The Ben and Emil Show - BAES 65: The Nicotine Wars

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

The nicotine wars are here, and they're heating up. With the rise in popularity of Zyn, the demand for nicotine pouches is only going up. This week we've got John Coogan, co-founder of Zyn competitor LUCY. John is remarkably well-versed on the history of the nicotine industry and spares no detail in bringing us up to speed on the fascinating business of giving people a sweet little nicotine buzz. Leave a comment to be featured as the comment of the week next week! And also, like this video, please! Thank you! Head to https://benandemilshow.com for this week's bonus episode and to support the show! :) __ LUMEN: Lumen is the world’s first handheld metabolic coach. It’s a device that measures yourmetabolism through your breath. And on the app, it lets you know if you’re burning fat orcarbs, and gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, andeven stress management. If you want to take the next step in improving your health, go tolumen.me/BAES toget 15% off your Lumen! __ This episode was shot and edited by Connor Rousseau / @ conrad_roussrad Follow us on instagram! @ benandemilshow @ bencahn @ emilderosa and @ conrad_roussrad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, gang, welcome back to another riveting episode of the Ben and Emile show. We've got a special guest today. We have a very fun episode. Yeah, we've got a really fun, it's really fascinating, informative episodes, so stick around to there again. We're talking all about kind of the new nicotine industry that's taking form. The way this came about, obviously, the Zinn shortage has been a major headline that we've all seen for a while. And you guys are all aware of the Zinternet and the Zin influencers? Yeah.

And so we had the opportunity to interview one of the founders of Lucy. Lucy, which is a rival company to Zinn. They make gum and they make nicotine pouches and stuff. And before we get right into it, we just wanted to disclose that this is not in any way like a product placement or a paid partnership with them. It's just we had the opportunity. He's a really interesting, well-informed guy. He knows his stuff about the industry. He really knows his stuff.

Wanted to hear more about how it all came to be. Yeah. So without further ado, here's the interview with John Coogan. I'm working down to town with Ben and Lee. Tell me what's going on. Tell me what's going on. So listen out up to Benin' Me. Tell me what's going on.

Tell me what's gone on. All right. John, thank you very much for coming on. We've got a very special guest. Yes. Thanks for having me. This is a long time coming. We needed to get a certified nicotine expert on the pod.

I don't know if you're familiar with the lore of the show at all, but Ben has been, Ben's had a almost maybe years-long journey at this point now because I made the mistake. of thinking he could um are you familiar with the international cigarette no okay so international cigarettes it's a very important thing in every young man's life it means uh that you when you leave the country okay you're allowed to smoke cigarettes sure sure no uh as soon as you step off u.s oil yeah you can you can let them rip and uh but not for me like a meme like drunk cigarettes don't count sure exactly um and so that i was a smoker i i went the traditional route I when I was uh probably 15 damn you started when you were 15 I thought I got to talk to your dad I mean but that's how that's how it usually works right when you when it was just cigarettes you get people hooked when they're young because only yep you know dumb children would fall for it I mean yeah it's a really bad thing for you and and so when I was a teenager I would smoke cigarettes and then probably when I was 25 I quit and did you quit uh yeah just like stopped buying packs also you

you know what a big part of it was, moving to New York. They're so expensive. It's, uh, I mean, you know, I was doing comedy in New York. I had no money. It was like, I mean, I'm talking, they were probably upwards of $15 back. And so, yeah, you just start going. Yeah. So the international cigarette.

Yeah, the international cigarette. I would still partake. Um, and we went on a trip to Japan and. I hadn't smoked in. 12 years and these guys are just ripping darts. We said you know it's totally

totally fine to rip a cigarette and he came back with a full-blown nicotine addiction but it's been funny to watch he's been trying all these things I have not been in I had not engaged with nicotine

in a long time but so Lucy's in all these things have been popping up a part of my life Yeah, popping up on the radar. And so this is very fun to get to talk to John, one of the founders of Lucy. So why don't, yeah, tell us who you are. Yeah, I'm John Coogan, co-founder of Lucy.

We sell tobacco-free products that contain nicotine. So our first product was nicotine gum. Similar to Nicorette, the regulatory structure is a little bit different. We're regulated as a tobacco product as opposed to a drug. So product like Nicorette, they go to the FDA, they get FDA drug approval. That's very similar to an Ozympic or Viagro, an Adderall. Like, there's a double-blinded study. It's very expensive.

And then at the end of the day, the FDA says, you now have permission to market this product as a drug that can make a claim to cure a disease. So for OZempic, it was originally diabetes, but now it's just kind of obesity, right? for Nicorette it's the disease of cigarette addiction and so if you go to a pharmacy you can see that Nicorette looks like a medicine we we liked all the we like the form factor we like the data around the product but we thought that there was an opportunity to take the nicotine gum market and try and introduce it to smokers who maybe weren't looking for a direct quick claim and they weren't necessarily trying to like, you know, cure the disease of cigarette addiction, but instead

just looking for a better product that could win on taste, texture, flavor, strength, a variety of packaging and experience and branding. Were you guys the, were you the only ones getting into that game trying to knock Nicorette off their pedestal there? There were, there were a few companies. So Nicoret was designed as an FDA drug, right? And so huge investment, similar to, you know, any other biotech project to get a drug approval by the FDA. It costs a ton of money. Once you get approved, the FDA won't approve similar products for like a number of years. So you kind of a monopoly. And so that's why drug development and biotechnology has been very profitable, although it's very risky. Like you create a cancer drug. There's a high chance

that does nothing. You don't get approved, waste all the money. But if you get approved, then you can sell it for a very, very high price for a very long time and you won't have a direct competitor. Then after a while, it goes generic. And that's what happened with Nicorette. So the nicotine gums became generic. And that's why if you go into CVS, yes, there will be Nicorat on the shelf, but there will also just be CVS brand or Kirkland brand. Amazon sells nicotine gum. They sell Kirkland. They sell Amazon Basic Care brand. Jesus. Nicotine gum. And so that, so there were other companies. There was a company called Zonic that I think they were acquired by maybe Ultria. one of the big tobacco companies, and they were also a white-labeled product where they went

to the manufacturer that makes all of the nicotine gum, that's all the generic stuff. So when you go to CVS or Rite Aid or Costco, it's all the same product, just different packaging around it. It's white-labeled. Zonic was trying to do the same thing, but push it into a convenience store market. And so they'd done some rebranding. It was like a black package instead of a white package. It still said all of the drug things.

It still had the, like, the aesthetics of a market. pharmaceutical product. But that was the idea. They wound up selling the company and then eventually shut that down. And now I think the Zonic brand is selling nicotine pouches and might be operating Canada. I'm not exactly sure. But at the time, there were a few companies that were working on alternatives. And the industry is called the modern oral nicotine market. So you can think about everything that contains nicotine as one big market globally, that's like a trillion dollars in the States, it's 100 billion. Then cigarettes are probably 55 billion, maybe 75 billion. It kind depends on what metrics you're using in the U.S. So the vast majority of nicotine consumed in America

is still cigarettes. Then you have vapor and e-cigarettes, and that's everything from your razor and blade model jewels where you buy the device, then you slot in pods one at the time. It's your massive rig that you have to refill and change, and there's custom batteries and all that stuff. And then there's also what they call smokeless. And so smokeless tobacco for a long time had been chewing tobacco, dip, loose leaf tobacco, ground up. You just put it in your lip. It's still bad for you because it contains carcinogens and tobacco leaf and that gives you cancer. And so there's, you know, countless stories about people who use, you know, smokeless tobacco, but even though they don't give people secondhand smoke or they don't get lung cancer, they get

mouth cancer, it's very bad. That wave kind of led to more and more innovation in the industry and more and more removal of different parts of different ingredients. So the first big innovation was taking all that loose-leaf dip tobacco that was very moist and loose in your mouth and putting it in a bag essentially. That's moist snooose. So it's very popular in Sweden, has the same tobacco leaf ground up but it's in a it's in a small package that's then inserted into the lip and then over time you know different companies figured out that if you remove the tobacco leaf you remove the carcinogens and then you're able to launch a product like this which although it still contains nicotine it's still addictive it doesn't have a warning on the label that says this product

causes cancer whereas whereas chewing tobacco does need to say that and cigarettes obviously do as well. Right. So can we just back up for one second? So when you were talking about the FDA stuff, because you guys are not going the route of being classified as pharmaceuticals. As a drug, yeah, as a pharmaceutical. So what is your, how does your process differ from something like Nicorette? Yeah. So the FDA kind of first approved a nicotine product decades ago with Nicorette. But they didn't have regulatory authority over cigarettes, which sounds crazy because it's like the number one thing that you would want the FDA to regulate, right? Who regulates cigarettes? For a long time, they were just unregulated.

Jesus. Then there was the... And when they feel that good, the only needs to regulate it? Yeah, I mean, when they were invented, there were obviously still laws. They were like taxes and eventually the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, came in and made a bunch of rules about where cigarettes could advertise. And so they were primarily responsible to the FCC and said, look we're like the FDA isn't going to look at the ingredients inside the product which again doesn't make any sense but the FCC will make sure that you're not advertising to kids or you're not advertising on TV shows and that's when we're lost some of our biggest tobacco soldiers Joe cool uh all of the exactly all the Marlboro man Joe Camel oh Joe Camel

Joe Camel not Snoopy sorry just yeah yeah hey guys boy oh boy we got to take a quick break we got to talk about Lumen yeah what is what is Lumen Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach it's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath and on the app it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs and gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition workouts sleep and even stress management okay so that sounds interesting right all you got to do is breathe into your lumen device first thing in the morning and you'll know it'll tell you through the app what's going on with your metabolism whether you're burning mostly fats or carbs.

And what does that do? Well, Lumen then gives you a personalized nutrition plan for that day based on those measurements. You can also breathe into it before and after workouts and meals so you know exactly what's going on in your body in real time. And Lumen will give you tips to keep you on top of your health game. Ooh, I love that. Okay, look, you might be going, what the hell is metabolism? metabolism is your body's engine it's how your body turns the food you eat into the fuel that keeps you going okay so because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits including easier weight management improved energy levels better fitness results better sleep and more okay

and it gives you recommendations based on what it reads in your breath to improve your metabolic health it can also track your cycle as well as the onset of menopause that's a huge one and adjust your recommendations to keep your metabolism healthy through hormonal shifts so you can keep up your energy and stave off craving so if you want to take the next step in improving your health go to lumen dot me slash bays to get 15% off your lumen that's l umen dot m e slash bays for 15% off your purchase thank you lumen for sponsoring this episode Like most of the pressure on the tobacco industry didn't come from the FDA up until the 90s and early 2000s. It came from the FCC and FTC and also lots of taxes and the big change in the industry came during the master settlement agreement in the 90s where the government basically went to the tobacco companies and said, you're giving everyone tons and tons of cancer. Obviously that's bad morally, but there's a financial.

problem with this, which is that when you give someone cancer, they come into the health care system and impose a cost on the taxpayer because the taxpayer has to fund these cancer treatments. And so we need to take that money. You need to pay us back, basically. And so the master settlement agreement is this multi-billion dollar transfer of money from the tobacco companies to state and local governments. And so there are still state governments, local governments today that have millions and millions of dollars coming in from the big tobacco company. They're still paying?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, they have to pay it constantly. And then also because it's an annuity and they will be paying for a very long time, state and local governments can actually go out and finance those and say, hey, look, we have this agreement where big tobacco is going to pay us $10 million of the next 10 years. Can you give us the $100 million that we're going to get over the next 10 years right now so we can build some. and ruds. So there's all these like financial instruments that have popped up around it. That's fascinating. But that was the that was the major, major penalty that was kind of levied on the big tobacco industry in the 90s. FDA still didn't have regulatory authority. That didn't happen until Obama got elected. So in 2008, he gets elected and passes what's called the TCA, the Tobacco Control Act. The real name's longer. It's like the family smoking control and

like there's a couple of words. He was always a closet smoker. He was, never proud about it. He did. Yeah, yeah, he was a smoker. He was always hiding behind the security door. We saw it. We saw you, dude. I think, I think that, yeah, I hadn't actually put that together, but maybe, I know that I think at some point he'd used nicotine gum to stop smoking. But, I mean, I think it was on the FDA's agenda for a while to get regulatory authority. And a big reason for that was because prior to 2008, there was a company called enjoy that launched the first major e-cigarette in the United States. And they bought a Super Bowl ad, I think, and they had a lot of big marketing campaigns, and they were actually making it

pretty popular. And that product, which interestingly is now, just like a month ago got approved by the FDA to sell, it was extremely controversial back in the early 2000s. So it grew very quickly. The FDA came in and said, look, you're marketing this as an unapproved it was a combination medical and drug device. And so the FDA has did always, or for a long time, has had authority over a number of different divisions. So obviously food. So they have regulations over, you know, when you go to, you know, some grocery store and you know how there's like there's pre-made salads. Those salads don't need to get approved in of individually.

It's not like a drug like a Zempec. They don't need to do a double-blinded trial on this salad. Right. All they need to know is that lettuce is. approved croutons are approved ranch dressing is approved cheddar cheese approved you mix all those together sounds like a terrible salad but you get what I'm saying right as long as you're mixing together food ingredients that are are generally recognized as safe by the FDA you don't need any new approval you can just you

can just come straight to the market with your product and that's why there's so many new food products that come to the market because if you want to start protein bar company as long as you're using a protein ingredient that's been used by other companies the FDA is aware of it, you're fine. If you want to bring something really novel, some completely new food, then the FDA might say, okay, we need to do some studies on this. The FDA also controls drugs, which we mentioned, like Ozympic, Viagra, Adderall, all the major drugs, cancer drugs, all sorts of stuff, vaccines. Then they do veterinary, biologics, medical devices, so that MRI machine that you go

and get your MRI done in. That is approved by the FDA. Surgery robots, all sorts of stuff like that, blood testing equipment that goes through FDA approval, supplements, which are much less regulated than drugs, obviously. As long as you are only making structure and function claims, you can say, like, you know, this improved liver health or something, or supports liver, supports kidney function. You can't really go say, like, it's a miracle weight loss burner or whatever, but the FDA still does have authority over supplements. And if you go and make crazy claims, and do some crazy marketing and you're hurting people or you're putting something in there that's poisonous or problematic, they can come shut you down.

But they couldn't in tobacco for a long time because they didn't have authority until 2008. So when Enjoy got really popular, the FDA brings this like lawsuit and says, hey, you guys, you think you're not regulated by the FDA because cigarettes aren't regulated by the FDA. But in fact, you are. And we are making the argument that this is a drug product. It's designed to help people quit smoking. It should be regulated like Nicorette, and you haven't filed any of those forms. Therefore, you can't sell in the United States.

And they were making it internationally. And so one of the big hammers that the FDA has is they can put an import ban on your product. So when it comes through the ports, they say, we're not letting anything under Enjoy Corporate come into the ports anymore. And so they were able to do that, pause all new shipments into the country, which essentially bankrupted the company. Because they couldn't sell, they couldn't do anything. they couldn't fight with a court case. Now, that court case actually went, I believe, all the way to the Supreme Court, and they won. The FDA lost. And the Supreme Court, the result of that lawsuit was that the FDA did not have regulatory authority over nicotine products that did not make

explicit quit claims. So if you had a nicotine product and you said, this helps you quit smoking, yeah, then you're in the drug category, then you're Nicorette. But if you didn't, and enjoy really wasn't what they were saying was just this is a vape it's fun it's cool it's like a cigarette it's like a cigarette but electric exactly they weren't really saying quit smoking with our product they knew to stay away from that so they didn't they didn't make that claim they were only saying hey it's the new cool thing whatever they said i don't remember but you know i they said said something got popular and uh and so all of a sudden they were bankrupt but allowed to sell the fda didn't have authority. And so the FDA had to go through the legislation. And so that's where the TCA,

the Tobacco Control Act, comes from. So the FDA, you know, raises hands to the politicians and says, hey, this isn't going to be the last vape on the market. Like, there's going to be more of these. Like, yeah, enjoy is kind of bankrupt, but a hedge fund wound up coming in and buying them out of bankruptcy, turning the company around, wound up making it very successful. But there's going to be more. And we need authority over this. So the Tobacco Control Act gave the FDA a authority over all tobacco-containing products. So that whole $100 billion industry you're talking about is now under the control of the FDA? It is.

And they have- Regardless of whether or not you're working for like smoking cessation. Yes, yes, yes, essentially. Even, although Nicorette is still responsible to the drug division, they don't need to talk to the tobacco guys. Because there's, there's different offices within the FDA. So is that a more stringent procedure for someone like Nicorette getting the pharmaceutical classification than you? way more, right? Yeah, I mean, it depends.

I mean, honestly, at this point, the, like, getting approval through the tobacco pathway has been years and years and years of work, so it's getting close to being equivalent. But in theory, yes, like, everyone in the industry is hoping for something called product standards, where similar to that salad analogy that I used, like if you're only using these ingredients,

these flavorings, these fillers, and this, like, this paper, and it's nicotine, then the FDA should be able to kind of sign off on it a little bit quicker because they're like, hey, look, like this, this looks a lot like the thing that we just approved last week. There's no real changes in here, so we should maybe approve it to the same level. We're not going to say it's like amazing, but we will say that, okay, it's not more harmful than what we already have out there, which would be good. But with drugs, it's very different because you have to do like a double-blinded trial. You really need to see the efficacy.

And then also you need to show that there's some novel aspect to the approach. Sorry. I want to get this straight here. So. It's very wonky. We're really in the weeds. No, it's not as long as you're enjoying it. It's wild to me.

So I'm making sure I understand this correctly. So if you're like a Nicorette or a vape and you, if you make a drug-like claim, like, hey, we help you quit smoking. Exactly. You're putting yourself on a path. of regulatory nightmares that could last years. Whereas if you go just the recreational route and you just say, hey, we're just a nicotine product, you sort of avoid that.

And Enjoy got fucked because they weren't saying the drug thing, but the FDA just kind of pinned it on him. Kind of. And then they just got kind of fucked over. Yeah. Huh. A little bit. Yeah.

Does that mean Lucy does not, you're not able to market as a. Smoking cessation. Yeah, like an effective way to stop smoking. So we technically do have a product that we have a nicotine law seems that is regulated like Nicarat. Oh. And so for that product, we can make quick claims.

Okay. And so it's helpful to have a portfolio of these products because if a smoker comes to us and says, I need a product that's approved by the FDA to help me quit smoking, well, yes, we have that. But for many, many smokers and vape users or pouch users, they just want the best nicotine product. whether that's our gum or our pouch, like, that's what wins them over. So the mission of the company is still to, you know, end cigarettes.

Like, that's what animates us. But the claims that we make are very much based on the current FDA standards in each product category. And they happen to be different across different categories. I mean, can we talk about the mission of the company? I find this all very interesting because, yeah, I mean, I think everyone that's not a cigarette, regardless of what they're saying to the FDA or regulatory bodies it seems like the goal is

we're better than cigarettes. Don't go for cigarettes go for us. And so what is the goal? Because are you you don't want to get more people hooked on nicotine. Yeah, exactly. No.

No. No. I mean the... Or is the goal just to get more of that chunk of the hundred billion dollars? Exactly. It's just switch everyone over

from cigarettes to something else. Because for me, my experience, has been that, you know, as someone who started the traditional way, smoked young, then quit, it's been very odd. I feel like I'm watching a lot of friends in their 30s who had never experienced nicotine, now getting addicted to nicotine. And I'm like, this feels very odd. This is usually what happens when you're a teenager.

But I'm watching grown men, you know, crying about the Zinn shortage. I mean, I'm watching Tucker Carlson on. fucking Fox News, be like, everyone should be on this. It's amazing. It raises your sperm or your testosterone. So it does feel like there's a bit of, I think there is a new market growing as well as not just the... Yeah, so I mean, like historically even before the cigarette, humans were using nicotine. And so for a certain portion of the population, it's totally possible that they just enjoy the benefits of nicotine or the effects of nicotine and never really feel bad about that or never wanted to lower or reduce their dosage, that's terrible if it's paired with a combustible

cigarette because it will almost certainly lead to cancer. Cigarettes kill 50% of people who use them. They kill 500,000 people in America every year. It's like 8 million. And if not cancer, other horrible things that's adversely. And so the FDA has this concept called the continuum of risk. Basically, they don't say that any nicotine product is free of risk. And that's why every nicotine product, including ours, has a warning label on it.

Just the warning label reflects where you are on that continuum of risk. What is yours say? Our say, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. So there is, there's literally an addiction warning. Like the risk of using this product is addiction to nicotine, whereas the risk of using cigarettes is the risk of lung cancer, right? And so generally the industry strategy has been to try and migrate everyone down the continuum of risk, move from, you know, cigarettes to smokeless tobacco, which still has carcinogens in it, but is much less likely to kill you because it doesn't give you lung cancer, but the mouth cancer is still a risk. and then get you to something that's tobacco-free.

So then cancer's not as much of a risk. And then just move everyone down. And then once you have a population that's not on carcinogenic nicotine, like tobacco-free, essentially. This is like the Swedish society where they've essentially become tobacco-free and cigarette-free. Swedes are always on the cutting edge. Yeah, they are. In this case, for sure. Then there's the question of like, okay, so if people are addicted and on

happy about that how can they get off of it most effectively and there are still a host of ways to get off of nicotine and cure addiction yeah whether that's everything from like hypnosis to cold turkey to titrating down and weaning off to you know different there are all sorts of like different pharmaceutical drugs that have been approved for treating nicotine addiction specifically and so there's there's this continuum of risk all the way down to cold turkey and but it's really important that there are that they're off ramps from each to the next right makes sense it does seem like we've we've kind of hit some the great dream of nicotine consumption where vapes I remember when vapes came out I mean I think the first time I encountered one was probably like 2012 or something

like that and people were like yeah it's way better than a cigarette totally safe and I remember it was we went out drinking and I probably hadn't smoked in a while at that point and I was like all right whatever. I was hitting my friends all night and I woke up just my chest was I was like what the fuck and I was like there's no way that that can be good for you but now it seems like we've hit this this new I don't know this new thing on the ziggurat of like yeah we're gonna we're gonna yeah the vape thing's interesting because the I mean like there have been vapor products that have been approved by the FDA they're they're not even really all vapes. They're more like nicotine inhalers, and they're very expensive. They're prescription

drugs. They never really got to wide popularity. It might be like $500 per. Jesus. Something like that. Your insurance would cover it. A far cry from the elf bar. Exactly, exactly. But what that means is that that product was developed by a biotech company, a pharmaceutical company. It had to go through trials, and the FDA looked at every single ingredient in there, all the flavors, all the chemicals, and probably isn't very much. It's probably as pure as possible. and they determine that that product, you know, all of these approvals are based on, you know, pros and cons. Like every drug, I mean, most drugs have side effects. And but if the benefit vastly outweighs the cost, then the FDA will approve.

And that's why, you know, no matter what drug you're taking, like, the cancer drugs, they make your hair fall out. But like, I'd be happy to lose my hair if it shows my cancer, right? And it's the same thing for these products. Now, with the vapes, they're starting to get approved by the FDA, but not approves. in the drug sense, they're getting authorized for sale, which just means that they've passed the hurdle that the FDA has in place, which is they've deemed them suitable for the protection of public health,

which means that they, look, they recognize that when they approved Enjoy recently, they approved a flavored version of Enjoy, the menthol flavor. So it's a mint flavored vape. This is a very controversial thing. I mean, a couple years ago during the Jewel Saga, We were really litigating this as a society whether or not we should have flavored vape products on the market.

And what apparently they found or what it seems like they found since they authorized this product was that, yes, there is a risk that kids use the product, which is very bad. And we can talk about that more. There's a risk that an adult might pick up this and then migrate to cigarettes. And that could kill them. That's extremely risky if that happens. But there's also the chance that a smoker picks this up, never smokes a cigarette again, and saves. their life. And so the FDA is balancing those two things out. And they've done a lot of research and the team behind Enjoy, I'm sure, did a whole bunch of scientific research and market surveys

and studies and really tried to understand because they've sold millions of these Enjoy products. They're in something like, I don't know, 50,000 stores or something. It's pretty widely distributed at this point. And so I'm sure what they did was they looked at all of their customers and said, okay, you know, we have very few, you know, underage users. We have very few users who start with our product and then migrate to cigarettes. And we have tons of smokers who started using our product and never went back to smoking. And the FDA said, look, this is suitable for the protection of public health. We're not going to let you say that it's less harmful than cigarettes. That's a different tier. That's a different category of approval. I'm sure they'll try for that

eventually. But for right now, and they also won't let them say, this helps you quit smoking, but they will let you sell it, which is the authorization. Can we do a quick rundown of that, of that jewel saga? Because it's fascinating. Yeah, and it's a bit confusing where, because, you know, it kind of, it gets banned, but then things that seem explicitly like marketed to children, you know, elf bars, it's like, I mean, I've seen kids mixing flavors and sucking to it once. and that kid was me drunk at Clark TG. But the, so it's, it's, it gets banned for some reason other people are allowed to do it. Then it's, it's okay.

So what exactly is going on with Jewel? Yeah. So, I mean, we, we talked about the, the Enjoy saga. Jewel was started years and years ago. I don't exactly remember the date that the company started, but they had a couple false starts where they launched one product called Plume. They wound up selling that off to Jay. The J.I. The Japan Tobacco Conglomerate, a big tobacco company. They had another kind of weed

vape. It wasn't, it didn't include cannabis, but it was often used for vaporizing cannabis. Like you could just place a cartridge in or something? Not even a cartridge. You could place loose leaf. So the, the, the, the, the, it was designed that you could put tobacco in there and then you could vaporize the tobacco, but the majority of users were probably using cannabis with that. and but then they they kind of went back to the the nicotine vape and they discovered that if they used nicotine salts they could get a much higher concentration of nicotine in the vapor so if you remember before jewel people who used vapes they would have these like pretty large devices

they would suck on them and then they would blow out it would be this massive cloud they would do tricks and the dubstep would play and the lights would be flashing it was like kind of like a crazy like cyberpunky 2006, 2009, like vibe. It was very not cool. Very not cool. And Jewel figured out that if they concentrated the nicotine in there, it would deliver more nicotine in a smaller puff. And so the end result was that when you use the Jewel, you wouldn't need to exhale this

massive cloud. And so that became very popular. It became popular with smokers. It also became very popular with kids. and what the FDA was tracking was the percentage of youths that would use a particular type of nicotine. So there's a survey that happens every year where pediatricians across the nation have to issue a survey to the kids that come in. So you come in for your physical, you're 15, and they ask you, you know, have you, like, we're not going to take you to jail, just tell us, like, did you drink, did you smoke? Did you use cigarettes?

Did you use vapes? what brands did you use, and all of these statistics are kind of compiled and then used to track trends. And the hope is that cigarettes drop to zero and everything else just stays at zero. When Jewel was introduced, kids were already vaping. Something like 20% of kids under 18 were using vapor products because there were a lot of other popular brands on the market. And at this point, you had to be 18 to buy. You had to be 18 back then. Now it's 21, which is a huge, huge improvement. illegally somehow.

I mean, you're getting them from cool older kids. Exactly, yeah, yeah, a high school senior could step out at lunch break, which is crazy. It's like,

it's such an improvement that we've moved to 21 plus. Obviously, there's still bleed over and there's still problems there, but it's at least like a step in the right direction. And so the,

the jewel phenomenon became extremely viral. And we saw that the youth usage rates of vapor products, exploded. So it went from something like 20% before Jewel was introduced to almost 40%. And during this time, cigarettes were declining a ton, which was great, but nicotine use overall was increasing way more. And that was the problem of that like cost benefit analysis, right?

Ideally, you want to introduce products that just kill off the cigarettes and they don't increase any nicotine use in society. Right. So basically, the Jewel, like, like the way the FDA saw jewel was that at the time it was like a net negative on the you know in their mission of protecting the public health right and so they during this time after the tobacco control act the TCA in 2008 the FDA created a framework for bringing products to the market they have what's called a pre-market tobacco approval application this big it's not quite as rigorous as a new drug application but it's quite rigorous and it's a it's like a a major, major filing with a lot of scientific evidence that you have to submit about how your product works, how it affects people, how it's marketed. It covers like, you know, hundreds of different variables that the FDA can review and say, you know what, this product does have that net benefit. What happened with Enjoy in the end, just like a month or two ago? When they looked at Jules, they made the determination, kind of, that Jule was not having a net

positive effect. That's not technically what happened. and technically they got them kind of on a technicality and they rejected their application and so they issued them what's called a marketing denial order saying that you can no longer sell this product in the United States. That was the ban. Now that ban was overturned in the courts.

They got a stay of the decision in the courts. The courts found that the FDA had not evaluated the application properly. I think it was something related to like the like the monitoring number or like the particular type of machine that they used to test something where Jewel corporate did have that information and would have happily shared it with the FDA but the FDA didn't ask they just said hey this is missing and so it was kind of one of these

things where it wasn't like the spirit and the politics was like Jewel is bad so we need to ban it but then the actual decision was based on kind of a technicality so they got so they got that paused but no one really remembers that everyone just thinks Jewel got banned right and so then they went in and they you know resubmitted with the FDA started working with them more they wound up you know Altria kind of wrote down their investment they wound up kind of recapitalizing the company doing a bunch of different financial deals and just recently the FDA reversed formally reversed that ban and said hey you guys have been good for the last few years besides realistically all the kids moved on to different products which we can talk about in a minute

So maybe we should look at this dual thing again and you guys have submitted a whole bunch more data and you guys have been good citizens and you haven't done anything crazy and you kind of been, you know, good citizens. So let's reevaluate this. We'll take another look at your application. So they reverse the MDO and they said, hey, we're going to start looking at it again. And so the FDA has been looking through these vapor applications, Enjoy kind of wound up at the front of the pile because Jewel was such a big one that they got banned. and then got put on the back burner, the focus moved over to Enjoy. Now the FDA will probably start looking at Jewel again. But meanwhile, while all this chaos is happening in kind of like the big brands,

there's tons and tons of opportunistic entrepreneurs who are jumping in and selling products that really have no strategy to interface with the FDA. They're not trying, they're not even trying to put together an application and convince the FDA that this is suitable for the protection of public health. They don't care. something like Elfbar? I don't know about Elfbar specifically because the company Elfbar specifically has like they changed hands a couple times like the brand's actually been sold and so it's very hard to say like what that company even is. But yes, like the disposable vapes that that you see

at the corner store that brand name changes every two weeks. Taste fully like candy. Yeah, exactly. It's super strong, super cheap, super poorly made, imported and just has like a ton of chemicals. They're not even planning on submitting to the FDA. Hey, here's what's in it. Is this okay? No way. They're just trying to make a quick buck. Exactly. And it's kind of like a hydra. You cut off one head and three more grow because explain that.

The distribution network is such that and they're international, they're overseas. So it's like they can't do anything. Yep, exactly. So there will be a number of manufacturing plants abroad, many in China. The main company that people think of when they think behind Elfar is the Shenzhen-I-Mirical company. which is just a hilarious name to me. Because it's like, kind of like Apple, like I, iPhone, but I miracle. I don't know.

Well, it's a miracle. How we got you to quit cigarettes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was going to say it's a miracle how great these flavors are. So many flavors to choose from. Anyway, go on. And so there will be a number of manufacturing hubs with the equipment to manufacture disposable vapes. Then those get shipped to America.

And in order to get into America, they have to have a company that's received. receiving them. And that company has to be in good standing with the FDA. And so, like, what happened with Enjoy where the FDA said, hey, guys, at the ports, no more, no more imports of enjoy products. If the FDA comes and says, hey, we issued a marketing denial order for Elfbar or for Puffbar or one of these companies, then when it gets to the ports, they won't be able to bring it in. But if the company changes their name or sets of a new shell entity, then all of a sudden the FDA has to issue a new denial. And so in that time, you can ship in $10 million a product before they even catch you.

And then once you're in the United States, you have the product, then you can just put it on the shelves and all the different retailers. And the retailers don't, they're not equipped to figure out what's approved by the FDA and what's not. And also, it's not that these products, like up until Enjoy, there weren't that many products that were actually authorized. So the only thing that you could say, you wouldn't, you wouldn't, like a store owner wouldn't say, I only sell authorized products. If they were good and legal, they would say, I don't sell

banned products, right? And so when Jewel was banned for that like couple of week period, they would have not had Jewel on their shelves. But then when that ban was overturned, they would be fully legal to put Jewel back on the shelf. And then once Jewel, if they get authorized, they would be able to keep it on their shelves. Now, there are big chains and something like, you know, Walmart doesn't sell jewel, but they would never sell some illicit vape that doesn't have FDA, isn't in good standing with the FDA, huge regulatory risk. And the FDA can levy fines against individual retailers. And they have. They've gone into corner stores and said, that vape right there, that's illegal. We banned that. You shouldn't be carrying that. You should have looked it up in

our database before you bought that and put it on your store shelves. Here's a fine for $1,000. And for a lot corner stores it's like yeah that's a lot of money so but there's tens of thousands of corner stores and the FDA does not have the manpower the money the resources to go and enforce that door by door exactly because they only set up this tobacco control center like you know i mean 2008 was when they got granted the authority and then it took years to get the funding and hire people most of the people are scientists who are looking at the data behind jule and these applications they're not necessarily field agents, so they don't really have the muscle to go door to door. And so it's been, it's been very tricky to enforce that. And that's why now it's estimated, no one really

knows, but it's estimated that the illegal vape market is the second largest nicotine market in the United States after cigarettes. Jesus. Jesus. Just changing the name like that, just basically. God damn. Where is, what are we talking about when we're talking about like non-vapor, non-smoke products like this versus like vapor have people moved on from the vapor movement or is it still vapor is still huge okay because it feels like it is it is declining um and a lot of that's due to enforcement so the fda just created a new framework so you know how i was mentioning that like they have the they've had the ability to ban imports with a certain company name they're now switching to you have to have an authorization number i forget what the exact term

is it's some big long acronym, but when you go to the port, you're bringing in a vape, you have to give them your FDA approved number, even if you're not fully authorized, at least you're in good standing. And so the FDA is shifting from basically from a blacklist to a white list. That's great. Yeah, should be a huge improvement. And everyone wants this to happen. It's interesting because the FDA wants it to happen because obviously it's bad for public

health if people are using, you know, dangerous products that aren't even trying to be in compliance with the FDA. Big Tobacco wants this because they don't like the competition. They want people buying Enjoy or Jewel or whatever they have ownership over. The anti-smoking non-profits want this because they don't want people using illicit products. And a lot of these products do target underage users. A lot of the corner stores that they're sold in don't necessarily card. And so it's been like a rare case where a lot of different organizations have aligned around putting kind of the end.

like maybe we're in the early innings of the beginning of the end of like the illicit vapor market but you're right that that the that the categories are growing at different rates and an e-cigarette and vapor is declining not by a ton maybe five or ten percent a year cigarettes are also declining about 10 percent a year and then smokeless is growing at maybe 10 20 percent a year it's all obviously anecdotal but it just feels like you know I don't know five or 10 years ago, I would be at a party. I'd see so many people with e-cigarettes. It feels like, I mean, just Sunday, we were all,

we were all together and everyone pulled out pouches. And I'm like, wow, there's been a real shift. You know why? Because they rock, dude. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely been a big shift in terms of culture. Like, just the culture of Zinn and the modern oral nicotine pouch. It's really broken through the Zikis. Now, Zin was created 10 years ago, 2014, was the name.

They launched, right? Yeah, Swedish match is the company. They have a headquarters in North America as well, but it's owned by Philip Morris International, which is a huge conglomerate. Yeah, whatever the online culture is, has propelled it into. Yeah. I mean, do you have any insight on how that even happened? I don't, all of a sudden there was just the internet.

Totally, yeah, the internet's a great, great term. And it's influencer. Yeah, I think right now there's a big narrative. the media that like this was this was all so methodically thought out by the big tobacco companies to like get the next thing to work but I don't really buy it like I met some of these people and I think the days of you know big tobacco creating the Marlboro man are gone I don't think that they employ those types of marketers anymore I think those those marketers it was big in the 60s in the madmen era because it was seen as the biggest industry, the coolest industry. It wasn't

immoral to go work for them. Then over the last 30 years with the master settlement agreement and these billion dollar fines, these companies have completely shifted their cultures to be focused. They're run by lawyers now. And so when you think of, when you think of Zinn, you know, there is no Marlboro man. What is their tagline, right? Like, I, I think it's technically find your Zen, which is a reference to find your Zen, because it was like a Zen reference, but like you've seen who uses this stuff. Are they Zen Buddhists? No. It's frat boys, right? It's, yeah. So they were able to break through there, but I don't, like, if you went into Swedish match in 2014 and you were able to dig through all their, all their, you know,

documents, I don't think that they have a slide deck out. there that says, oh, yeah, in 10 years, Tucker Carlson's going to be hanging out with the knelt boys and, like, promoting this. Like, I don't think they had that much foresight. I think what actually happened was they realized that there's this continuum of risk that if they want to keep selling nicotine and keep their business going, they need to get away from cigarettes. Cigarettes are political issue.

They're expensive. Like, people are waking up to the fact that they're bad. They're not smoking them as much. They're getting really expensive. There's a million reasons why. And so these companies wanted to ultimately get smokers to quit smoking, which sounds crazy because it's like their core business. But if they can launch a product that replaces it and doesn't cause cancer, then they have

the best thing ever, right? Because then they have a great business model, leverages all their supply chain and their distribution, but it doesn't come with any of the moral baggage. It becomes like coffee. Exactly. Caffeine, which is kind of where that's still the fucked up thing for me is accepting or are believing that these pouches are, I say this very carefully,

they're virtually harmless, except that they raise your blood pressure a bit. Well, can we talk about that before just saying that? Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I mean, from your, like, yeah, we've talked about the harms of cigarettes and the, and vapor and e-cigarettes and all that. Like, let's talk about what is in, you know, in Lucy and in Zinn and whether or not they are, I don't want to say healthy.

I'm not going to say healthy. Well, I'm not going to say that they're healthy. I don't know what other words. I don't think it's healthy for your blood pressure to go up like that, especially when you're someone like me who's... But it's obviously better than those other products. But what is actually in... Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty simple formulation.

Tobacco-free nicotine is the main one. Like, you have to extract the nicotine from the tobacco plant completely. There are two ways to do this. One is just take the tobacco leaf. You grind it up, centrifuge it, you know, treat it until you've separated these things out. If you ever done a centrifuge experiment, you take the test tube and then the different elements are at different kind of columns in the test tube, kind of like that. But you're extracting the pure nicotine from the tobacco plant, getting rid of all the carcinogens.

You can also synthesize nicotine, doesn't even use the tobacco plant at all. And of course, if you're not introducing carcinogens, then you shouldn't have any cancer risk. there are a ton of different studies on like the health impacts of nicotine and it's a very controversial issue right now like there's there's a lot of people out there that are like it's amazing it's so good and then there are lots of people that are like it's terrible it's brain poison and I think that the the answer is kind of in the middle like I think it's obviously a huge upgrade that these that you're able to remove the carcinogens like that that's obviously such a big upgrade over cigarettes but I don't think that the coffee comparison is perfect

because they are more addictive than coffee, and it's because they have a shorter active half-life. And so if you ever notice, if you drink, you know, a red bull and it's 100 milligrams or something, if you drink it at 3 p.m., that might throw off your sleep, right? Because the half-life of caffeine is like eight hours. Right. And so you feel it later into the day.

That can be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on your sleep schedule or how long you're trying to work. But with nicotine pouches, the half-lifes maybe 45 minutes. And so that's why you'll see a lot of people chain smoking, right? They finish one cigarette and then they're like, okay, the nicotine's out of my system. I need more. And so the short of the half-life, the more addictive of the product. So cigarettes are extremely addictive because you breathe it in.

You get the hit extremely quickly. Nicotine absorbed through the lungs hits your brain faster than if you injected it into your arm. Like it's extremely fast. Now, oral nicotine is a little bit slower. but we're still not talking caffeine level. So these products are addictive and it is fair to say that nicotine is more addictive than caffeine. But I think in general, you know, I feel quite confident about the product just because I don't think it will take any years off my life. So are you guys using synthetic nicotine or are you guys?

So we actually use both. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, there's tradeoffs between the two. Like tobacco-derived nicotine, obviously it's cheaper. and it's more abundant because there's like tobacco fields all over the world. But there's a big question about like should we be using like our fertile lands to grow tobacco? Maybe we should use that to grow like, I don't know, corn or, you know, rice or whatever else.

And then with synthetic, obviously there's, you know, it's more expensive but doesn't have any of the kind of like environmental concerns. Right. If it's manufactured effectively. And it comes carcinogen-free apparently. Yeah, exactly. I mean, but both can be tested for purity. And I mean, they've tested Zin for all sorts of stuff. Okay, so outside of the nicotine, what is in there?

Yeah, so cellulose, which is like plant fiber, basically, like if you use one of these pouches and then you spit it out. Oh, that's just what it's wrapped in. Yeah, it's not wrapped in it. That's like a paper material, but the actual like bulking agent inside. So when you spit one out, you've noticed that like you got all the flavoring and nicotine out of it, but there's still something there. Like, what is that?

That's just like filler. That's cellulose. basically just ground up plant plant fibers so you take a tree you grind it up it's like basically like sawdust almost but but extracted even further and then there's a few other things like pH boosters because nicotine needs to be absorbed through an alkaline environment can't absorb an acidic environment this is why there's no nicotine beers or nicotine energy drinks like that seems like a really hold on that's our idea we call that one it's impossible it's impossible says you yeah yeah come on I mean people have raised money for that and they've and they've tried to build companies around it and science just yeah yeah god

the tech just isn't there it just isn't there people have tried different micro encapsulation stuff but it seems like an obvious thing because if you look at what happens better than smoking cigarette cannabis and CBD there are drinks they're you know gummy bears and bars like we put caffeine and TC and alcohol and like everything basically uh why not nicotine you think people would have come up with that already but it actually is impossible from a biological perspective And when I'm talking about just going back on the safety, in quotes, like, Nicorette's been around for decades. Yeah. And you never hear, or at least I could be totally ignorant.

I'm ignorant about all of this, but I feel like if Nicorette were a major cause of oral cancers and stuff, we would have heard about it by now. And it would have been, it would be like, hey, yeah, Nicorette's okay, but just be sure to not stay on it, you know? Yeah. yeah i mean that's literally what gave us the confidence to start the company we didn't want to start a company where it would be like oh we wind up doing a bunch of harm down the route yeah i've been trying to get funding for i'm trying to do uh recreational patches and um there's just not extremely long half life extremely long half life because it's it's it's it's delivered so slowly it's even less addictive yeah yeah i just don't see patches coming

back no yeah they're not as cool you can't whip them out of the party and go anybody want to smack this on your arm Unless you made like a ring or a bracelet or something, that might be cool. Somebody might try and do it. But again, but it's very hard to launch that problem. And you use your own shit, obviously. Yeah. Okay.

No. No. See? So how did you get into this? Yeah. I mean, my co-founder was quitting smoking and it studied, and my other co-founder had studied the nicotinic receptor at Caltech and they'd kind of done the biotech side of business and saw that.

the product was that there was like an opportunity in this space to have a much larger impact than going to biotech route. Yeah. Like he was working on cancer drugs and it was like if there was a blockbuster outcome, you would help maybe 5,000 people avoid cancer or something like that. But I mean, we've helped like over 10,000 people. Well, you helped me truthfully. A guy at my gym turned me onto your gum.

Yeah. I'd never heard of it before. And yeah, I tried it and I, I was still smoking because I liked them. But yeah, I just, and then I switched over to, don't kill me, but I went over to Zinn. There you go. And do you, do you use Zinn at all or are you just your own product? I've tried it. I like our product more.

Interesting. You like the flavors, huh? The flavors and also, I mean, we developed a product that has a capsule inside. Oh, yeah. So the capsule, you crack it and it moistens the pouch. And this is kind of like a general trend in the category around like a version two of the pouch, which is more moist because the dry pouches are what's in America right now, but they're not the most popular internationally. So I think there will be a revision in the industry to moist pouches. What's your plan? Are you guys going to like try to go public or is your goal to sell to an Altrio or Philip Morris?

Or at this point, I'm sure that there are probably some CPG brands that may even start to want to be interested in. Because if nicotine starts to lose the stigma as the continuum of addiction, what was it called? The continuum of risk, yeah. I don't think, I don't think there, like, there used to be a big crossover between food and tobacco products. Like R.J. Reynolds was a big one. They bought Nabisco and there's this big merger. It's Barbarians of the gate. It's a big, big, like the biggest LBO of all time, a big private, private equity deal with KKR.

But the business models have never gone that well together. They're not actually that synergistic. They distribute through different channels, gas stations, versus like grocery stores. It's just a different world, a very different production methods, different regulatory bodies. Obviously, there isn't as much synergy as people think. So I don't think that's one. I think we have an advantage just to staying independent. We have currently have the longest tenured CEO in the entire tobacco industry.

Whoa. And it's not you. No, it's my co-founder. Oh. He's been CEO of this company for eight years, and every other big tobacco company has turned over their CEO, like, every four years. And so there's, like, this compounding advantage to being a company that has never sold a cigarette,

but is still, like, in it for the long term, run by the founders. And that compounding advantage, I think, just gets more and more powerful. How many employees do you guys have? We have, like, 10 right now? It's pretty small. Wow, that's incredibly small. Yeah. 10?

Something like that, yeah. Wow. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Holy shit. And where do you rank? I mean, a lot of it's like if we, if you go and sell a product, you could, like, one guy could sell a million dollars in the product.

Yeah. Like if they just say, like, put it in all these chains, like call someone and push it. So, I mean, there are lots of people working on the manufacturing side and there are lots of people working on the retail and distribution side. But in terms of like the actual company, it's very thin. And how did you guys avoid the same supply constraints that Zinn has? Is it just because Zin is just so. insanely popular right now yeah for sure that i mean we we honestly scaling production is really really hard for

everyone and the entire industry is kind of out of stock right now honestly um mostly because uh the the category did grow beyond expectations and then uh the swish match team wasn't able to keep up and um and i think their their projections might have just been off but they they they kind of missed on their own forecasts and so um yeah so we so all the brands that had slack capacity kind of maxed out and grew a ton and then um and then they eventually hit their capacity as well so basically everyone's that capacity you can't underestimate people's love for nicotine yeah it's more just like because it it's like the actual nicotine usage rate in america isn't really climbing it's more just that zin's popular and so people are switching from dip and chewing tobacco and

vapes and cigarettes and I feel like it's important to note humans have enjoyed nicotine long before 50,000 years people started like companies started just mass producing yeah uh cigarettes I mean like there was not a really like tobacco was not an epidemic in our so Tucker Carlson is right about what it was yeah what is it is I don't know what he says well that's the thing is everything is such a culture war thing that as soon as he sort of said I like Zin and Zin are good it kind of it even works on me where it subconsciously becomes like oh okay now zin's and by virtue of the fact that it's kind of a frat so it took tucker carlson to say it's like okay now the republicans own that well how did it because do you have any insight on like the right it became

like a weird right wing thing almost yeah i mean like going back to like the like how zin became popular it's really just like they they created a better product something that tasted better it and then like the fact that it didn't contain carcinogens was like a little silver lining they were again they weren't able to market it as something that is better for you than smoking yeah they I weirdly they can make that claim about general snooze which is also owned by the same company that created zen general snoo has the carcinogen it does but they got what's called a mrtp modified risk tobacco product approval so you can think about these the FDA approvals kind of as like three tiers. Tier one is PMTA. That just says, look, it's legal for you to sell it. You have to

put a label on it that says it's, you know, an addictive chemical. You can't say it helps you quit smoking. You can't say it's better for you than cigarettes, but you can sell it if it's 21 plus in a store, blah, blah, then there's the MRTP. This allow, this is the modified risk tobacco product application. And that lets you say this is less harmful than cigarettes. That's great in my opinion. And I want our products to get there. I want Zinn to get there. I want every product where the science says that. I want the regulation to match that. And if that's not the case, then I don't want those approvals. I don't want more harmful cigarettes somehow sneaking in there. Right. That'd be terrible. And then the third tier is that smoking cessation aid,

the drug classification. That's the Nicarat. And Nicarat can make that claim. Now, Swedish Match, the company that owns Zinn climbed those two hurdles with their previous product general snooze and that is just loose leaf tobacco ground up wrapped in a pouch they brought it to America they got approval for the PMTA legal for them to sell it and then they got MRTP legal for them to say this is less harmful than cigarettes kind of weird because it's not the healthiest product in my opinion like I personally would never use it but um I think they're right and I think the FDA made a good call. I think that that product is less harmful for you than cigarettes, and so I think it's good. And my hope is that there is enough, you know, scientific resource

to evaluate all the products in the market because I think we'll do very well. Now, I can't say that, oh, we are less harmful than cigarettes today, but I want to get there. It's going to take years and millions of dollars. Question. Is there a push from companies like you to get that classification? Oh, 100%. Yeah. Because then you can go out and say, we are, we know, that nicotine is like safe kind of thing? No, you just say it's less harmful than cigarettes. But you don't feel comfortable at this point. I legally can't say it.

Yeah, but yeah. Right. But personally, you feel that way. Oh, yeah, of course. I wouldn't start the company unless I believe that we would eventually get there. You wouldn't be sticking them in your damn out. Exactly. It's been a very confusing thing for me.

I'm like, naturally very skeptical. And when all this was getting popular, I was like, there's no way. There's no way. There's like, and we've, we were looking. stuff when we were preparing for the episode and I've seen doctors be like yeah the real risk is addiction and I'm like there's no other real it's fucking pleasing there there are other risks right like so there's the bigger question of like is nicotine good or bad and then but but just in terms of risk I mean there's obviously acute risk like nicotine can just like caffeine if you take

you know 100 milligrams of it you can acutely die like it can kill you in the moment if you'd chugged a bottle of it or something or like got it all over your skin like you know that that would be bad um and and then yeah like addiction has a number of different things there's like the mental cost of like having to prioritize something in your life having to think about this thing instead of work that could make you money or something financial cost is very real there are a number of different things um the i i think the industry is right now just focused on getting away from cancer because cigarettes are so bad right so bad it's like it's like if we you know we're smoking our coffee beans every morning like we would also be getting cancer from that like we got away from we

we just got to get away from like burning ash and like inhaling burning ash well so what was it that when people were doing dip and stuff like that what was it causing them cancer and there's just carcinogens in the actual tobacco that's getting into their nitrosamines yeah that's what scared the shit out of me with these is I'm like so many of these story of the jog yeah so many of these young that from the smoking stuff uh when i was a kid that's what affected me the guys without jaws and stuff and so like seeing all these uh young men putting zins in their mouth i'm like aren't you guys scared of losing your jaw totally and then yeah i started yeah but then i'm smoking and i'm like aren't you guys scared yeah i mean there there is one scientist out there who

believes that it doesn't believe that nicotine causes cancer but he believes that he believes that if you have cancer, nicotine can accelerate tumor growth, which is interesting. It's not a scientific consensus, and it wouldn't make it a carcinogen, but it would definitely be something that if that was proven true by the scientific community, it would cause kind of a re-evaluation. But then again, if you walk into a doctor's office and you're like, I have cancer, like, they're probably going to be like, stop zinning. Yeah.

Yeah, like also stop drinking like Celsius all day or whatever. right i'm sure doctors aren't like soup maybe or something doctors aren't telling pregnant women it's okay to zin yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah pregnancy is another thing obviously you're gonna stay away from all all stimulants even coffee i like to say that these things just whenever people ask me like my mom for instance was like so what is it do i just like to say it makes me feel scared for like for like 20 minutes because that's what it does for me it does increase anxiety 90% of the time i i have it in my mouth and i'm like god i feel so scared and anxious right now. Oh yeah, it's this thing in my mouth. And then I spin it out and then like 40 minutes later, I'm like, I got to get another man. I got to put another in my mouth. And you're over

there putting in the eight, eight milligrams. How do you not, how do you not, what's your secret, man? So, so I, there haven't been a ton of studies about nicotine and anxiety, but I do think that it increases anxiety because it's a stimulant. Like all stimulants just kind of jack you up and that's an anxiety response. Now there's a question about like, you know, what, what is the cost of anxiety and how bad is that? I think of a very low, like, not anxious person. So that's your secret is. So maybe my nicotine regimen hasn't changed that.

John's a Chiller confirmed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Your baseline is you're an emotionally healthy person. But I do, I do wonder if you, I mean, first off, like, no matter how anxious you are, if you're smoking cigarettes, you should definitely quit smoking cigarettes. But the question about, like, for someone who's only using tobacco-free nicotine, if they have an anxiety problem, yeah, they should wean down.

Yeah. Yeah, that's why I'm on the, when I have them, I've got the three or the four. Because I have, there was a guy from your company who watches our show. I'll have to find him.

He reached out to me on. Adam? I can't remember. And I'm sorry, Adam, if that's you. But he was like, hey, man, I noticed that you, you do, you do Zins. I'll send you some free breakers.

and he sent me, I was like, okay, which flavor do I get? Because you don't have the one of the gum. I was doing the grape berry, very, yeah, great flavor. And he had me do the coffee-flavored breakers in there, four milligrams. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, well, I think we're just about out of time. Cool.

John, thank you so much. I really admire not only your, the scope of, your knowledge about this subject, but the business as well, the history behind it, and your enthusiasm for it. Because anybody who's enthusiastic about anything that they're in, it's infectious, and I admire it. And so, yeah, thank you. Yeah, this is very informative. We're going to have to have you back on and talk some more stuff. This is very fun. So thank you for coming on. It's a real treat. Yeah, thanks for having me. Oh, and where can people find you and you plug

plug whatever you want to plug. Yeah, I'm usually just John Coogan on social media. I post mostly on Axe and YouTube and then the website's lucy.c-o if you're trying to put down the cigarettes.

There you have it, folks. Come on over. God bless America. We'll see you in the bonus.