I smoked for 40 years. Now I'm 190 days clean — and somehow going viral on TikTok.

They call me PawPaw. I’m a U.S. Army veteran. You may have come across me on TikTok recently.

My handle is @real1jackson. About six months ago, after more than 40 years of smoking, I decided I was done.

I didn’t tell anyone. I just stopped.

Then, a few days later, with no real plan, I picked up my phone and made a TikTok. Then another one. Then another.

I started at Day 1. Today I’m at Day 190. And the internet won’t stop watching.

In my Day 175 video, I laid out my three reasons for quitting...

And then I said this, on camera...

And one of those people was my son.

That's him on my left — Dr. Chris Jackson, PharmD. A Doctor of Pharmacy. The founder of Betterbrand. And the kid who watched me try to quit my whole life.

I made another video earlier in the series — much earlier — that I still have a hard time watching back. I called it "Apologies to My Children and My Grandchildren."

Here's the part I don't think I let myself feel for 40 years: the people I love spent four decades hugging a man who smelled like cigarettes. My kids. My grandkids. Every goodnight. Every holiday. I'm the one who carried that smell into the house, and I'm the one who has to own it now.

That's me.

Now I want to tell you why this one matters.

I served in the United States Army. I bought my first pack of cigarettes overseas, in uniform, in Germany. 26 cents.

That pack turned into 40+ years of smoking.

U.S. Army

Germany

Home from service

The '70s

30 years in

My kids grew up watching it. The cough in the morning. The pack in the truck console. The way the smell got into the upholstery, the curtains, the hugs goodnight. The way I’d step outside on holidays and stand alone in the yard.

They watched me try to quit. More than once. Many more than once.

They watched the work my chest was doing when it shouldn’t have had to.

Chris will tell you that’s a big part of why he became a pharmacist. He thought the medicine could fix it. He thought there had to be a protocol.

The medicine helped. It helped a lot of people. But for me — and for a lot of the folks I came up around who were also lifelong smokers — it wasn’t enough on its own.

So in 2019, Chris started Betterbrand, and the first thing he built was a daily lung-support supplement called BetterLungs.

It's built around mullein leaf — an herb people have leaned on for respiratory comfort since Greek and Roman times — dosed and tested by a pharmacist. We've made BetterLungs in a few different formats over the years: gummies, drops, and a nasal Reset Stick.

The newest one is a pear-flavored gummy. I keep a bag on my counter and chew one every day — it’s the easy part of what I’ve started calling my “lung reset.” The quiet daily work of giving these lungs a hand after 40 years.

For my dad, the daily setup is our Quit Smoking Support Bundle — Mullein + Chlorophyll drops paired with our nasal Reset Sticks. The drops live next to his coffee. A Reset Stick rides in his pocket for when the urge hits.

See what I take

See what I take

Across the whole BetterLungs line, over 836,000 people have ordered one.

But Chris didn’t build it for them. He built it for the man in those old photos. His dad. The one who needed to give his lungs a hand after all those years.

And then, at Day 190, I did it.

I made it to Day 190. I’m walking new trails, finding new parks, and breathing a little easier on each one — and a lot of that, honestly, comes down to the daily work of looking after these lungs. If you’ve smoked for any stretch of time, or someone you love has, this is what my son built BetterBrand for.