2: Zen creators have really kicked off this zin mania. For
Speaker 2: lack of a better term, all right.
Speaker 1: So today it's my boyfriend's birthday and he does not
Speaker 1: like sweets of any sort, so we're gonna make can
Speaker 1: make a thin birthday cake.
Speaker 2: People keep asking me, Chops, what is your favorite Zin combo?
Speaker 2: And I keep saying peppermin Zin's with some coffee. What's up, boys?
Speaker 2: A couple new termis a couple of new terms for cassinin,
Speaker 2: upper deckies, lip cushions, pillows, you name it.
Speaker 1: Many of these so called zinfluencers are men. Most of
Speaker 1: what they're posting is silly or absurd or made for
Speaker 1: shock value, and Ellen says there's another thing zinfluencers have
Speaker 1: in common. They're essentially making Zin ads for free.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think what's most interesting about influencers is that
Speaker 2: they are not paid by the maker of zin right,
Speaker 2: so they are not necessarily Zin users. They are people
Speaker 2: who are content creators who are hoping to get a
Speaker 2: viral hit if they happen to make free advertising for
Speaker 2: a nicotine product along the way, Like so it.
Speaker 1: Goes, Zin pouches are now finding their way to be
Speaker 1: upper deckies or upper gums of more and more American users,
Speaker 1: and Philip Morris International, the tobacco giant that owns z in,
Speaker 1: is profiting. But Ellen says all this online attention could
Speaker 1: also pose an existential problem for the company because the
Speaker 1: pouches are illegal for people under twenty one to purchase,
Speaker 1: and social media is swimming in teens.
Speaker 2: I think the major risk is they want to get popular,
Speaker 2: but only a specific kind of popular. They want to
Speaker 2: get popular with adults, and they do not want to
Speaker 2: get popular with anyone who's under twenty one.
Speaker 1: How can they control that?
Speaker 2: The problem is they can.
Speaker 1: I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from
Speaker 1: Bloomberg News Today. On the show, we enter the Zinomatic
Speaker 1: universe to understand whether the same forces that fueled Zin's
Speaker 1: rise could lead to its downfall. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of nicotine products on the market alternatives to tobacco that
Speaker 1: some people use recreationally or to help quit smoking.
Speaker 2: Like camel orbs, which are like dissolvable pellets of nicotine
Speaker 2: or nicotine gum or nictine toothpicks mouth strips that you
Speaker 2: can let dissolve in your tongue.
Speaker 1: But Bloomberg's Ellen Hewitt says none of these nicotine products
Speaker 1: have caught on the way Zin has in the past
Speaker 1: few years.
Speaker 2: So Zin arrived in the US in around twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: but it spent the first few years being like completely unremarkable.
Speaker 2: Like the early branding from PMI was kind of bland.
Speaker 2: It was very medical. It was like, you know, find
Speaker 2: your Zin. Everything was very clean and white, trying to
Speaker 2: appeal to smokers to switch. And something changed around late
Speaker 2: twenty twenty one. All of a sudden, there just started
Speaker 2: to become a lot more sales of Zin. People started
Speaker 2: buying a lot more in the US. Sales suddenly doubled
Speaker 2: over the course of a month, and then like kept
Speaker 2: growing and growing, and sometime in like twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: you started to see a lot of Zin related content
Speaker 2: on social media, so that's TikTok Instagram reels. Like a
Speaker 2: lot of influencers are just trying to go for the
Speaker 2: same things that some creators are going for on all platforms,
Speaker 2: which is like shock value, attention grabby kind of controversial.
Speaker 2: So you know, you see videos of people who stuff
Speaker 2: like twenty Zin pouches in their mouth at once. Like
Speaker 2: I interviewed a guy who made a Zin video where
Speaker 2: he he talks about like this is his meal prep breakfast.
Speaker 2: It's like frosted flakes, his meal prep, Zin pouches in
Speaker 2: the cereal bowl and then a red bull on top.
Speaker 1: Offline, Zin is quite literally flying off the shelves. Last summer,
Speaker 1: there were actually Zin shortages in major cities, and that's
Speaker 1: been great for Philip Morris's earnings. Pouch sales in the
Speaker 1: third quarter of last year rose forty one percent compared
Speaker 1: to the same period in twenty twenty three, pushing the
Speaker 1: company's shares up ten percent in October. But it's hard
Speaker 1: to pinpoint exactly what it is about Zin that makes
Speaker 1: it so social media friendly.
Speaker 2: It's this sort of smoking cessation product. It is not
Speaker 2: designed to be cool. Philip Morris did not design this
Speaker 2: to be like a cool product, but all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: it has become associated with I don't know, hustle culture,
Speaker 2: right wing pundits, hockey bros. I spoke to a guy
Speaker 2: who made a rap song about Zin and the way
Speaker 2: he described it to me, he was like, Zin is
Speaker 2: really hot right now, every chad is doing it. And
Speaker 2: so for those of you who don't know what a
Speaker 2: chad is, it's just kind of a generic term for
Speaker 2: an alpha male.
Speaker 1: Zin has gone viral, and Ellen's been tracking how that's
Speaker 1: made its use into something of a badge of honor
Speaker 1: for certain types of people.
Speaker 2: In the story, I try to lay out a few
Speaker 2: different pockets of people who have kind of claimed Zin
Speaker 2: as their own. One of them is kind of like
Speaker 2: Wall Street junior analysts who were like huffing on their
Speaker 2: jewel jewel vapes to get through their late night Excel sheets.
Speaker 2: There's a sort of a Silicon Valley contingent people who
Speaker 2: like to use nicotine as a productivity enhancer. So like
Speaker 2: you have founders who are like using nicotine. That's kind
Speaker 2: of this like contrarian way to get a productivity edge.
Speaker 2: And then yeah, it's largely right leaning.
Speaker 1: Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson was also a major
Speaker 1: Zin booster before he soured on the brand after Philip
Speaker 1: Morris refused to partner with him. He launched a competing
Speaker 1: nicotine pouch brand of his own in November.
Speaker 2: He's obsessed with nicotine. He was talking about all the
Speaker 2: time about how Zen feels like the hand of God
Speaker 2: massaging your central nervous system. People called him Tucker Carls
Speaker 2: in They just have these like uncontrollable voices out there
Speaker 2: who are either like saying things about Zen or deciding
Speaker 2: to promote Zin or not promote Zin, or promote a rival.
Speaker 2: It's just kind of chaos out there.
Speaker 1: Well, that does sound like a dream for the company
Speaker 1: in a way, for Philip Morris, like they're getting all
Speaker 1: this free advertising, but there's also this big risk for
Speaker 1: them in all of us right totally.
Speaker 2: That has been kind of the blessing and curse for
Speaker 2: Philip Morris. They wanted to be popular, but obviously they
Speaker 2: don't want it to be popular with teens. So that's
Speaker 2: the crux of the story is they might just become
Speaker 2: a victim of their own success.
Speaker 1: After the break, how the trajectory of another viral smoking
Speaker 1: alternative could offer a cautionary tale for Zin. Before Zinn
Speaker 1: became the latest buzzy nicotine delivery product to capture the
Speaker 1: popular imagination, Jewel E cigarettes dominated the market, and BusinessWeek
Speaker 1: reporter Ellen Hewitt says that company's story holds lessons for
Speaker 1: Philip Morris, which owns in.
Speaker 2: Basically, Jewel became and potentially for good reason, the marquis
Speaker 2: villain of the teen vaping crisis.
Speaker 1: Jewel debuted its product in twenty fifteen. By December twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: the company was doing three point two million dollars in
Speaker 1: monthly sales. But its success had a downside. It got
Speaker 1: too popular with the wrong kind of users. In twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: state and federal lawmakers and the FDA accused Jewel of
Speaker 1: marketing its products to minors, and as more and more
Speaker 1: teens got hooked on the products, regulators circled.
Speaker 2: They have also been sued and had many penalties levited
Speaker 2: against them, and at some point the FDA banned Jewel.
Speaker 2: They kind of walked the band back and eventually walked
Speaker 2: it further back, but I think that really hurt their sales,
Speaker 2: and then what ended up happening is vaping kind of
Speaker 2: continued like people started buying these really unregulated important vapes.
Speaker 2: So Jewel got really like smacked down. Other vapes replaced them,
Speaker 2: and it was like really pretty damaging for the company.
Speaker 1: Regulatory crackdowns, costly lawsuits, new competition. These these are the
Speaker 1: kind of factors that can bring a trendy product crashing
Speaker 1: down from its comfortable spot at the top.
Speaker 2: With Jewel, of course, there were some differences, like Jewel
Speaker 2: marketing very aggressively toward teens, you know, and as far
Speaker 2: as we can tell, maybe that's not happening. But social
Speaker 2: media is full of teens, and of course this content
Speaker 2: is getting shown to miners. Of course, this could lead
Speaker 2: to miners picking up this product in in mass.
Speaker 1: To figure out how many teens are actually using ZIN,
Speaker 1: Ellen looked at the results from the annual National Youth
Speaker 1: Tobacco Survey twenty twenty three. Data showed that about one
Speaker 1: point eight percent of middle and high schoolers reported using
Speaker 1: nicotine pouches like ZIN, and that the number hadn't grown
Speaker 1: much since the previous year. But the report for twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four, which will come out this fall, could paint
Speaker 1: a clearer picture of its growth over time.
Speaker 2: We just don't know what the results for twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four are going to show, and as we saw with Jewel,
Speaker 2: basically if those results go up, that triggers a lot
Speaker 2: of reaction, where it's usually like government response, FDA responses,
Speaker 2: like there might be legislation, lawsuits, things like that that
Speaker 2: might get triggered by a spike in usage of teens.
Speaker 2: So it's kind of this guillotine hanging over the whole industry,
Speaker 2: as someone described it to me. And I think PMI
Speaker 2: has to be aware that this is an enormous risk
Speaker 2: that if kids start using this, they might be screwed,
Speaker 2: you know. And Philip Morris have tried to complain to
Speaker 2: the social media platforms about certain content that they know
Speaker 2: for sure is showing underage usage.
Speaker 1: But Philip Morris says it doesn't have that much control
Speaker 1: over what's influencers are posting about their product or who
Speaker 1: sees it. It's directed the blame toward Meta TikTok and
Speaker 1: YouTube for declining requests to remove some content. Representatives for
Speaker 1: TikTok and YouTube said their employees enforce their community guidelines,
Speaker 1: which prohibit content that shows miners using tobacco or nicotine
Speaker 1: TikTok also says the platform Drick's content promoting nicotine products
Speaker 1: to users eighteen and older. Meta didn't respond to a
Speaker 1: request for comment.
Speaker 2: Of course, our Zin users are older, but like a
Speaker 2: lot of these content creators are young, and I think
Speaker 2: if you know, Chetty's audience of course is going to
Speaker 2: include teenagers. Like, there's just no way that that's not happening.
Speaker 1: Chetti aka Max Vanderard, the TikTok user we heard about earlier,
Speaker 1: didn't respond to requests for comment.
Speaker 2: You know, I interviewed a guy who was a Zen
Speaker 2: user in his mid twenties who picked it up when
Speaker 2: he was twenty two, and he's trying to quit now.
Speaker 2: And then his seventeen year old brother like sent him
Speaker 2: a video of Chetty making jokes. And of course, if
Speaker 2: his seventeen year old brother is following this creator, like,
Speaker 2: he's going to get exposed to Zin content. He's going
Speaker 2: to see and he's going to absorb some subliminal message
Speaker 2: that suggests that, like, this is cool, this is what
Speaker 2: college boys do, This is like how you fit in.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, lawmakers in the US are still circling
Speaker 1: the question of how to regulate Zin, and Ellen says
Speaker 1: that just course is helping keep it in the news.
Speaker 2: About a year ago, Chuck Schumer decided to hold a
Speaker 2: press conference where he lay ambasted Zin and talked about
Speaker 2: how this was like a pouch full of problems that
Speaker 2: was like going to hook our teens on nicotine. And
Speaker 2: so he held this press conference and talked about how
Speaker 2: dangerous ZIN is. And I guess this prompted Republican lawmakers
Speaker 2: to try to clap back and be like, you know,
Speaker 2: keep your pause off my nicotine, give me you know, nicotine,
Speaker 2: or give me death. Marjorie Taylor Green tweeted about how
Speaker 2: this calls for a zinsurrection and I think whatever correlation
Speaker 2: there might have been already between conservatives and Zin was clinched.
Speaker 1: How is the cultural conversation, the online hype around ZIN
Speaker 1: and the political discourse impacting who's getting into it now
Speaker 1: and who's finding Zin and who's buying it?
Speaker 2: You know, I did talk to users who were just like,
Speaker 2: this is a better product than what I used to use,
Speaker 2: Like I wanted to stop vaping. You know, you can
Speaker 2: Zen at your desk. You no longer need to step outside,
Speaker 2: You no longer need to like hide your habit. It's
Speaker 2: really discreet and so yeah, for a lot of users
Speaker 2: I talked to you, they just said, look, I have
Speaker 2: an addiction. I used vape. I wanted to do something
Speaker 2: else in works better for me. But I did touch
Speaker 2: to a lot of people who were picking it up
Speaker 2: as a result of these types of Z influencers on
Speaker 2: seeing the content, thinking like, oh, you know, it can't
Speaker 2: be that bad, like everyone's talking about it.
Speaker 1: The FDA authorized several ZIN flavors for marketing this month,
Speaker 1: citing the pouches public health benefits as a tool to
Speaker 1: quit smoking, and the fact that so few young people
Speaker 1: report using it as of now. The regulator also said
Speaker 1: ZIN wasn't as harmful as cigarettes or other smokeless tobacco products,
Speaker 1: but it didn't say ZIN was safe, and it didn't
Speaker 1: recommend it for just anyone to use. What did doctors
Speaker 1: say about the health impacts of ZIN and what are
Speaker 1: some of the potential long term impacts of using it?
Speaker 2: Most health experts agree that like combustible cigarettes really bad
Speaker 2: for you, Vaping like also probably not very great for you,
Speaker 2: And so if you already have a habit of doing those,
Speaker 2: then using a nicotine pouch instead it's probably gonna be
Speaker 2: better for you. It's not going through your lungs, and
Speaker 2: if it's going to help you quit, then that's probably good.
Speaker 2: The issue is, like, of course, the pouches themselves come
Speaker 2: with their own problems. So if you didn't have a
Speaker 2: habit before, you are now picking these up, which might
Speaker 2: include mouth ulcers and basically a lot of like GI
Speaker 2: issues because you are swallowing nicotine laced saliva.
Speaker 1: Basically, Ellen says she isn't really the target audience for
Speaker 1: the pouches, but in a small act of Gonzo journalism,
Speaker 1: sorry gon Zin journalism, she bought them. I wouldn't call
Speaker 1: her a zinfluencer, though her experience was pretty mixed.
Speaker 2: I did buy a tin for researching this story, and
Speaker 2: I tried the first pouch and I kept it in
Speaker 2: too long and it made me sick. But then I
Speaker 2: can't lie. I did finish the tin eventually. It took
Speaker 2: me maybe like a couple weeks.
Speaker 1: And did you buy another one after that?
Speaker 2: No? I did not.
Speaker 1: This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by David Fox and Alex Tie.
Speaker 1: It was edited by Tracy Samuelson. Aaron Edwards and Raihan Harmancy.
Speaker 1: It was mixed and sound designed by Alex Suguiera. It
Speaker 1: was fact checked by Adriana Tapia. Our senior producer is
Speaker 1: Naomi Shadin. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Hanso. Our executive
Speaker 1: producer is Nicole Beamster borg Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head
Speaker 1: of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure to
Speaker 1: subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: It helps people find the show. Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 1: We'll be back next week.