Amos Barshad

Nowadays the concept of a sober January doesnt feel so exotic. In fact, as known by its pop-lexicon title, Dry January, its practically a brand. According to a YouGov poll, 23 percent of Americans over 18 had plans to attempt a booze-free January in 2019. That would correspond to an astounding 58 million temporary soberers.

How to Be 'Sober Curious' and Still Have Fun

I have what I consider to be a pretty good relationship with drinking. Plainly: Im a fan. I wasnt a young drinking prodigy. It was when I moved to New York, at 21, that I fell in love with bars and the things that can happen in them. I met some of my best friends that year. I also puked more that year, quite possibly, than in the rest of my life combined. Over time, Ive calibrated my intake choices and minorly dabbled in drugs, from gateway to stronger stuff. Its all brought me back to the same initial conclusion: In drinking, I have all the vice I ever need.

And yet Ive been swept up, too: Ive attempted Dry January three years running. Meanwhile, beyond episodic fads, sobriety has morphed into a lifestyle, the sober curious, a term popularized by the author/podcaster Ruby Warrington via her 2018 book of the same name. These people dont just do Dry Januarythey hang out at sober bars, download sobriety podcasts and apps, and consume content from self-branded sober gurus. I feel like alcohol is the new cigarettes, says Warrington. Smoking was completely socially acceptable 20 years ago. Fast-forward a couple of decades and people will drink and use alcohol much differently.

As Dry January has boomed and cross-pollinated into sober curious, its also become divisive. If you have partaken, you know. Some people get it. But turn down a drink during the month of January and someone will declare, as if theyve caught you: Youre doing Dry January? You have to be readyaesthetically, morally, spirituallyto defend your decision.

To me, that makes total sense: The rapid permeation of the sober-curious wave has given it a slight tinge of mass psychosis. Were talking about millions of people, largely people who dont believe they have a drinking problem, giving up the sauce. Why would anyone willingly stop drinking?

Well, okay: You stop drinking because it is, almost surely, not all that great for you. In 2018, The Lancet published what it called the most comprehensive estimate of the global burden of alcohol use to date. Its widely publicized conclusion contradicted years of prior research and general common wisdom and declared, dramatically, that, actually, there is no safe level of drinking. That even one drink a day correlates to an increased chance of health problems. And that more drinking correlates to, yes, more problems.

While some criticized the studys observational tactics and other research points to the potential benefits of moderate alcohol intake, its conclusion resonated widely. Perhaps thats because sobriety is attaining an increased cultural cachet. Sober curious is part of a more general move to open up decision-making trees in various aspects of modern life. People used to be either something or not that thing. But you can temporarily quit meat, or only do gluten when youre partying. Its not just all-or-nothing. Nowadays there are all sorts of gradients. There are so many reasons to choose sober-ish.

To learn more, I belly up to the bar at Redemption in London, where the food is vegan and the drinks are non-alcoholic. And there are sober bars like this across America and, of course, an app, Loosid, to help you find like-minded sober folks. Zoey Henderson, head of ops at Redemption, tells me about how her cocktail menu has moved away from homemade kombucha, shrubs, tinctures, and essences and toward an influx of nonalcoholic plant spirits and bottle brands that replicate gin and rum flavors in cocktails that are a combination of mixology and alchemy.

The Redemption bartenders, Henderson explains, are using older recipes and herbal tonics that give you all those wonderful, positive reinforcements that you look for in a drink. They make you feel a bit buzzy. They make you want to dance. She specifically recommends Redemptions hibiscus sour, a powerful botanical elixir. And as for what a night out at Redemption is like, its exactly the same as a social outing with alcohol, Henderson says, except the toilets stay cleaner, nobody gets rowdy, glassware is smashed a lot lessall the positives, none of the negatives!

Another group of people sliding into sobriety are those on restrictive eating plans. Well-known lifestyle diets like keto and Whole30 famously restrict or eliminate your alcohol choices. I have two very smart scientist friends in Boston: Rachel, who is a physician and scientist at Harvard, and Greg, a scientist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Both are paleo. I use paleo more as a framework for a low-glycemic-index diet, which is the diet that has the most data behind it as being good for overall health, Rachel explains. I do still drink, but being on a paleo/low-glycemic-index diet has made me more conscious in general about what I take in and how I feel after eating/drinking things. For Greg, paleo helps him maintain an overall healthy lifestyle and control in the amount of alcohol I consume. And even when drinking, he stays paleo via grape-based Ciroc. Thank God, he says, for Diddy.

Sean Combs Press Conference to Announce New Business Venture with Diageo North America and Ciroc Premium Vodka

While Greg gets loose on grape vodka, many more are relying on a buzz from a different botanical source, popularized by West Coast rappers like Snoop Dogg. Though the legalization of marijuana has not impacted the sales of spirits, it has illuminated a spectrum of usage that ranges from cross-fading (spirits and weed) to Cali-sober (weed only). Writer Katie Heaney recently chronicled her Cali-sober journey, detailing how smoking marijuana has helped take the edge off cutting back on alcohol. As Heaney told me, I dont necessarily relate to the more wellness-y aspects of sober curiosity. I think its great if anyone wants to drink less. But I think thats a decision most people have to come to on their own, for their own reasons. For some people, having a like-minded community might really help with that, but its just not my thing.

However, data on overall alcohol consumption for the past several years does reveal year-on-year declines, so people are drinking less, especially millennials. Annie Grace, another author/influencer/podcaster, credits social media for this trend and says young people dont want to be embarrassed on a platform that lives forever. I certainly am glad there was no photographic record of what I did in my early 20s.

Its not just about embarrassment, though. As The New York Times put it in a recent sober-curious story: Beyond the health risks, the booze that flows freely at fraternity parties or holiday mixers has started to look to some women like a tool of oppression in the age of radical consent. Grace adds another factor in the decision-making of millennials and Gen-Zers: Their experience with their own parents drinking. It seems that they feel alcohol is their parents drug.

Instead, the kids want to get high on...wellness?! You know, yoga, meditation, adult coloring books, wheatgrass shots, CBD everything, and so much more. Once a person begins the journey into health and wellness, alcohol often sticks out as a sore thumb, says Grace.

I personally didnt dip a toe into the sober-curious pool, via Dry January, because of sober bars, sober gurus, diet, weed, or youth. It wasnt thanks to the sweaty hoops player either, but through the wisdom of someone even more impressive: my girlfriend.

If I were ever to try it, trying it with her seemed like the most palatable option. I thought cutting out one twelfth of my yearly alcohol intake seemed like a pretty good idea. Id save money, lose weight, focus better, blah blah blah.

I succeeded, with pluck and guile, in my first attempt. I found that all the clichs were true. I did want to socialize less. I did want to eat more ice cream. I also found out that, after the first week or so, it got easier. That once I got even a little bit of a head of sober steam, the booze cravings werent crowding my brain. I slept better! I also felt, slightly, like I was living in stasis.

Close-Up Of White Wine Against Yellow Background

There are many reasons to stop drinking, either temporarily or altogether. For me, the reason is this: I need to check with myself that, while I love drinking, I do not need it. And not to get carried away here, but if youre not questioning everything in 2020, as the world tilts on so many axes, maybe youre not thinking hard enough. We should be analyzing our relationships with our coworkers, our romantic partners, our families, our best friends. We should be thinking about our booze.

We can do that in January. Or we can do it whenever. And if its January and were not feeling good about our fast, we can juststop! Years ago, I was with a pal at breakfast, contemplating getting a doughnut. I hemmed and hawed and muttered to myself how it was bad for me. He looked at me and he pointed to his brain and he said something Ive honestly never forgotten: Its good for the mental, though.

Yes, even one drink is bad for you.

But even one drink can be damn good for the mental.

<h1> Use these tips to thrive whether youre doing Dry January or leaning into sober curious. </h1>

<ol><li> If alcohol helps you decompress after work, do another activity that helps you relax. It could be a short workout, like a fitness snack (see page 13), or committing to a daily stroll. Or something more explicitly stress-busting like meditating or writing down whatever is on your mind, says psychiatrist Drew Ramsey, M.D. </li><li> If you enjoy the rituals of drinking, plan your alcohol-free stand-ins at home and out. Think about what you like most about your go-to drink and give yourself alcohol-free options, whether its a nonalcoholic beer or mocktail or seltzer or kombucha, advises Jenna Hollenstein, nutritional therapist and author of Drinking to Distraction. </li><li> If alcohol is your social lubricant, you may need professional treatment. Talk therapy is a proven way to deal with social anxiety, says Dr. Ramsey. Or talk to a doctor about meds. Alcohol calms by enhancing the same neurotransmitter effects as Xanax. </li></ol>

The first time I remember hearing about the concept of not drinking in January, it was with my basketball buddies after a rec game in the East Village in New York City. This was a winter night more than a decade ago, over a table of chicken sandwiches. One guy, who worked in commodities, was explaining to a group of us how, after the excesses of the December holiday season, he liked to take the month off from drinking. To detox. To refresh. To healthify. It felt like a strange secret from a b...

Are You Curious About Going Sober Curious?

Foals — a brawny, dancey, heartfelt rock band — came up in the late 2000s playing hometown house parties and South London squats built out of abandoned hostels. “Chaos,” said Philippakis, 33, gleaming-eyed when asked what he remembered from those days. “And a kind of beautiful naïveté. And, like, I never felt tired.” He smiled. “There was one gig where a whole wall got demolished by fire extinguishers and everyone was on ketamine.”

Philippakis recalled this, over many cigarettes and one sparkling water, on the roof of a Paris venue overlooking the Notre Dame cathedral, a few hours before a recent Foals show. Last week, the band released the second half of a two-part album, “Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost,” that explores the apocalypse by way, abstractedly, of the climate crisis. “The hedges are on fire in the country lanes,” Philippakis broods over spare piano and synths on “I’m Done With the World (&amp; It’s Done With Me),” “and all I want to do is get out of the rain.”

It’s an earnest, audacious project. And it’s right on brand. In the decade-plus since they were playing druggie house parties, Foals have grown into a very specific modern-day anomaly. They’re signed to Warner Bros. and Q Prime management, home to Metallica, Muse and Disturbed. They’ve also been nominated for Britain’s esteemed Mercury Prize three times. They are now one of a spare handful of contemporary, critically acclaimed and commercially viable rock acts.

They didn’t always seem destined for wider audiences. For their 2008 debut, “Antidotes,” Philippakis said he wanted to make techno with guitars: “I almost set out a manifesto. No chords, everything played staccato, really clean.” The result was a wonderfully strange collection of stop-start bangers. Back then, he sang with the microphone facing stage right. Finally, a manager intervened: “You’ve got to start [expletive] facing the crowd.’”

But looking back now, the band always had ambitions. “I was really worried that we were going to have a taste of it and it was going to be taken away,” Philippakis said. “We’d seen a lot of bands in the U.K. get pumped up by the NME and then implode.”

By their second album two years later, “Total Life Forever,” they’d moved away from the obliqueness of their debut and smoothed out the staccato. Soon enough, Philippakis said, “I felt like we couldn’t be erased.” Albums in 2013 and 2015 followed, before this year’s double release. Now they’re gunning for the top slot at the Glastonbury festival. (SkyBet has them as a 7/4 favorite, alongside Paul McCartney and Fleetwood Mac, to headline next year.)

Their live show is purposefully boozy and shambolic. Philippakis likes to clamber onto balconies and other high-rise structures, or to float his way to the bar and slug a shot. “It needs to be almost shamanic,” he said. “The show is a chase: We’re chasing that transcendent moment. You’re getting yourself to the edge of yourself — and then, ideally, losing yourself.”

The guitarist Jimmy Smith, 35, explained how they get there. “Yannis drummed it into us from a really early stage: Play every show like it’s your last,” he said.

There have been times, the 34-year-old drummer Jack Bevan said, that the show got so out of hand, he stopped playing altogether: “I felt like, ‘If I keep four to the floor, he’s going to kill someone.’” Congreave, 35, said their frontman can even wander away from the song: “Sometimes Yannis is doing a solo and he’s kind of — in another world. He’s — playing cosmically. And he’s playing — the wrong notes.”

In the last few years, Philippakis’ climate-change anxiety has started to keep him up nights. Channeling that into the music, he explained, was about trying to engage beyond the immediate concerns of his romantic or filial relationships, the stuff that powered the previous albums.

Philippakis wrote the lyrics for these new albums in a furious month and a half, almost entirely in pubs. He wanted the lyrics to pour out of him. He hoped to archive, naturally, “the insecurities and perils” of what it feels like to be alive today.

Congreave, the band’s in-house cynic, said he’s glad Foals are talking about climate change but added, “We should be running around screaming, not having conversations.” Philippakis, though, said he tries to avoid nihilism and “oh-dear-ism.”: “I’m always looking to convert life into music.” And it’s true; someone has to write the songs that people listen to while they feel bad that the world is falling apart.

Both the double album and the overtures to the climate crisis can also be seen another way: as a grander statement, a shot at a wider relevance. Peter Mensch, a co-founder of Q Prime, has worked with stadium rock bands since the 1970s, and is candid about the band’s place in the firmament. “We’re standing on the SS Her Majesty’s Ship the Album and we’re bailing water as fast as we can!” he shouted over the phone. And while he doesn’t want Foals to change, he believes they can still access a bigger audience.

“There’s a whole bunch of people who are obsessed by Foals,” Mensch said, “and there’s a whole bunch of people who don’t know who they are.” He said he’d love for Philippakis to write a hit. “Chances are that it won’t [happen],” he added. But he wants the band to reach megastardom, “And I will literally die trying.”

The Paris show, an underplay to a 700-capacity room, was packed full of young people. Some were, consciously or otherwise, cosplaying as Philippakis, in loud, short-sleeved button-ups and thin gold chains. They shouted along with him and followed all his commands, including one to crouch down to the floor mid-breakdown on “Inhaler,” then pogo back up.

At the end of the set, Philippakis abandoned his guitar and waded into the crowd. With one hand he held his microphone; with the other he clasped hands with a fan. From between the crush of bodies it was hard to tell if it was for balance, or for that extra oomph of communion.

This article originally appeared in

Foals Are Writing the Soundtrack to an Apocalypse

PARIS — The Foals keyboardist Edwin Congreave met Yannis Philippakis, his future frontman, at an ice cream shop in the English town of Oxford. Congreave had just been hired, while Philippakis was cheekily returning to a scene of a crime: He’d been fired a few weeks earlier for incinerating the shop’s mascot, a polystyrene toy cow, in a toaster oven, to impress a girl. Both also briefly matriculated at Oxford University. “I dropped out because I was an idiot,” Congreave said. “But with Yannis,...

Chatten had to kill the better part of the next 24 hours, waiting for the next flight. He passed the time, he said, by “drinking bad Guinness until it tasted like good Guinness.” In the air, he kept going with plenty of free wine. Eventually, Chatten made it back to Dublin and to his parents’ house — or “gaff,” as he calls it — where he lives between touring.

Later that day, in an interview with his bandmates at a pub near the studio where they rehearse, Chatten had a rolled cigarette in his hand and a Flann O’Brien novel in his overcoat pocket. He recalled that he was still drunk when his dad came to collect him at Dublin Airport. But the old man wasn’t upset at the boozy state of his son, Chatten said: “He joined in when we got home!”

The vagaries of rock band road life may not pair naturally with filial domesticity, but that’s just where Fontaines D.C. is at right now.

A tour for the band’s debut album, “Dogrel,” released in April, has taken Fontaines D.C. all over Europe and the United States. The summer has been a blur of major festival dates, plus a punchy performance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and a nomination for the Mercury Prize, a major British music award.

Fontaines D.C. is an anarchic guitar rock band in a bleep-bloop present. And unexpectedly, it’s become one of the biggest Irish breakout acts in years.

The emphasis is on Irish. The band references Ireland’s famed literary tradition — from the works of giants like James Joyce and William Butler Yeats to lesser-known figures like the poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh — as inspiration. They don’t seem afraid of how unhip that might sound in 2019.

The formula on “Dogrel” is simultaneously timeworn and specific: over guitars and drums, Chatten delivers oblique, compact poems about Dublin. “You know I love that violence that you get around here, that kind of ready-steady violence,” Chatten singsong shouts on the track “Liberty Belle”: It could be a hand sweep toward Ireland’s bloody history, or a nod toward a rough night out in the city.

The band’s five members, all in their early 20s, met as songwriting students at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute in Dublin, and initially bonded over their shared love of those lions of Irish words. The band grew, naturally, out of their friendship and shared interests.

For a few years starting from 2016, they ambled about playing local gigs and shuffling through sartorial phases, they said: In one, no matter the weather, they wore Echo and the Bunnymen-inspired long coats; in another, it was all women’s crop tops.

They spent as much time rehearsing as they did writing verse, bassist Conor Deegan recalled. They’d go to pubs and pass a shared notebook around the table; they self-published chapbooks and slipped them into bookstores. They put on readings with other writers, including a soap salesman-poet they met in Sweny’s, the drugstore that features in Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

“We pounded each other down to our bare emotions,” Chatten said, remembering those times. “And that’s why we’re friends for life. And enemies for life.”

That kind of open intensity and proud sensitivity might explain why a traditional white-dude rock band has hit a nerve, when the world seems to need anything but more white-dude rock.

“I certainly don’t think that there’s any element of machismo” to Fontaines D.C., Chatten said.

“We’d just sit and read books and drink pints and think fancifully,” Deegan added.

Mesmerizing early 7-inch singles like “Chequeless Reckless” and “Hurricane Laughter” caught the attention of the U.S. indie label Partisan Records, which signed Fontaines D.C. in November 2018. Then “Dogrel” was released, and the band’s lives were upended. They were living on rice and Tabasco not that long ago, Deegan said; nowadays, he added, the label worked them to the bone with festival dates.

The band’s last chance for a vacation, a few precious days in Mexico City, was stolen by the offer to play “The Tonight Show” in New York. Their next chance for a break, Conor Curley, a guitarist, mumbled, could be taken away “by a [expletive] gig on the moon or something.”

But the hard work was worth it, Chatten said: Fontaines D.C. wants to give the world a view of Ireland that neither accepts antiquated clichés nor rejects the past.

Even so, the band’s love of Joyce and Yeats is unusual; young punk-adjacent bands aren’t supposed to love dusty books you get assigned in high school. A fellow Dubliner, Sally Rooney — perhaps the most famous young novelist in the world right now — has taken shots at her literary forebears. “I hate Yeats!’ she told the Irish Independent newspaper in 2017. “How has he become this sort of emblem of literary Irishness when he was this horrible man?”

But Chatten said Ireland was “sitting on a gold mine of history.”

“For us to pretend it doesn’t exist is for us to become a whitewashed, faceless country, which means we are essentially robots with particular accents,” he added.

His deep interest in Ireland’s history and culture went back to coming from somewhere else, the singer said. He was born in Barrow-in-Furness, England, though he was raised in Ireland from the age of 9 weeks. “I was insecure about my Irishness,” Chatten said. “I wanted to achieve an understanding and a verification.”

Another band Chatten likes that fixates on Irish things is Girl Band, he said, a Dublin trio whose song “Um Bongo” revolves around a mundane local street snack. “For Girl Band to scream the words ‘chicken fillet roll’ over and over again — it’s so poignant,” he said. “Not all romance has to belong to the past. And if we can accept that as a society, I think we might be happier.” Or at least more romantic. Eventually, the band had to leave the pub. They were meeting with their record label, the drummer Tom Coll said: There was “anxiety-inducing” 2020 business planning to attend to. Before they got up, Chatten took a last gulp of his Guinness, then reached through a forest of empty pint glasses for a takeout menu from a Moscow cafe that was lying on the table. He’d scribbled down some scraps of verse on it during the tour. “I don’t know if you want that,” he said, handing it over.

On the back were scrawled fragments about a “salvaged life to live again” and “heaven through the fog,” “Irish mind” and “Irish eye.” It was a romantic thing to do, to hand over a note covered with half-baked poetry — and perfectly on brand for a band so unafraid of seeming naive.

“Later Sam,” Chatten said to the bartender as he strolled out.

“Yeah,” the bartender answered. “See you on the TV shows.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/arts/music/fontaines-dc.html" id="a73bb8ed-6385-3993-a73a-cb7e78df051d">The New York Times</a>.

Irish Band Channels the Spirit of Punk, and James Joyce

DUBLIN — In one week in July, the Irish rock band Fontaines D.C. went from the Glastonbury Festival to Copenhagen to Barcelona to St. Petersburg to Moscow. At the airport on the way back from that last stop, the frontman, Grian Chatten, wandered off to buy some headphones while the rest of the band got on the plane.

Roman is one of a cluster of new health-care start-ups that want to help men fix themselves. Theres Keeps, which wants to stop your hair loss, and Candid, which wants to straighten your teeth. And then theres Hims. Romans primary nemesis, its the flashiest of the bunch; it wants to fix your hair and your wrinkles and your erection and other stuff, too. And it wants to do this with the breezy, direct-to- consumer model perfected by Warby Parker and Casper. Hims and Roman both boast scores of prominent medical advisors and, with less fanfare, employ bunches of gig-economy doctors paid to do online consultations. And they want, with ease and comfort, to sell you drugs online.

Roman started with the penis. It launched on Halloween 2017 with a staff of five and one product: Sildenafil, the generic name of Viagra. Now Ro has a staff of 100-plus and product lines covering hair loss, premature ejaculation, genital herpes, and enlarged prostates. It also has a vertical, Zero, focused on smoking cessation.

Erectile dysfunction was always a way to build a bond with members, Zachariah Reitano, Romans 27-year-old cofounder, tells me. We never wanted to build an ED company or a mens-health company, continues 36-year-old cofounder Saman Rahmanian. We wanted to build a health-care technology company. Theres no reason that, one day, Roman couldnt provide you, from the comfort of your own sickbed, with the cure for everything.

Saman Rahmanian, one of the cofounders of Roman

Along with Jessica Prager, Romans VP of product, were stuffed around a small, uneven table. Reitano, whom everyone calls Z, is in a tech-logo hoodie. He sits, in proper careless-wunderkind fashion, hugging one knee thats hiked up onto the chair; he does most of the talking. And in accordance with what I come to learn is a theme of this burgeoning mens-wellness industry, Romans origin story came out of his own painful, personal experience.

In a 2017 Medium post, complete with Anchorman GIFs, Reitano charted the saga. I had been like most young men: A light breeze would send me calculating square roots to fend off the consequences of my adolescent mind. Then ED hit at 17. It turned out to be a symptom of a heart condition, one that would recur later in his life, while Reitano was the Entrepreneur in Residence at the NYC venture studio Prehype, where he met Rahmanian.Wed already decided we were going to be cofounders, Rahmanian recalls. We didnt know on what yet. Then one day Z shows up with a heart monitor and we start talking about mens health.

Reitano says how proud he is to build an empire off his own medical condition and, in the process, attempt to break its stigma. He tells me about an armed-forces veteran suffering from ED who was so happy with the treatment he got through Roman that he sent Reitano a personal letter and a medal, which Reitano keeps on his desk. Also presumably helpful in sailing past any stigma: This erstwhile boner-pill company is making money. Within a week, we reached what we thought would take a year in our growth projections, says Rahmanian. To date, Ro has pulled in $91.1 million in funding.

This sudden appearance of a mens-wellness start-up industry isnt a fluke. Its a result both of shifting telehealth laws and of an increasing number of brand-name medications going off-patent. That means the pills are cheaper and (depending on which state you live in) easier to get. Then theres the cultural shift: Young men seem more willing than ever to pay money to take care of themselves. They use terms like wellness and self-care in their vocabulary-regularly. This should be a good thing, because men are less likely to see a doctor than women are, and more likely to minimize their symptoms, according to a Rutgers study.

None of these companies have actually discovered anything new. Theyre repackaging preexisting medicine. Prior to launch, the competition was actually just the status quo, Reitano says with unblinking confidence. Making a doctors appointment in person. Now weve seen this massive increase in telehealth. The best company that will take care of the patients in the best way, get them their medications the fastest, have doctors be the most affordable and convenient and responsible-they will win. Whether its also a win for patients is not so clear.

Zachariah Reitano, one of the cofounders of Roman

Tiffany Zhong, a Gen Z whisperer and the founder of brand-consulting firm Zebra Intelligence, says some of this may be attributable to the ever-looming question of our modern age: How can I make my life look as awesome as the next persons on the Gram? Yet with wisdom beyond her 21 years, she adds, But looking better, feeling better-thats a core human desire.

As an older millennial and therefore a member of the demographic being courted here, I should note that men my age dont need that much of an excuse to try hair-loss or ED cures, especially if we can do it without the friction of human interaction. But there is something else going on here-a chumming of millennial angst.

Himss marketing is, ostensibly, all cheeky fun, an aspirational lifestyle brand. But it highlights the apparent commonality of the problems: 66 percent of men experience hair loss by 35; up to 39 percent experience premature ejaculation; and 26 percent of men under 40 will struggle with ED. Its all in the service of trying to make you feel like you are a lovable idiot who never knew there was something very obvious missing from your medicine cabinet. Roman is shooting for a rep as the fields reliable older brother. It just released an app called Morning Glory: It encourages you to track your morning erections and celebrate them with GIFs! And if you go three days without having one, you can talk to a Ro doctor for free. Looked at another way: It encourages someone who never thought he wanted or needed Sildenafil to go buy some Sildenafil. This riles some health experts.

Theres the millennial FOMO factor, says Drew Ramsey, M.D., a clinical psychiatrist in New York City. Social-media marketing gets some men twisted up. What if sex is better and longer with a mix of pills? Theyre stoking those fears and pitching Viagra and Zoloft as the solution. Thats not medicine.

Start-Ups Exploiting Millennial Insecurities

its overcast the day I visit Hims HQ, in San Franciscos lovely Presidio Park. Cinematically so. Complete with the modern, glass-heavy look of the building, the afternoon gives off the unavoidable air of the final scene of a sci-fi thriller in which the genius scientist/humanitarian turns out to have had nefarious ends all along.

Hims, like Roman, is growing fast; soon itll have to leave its current space within the offices of Atomic, the Peter Thielbacked start-up studio that birthed it. Hims has amassed $97 million in funding and racked up a million dollars in sales in its first week. And, it claims, every week since has been bigger. All the clichd benchmarks of a start-up are here: scooters and longboards at the front door; glass vases of sour straws and gummy bears; the sound of far-off Ping-Pong balls.

I sit in a sunny room full of mini succulents with Adrian Rawlinson, M.D., VP of medical affairs, and Hilary Coles, brand lead. (Founder and CEO Andrew Dudum is in France.) But for the record, heres Himss painful, personal origin story: Some years back, Dudums little sister told him he looked wrinkly and tired, then made him buy $200 worth of products.

Looking back at Himss splashy debut, Coles says, We started with a lot of humor, and that was critical to break the ice. A lot of the eggplant emoji. But we are trying to be more universal versus the masculinnial beige and all the things we were called. Certainly the needs you have as an undergrad are different from if youre trying to start a family. We want to be alongside people our age as they go through all these stages. Continues Dr. Rawlinson: Do you want to learn about cancer prevention? About cardiovascular-disease prevention? We want to provide the whole gamut of care. But were not going to be churning out stuff to make a fast buck.

During my chat with Reitano back at Romans HQ in New York, he told me, Youll see other companies that offer biotin gummies. That is, in fact, a product Hims sells; it claims theyre for thicker hair, stronger nails, better skin. According to Reitano, The FDA says that certain biotin gummies can actually be harmful. They can lead to falsely high or low test [results] and can actually prevent a physician from [diagnosing] a heart attack.

I try a joke, possibly in bad taste.

Romans bubbly publicist laughs, but Reitanos earnestness is utterly unshaken. I do think that companies have a responsibility to only offer products that are clinically proven to work.

Companies like Roman and Hims have great potential but tricky paths. The growth element is clear: Sell more pills for more problems. Its undeniable that theres something appealing about having all our ills handled through discreet online consultations and our medications shipped in elegant packaging. But maybe theres a reason health care isnt as easy as getting a package delivered overnight. We are at a stage of the tech-boom era where we realize we cant let these companies grow without thinking about what they will grow into.

Rob Schutz, one of the cofounders of Roman.

Doctors are concerned that the popularity of telehealth evaluations may lead to a reduction in actual office visits. That carries potentially fatal consequences. For example: You may find that the ED is merely a symptom of a more serious underlying pathology, says Larry Lipshultz, M.D., a professor of urology at Baylor.

Sarah Sossong is the executive who launched the telehealth service at Bostons Mass General Hospital. She now works at the health-care tech investment firm Flare Capital. Sossong knows what her former colleagues would say of Roman and Hims: Mass General is all about your own physicians who know you. They would [dismiss] these types of companies-say its not good clinical care. But she wants to hear the start-ups out-cautiously. Theyre looking at other ways of delivering care, she says. That needs to be emulated. But at MGH, those are really good doctors-if they do anything wrong, it comes from a place of trying to do the right thing. These start-ups are businesses. The medical practice, while core to their business, is not their priority necessarily. Theyre trying to make a buck.

The cofounders of Keeps, Demetri Karagas and Steve Gutentag.

We didnt foresee that Amazon would end up as a monopoly trampling over labor rights. We didnt predict Facebook would be connected to election meddling. But we can see where a cutesy, ambitious telehealth start-up might go tragically wrong. The model is what the model is. This time, we can all envision at least the broad outlines of the dystopia.

Once dudum gets back from France, we catch up over the phone. Its been over a year since the Hims CEO became a start-up superstar, and his salesmanship is on point. He wont say what Hims will offer next, except that it will be prolific. Youll see us do a lot of [conditions] that a lot of people-30, 40 percent of the population-are suffering from. These are important categories for us, as a health-care company, to solve. Likely, its statins for heart health and other drugs for obesity and diabetes.

Just as a thought experiment, I bring up parabiosis, plasma infusions done in the theoretical hope of achieving energy rejuvenation and life extension. Effectively, its rich people buying the blood of the young. Atomic backer Thiel is a Silicon Valley titan associated with it. Considering Thiels connection to the company, I ask Dudum: Would Hims ever consider selling a life-extension therapy like parabiosis?

I couldnt give you the answer, he says. We evaluate all of the treatments based on the highest-quality, longest-duration studies. We try really hard to make sure what were selling is the best in class, best respected, by all physicians. If that mode of becoming more youthful actually proves to be exceptionally efficient and theres ways of bringing it to market in a safe manner...those things are not off-limits.

Above a slice of midtown Manhattan full of proudly stubborn vestiges of a scruffier, older New York-wholesale perfumeries, a hodgepodge of shops selling bedazzled ball caps-sits the headquarters of a start-up company called Roman and its parent company, Ro. A swarm of people sprawl and huddle throughout the dinged-up open floor plan. Whiteboards are filled to the edges with urgent scribblings: Relieve stress. Lets take care. A bubbly publicist finds me and-while unabashedl...

Inside the Start-Ups Getting Rich on Millennial Insecurities

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