In Alex Slater’s ideal world, everyone would eat well, go to the gym, take creatine, work hard, get married, have children, and never watch porn. At age 20, he has visions for a society ruled by entrepreneurs like himself, one where people are wealthy, healthy, and free from vice. Someday, he wants to be prime minister, to “American-ify” London, and to “transform [the U.K.] to its former glory.”

He’s starting with porn. Slater, blond and with cheekbones like Barry Keoghan’s, is a founder of Quittr, an app that for $30 per year promises to kick porn addictions using one of the human brain’s strongest motivators: shame. Should a Quittr user consider watching porn, they can click on the app’s most used feature, a big red panic button that immediately triggers their phone’s front-facing camera and prompts pleas like “What’s your excuse this time?” and “You’re going to regret it like you always do.” Since its launch in August 2024, the app, which also includes the option to block NSFW websites and apps, has been downloaded 1.5 million times, according to Slater, and brings in more than $500,000 per month, despite having taken only ten days to build and with upstart costs of $3,000. “I know that we’re gonna spark a cultural shift in men. I know that,” he says. “In the past, you see people wearing bird masks to avoid the plague, and you’re like, They are so silly.’ I think people will look at porn users the same as well. Why would you want to nerf your human ability?”

Like many guys who grew up online, Slater’s crusade is motivated not by religion but by the modern preachers of YouTube, manosphere and manosphere-adjacent gods like Chris Williamson, Scott Galloway, Hamza Ahmed, Iman Gadzhi, and the Andrews (both Tate and Huberman), who believe porn addiction is a huge problem for Gen-Z men. They think porn is one of the reasons zoomers socialize and date less, and that its use is both a symptom and an accelerant of a loneliness crisis among men. People have been looking at erotica for millennia, but the fiercest manosphere critics argue that the accessibility and sheer volume of internet porn on view for kids who don’t remember life without smartphones has been uniquely damaging. “We are living in a world of cheap dopamine,” Slater says. “Instead of talking to real girls, we’re just going online and watching pornography, and that suffices the same urges. It just makes men weak.”

January was Quittr’s best month ever. While FaceTiming from a Miami high-rise overlooking a crystal-blue pool, Slater tells me he has been porn free for six months after a relapse over the summer and is living the Gen-Z influencer-founder dream, flitting between London and Miami thanks to an O-1 visa, which allows non-Americans with “extraordinary ability” to live and work in the U.S. When he’s not working on the app, he makes YouTube vlogs like “pov: you and your friends make $100k/day” and “i was broke a year ago, now i live in a $10m mansion. (i’m 19).” These videos have each netted fewer than 10,000 views, but eventually he wants to be the next Logan Paul (“I feel like that’s kind of missing from YouTube right now.”) Talking to girls has never been a problem, either. In December, he was dating a woman he met at a club; by January, he’d started seeing a woman from his hometown in Surrey, England, and broken up with the ex. (She was toxic, he says: “My wife would never be like that.”)

The story of Quittr is less a story about people setting out to solve problems they themselves experienced than about young men capitalizing on a deep generational fear: There is something fundamentally wrong with them because they were the first children to grow up with unlimited access to porn. “I won’t lie to you. When we started this, we were trying to figure out a way where we didn’t have to get a job,” says Connor McLaren, Slater’s 23-year-old American co-founder. “We were like, How can we build an app to make money? Then as I realized how large the issue was, that’s when it became more of a passion project, like, How can we help men actually become men again?” When I met him at a café in Soho in December, he had just finished reading Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man and was in the middle of 75 Hard, the viral self-improvement challenge that involves two-a-day workouts, not drinking, and following a diet for two and a half months straight. “My wife is somewhere in this city,” he says; his type is a “brunette, bitchy hard worker” who does Pilates. (“You can’t be lifting, you gotta be doing Pilates.”) Both Slater and McLaren speak of their future spouses as though they know them already and seek out career-oriented women who will seamlessly transition to full-time motherhood when the time comes. “I just personally think it’s ‘provider’ and ‘nurturer,’” McLaren says.

They grew up in the suburbs. McLaren attended a Jesuit high school in Washington, D.C., while Slater says his grandparents were millionaire entrepreneurs. The origin of the Slater fortune is unclear (says Slater: “I think he invented the collar on the shirt; that’s what I was told”) but was allegedly squandered in a Nigerian internet scam. Slater’s father is the English DJ Gat Decor, known for the 1992 house single “Passion.” McLaren had just graduated from Villanova University when he and Slater connected through Y Combinator’s virtual co-founder-matching platform, where aspiring entrepreneurs can find goal-aligned collaborators with complementary skills. At the time, McLaren had been trying to build a fitness app that took people’s money if they didn’t work out that day. He and his other partners and investors put between $20,000 and $30,000 into the project, which “failed tremendously.” The two met up at a San Francisco Chipotle in July 2024, when McLaren said that he........

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