The best-case scenario for AI companions

Craving to Be Called In

You may be one of the six million viewers on YouTube who watched the Saturday Night Live skit about the “Man Park [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XOt2Vh0T8w],” where the lonely boyfriends of successful Manhattan women are taken to make friends. It’s funny because it captures something real: many men do struggle to make and maintain friendships. But it also gets something important wrong, as I discuss with Sam Pressler [https://substack.com/profile/4765293-sam-pressler] and Soren Duggan [https://substack.com/profile/250985744-soren-duggan]: The men likely to be disconnected are not, for the most part, college-educated boyfriends and husbands of successful urban women. They are men and women without college degrees. So why is this a gender issue? Because fewer men are enrolling in higher education (a trend AIBM aims to address through the Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative [https://www.menincollege.org]). Sam and Soren walk us through their recent report, Nobody to Call: An exploration of friendship, community, and purpose among men without college degrees [https://nobodytocall.org]. It does something that much of the public conversation about men fails to do: it listens. We’re talking about men without listening to them Nobody to Call emerged from Sam and Soren’s frustration with elite discussions about working-class men. Journalists, academics, and policymakers often have strong opinions about non-college-educated men despite having little direct contact with them. As a result, these disconnected men become villains, victims, voters, and problems to be solved. Their complex lives are flattened into stereotypes. But if you listen, a different picture emerges. Throughout the 30 in-depth interviews, these men are craving connection and contribution. They want friends. They want mentors. They want to be useful. They want someone to call, and they want to be the kind of person someone else can call. Are friendships really so important? Friendship is more than fun; it is a social safety net. It protects health, buffers stress, expands opportunity, and gives people a sense of being needed. Beyond emotional and practical support, friends introduce us to job leads, romantic partners, financial tips, and other friends. They often motivate us to exercise, read a book, and take our medicine. They help us live longer and healthier lives [https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000316]. Without strong social relationships, our bodies protest, creating more stress hormones [https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf], inflammation, and poorer sleep and cognitive function [https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-024-00328-9]. And yet, for many of the men in Nobody to Call, friendship had become fragile, distant, or absent. More disconnected than was expected Sam and Soren expected roughly one-quarter of the men to report having no close friends based on their original survey responses. Instead, about half said they lacked close friendships. Even those men who claimed to have close friends described relationships that appeared fragile or distant. Some of the men had one meaningful connection—a friend, relative, partner, or coworker—but if that relationship disappeared through death, incarceration, conflict, or relocation, their entire social life would collapse over a single point of failure. The friendship cliff and the slow drift Most of the men had friends in high school. School provides proximity, shared experience, and repeated low-stakes interactions. Work might seem like the obvious successor. But for many of the men Sam and Soren interviewed, work did not provide durable friendship. Some worked unstable schedules. Some moved between jobs. Others avoided becoming too attached because they had learned that workplace relationships could disappear quickly. Work gave income, but it rarely gave belonging. Into their 30s, many men experienced slow social atrophy. Friends drifted away. People got busy. Someone moved. Someone stopped texting. Eventually, there’s nobody to call. Family remains the strongest source of meaning If friendship was often absent, family frequently served as the most common source of connection and purpose. Fatherhood especially stood out. Many men described becoming fathers as a profound turning point that gave structure and meaning to their lives. Others found a similar sense of purpose as uncles, brothers, and caregivers. However, caregiving responsibilities could easily become overwhelming. Some men felt so consumed by work and family obligations that they had little capacity left to build friendships or community outside of the home. The biggest obstacle may be shame Many of the men blamed themselves for their isolation. They described lacking confidence, social skills, self-esteem, or initiative. They felt they needed to “fix themselves” before they could build relationships. Clearly, confidence and social skills matter, but Sam and Soren arrived at a different conclusion: disconnection is a societal failure. The burden should not rest entirely on isolated individuals to solve a problem created by the erosion of community institutions. Men are more emotionally open than stereotypes suggest The participants were often remarkably candid, vulnerable, and emotionally articulate. They spoke openly about loneliness, grief, regret, and longing. Soren notes the stark contrast between what he heard in interviews and the common image of emotionally closed-off men. The issue isn’t an unwillingness to talk. Rather, it is a shortage of opportunities to be heard. Building emotional and social skills into basic education could certainly help. But especially for men, we must also rebuild the institutions, rituals, spaces, and relationships that make connection possible in the first place. Technology is not the whole story, or enough Given our work on boys, men, and online life, I expected technology to come up more often in the interviews. So too did Sam and Soren. It did come up, occasionally. Some men played video games with others. Some had online friends. Some followed influencers who served as substitute mentors, especially when fathers or other role models were absent. But technology did not dominate the interviews in the same way it tends to dominate media and podcast discourse about loneliness and disconnection. The more important finding was that online connection rarely translated into in-person community. This does not mean online friendships are necessarily superficial. I have meaningful online relationships that I value deeply, and, likely, you do too. But online connection by itself is not enough. The men in this report wanted to be seen, known, and needed in the places where they actually live. So far, our social technologies have been designed to capture attention more than build belonging. Calling men in Calling men in means building spaces and rituals where connection is easier to find and harder to lose. That could include: * Mentorship built into vocational programs, apprenticeships, community colleges, and workforce training. * Local rites of passage that help young men understand what adulthood asks of them and what their community offers in return. * Low-cost spaces where men can contribute, repair, coach, build, teach, serve, and be useful. * Stronger support for fathers, uncles, caregivers, and men who find purpose through family. * More attention to the transition after high school as a period of social risk, not just educational or economic risk. * Public or national service models that give young people shared responsibility, cross-class relationships, and a role in something larger than themselves. * Technology designed to introduce neighbors, support mutual aid, and move people toward local relationships rather than endless passive consumption about distant celebrities. There is no single solution, as Sam emphasizes toward the end of our conversation. Social infrastructure is the accumulation of many places, rituals, habits, institutions, and invitations that cultivate belonging. The male loneliness discourse often asks: What is wrong with men? Nobody to Call asks a better question: How do we rebuild and renew the structures that once helped men build connected lives? For more coverage of Nobody to Call, see: The Social Wealth Men Without College Degrees [https://www.merionwest.com/the-social-wealth-men-without-college-degrees-need/] Need by Bruno V. Manno [https://substack.com/profile/227720859-bruno-v-manno] Disclosure: Funding for Nobody to Call was provided by Rise Together, a donor-advised fund sponsored and administered by National Philanthropic Trust and established by Richard Reeves, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.menonline.org [https://www.menonline.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Asking people what they remember vs. observing what they actually do

Last week, Boys & Men Online [https://open.substack.com/pub/bmonline] co-hosted a webinar with the Psychology of Technology Inst. [https://substack.com/profile/105795504-psychology-of-technology-inst] to bring together researchers using new tools to study digital interactions. Many of the most important questions about technology—from sports betting and pornography to social media and AI companions—cannot be answered through recall surveys alone [https://www.menonline.org/p/new-tools-for-studying-digital-interactions]. People often misremember what they do online and struggle to reconstruct the context surrounding their digital behavior. The five featured researchers share how they combine behavioral data, AI tools, and real-time surveys to study how digital technologies shape our lives. Alexandra Rodman [https://www.alexandrarodman.com] & Varun Mishra [https://varunmishra.com] described the Connect Study’s [https://www.socialdevlab.com/connect-study] approach to analyzing how digital experiences affect adolescent mental health using objective behavioral data rather than relying solely on surveys. Rodman described her motivation for the study: mental health disorders often emerge during adolescence, when teenagers are highly sensitive to online and offline social experiences. The Connect Study follows adolescents for eight months and collects: * Smartphone usage data * GPS location data * Physical activity data * App usage data * Smartwatch physiological data * fMRI scans * Repeated surveys and interviews Instead of sending surveys at random times, the software monitors behavior patterns, identifies unusual behaviors, and immediately asks participants what is happening in the moment. For example, if a teenager who rarely uses Instagram late at night suddenly spends hours on the platform on a school night, the system can detect that anomaly and ask follow-up questions about what they were doing, who they were interacting with, and how they were feeling. This allows Rodman and her colleagues to move beyond simple measures of screen time and instead understand digital behavior in context. Matthew Brown [https://mattbrownecon.github.io] collected actual betting data alongside surveys to ask: Are sports bettors making informed choices, or are they systematically misunderstanding the risks? Study participants predicted they would roughly break even. In reality, they lost about 7.5 cents for every dollar wagered. The study participants underestimated the true financial cost of betting, which may strengthen the case for stronger consumer-protection policies. Brown suggested that behavioral data and surveys should be viewed as complements. Behavioral data tells us what happened, while surveys can help explain why. He also highlighted two challenges using sensitive observational data: * People willing to share account data are not representative of all bettors. (External validity) * Researchers must manage attrition so that participants who drop out do not bias the representativeness. (Internal validity) Fiona Baker [https://www.sri.com/people/fiona-c-baker/] provided an overview of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study [https://abcdstudy.org], one of the largest longitudinal studies ever conducted: * Over 11,000 participants * Began when participants were ages 9–10 in 2016-2018 * Has followed them for about a decade * Combines neuroimaging, surveys, health measures, and digital behavior data * Just recently released data through the participants’ seven-year follow-up visit. Using the EARS app [https://ksanahealth.com/ears/] to capture smartphone data, researchers found that adolescents averaged about 70 minutes of phone use during school hours — mostly on social media, streaming video, and games. During the 10 PM–6 AM period, adolescents averaged roughly 50 minutes of phone use, with social media the dominant activity. Future studies will combine smartphone usage, sleep data, heart rate measurements, and physical activity data to explore how digital behavior affects sleep, health, and development. Richard Landers [https://rlanders.net] introduced QUAIL (Qualtrics AI Link) [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10869-025-10035-6], an open-source system that allows researchers to embed AI conversations directly into Qualtrics surveys. Rather than asking participants how they think they would respond in a hypothetical situation, researchers can simulate realistic conversations and observe actual behavior. For example, participants could be randomly assigned to interact with different AI personas: * Self-reliance framing * Anti-stigma framing * Neutral framing Researchers could then compare how these different conversational styles influence disclosure, help-seeking, or emotional expression. Landers argued that AI-based interactions could become valuable tools for studying loneliness, stigma, mental health disclosure, and other sensitive topics that are difficult to capture through traditional surveys alone. At the same time, he cautioned that AI systems evolve rapidly, models change over time, and rigorous validation (by humans) remains essential. Three Big Takeaways * Digital behavior should be measured directly whenever possible. Surveys remain useful, but people are often inaccurate when recalling their online behavior. Researchers increasingly need tools that capture behavior as it occurs. * Context matters more than raw screen time. Beyond raw screentime numbers, researchers are now asking: “What were you doing, with whom, under what circumstances, and how did it affect you?” * The next generation of digital interaction research is multimodal. Researchers increasingly combine behavioral data, wearable devices, real-time surveys, and AI-powered interviews. During the Q&A, panelists emphasized that collecting better data requires building greater trust. Researchers ought to ensure easy-to-understand disclosure, participant ownership of data, and giving participants value in return for sharing their data. They also noted the need for better tools, more collaboration, shared methodologies, and better ways to track behavior across websites and platforms. If we want better answers about how technology shapes attitudes and behaviors, we need more accurate methods of observing how people actually behave. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.menonline.org [https://www.menonline.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Is Porn Addiction More Like Food Addiction or Alcoholism?

Noelle Perdue [https://substack.com/profile/45296404-noelle-perdue] is a writer, researcher, and media commentator focused on pornography, internet culture, censorship, and digital sexuality. She is known for bringing a nuanced, sex-positive but critical perspective to debates about pornography’s effects on relationships, intimacy, technology, and culture, including in the Netflix documentary Money Shot: The Pornhub Story [https://www.netflix.com/title/81406118]. I first saw pornography when I was 19. Noelle’s experience was different. She first watched pornography around age 10 or 11 — much closer to the norm for today’s adolescents. Like many young people growing up online, pornography was available long before she had a lived experience of sex, intimacy, or relationships. I wanted to speak with Noelle because we approach pornography from different perspectives and generations. Noelle often defends the pornography industry against censorship, moral panic, and surveillance. I’m more concerned about pornography’s negative effects on relationships and compulsive digital habits among boys and young men. Unexpectedly, we ended up agreeing more than not. Noelle reminded me that society’s approach to sex before online pornography wasn’t ideal either. Ignorance, shame, coercion, and poor communication all pre-dated PornHub and the “tube sites.” Pornography did not create all of today’s many challenges facing sexual development. Rather, it filled a gap left by parents, schools, and policymakers unwilling to talk honestly about sex. Too often, pornography debates become moral arguments about whether porn is good or bad. But pornography is not one thing. It can support sexual exploration, but it can also replace it. It can help couples communicate about desire, or it can help them avoid difficult but necessary conversations. It can affirm a young person’s sexuality or convince them that sex is primarily a performance to be evaluated by body types, stamina, novelty, dominance, and escalation. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, and we each reveal how our respective thinking has changed about pornography addiction, AI-generated porn, infidelity, sex education, and the ingredients of the good life. Much like gambling and gaming, the question is not whether pornography is good or bad in the abstract. My concern is less that pornography exists, and more that sexual desire is increasingly mediated by companies whose business model depends on attention, escalation, and habit formation. So where do we go from here? To start, researchers must go a level deeper: when does pornography help people live fuller embodied lives, and when does it pull them away from the lives they actually want? They’ll need funding to finance the studies, something most foundations and federal agencies have been reluctant to provide. As a starting point, and with Noelle’s helpful input, I’ve developed a list of potential positive and negative uses of pornography that ought to be tested as hypotheses, not taken as assumptions: Positive uses of pornography * Pleasure: Porn can be a source of sexual pleasure and fantasy. * Relief: Like any entertainment media, porn can offer a temporary escape from stress, anxiety, boredom, or loneliness. * Sexual curiosity: Porn can help people explore identities, fantasies, and boundaries privately before involving another person. * Affirmation: For anyone whose body type, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, age, or desires are rarely represented as attractive, porn can offer validation. * Inspiration: Porn can give individuals or couples ideas for new sexual acts, scenarios, conversations, or forms of play. * Arousal support: Porn can help some people get into an erotic mindset, especially when stress, fatigue, or mismatched libido makes desire harder to access. * Couples’ intimacy tool: Some couples use porn together to discuss desire, reduce inhibition, introduce novelty, or make sex feel more playful. * Sexual knowledge: Some people assess their sexual readiness and learn vocabulary, possibilities, or basic sexual concepts from it. Negative uses of pornography * Substitute for sex education: Porn can teach young people scripts about sex before they understand consent, communication, contraception, pleasure, or emotional intimacy. * Compulsive or habitual use: Porn can displace sleep, work, school, dating, exercise, friendships, or the life a person desires. * Avoidance of intimacy: Porn can become an easier substitute for asking someone out, repairing a relationship, tolerating loneliness, or having difficult conversations about desire. * Algorithmic escalation: Tube sites and social platforms often push users toward more extreme or attention-grabbing content, making it harder to know whether consumption reflects genuine desire or platform conditioning. * Shame and moral conflict: Some users feel guilt because their porn use conflicts with their values, politics, or religion. Shame can worsen secrecy and compulsive patterns rather than resolve them. * Unwanted exposure: Porn is no longer only something people seek out; it often finds and follows users through algorithmic feeds. * Distorted sexual scripts: Porn can normalize performance-heavy, aggressive, or one-sided sex. Some young people, especially women, report feeling pressured to engage in sexual practices they do not necessarily want. * Body image and performance anxiety: Porn can teach men that normal sex requires an unusually large penis, extreme stamina, muscular bodies, constant erection, and instant arousal. * Relationship conflict or secrecy: Pornography can be positive inside some relationships, but damaging when it is hidden, used to avoid a partner, or experienced by a partner as betrayal. * Parasocial dependency: OnlyFans and other camming platforms can blur the line between erotic entertainment and pseudo-intimacy, especially for lonely users. * AI pornography and dehumanization: Generative AI porn may remove the remaining human presence from sexual media, raising concerns about antisocial fantasy, isolation, and sexual habits increasingly detached from real human connection. What we still don’t know I’m grateful to Noelle for our conversation and for helping me think through the potential benefits and risks of pornography as it rapidly evolves from pixelated JPEG images to AI-generated, immersive virtual reality. Attempts to prohibit access to pornography rarely work and may backfire. Boys and young men will always have sexual desire and seek sexual fantasy. The task ahead is to ensure they can become men capable of restraint, consent, confidence, and real intimacy. Pornography can become less central to sexual formation if young people have access to better guidance, technology companies have fewer incentives to exploit human vulnerability, and research produces more practical answers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.menonline.org [https://www.menonline.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Everything you wanted to know about pornography

We recently published a new commentary [https://aibm.org/commentary/its-time-for-a-real-conversation-about-porn/] and landscape scan [https://aibm.org/research/what-we-know-and-dont-know-about-pornography-and-boys-and-men/] at AIBM.org to kick off our work on pornography—an issue that’s widely discussed, but rarely examined with clear, evidence-based thinking. The average American boy first encounters pornography around age 12. By the time he graduates high school, he’s spent years consuming content that looks very different from what researchers have studied—or what most parents imagine. But the research hasn’t kept pace. And neither have parents, educators, policymakers, or funders. As a result, young people are navigating unprecedented, always-on access to sexually explicit content with very little guidance or honest conversation. In this episode, we bring together leading researchers to take stock of what we know, what we don’t, and where the field needs to go next. You can view a recording of the webinar below, or listen to the audio on our podcast feed [https://open.spotify.com/show/4YhUNDKo50QwyeXQUVScJD]. Researchers: If you are studying these questions and would like to be part of a research convening this summer, please contact David at david@aibm.org. And stay tuned as we’ll continue publishing more interviews with pornography researchers over the coming weeks and months. Finally, if you want a good laugh, here’s a clever public service announcement from New Zealand’s Keep It Real Online [https://www.keepitrealonline.govt.nz] initiative: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.menonline.org [https://www.menonline.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Play Video Games With Your Kids

If you have boys in your life — whether you’re a parent, teacher, mentor, or coach — I think you’ll enjoy this week’s discussion with Kruti Kanojia of Healthy Gamer [https://www.healthygamer.gg] and Jim Festante of Health-e-Habits [https://www.health-e-habits.org]. We cover practical, realistic ways to help boys build a healthier relationship with games, social media, and the online world, including: * Shifting the focus from “how much screentime” to “what’s on the screen?” * How to show interest, not fear, in your boys’ digital experiences. * The core needs boys seek online: achievement, curiosity, escape, community, and identity. * How to build competing interests offline that meet those same core human needs: e.g. sports, museums, planning trips, clubs. * Online friends and communities are genuine support systems, often underrated, and sometimes even lifelines. * Why structure matters more than bans or time limits: Using shared family spaces (e.g., computers in one room) and norms like “headphones are earned.” * How to make parenting less tedious and more joyful. Jim and Kruti offer more wisdom and practical tips throughout our 30-minute discussion. Here’s a 5-minute clip: What did you think of the conversation, and what advice would you share? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.menonline.org [https://www.menonline.org?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]