Palantir and other tech companies are stocking offices with tobacco products
fortune.com
fortune.com
Just vice signaling all the way down.
Which industry has the most to gain from these products? We’re living in some weird time period where value systems are regressing.
Is the article wrong in this statement?
Like being a selfish prick of a CEO is whatever, wrong but money I get it. But this other stuff like signaling with tobacco? What social media rabbit hole makes tobacco seem like something to spend money on??? Are all these guys actively “twitter poisoned”, like they’re really into this weird shit like excessively worrying about other people’s genitalia or anti christ shit?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...
- when quantifying for gum and patches, it is really hard to conclude that these pure forms of nicotine are any different from caffeine in harms / addictiveness
- cigarettes, or even pure tobacco smoked is definitely addictive and bad due to other compounds in play
- chewing tobacco products are likely a lot less worse than smoking, but still probably worse than pure nicotine gum or patches
- data is very unclear on vaping
IMO experience suggests vaping can clearly be highly addictive (see: young adults and teens), and I know personally there is even some minimal research on vaping e.g. THC that shows that vaping might be worse than just smoking cannabis, so vaping definitely warrants caution in general [though vaping THC requires much higher temps and different solvents, and involves different terpenes and other compounds].
Sesh (2025): Max Cunningham is the Founder & CEO of Sesh, a nicotine pouch startup. In September 2025, Sesh raised $40 million in funding from investors including 8VC, a firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.
David Renteln is the ceo of Lucy. I couldn't find a direct link between Thiel and Lucy, but it looks like Thiel has been friends with Renteln for a while and invested in Renteln's Soylent.
If you need a boost beyond caffeine, consider a square of 95% or 100% dark chocolate. It works. It too stresses the heart mildly, and can aggravate reflux a lot, but overall it's significantly safer than any tobacco product. You can also eat more of it if as needed.
The only sane time to take pure nicotine might be if someone is dying from Covid, their lungs are collapsing, and one desperately needs a daytime breathing boost.
I have paused it for the time being due to reflux, but not everyone has reflux. Note that its strength can build up over days, so do not exceed the amount taken by more than 1 square a week. Overall, do not exceed 1 square per day per 50 lbs of body weight. Overuse can risk a high heart rate and insomnia.
More likely these companies just offered to give them some free vending machines and some office manager said sure why not. Not everything is a careful corporate strategy.
If my boss gives me a stimulant to be more productive, especially a relatively harmless one like nicotine, I would gladly take it, as I like stimulants and am an adult capable of making decisions for myself. If I didn't, I would just refuse, just how I might refuse the free coffee by boss offers me.
I doubt anyone is forcing the employees to take the stimulants. That would be bad, indeed.
Yes, but the important distinction is that its intention is to bring people together face-to-face, not isolate them to their desks for continued work. Just because the end goal is "productivity" broadly speaking, doesn't mean the mechanisms are socially/morally equivalent.
> I doubt anyone is forcing the employees to take the stimulants.
I agree, and I hope my comment didn't imply I thought that was the case.
OTOH, if you've witnessed how most managers talk about their employees to one another, it's with a cold calculating language. Sure, a manager may feel bad for firing an employee, but first and foremost is the business analysis of whether it makes sense to do so - just pure math and predictions.
Personally, if I was in a management position and an employee asked me for a cigarette, I would happily give it to them. In fact, a few times a week I give a few cigarettes to 1 person who is not my employee, but who I talk to from time to time. I don't gain anything from this and I give them cigarettes because they are on a tight budget.
Also, if I, as a hypothetical manager, realized a lot of my employees would take an offer for free coffee, cigarettes, pure nicotine, beer or another drug, I would give it to them as long as it didn't hurt productivity too much. Of course some drugs like alcohol could hurt short term productivity, but it would make them happier overall, which would have positive long term effects. If asked why I do this, I would say that I'm both giving them out of my good will and to increase productivity, which would be true.
It’s just Zyn, which doesn’t seem that dramatically different than coffee. But maybe that’s because I don’t drink coffee or use nicotine
I'm not a doctor though so while I might sound sure it's based on what I've read on the topic over the many years.
Edit : rightly corrected its not just heating and burning, its tobacco and others in general. But nicotine itself is not cancerous.
This is an incredible and outright lie.
Actually try reading the page I linked, there are plenty of links to scientific studies, scientific reviews, and high-quality resources, as well as lots of careful notes about serious confounds in the usual studies. This includes in exactly the sections I linked.
By all means still be cautious and not careless about using the stuff, that is a perfectly sane position. But I think it is very clear that e.g. patches and gum are highly unlikely to have anything even approaching the risk profile of classic tobacco products.
I'm not encouraging anyone to use these things, but we should only make claims that are based on evidence.
Your final statement doesn't really add value without knowing that, unless you agree that we shouldn't assume other people are actually people, and not lizards in people suits until they prove, definitively, otherwise.
But the other day I ended up vaping some melon-flavored liquid. When it was empty, I was going crazy for a few hours, I absolutely had to have more. And it didn't even have more nicotine than what I usually vape. It was just the sweet taste that had me wanting more, exactly like back in my college days when I was eating Snickers bars like no tomorrow. Now that was a habit that was tough to break. And most people I see vaping out in the street seem to be vaping those ultra-sweet smelling liquids.
I've seen multiple friends that could give up an addiction: until after a while and then they couldn't.
For many people, addictions are not that addictive until they are.
Be careful generalizing from your own experiences. Try and learn from the mistakes your (often older) peers have been taught the hardest way.
I've seen it with drinking, vaping, smoking, meth, bad partner, gambling; my friends that weren't hooked, could take it or leave it, and then one day they find they are hooked.
Take care.
bots are very active on HN and are very effective
If we’re talking about smoking or vaping, or nicotine pouches, sure, but mode of administration and how quickly it peaks in your bloodstream cannot be hand-waved away like that.
Got something other than anecdata? Because a web search returns a list of contrary sources as long as my arm.
But, hell, if we are trading stories, I dipped snuff for 30 years and I’ve consumed coffee since middle school. I can go days without coffee, even if I might not be happy about it. Quitting tobacco, OTOH, that was tough, with multiple starts and stops until success.
Here’s from someone that knows what they’re talking about: https://gwern.net/nicotine
Then surely you have some evidence, especially that caffeine is more addictive, rather than "hand-waving it away" via personal anecdote?
If you consider heroine a "not even once" type of drug then nicotine should give you pause.
There is like zero messaging out there from anything resembling a health organization that says, "nicotine in purer forms is okay actually." It's an extraordinary claim that nicotine is super addictive only when mixed with other stuff and if you get the pure concentrated drug that actually lessens its pharmacological effects.
The delivery system modulates speed and magnitude of the hit, which affects how rapidly and how strongly dependence forms, but every form produces dependence with sustained use.
There isn’t anyone who is going to say “nicotine in purer forms is okay actually” because there isn’t anyone who is tasked with answering such a broad question.
Also, be careful not to shift the frame. Spivak ranked nicotine with other drugs. You changed the framing to “all are highly addictive.” These are different assertions, and both can be true at the same time. That’s why it’s more important and more interesting to discuss it in terms of addiction subtypes
Nothing wrong with still being cautious about pure nicotine products though, and I definitely would be cautious about vaping.
But it was also easy to quit by substituting nicotine-free pouches, and withdrawal symptoms only lasted like 3 days.
know thy enemy.
I realize the risk as GLP long term use is untested, but in my case it’s that; or deal with inevitable health problems from high BP and being only moderately overweight.
I don’t see a good reason for nicotine products.
I'm saying nicotine pouches are the tobacco industry's successor to vapes in the way vapes were their successor to cigarettes and some conservatism is warranted in light of that. Or like how every 10-15 years the evidence of health effects of some ubiquitous plastic grows too heavy and 3M comes out with a new one to replace it and the cycle repeats.
Are the Palantir headquarters inside an active war zone?
When i worked in an office with free zoke zero I drank 3 cans per day.
It's not a new phenomenon, either. I remember biohacking being mentioned in the late aughts, if not earlier, and it's referenced as being part of SV culture in the 2012 novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore [0].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Penumbra%27s_24-Hour_Books...
Nicotine (without tobacco e.g. Zyn or gum) does seem to have some nootropic-ish properties but it's vastly inferior to a lot of other things and has major addiction/tolerance problems. It's not a great performance enhancer for anything but very sporadic use.
that said, this is a site run by venture capitalists -- flogging product is a given
The timing as I remember it matches up with ACA passing (optional) and going into effect (mandatory) so may have something to do with health insurer costs related to that. But I don't know enough about it to guess more, just a suspicion.