First Time Founders with Ed Elson – This Founder Wants to Help Men Have More Sex

0:00Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. Scott, why do you think young men are having less sex? The most well-resourced, brightest people in the world are trying to convince young men they can have a reasonable facsimile of a life online.

0:41You don't need friends. Go on Reddit or Discord. You don't need to go through the bullshit of trying to find a job, just trade stocks and crypto on Robinhood and Coinbase. And you don't need to go through the aggravation, the effort, the rejection, the humiliation sometimes. the effort, learn how to be funny, learn how to be smart, shower for God's sakes, work out, dress well, show up to things, of trying to get a romantic partner when you have you porn. So I think a lot of men are just opting out of the dating scene. In addition, there's some societal factors. Men are going more conservative.

1:18Women are going more progressive, which creates another reason why they don't want to date or don't like each other. I've said to you in my 20s and 30s, for the life of me, I can't remember the political affiliation of anyone I dated. Now It's just another reason why people don't date. I think online dating creates this portion of polygamy where 80 % of women want the same 10 % of guys, which kind of blocks out the bottom 90. So I think there's a lot of wins in the face of a young man who is trying to find a relationship that ultimately involves sex. And you see it everywhere. the number one out of five men you walk by under the age of 30 on the street hasn't had sex in a year.

1:58And people hear sex and their brain goes different places. It's a key step to forming the most important thing in life. And that is a loving, secure relationship.

2:13Welcome to First Time Founders. I'm Ed Elson. 30 years ago 152 million men worldwide struggled with erectile dysfunction today that number has doubled and it's not just older men who are affected more than a quarter of men under the age of 40 experience ed with over a billion dollars spent each year on ed treatments many men rely on medication but after dealing with these issues firsthand, my next guest was determined to find a better long-term solution. And so together with his cousin, he created an app filled with resources from psychologists, urologists, and physiotherapists designed to help men address their issues naturally.

3:00Since launching in 2020, the app has helped over 700 ,000 men improve their sexual well-being and has fostered a community that's breaking the stigma around discussing intimate health issues. This is my conversation with Angus Bodge, co-founder and CEO of Mojo. Angus, thank you very much for joining me. Oh, thank you very much for having me. So we're going to talk about Mojo, what the company is and what it does. But I think the place to start is how you came up with this idea, because I think it is really important. So just quickly tell us the origin story of Mojo. How did this all begin? That is a question I often get, and people react differently as I kind of stare them down the barrel and tell them what the business does.

3:45Yeah, the business idea came from a long car journey with my cousin, actually. I think I had one of those moments when in the car with him that your mouth just starts moving, your brain hasn't really engaged with what it was saying. And kind of looking very far out the passenger window, I basically told him that as a fit, healthy 28-year-old who'd never had any issues, suddenly I was struggling to get it up in bed. and I think kind of understandably was withdrawing from dating I was single at the time loved going out love meeting people and it felt kind of understandable that I'd withdrawn from that but also noticing that I was having kind of withdrawals from my social confidence as well like I'm a big extrovert love going out love seeing my mates and found that I was almost hermiting there and losing self-confidence I think what I told him was basically for those six months I'd been as close to a mental health crisis as I'd ever been for this seemingly small part of my life.

4:45He paused long enough that I kind of wished the car had imploded and been swallowed up by the road. And then he said, you know what, screw it. I know exactly what you're talking about. He'd been struggling on and off throughout his 20s with performance anxiety. And I think in that moment, we had a conversation that not many people or not many men would have had. And it was like, pat on the back well done us we've had this kind of vulnerable conversation and you start laughing about all the stupid stuff you tell each other like or you tell yourself in your head like i'm never going to get married no one's ever going to love me all this kind of stuff and i think that would have been the end of it i don't think we would have taken it any further had that not been basically to the month that we saw the kind of real power of venture capital money in london and I'm sure you guys had the same in New York, but like every bus and every tube was covered in this new message, which was sexual issues aren't just for old guys, they're for young guys too.

5:42And you should be the best partner you can be and you should just take pills. And it felt kind of instinctive to us that we knew that medication wasn't what we needed and it wasn't what was wrong with us. It didn't feel like it was physical. So we kind of disregarded that and thought, well, well, if that's not the real solution, if guys shouldn't be taking medications like Viagra, then what is the solution? And we very quickly found out it's a very small and niche profession called sex therapy. Very small and niche to the extent that there's like four, 500 sex therapists in the whole of the UK.

6:16And one of them actually happened to be my mum. So having had a really awkward conversation with my cousin in the car that day, kind of two, three weeks later, when this idea just kept coming back to us and kept niggling, I was kind of set up for a second awkward conversation with my mum. But I think it shows that this is a very small niche industry that not many people know kind of even what it does by the fact that I struggled for a year and didn't realize that it was what I needed. Yeah, I think this story is going to resonate with a lot of young men. And, you know, I can actually prove this statistically because the prevalence of erectile dysfunction is just growing rapidly, not just in America, but all over the world among young men specifically.

7:02And according to the Journal of Sexual Medicine, 26 % of men under the age of 40 today struggle with erectile dysfunction. So that's one in four young men. So this is a massive issue that is getting worse. Anecdotally, we have the evidence that you just described of you know being in the car and then seeing all these ads telling people you should take viagra and cialis and all of these ed pills but also we're just seeing it in the data one in four young men so you know you've been studying this for a long time why is this happening why are seemingly healthy young men struggling to get it up yeah and i think the stat you just spoke about as well is kind of erectile dysfunction which is like defined in the dsm or like the manual for statistics as this kind of healthcare condition.

7:54But kind of one step back from that, like actually lots of young men aren't struggling from erectile dysfunction. That's like a convenient name that makes people think they need medication to fix it. What they're quite often struggling with is performance anxiety, like going through bouts of not being able to get it up and kind of these psychological seeds of doubt. And that's actually far more prevalent than one in four. so i think the kind of first data we really see is that in 1999 like three to five percent of guys under the age of 40 were struggling with erection issues and then by 2011 you start to see studies coming out there's like 30 percent of guys under the age of 30 so just this huge shift in demographic who are struggling i'd put some of that down to people more openly reporting it with companies like Pfizer making drugs available and it becoming more understood there'll be a little bit of a reporting but certainly just an absolute boom in the the space and the issue I think lots of people have quite kind of they like to come up with simplistic views of that they look at that kind of decade and quite a few people will jump to oh well that's when the porn sites and the streaming sites really came onto the scene and it's quite you know a nefarious industry which is easy to give a kicking and lots of people love to get on board with it.

9:12Not ruling porn out and saying that hasn't had an impact, but there's plenty of studies as well in sexology research that says there's kind of a correlation with porn use, no causation. It gives you kind of unrealistic expectations of as much yourself as your partner, and that can really set you up for failure. But this whole idea that there's like a hijacking of your dopamine system is kind of pseudoscience at best. I'm one of the people who believes that porn is probably having a bad effect on young men. And I'll just, the statistics that I am aware of are that 70 % of American men view porn regularly, and 10 % of them say they are addicted.

9:54And that's all men. So I would assume that among young men, the statistics are a lot higher. You mentioned there's correlation versus causation. I'm not fully sold. I kind of still believe that porn must play a role in this. Absolutely. And I think by saying there is correlation, it's certainly having an impact. And I'm not here kind of holding a torch saying that porn is good and everyone should be taking part and it's going to suit everyone. but I think what you do see with porn and when you actually dig down into it there's a real shame element around sex and your erotic template and almost that is the sticking point which kind of anchors you into porn the term porn addiction actually isn't widely recognized in the expert field so it isn't porn what is it then with kind of zooming into that decade I think one thing that people forget is kind of our whole lives were turned upside down from 2000 2011 everything went online the way we were communicate date we kind of suddenly became chronically online in some way and i think in that decade we saw kind of the emergence of the most anxious human beings ever to have walked the planet so i think it would be too much to hang the the blame on on one sector it just seems to be a kind of direction of travel.

11:14You could now say that 50 % of millennials and Gen Z will struggle with some form of psychosexual issue. And for me, that's really just a kind of physical manifestation of there being something much more dangerous underneath that. For me, I think I actually label it on kind of loneliness and disconnection, which is we're the most social animals ever to have walked the planet. And that's kind of why we're here. And for me, I think we've We've now gone for so long where community and connections are kind of breaking down in a way that now it's got to breaking point and it's turning up in kind of, like I say, these physical manifestations of we can't actually physically connect anymore.

11:55So, yeah, kind of if you get me excited and I'm holding court and giving wax lyrical about where this all really begins, I think you can map it back to like the agricultural revolution. Bear with me. Yeah. Which is kind of that was the first time if you think we were in these nomadic tribes and we were kind of the man beside you was your ally in the hunt. You kind of take it into the agricultural revolution and suddenly the land you own becomes very important and therefore the family you have becomes very important because your livelihood relies on it. So you kind of have this idea of ownership and this civilization brought into this kind of competitive nature between people where actually I now think we're seeing repercussions of that, that slowly the kind of connections that we were used to for millennia have now broken down ever since.

12:49In sum, we don't know how to interact with people. I mean, I think the amount of time that we've actually, we're spending with our friends is down around 70 % in the past decade. I think the most important number is 12%. And that's the share of Americans who say they have no close friends at all. That's up from 3 % in 1990. Yeah, it's absolutely heartbreaking. I mean, it feels as though this is all downstream of the loneliness issue. And I think there's another important point that you're making there. I think in the past, we've talked about sexual dysfunction, erectile dysfunction as sort of a physical problem, or at least some sort of vascular problem.

13:30But it sounds like what you're saying is that actually this all begins in our heads. Yeah, there was a study, again, we're talking specifically about erection issues here, but things like premature ejaculation is another kind of very common issue that guys face. But yeah, in erection issues, they did a study where kind of in guys under 40 who are struggling, for 85 % of them, it's totally psychological. There's no what you call organic element to that, which means that you can rule out things like testosterone or cardiac problems or fitness. It is all psychological. And then when you start to understand how the drugs like Cialis, Viagra, Tidonophil, Tidonophil work, the only way they work for these men is through a placebo effect.

14:15Oh, interesting. How do we know that? I assumed that Viagra and Cialis, they just have a cellular effect on your penis. They do have an effect on the body, but I think if I explain to you what performance anxiety is, it starts to make sense, which is when you're struggling with performance anxiety or psychological erection issues, basically you're in a state of fight or flight. Your body is scared, it's getting ready to run away or fight. in those instances your body sends all the blood it can to your skeletal muscles and your brain and that means it goes away from your digestive organs and your genitals because those parts of your body are just not needed when you're about to fight a saber-toothed tiger and what all of these drugs they're called pd5 that's the umbrella term for them that all they do is two things they widen all your blood vessels so they're a vasodilator it means you will blush, you get headaches, you get all the kind of side effects come from that vasodilation.

15:14And the second thing they do is they block what's called a PDE5 enzyme, which is naturally secreted at the end of sex to allow blood out of your genitals. So if you think a guy in fight or flight, no blood is going to his penis, whether the blood vessels there are wide or not. The only reason it then works for him is because you take a Viagra and you think, oh great like i'm on for tonight this is going to be good i'm on my a-game here i'm relaxed i don't go into fight or flight and it does work and yeah like he'll get a great erection as well if he's a fit healthy young guy because there's some extra chemicals in there helping him keep all the blood in there but the reaction starts through a placebo effect we'll be right back

16:32Thank you.

16:42We're back with First Time Founders. So we basically have a generation of young men who, in record numbers, are getting into the bedroom, taking their clothes off, and then they suddenly start panicking. And this is happening, it sounds like, to the majority of young men in the world right now, if that's right. And I think you saying as well that you don't believe that porn doesn't have anything to do with it. I think that's where porn does come in. You get in there, you take all your clothes off, you don't look like a porn star, you start to feel nervous and anxious about your body. That's where porn can be detrimental.

17:20So tell us where Mojo comes in. How is Mojo, the company, your company, addressing these problems? I mean, for four years, we went from that conversation with my mom and we had this unfair competitive advantage where we suddenly had an incredible network of kind of Europe and America's leading experts who were really keen to work on it on this because so few companies were and for the first kind of four years we basically took what hides inside sex therapy rooms and digitized it quite unlike other forms of therapy sex therapy is built on a foundation of exercises and techniques which have kind of been built up over the last 50 years so the idea for us was really simple how do we digitize them how do we make them more accessible how do we get rid of the barriers to entry how do we make them low cost to be able to deliver them really scalably to everyone so yeah we set up an app and the kind of message for us was let's treat our sexual well-being the same way we do our mental and our physical well-being which is now very common that you would invest in that on an ongoing basis and i mean it works incredibly well we're really proud Out of the work we've done, we've got to a stage where the product is effective and can really unpick some pretty complex psychosexual issues.

18:35I will have guys who have been struggling for 10, 15 years and we're able to help them overcome that. It is, again, a kind of majority US company, 60, 70 % of our user base in the US. And we now have a user base of kind of 700 ,000 users. Everything seemingly has gone great for the last four years. I think where things have got really exciting for us recently is whilst we found that we were able to successfully digitize all of these exercise and techniques and they could be as effective in person. One thing that we were missing is the kind of leading determiner of positive outcomes in any form of therapy, not just sex therapy, is something that's called the therapeutic alliance.

19:18So it doesn't matter if you go to a therapist and you do kind of Freudian psychodynamic, you're lying on a couch and you're talking about your childhood, or you are doing CBT and it's very much about like cognitive restructuring, they're polar opposite ends of the therapeutic spectrum. the leading factor that will determine whether you have a successful experience is what's called therapeutic alliance it is the relationship between you and the therapist do you believe they have positive regard for you do you believe that you're kind of in the same boat working towards the same goal are they empathetic do you trust them and i think that was something we were never able to deliver through the app in those first four years what did the product look like were you interacting with a therapist on the other side or was it a sort of algorithm suggesting you feedback in what sense was the therapeutic alliance missing so to make it scalable our ambition has always been to have the biggest human impact we could possibly have so we wanted this to be available we're kind of in 150 countries at the moment so that meant some restrictions which is we always built for scalability so we always did asynchronous content we did a lot of kind of video format where we'd have experts coming on and talking about common causes of erection issues they'd talk through their uh some of these exercises and we'd actually like throw presenters in and we'd get them to go and do the exercises we wouldn't really prep them so they'd be asking kind of the stupid questions which therapists would get asked but it's really trying to be as kind of fly on the wall as we possibly could be but there was never that level of personalization that could have formed a therapeutic alliance we tried to lean on things like community so we have a really kind of vibrant community.

21:01It's anonymous and you'll just see conversations in there that like you wouldn't believe anywhere else on the internet. I think for three years, I ran a session every week, which was 40, 50 users. They drop in. We do kind of group sessions. All of that was in trying to find this missing piece of the therapeutic relationship. But I don't think we were ever successful. And then I think last year when you really started to see ChatGPT and 4.0 coming through, you started to notice that I think deep human relationships will be, if not already are possible with AI. So yeah, at the back end of last year, we have pivoted the company and we're now an AI coach for dating, sex and relationships, all in the hunt of that kind of missing piece.

21:48So it's now an AI therapist, which I think, you know, in the past year, we've seen a lot of this, or at least we saw this coming. And I don't really know how to feel about it because in a sense, it's a good thing, I guess, but there's something highly dystopian and freaky to me about human beings relying on an algorithm to offer them respite and therapy. so what would you say to someone like me who generally finds this a little bit frightening one would i imagine some of the kickback here is quite often safety as in the the safety frameworks you have to put in place to to make sure that people who are seeking help and being vulnerable are are going to be safe the rigor that you can put into that now is very kind of complex the way we've approached it is we have a team of kind of six sex therapists who have been reading 100 % of our conversations and annotating them all what's appropriate what's not and using that to kind of train the main prompt as you'll find with LLMs like the longer a prompt is the kind of more off course it can go so the way we've also tried to counter that is you build a safety agent in the background which has a much smaller tighter remit and we're finding that that is the the beginning the kind of risk well handled was poor and now we're finding it to be absolutely exemplary so i'd say it's the first thing people should worry about is it is safe and can be made safe still very much with kind of human in the loop in terms of the dystopian idea i think you'll see that there have been there are ai companies which are trying to kind of promote boyfriend or girlfriend relationships or kind of you can chat to albert einstein for and make him your friend that's not what we're trying to do which is we believe that kind of the problem with society and the problem with a society that's having less sex and less connection is that kind of in real life meaningful connection with others so for us we feel that we are able to kind of enable external relationships through the relationship with your coach or your ai therapist it's very much an enabler we'd never see it as a a substitute and i i guess it's kind of like you wouldn't go and speak to a therapist at the weekend like like these relationships are very much for kind of pushing you out in the world and helping you perform better.

24:28So we don't imagine a dystopian world where people are foregoing in real life relationships for what's in their phone. Do you think it's possible that AI could be better at providing therapy than a human, or is this more about cost and scalability? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I can speak from my experience of the last couple of months and watching the team build this product. As I said, for safety, we had kind of six therapists in reading all the conversations and kind of training the bot. And in the very first meeting we had with all of them, one of them said, don't worry, ladies, I think all our jobs are going to be safe.

25:05Like she was laughing at this thing. Two weeks later, the very same therapist came back and was like, this product is now handling conversations, backing off, leaning in better than the average therapist. Wow, that's incredible. I think the technology is there and the way we've been able to train it is already there to kind of handle singular conversations. That for me isn't the therapeutic relationship, it's the beginnings of it. And now just having a team that's like absolutely obsessed with the idea of going really deep and creating a relationship over a multi-day, week, month period is the real key that we have to crack.

25:38It's not an easy one, but I for one definitely believe it's possible. So what are some of the most common issues that your users are reporting in the bedroom? For us, the vast majority of our users are erection issues and performance anxiety. You can kind of get down into the different users will experience it in different ways at different times. Kind of when you're losing it will tell you kind of different exercise and techniques that someone would give you. what we've looked at with the we're starting to work with ai and llms as well is what's exciting for me is it feels like you have 24 7 user feedback on which is they are speaking to you the whole time and we've kind of created this content beast which is we know exactly what the users are experiencing what problems they want to solve so it has meant that we've had to expand very quickly in the kind of user's job to be done that we're covering and i think that goes into dating and relationships.

26:38It was kind of too simplistic to think of it as, well, I just can't get it up or I'm coming too quickly. When you start to get into the nuance, it might be that you have a young guy who feels like he's dependent on porn or a guy in their twenties has just suffered with a big breakup and he's lacking confidence and doesn't know how to get back into the bedroom. Or a really common one as well as couples will start to try for a baby and suddenly sex completely changes. It's no longer about fun and connection. It's suddenly a job to perform and it has to be an exact time and it can be very like green light, go, go, go.

27:13And that's a real pressure situation. So like kind of dealing with that, how has that changed our relationship? So yeah, it can get a lot more nuanced now, which I'm really excited about. What's sort of the most common type of person that is using your app and that is struggling right now? Listen, we're a young audience. I think if you look at the average age of those really big kind of pharmacy, online, young brands, their average age tends to be kind of late 40s, early 50s, even though they feel very young. For us, most of our users are under the age of 30. We did a piece of research and we have this saying in the company, which is that men need change to change.

27:50Like we think we're dealing with a very high intent user base, but it's always because something in their life has changed. it's usually that they're kind of back on the dating scene and they're they found someone they're really excited by but they're suddenly struggling in the bedroom and it feels really catastrophic it's like i need to fix this problem otherwise i'm going to lose this person we'll be right back

28:39We'll see you next time. and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more. Read, watch and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.

29:00We're back with First Time Founders. What about women's role in all of this? I mean, this is specifically designed for men. Do you ever get any feedback from women? Do you ever hear stories from women about how this issue of erectile dysfunction and just sexual dysfunction is affecting their lives? Yeah, I mean, it's quite common for us to have users who have either been sent by their female partners or have kind of come to the platform, started using it for a week and then have disappeared. and we've spoken to them when they've come back and said kind of what happened and it's quite often well oh actually i felt like i needed to speak to my partner and kind of get her consent and get her on board with this the thing which gets me excited generally is all the solutions that have come before us have been very single player when this is a very relational problem and it's a it can be a very multiplayer game and i think it's been awful for both sides of the equation actually the experience of uh women being with a guy who has erection issues and he feels very ashamed of it quite often given the cold shoulder they don't know how to to help like do you can't go and buy him kind of medication or like send him off to to therapy that feels very kind of putting the onus on the guy so i think coming up with these multiplayer solutions is something that's really exciting for this space and can improve the experience of both people in the relationship this is one of those things that i just find so fascinating because we very rarely talk about it or at least not in depth and i i gave you those statistics on how many men this is affecting but then think of all the women that this is affecting too i mean for every man you know you need a partner and this is affecting them too which is just incredible to me.

30:56You mentioned that these medications, you know, they're sort of these easy fixes, but they don't get down to the root cause of the issue. What does getting down to the root cause actually look like? Like if you're making a pitch to someone who's struggling with this and they're given the option, okay, you can go with Mojo or you can go with this pill that's kind of just going to fix it like that. Why is it that Mojo is more compelling or healthier over the long term for that person? I mean, the medications work really well. Where they stop working is when you don't feel that confident that one time you've taken the Viagra, you don't feel that confident for some reason, something's thrown you off.

31:40And if it doesn't quite work the way you think, you've lost it. You've lost your magic pill. You'll actually see that it's working every time and then it starts to deteriorate over time so it's unlikely for it to work for you on an ongoing basis the thing for the sound of kind of like really getting down and deep to the root cause makes it sound like it's really hard to access and maybe i'm make it sound like i'm doing something incredibly complicated a lot of it is kind of within mental well-being uh your kind of mind body connection you're really starting to see things like mindfulness are becoming a cornerstone in therapy.

32:14I think I can speak definitely from personal experience. I run around my week working kind of crazy hours and just will feel like my body is buzzing. If I actually stop and think about it, like my hands are buzzing, like I'm absolutely jacked. And I just haven't been in my body probably for the previous few days. I think actually what committing to mojo looks like is quite a lot of kind of just like self-exploration, really linking up that kind of mind-body experience and you'll see practices in there like meditation, breath work, all of these kind of things that really get you to think about what's going on for you.

32:52I mean, I find this so interesting because it's basically a reflection of the holistic nature of sex and sexual health. That basically what you're describing is that your ability to perform in the bedroom and your ability to have sex is a function of everything going on in your life. It's not just some vascular issue that's happening in your penis. It has to do with how you're feeling in your head, your relationship with your partner, possibly other things, how things are going on, how things are going at work, maybe how you're eating. I mean, it has to do with literally everything. And the reason that I bring that up is because this is why I find the level of sexlessness in our society so sad.

33:40and I'll just bring it up, but I'm sure most of our listeners know this already, but the share of men younger than 30 who have not had sex in the past year has tripled in the past decade or so to 28%. So that means one in three young men today, they have not had sex in the past year. And to me, that is a reflection, not just that we're not having sex, but we are just deeply unhealthy and sick as a society. Because as you mentioned, this all comes from the brain. It almost all comes from the soul too. It's a total reflection of your entire health. So just talk about sexlessness and how that's, perhaps maybe you agree with me that that's possibly the worst thing that we're seeing in our society today.