Antoine Faessel

Reading what men refuse to see in their own bodies.
Building Owain, a daily check-in for men. Solo founder, 20.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

Between 2008 and 2018, the share of American men aged 18 to 30 who reported no sexual activity in the past year more than tripled. From 8 percent to 28 percent. General Social Survey data, published in JAMA Network Open, 2020.

Nobody knows exactly why. The theories point to the usual suspects. Dating apps, porn, delayed adulthood, economic anxiety, phones. Probably all of them at once.

The number that stays with me is different. Almost one in three young American men is now living outside the sexual life his father took for granted at the same age.

We're calling this a lot of things. We're not calling it what it is. A generation quietly dropping out of the body they were supposed to inhabit.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

JAMA Network Open, October 2024. A team at UChicago led by Nathaniel Glasser measured what they call Male Gender Expressivity in a sample of American men. Then they cross-checked it with the objective cardiovascular data of the same men.

The result. Men who perform masculinity the strongest are much less likely to report a cardiovascular diagnosis, even when they have measurable hypertension. And when they do report a diagnosis, they are also less likely to say they take their medication.

Performing masculinity has a body count. It's not a metaphor, it's a number in a peer-reviewed paper.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

Something strange in the first weeks of data from my app.

Men who report performance issues in onboarding are not the ones who log most consistently. The most consistent loggers are the ones who reported nothing wrong.

The men with the most to gain from observation are the least willing to observe. The men with the least to gain do it daily.

I expected denial to reduce signup. It doesn't. It reduces
retention. Denial doesn't stop men from downloading a health app. It stops them from opening it on day 4.

I don't have an explanation yet. But nobody in the literature seems to have documented this pattern, because nobody had this data before.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

Health & longevity being on the chart is why I'm building right now.

Men's health tracking specifically. The market is split between pill sellers (Hims, Roman) and hardware sellers (Whoop, Oura). Nobody built the software-only daily check-in layer yet. 16MB app, no device, 90 seconds a day.

The trend is early enough that the gap is still open.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

Useful test. Applying it to what I'm building:

"A daily 90 second check-in that logs morning signals, sleep, stress and substances, calculates three sub-scores, and surfaces weekly patterns from your own data. No diagnosis, no pills, no hardware. Men 20-50, iOS only."

If you read that, you could spec it. That's the bar.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

@ChrisWillx @jackbutcher The status cost of practice is front-loaded. The status cost of theory is back-loaded.

One hurts now. The other hurts when you're 40 and still preparing.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

Available now on the App Store.

https://t.co/0OWO8bec2p

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

Every man tracks his sleep, his macros, his heart rate.

Nobody tracks the one signal that quietly tells him everything about his body week to week.

Owain. Live today.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

Built this because I looked at what the market offered men my age. Either sell you a pill for a symptom. Or a 300 dollar wearable for general wellness.

Nothing that just helps you understand your own patterns without diagnosing you.

Owain does that one thing.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

This is exactly why I built a daily health tracker for men.

Most guys won't go get a diagnosis. But they will log 90 seconds a day if the app never uses the word "diagnosis." The pattern data gets them to the doctor faster than the stigma lets them go on their own.

The bridge between ignoring your body and getting diagnosed is observation. That middle step barely exists right now.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

The detail that makes this study land harder than most sleep research: 80 minutes is not perceived as sleep loss by the subjects.

Most people who sleep 5.5 hours instead of 7 would describe their sleep as "fine, maybe a bit short." The metabolic cost accumulates below the threshold of subjective awareness.

This is exactly why passive tracking catches what self-reporting misses.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

Reading this at 20, four projects in, and the story that's been hardest to unwrite is not "money is scarce". It's "credibility is scarce".

The version of that story sounds reasonable. Wait until you have the degree, the exit, the followers, the validation. It's the operating system that keeps founders in optionality forever.

Turns out credibility is invented too. You build it by shipping things people talk about, not by accumulating credentials people respect.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

@stijnnoorman The list is achievable. The invisible line item that makes it work is having built one thing that compounds without your presence.

Everything on your list assumes that piece is already in place. Most founders skip it and then wonder why the lifestyle doesn't hold.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

@nottrollguy @bryan_johnson Men track their sleep, their macros, their heart rate. Nobody tracks the thing that actually tells them how their body is doing week to week. Owain is that daily 90 second check-in. Built it because I couldn't find it.

https://t.co/4ZjNIavpr2

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

Necessary but incomplete is the right cadre. It reframes the debate from "wrong tool" to "right tool at half its needed reach", which is the harder policy problem.

Of your four failure modes, foundation model concentration is the one that most quickly escapes cloud-focused instruments. DORA can compel a bank to prove its AWS dependency is auditable. It cannot compel that bank to prove its GPT-4 or Claude-based decision layer has a viable substitute if the underlying model is deprecated, price-shifted, or restricted by export control. That last dimension is where cloud regulation and AI regulation diverge fundamentally: cloud is a fungible substrate, foundation models are not.

The incompleteness gets structural the moment autonomous decision-making runs on models that themselves depend on a supplier of three.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

Read the piece properly. My reply was calibrated to the social summary, not to the argument, and the article is doing something more structural than I gave it credit for.

The question I'm left with after reading the whole thing: your framing treats cloud concentration and AI concentration as symptoms of the same disease. But the regulatory tools you cite, DORA, NIS2, the incoming UK Cyber Bill, are shaped around cloud, not around AI. If AI dependency accelerates on the timeline you sketch, do you see the current instruments as extensible, or as a category error we'll only recognise after the first genuinely systemic AI failure?

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

The hard part isn't stacking the two.

It's that the gentleness has to be real, not a mask over the violence.

The people who fake it get caught within 90 seconds by anyone who's ever been dangerous themselves. Warmth as strategy reads as weakness. Warmth as overflow reads as power.

The order of operations matters. Depth first, surface after.

[Antoine Faessel @owain_app]

Solo founder for 2 years. The mirror problem gets worse the more autonomy you have.

Nobody's going to fire me for missing the gym. Nobody's going to notice if I ship half. The accountability structure I lose by not having a boss is the same one I refuse to build for myself.

Freedom without self-imposed friction is just decay in slow motion.