Only worse.
We're raising capital to fund the first public health campaign in the U.S. to make mindless scrolling as taboo for young kids today as smoking.
Co-led by the creative minds behind the campaigns credited with reducing teen smoking from 30% to 2%.
"A toddler scrolling TikTok. His mother takes the phone back to scroll herself. He wails. The bus crosses a bridge. For one second, his gaze breaks loose and he sees the river."
You only get 18 summers with your kid.
We don't need more research. We need action.
Tobacco. Drunk driving. Secondhand smoke. Every modern harm at this scale was solved by public health campaigns. Doomscrolling is the next one.
What scrolling has done to a generation.
In 1998 the tobacco industry was forced to pay $206 billion into a settlement that funded the campaigns that took down its own product. Today, Meta is being sued by 42 state attorneys general for the same playbook on a new product. The campaigns are the missing piece — and the settlement money will fund them.
Tobacco line: actual CDC data on U.S. youth smoking, 1964–2024 (peak ~36%). Doomscrolling line: teen daily compulsive social media use, rising since the 2007 iPhone era to roughly 85% today (Pew, Common Sense Media). The dashed segment is the projected drop — if the campaigns get built and run.
Truth didn't reduce teen smoking by accident — it was funded by the settlement and ready when the moment broke. The Meta verdicts are landing. The campaigns need to be ready.
The first hero film, the first billboards, the first cultural moment — built with the same craft tier that gave Truth its bite. The work is what moves the needle. Everything else is in service of the work.
Truth ran on broadcast, billboards, and youth events. We're running the same playbook through creators, vertical video, group chats, and the platforms the harm lives on. Same strategy, modern media.
Culture gets shifted by storytellers.
Every campaign that has ever shifted a generation's behavior — Truth, MADD, Brain on Drugs, Tips From Former Smokers — succeeded because it engineered ideas with the structural properties to replicate, mutate, and survive across millions of human minds. We treat that science as the work itself.
A meme survives only if it can be passed by one stranger to another in a single breath. "Phones are this generation's cigarette." Nobody needs a citation to repeat it. Compression is the first test.
Strong memes survive their carriers reshaping them. "Friends don't let friends drive drunk." "Just say no." "Real men don't smoke." The core idea holds while the surface mutates across contexts. If it dies on first contact with a remix, it wasn't strong enough.
The strongest memes lodge for a generation. "This is your brain on drugs" still triggers recognition forty years later. We engineer for that half-life. The campaign is a virus we want to leave running for thirty years.
I'm 22. Old enough to read the empirical research, sit in donor meetings, and translate strategy across generations. Young enough to know — viscerally — what it felt like to grow up as the first generation handed an infinite scroll at 11. I am the bridge between the adult strategists who built every great public health campaign and the youth audience this campaign has to reach.
The playbook isn't theoretical. The people who ran it will help us in running it again. The team could not be better suited to solve this problem.
Depth of experience operating creator-first companies reaching millions of young people. Not theorizing about Gen Z — operating in their feed.
Truth worked because culture moved. Culture moves because creators move it. We're already plugged into a powerful network of people like Jesse Itzler.
"These guys are brilliant."
Alex Sutton · President, Jesse Itzler's officeThe architects of the campaign that took teen smoking from 30% to 2% are building this with us. Not advising from the sidelines. Building.
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42 states plus DC have filed legal action against Meta over harm to youth mental health. The case is no longer being made — it has been made.
Donor support, foundation grants, philanthropic capital. The work is privately funded until the industry pays. If you can move a check, this is where the leverage is.
Filmmakers, designers, writers, comedians, musicians. The campaigns get made by the most creative minds in the world.
The algorithm is taking both, one scroll at a time. Help us take them back.