Last week, we published Nobody to Call, our deep qualitative research project on friendship, community, and purpose among men without degrees. If you haven’t yet had the chance to dig into the research, please consider checking out our interactive, our full report, and our case studies.
This week, we’re interviewing ourselves. We wanted to share our personal reflections on the project — both Soren’s perspective as the lead interviewer and Sam’s perspective as the one responsible for making sense of what we heard. We explored many threads throughout the conversation, including:
What it felt like, emotionally, for us to do this research
Why we chose a purely qualitative research approach for this project
What we learned, and what surprised us about what we learned
And, importantly, whether we’re still friends at the end of this project
This is our first published Connective Tissue Q&A with video. It’s an experiment, so we encourage you to watch it and let us know what you think. If you can’t watch the video, no problem: We’ve included a lightly edited transcript below for you to read.
From the start of this project, we’ve felt a responsibility to steward these men’s experiences with the respect they deserve. We’ve been grateful and heartened that so many of you have done the same.
-Sam + Soren
Sam: Something that surprised me in reading the transcripts was how emotional the conversations got — these guys really did open up. Is that something you expected? Were you trying to drive towards it? What was it like being in that virtual room as the interviewer, meeting these guys through an Ipsos re-contact survey while they were disclosing some of the most personal, vulnerable, sometimes heartbreaking experiences of their lives?
Soren: Yeah, I expected it to be a lot harder to draw out than it was, and I was shocked and incredibly impressed, honestly, with how vulnerable these guys were willing to be with me. Again, they met me minutes ago over Zoom. I gave a quick spiel as far as the admin side of this interview goes, and then jumped right into it. And the vast majority of guys were willing to, immediately, from the get-go, talk about some very vulnerable and emotional things with me, share some stuff that I think they even might hold closer in their personal lives. They were just very willing to talk about that stuff, and that realization fed a lot into the findings that we had. These guys are much more emotionally open and vulnerable than a lot of people assume them to be. But that doesn’t mean you need to be vulnerable and share all that stuff with a stranger on the internet that you just met. It was very impressive, and I think it speaks a lot to these guys’ strength.
Sam: Can you take me to a specific emotional moment in an interview that stands out to you?
Soren: Yeah, there are a lot. But one stands out, towards the end of the interview process. I talked to a man named Jorge who was in his late 30s, I think early 40s, maybe. And he’s divorced. He had a daughter that he saw occasionally, but he had moved from the place he grew up to Rhode Island, where he hadn’t known anybody in several years, and his relational life was nearly nonexistent. In the beginning of the interview, I think he was a little bit more closed off and was just answering the questions, but we started to dig into what that felt like as somebody who used to have a more robust relational life, and it had left and atrophied and dissolved. The way that he talked about what that felt like to him, and how much he yearned for somebody to connect with, was pretty affecting. He talked a lot about one friend he had met online through playing video games — someone he had only known digitally — but they had become very close over the years. They talked multiple times a week on the phone. It was a deep, deep emotional friendship. And that was, in his words, the one person that he talked to day to day. He was very, very appreciative of that, and it was obviously doing a lot for him, but it left him wanting something more. The way he voiced that, the way he talked about it, was just incredibly vulnerable. And it made me very appreciative of the relational life that I am fortunate enough to have. I thought a lot about that in the coming days.
Soren: Did that come across for you? Reading through the transcripts, listening to the interviews — how did that make you think about your own relationships, your marriage, your own friendships?
Sam: Yeah, it had a really significant effect, to be honest. I think it’s unavoidable not to map some of these guys’ stories onto your own relationships. And I have one friend who I definitely mapped some of these stories onto — particularly the way he blames himself for his isolation and then feels that he has to fix himself. Since going through this project and this research, I’ve spent a lot more time just trying to pump up and bring him out so he doesn’t feel like he’s the only person responsible for doing it.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about this idea of relationships as gifts to be inherited, rather than entrepreneurial prizes to be earned. I’ve been thinking about the generational inheritances I’ve had relationally through my family life — growing up in a community where my whole family was around, being embedded in the institutions that my father and grandparents came up in. I was born into a foundation that made relationship formation and community participation much easier because I had people who were calling me in rather than me having to figure it out for myself. Some of these interviews, as contrasts, really crystallized how much harder it would have been for me, and how much I’ve taken for granted from that experience.
Soren: Yeah, did you think about that before? Was that top of mind for you before this project? Because class was a big part of this study and our question sets, but the inheritance of a relational life and the inheritance of social circles — frankly, that wasn’t something that I fully appreciated before doing this.
Sam: The honest answer is you look at these things from so many different angles, but at a certain point you’ve heard everything. And so it was something that I understood in the back of my mind, right? That one of the most important forms of connection from which we’ve been disconnected is generational connection. But I think having so many of these conversations, and seeing those patterns play out or not play out, took it from a back-of-mind thing to something that is much more present now. Just to be very concrete: I think the one genuinely flourishing man we spoke with is this archetypal example of generational inheritance and generational stewardship. Roger — he was born into a family and religious community life where he was receiving relationships, receiving habits of participation. He then realized his own leadership in that family and in religious and community life. And then he sees it as a core purpose to steward and pass that on to his children so that they can inherit it as well.
And that, frankly, couldn’t have been more distant from the kind of mean experience of the men we spoke with. For most of the guys, it was this real feeling of benefiting from the structure of high school and having friendships through high school, losing that one structure of social interaction, and then not having anything to replace it. And so building connection became this entirely individualistic endeavor, often from a place of deficit: less time, less money, and — crucially — fewer existing relationships. Because the number one thing that helps you build relationships is other relationships.
Soren: Yeah, that makes sense.
Sam: So, to me, a surprise was the emotional openness piece we talked about earlier. I know you said something similar, that in a positive way it kind of caught you off guard: “Oh wow, these guys are really willing to open up.” I think we both had preconceived notions going into the interview process, like anyone does. But I’m curious, maybe outside of that emotional piece that we were speaking to, is there anything else from your experience as an interviewer that surprised you or challenged your expectations going in?
Soren: Yeah, I was very shocked that in all of the interviews, the topic of politics and digital media — or even the internet broadly — rarely came up. We purposefully didn’t ask about it, because it would have taken over the conversation and added a lens we didn’t want. But you would assume that even in talking about other subjects it would come in, right? Everyone is so dominated by media these days. Politics is so present in everyone’s minds. Maybe it’s because that’s the world I was in before, so I just assume everyone thinks about this stuff all the time, and they probably don’t.
Sam: You’re actually the crazy one.
Soren: I learn every day that I’m actually the weirdo and everyone else is quite normal. But I was just very surprised that it didn’t come up. I think the biggest open door for it was the role model and mentor aspect of it. That was the only time it did come up, and guys talked about people that they watched online, a lot of content online meant to provide some sort of shape to masculinity. But beyond that, it just didn’t. And it certainly challenged my assumption that this stuff is dominant in everyone’s mind day to day. I’m sure if I’d asked about it once, we could have talked about it for an hour, but it wasn’t what everyone blamed all their problems on. I thought that it would be. And I still believe that it is the source of a lot of problems in our society — the digital media part, the screen time, everything that goes along with that — but the fact that it wasn’t hyper-present in what they answered with, I think, is encouraging.
Sam: Yeah, reading through, you saw glimmers of online life — video games, for example — right in the background. When we asked the close friendship question, there was definitely a small sub-thread of people who said, “I have friends who I’ve never met in person. I met him on Zoom, I met him through a video game, I met him through an online forum.” So it was there. But, with maybe the exception of Jorge and maybe one other person, very rarely did they consider those online relationships close friendships. Very rarely did they consider those online “communities” real communities. They would often say, “Yeah, it’s just kind of a sporadic thing I do online, but it’s not a real community. We don’t meet in person.”
And so I found the absence of even taking online community seriously, and online friendships seriously, surprising to me. Because sometimes, in this discourse, you’ll hear: “Well, we shouldn’t say that online community is worse or online relationships are worse, because there are people from marginalized backgrounds who are actually really finding community and friendship online.” And I 100% believe that’s true. But what’s notable is that we are talking to guys who elite liberals would call “marginalized” and none of these guys are saying, “I found my home through online communities.”
Soren: Yeah, I think there’s a lot to it, and I think it does add something. Jorge is one of the shining examples there. It obviously is more than zero, right? It’s not a completely absent relationship, even with the people who haven’t ever met friends they’ve made online. But even the folks who had them would be the first ones to tell you that it wasn’t enough. It was something, but it didn’t provide everything that they wanted. And so that’s probably one of the questions I’m most conflicted about: What do you do about those online relationships? It’s clearly better than nothing, but it’s not enough. So how do you wrap your head around it?
Sam: It seems like there’s a “yes, and” approach where we shouldn’t say those online relationships are normatively bad. And to your point, it’s not enough. And so what are the pathways to encourage online-to-in-person relationship building? Which, when we layer on the class angle, is much more difficult because people say they don’t have the time or money. And if you’re spread across the country, I don’t know how you’re doing that translation. So what that then leads you to — particularly with the class angle — is a fallback into in-person connection and contribution, being part of something bigger than yourself in the real world. By the way, this is what the majority of the guys we talked to want.
Soren: Would you say that was the thing that was most surprising for you? Especially having done this study with Dan Cox a few years ago — you had a lot of assumptions about how this would go and what you would hear. What stood out to you?
Sam: So I’ll say two things. There’s a hopeful standout, and then a pretty despairing one. The bright spot, to me, is family. The role that family played in these guys’ lives, and the degree to which these guys, for the most part, were glowing in how they thought about fatherhood. Particularly, the purpose that came through fatherhood, or through being uncles — being there in their nephews’ and nieces’ lives. The purpose that came from that, and the real reciprocal and mutual sense of needing and feeling needed by family — that was beautiful. And what gives me hope in that is, frankly, my belief that family is one of the foundational pillars of civil society and associational life. And what that tells me is that this core pillar — as religious participation, community participation, unions, and neighborhood membership have all declined — is still there for a lot of people. And that’s a foundation from which we can build.
The despairing piece for me was the shadow of addiction, the shadow of deaths of despair, the shadow of loss. It wasn’t the majority of the men we talked to, but there was a significant enough subset of guys who lost multiple best friends to suicide or drug overdoses, who lost friends to prison, who lost friends to murder. And those guys were feeling a real, grounded sense of hurt and pain. It seemed that they’d been hurt so much that the openness or willingness to make themselves vulnerable, to build new friendships, just didn’t make sense. We talked to this guy, Douglas, who had incredibly tragic losses in his life — his two closest friends. And he spoke beautifully around the potential of friendship as something akin to blood and family. He basically said, “I’ve just been hurt too bad. I don’t know if it’s worth getting hurt that way again.” His story was maybe more intense than others, but we heard that time and again. Maybe it wasn’t loss from death, tragic death, but it was from betrayal, from getting used, from getting let down. And the guys who felt like they got burned don’t want to get burned again. And that, to me, is pretty despairing.
It reminded me a lot of what I saw in terms of the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve both seen what happens in the wreckage of policy decisions that were made 20 years ago, and how future generations have to deal with that wreckage. And I saw that in these conversations, particularly around the opioid epidemic and deaths of despair.
Soren: Yeah, totally agree.
Sam: Let me ask you that question. There’s a whole interesting thread for us, which is we both have a connection to the military and veteran experience — you obviously serving in the military, me pretending like I served in the military (but, actually, building a veterans nonprofit and leading that for seven years). Did you see any parallels in the research and the interviews between your experiences either in the military or now with friends who are veterans, and the guys that we talked to?
Soren: Yeah, I saw a lot of similarities there. When you make decisions that affect 300 to 400 million people, you have wild reverberations that last a very, very long time and have externalities that you just don’t expect. A lot of veterans, I think, feel their pain comes from this feeling of alienation. And even if they do have a robust relational life, even if they aren’t physically or emotionally alienated from the people immediately around them, they feel very alienated from society. They feel very different. They feel like nobody really understands their pain. And that ends up becoming a source of great strife, I think, for a lot of veterans. Sebastian Junger’s book Tribe — which I know you’ve read too — talks about this deeply, through his own battle with PTSD. But it’s this feeling of alienation from the society around you that just doesn’t understand what you went through, and then you end up feeling very alone and forgotten.
That feeling came across a lot with these guys. They were going through these issues that they knew were not unique, necessarily. They knew they weren’t the only guys who felt this way in the world, but they felt very forgotten, and they felt very alienated and left alone from the people around them. But I left this out of what I was surprised about before. I expected them to go back and blame those structural issues and those policy failures, whatever it might be, and they just did not. They refused to, even when they absolutely should have brought up how they were failed, or how there were forces working against them. When you’re working 80 hours a week and you can barely afford rent, obviously there are structural issues affecting your life, but it just didn’t come up hardly at all.
Sam: So, we’re now going to speculation here, but that, for me, is different than the veteran community. Because the veteran community has this feeling that society — and I’m speaking in generalities — owes a burden or responsibility of care to them. Obviously, that’s manifested through the VA as an example. But when veterans face issues, oftentimes they blame the government and the VA for those issues, at times when it’s not even the VA or the government’s fault. And so I’m curious how you think about the distinctions there. These guys, in our perspective, should be placing the blame on structures, on systems, and aren’t. What’s your hunch on what to attribute that to?
Soren: Yeah, I think one of the weird experiences of serving and then coming home is you get thanked endlessly at the halftime of every NFL game and all these commercials and politicians and this and that. I’m being a little facetious here. Obviously, a lot of the thanks is very sincere and genuine, and I took a lot of very long flights and owe a lot to random grandmas at USOs across the country that baked some cookies that morning and left them out. So there’s a lot to be very thankful for. But you are thanked endlessly by society. And so there’s this discrepancy in a lot of veterans’ minds between that public appreciation and the material help they actually receive when they get home. And so they feel owed something they’re not getting.
Then when you talk to these guys, they don’t feel like they’re owed anything. No one has thanked them for anything. They don’t feel like they’ve done anything that deserves that type of help, which in many cases was just, frankly, not true. But they feel like they are in a very thankless role in society. And so because of that, why do they deserve help? The structures shouldn’t be built for them. And so it’s all up to them to fix the problem. But working-class America is obviously the backbone of everything, so they’re doing quite a lot that deserves our thanks.
Sam: We didn’t write about this explicitly in the report, but the thing that I’ve been circling around is the role that therapy culture has played in all this. A lot of these guys were in therapy or had been in therapy, which is surprising — not even for class reasons, but because therapy is so often described as inaccessible. And my perspective is it seems like some people have been in bad therapy. It feels like the guys we interviewed have bought into this idea that they need to fix themselves in order to be in relationship with other people. And that is just so wildly disconnected from how relationships actually work. You build your confidence and self-esteem in relationships, not apart from them. You build your relational skills in the container of community and relationships, not apart from them. But there was this idea that, “I’m going to self-help fix myself, and then I’ll be ready to return to community.” That felt like a quite pernicious turn. These guys felt like there was something they could be better at, and then at that point they would be ready and worthy to be in relationship with other human beings.
Soren: Yeah, that’s a really interesting thread to pull on. And this is actually where I expected more of the digital media diet to play in. I have watched a lot of this stuff for my previous work, and a lot of it is just telling guys that to be a successful man, you need to make a bunch of money and sleep with a bunch of women and be powerful in some sort of way. And if you don’t have all three of those things, then you failed in some sort of way spiritually as a man. So they feel like, “Well, I might not be any of those things. I need to fix myself before I am worth anything to society,” which is just not the case at all. And then maybe some of them go to therapy to try to figure out a way to reach those points. And one, you’re just going in the wrong direction. That is not the stuff to work on. But two, as you said, I agree — you can’t fix yourself alone. You need a bunch of people to help you do that. That’s the whole point of relationships — to have that sort of social mutual aid between people.
But I will say, a lot of the guys were in therapy and talked really encouragingly about it. They said it was very helpful to them, which was good. Especially if you think about the idea of being sold this bad bill of masculinity when they were younger, about not talking about their feelings and just shoving it all down inside, and this weird, perverse stoicism that has kind of swept the nation. Therapy has been a way for them to move past that and get more in touch with their emotions, which is great. But it’s not everything.
Sam: Yeah. I think that’s a good correction. It felt like it should be one of a multitude of things. So much of the emotional openness we were speaking to, and the rejection of the hyper-masculine, stoic approach, emerged through guys who had been through therapy and were processing things they were letting go of. For the most part, that was good. The problem was that it was the only thing, and that was what stood between them and being involved in other things. And I think both of those things could be true at the same time.
I kind of want to switch gears here, if it’s cool. I know we’re coming to the end. We’ve been talking about some heavy stuff. There was a lot of heavy stuff in this. But I also know that, in my experience just talking to dudes, there’s some funny shit that comes up. And I’m curious if there was anything in particular that stands out as a really funny thing that someone said in the interview process.
Soren: Yeah, there were two. One was funny just because of how it reflected on me. The other one was funny just for what they said. There’s one guy, Beto, who had a wife and a newborn daughter. And the way that he talked about them, it was just unbound love for these two people in his life. He loved his wife dearly. He was smitten by this infant child that he just had. He could have gone on for an hour about how much he loved them. And I forgot how it came up, but we were talking about successes or something, and he goes, “Yeah, well, growing up when I was younger, I always wanted a hot goth girlfriend. And if you look at me now, I got it.” And he was so proud of himself for doing it. I was like, “Fuck yeah, brother, live your true self.”
Sam: That would have been the one I chose to
Soren: Then there was another one where I was talking to a guy, and up front I asked, “What do you do? What are your hobbies?” I play chess now; that’s my main hobby. And I said, “What are your hobbies?” And he said that he fixes old chainsaws, which was an incredibly masculine hobby, and emasculated me immediately at the top of the interview, and I found it hard to come back from.
Sam: He just goes: “Chainsaws.” Yeah, that was really fun to read. The only other thing I’ll say is there was an exchange in one of our later interviews with Hector. You asked him about who his role model was, and he just, without a hesitation, said “Boromir.” I know you’re a big Lord of the Rings guy, so you guys just had this great completely-unrelated-to-the-interview-process riff on how Boromir is misunderstood. And I just thought that was heartwarming to read, but it was also just a pretty funny few pages of interview transcripts all about Boromir.
Soren: That one really took a turn, and I do feel very strongly about that. He’s a great man. He was served a bad bill. He’s a great icon of masculinity as somebody who failed but then made up for it and admitted his failures and went out a hero.
Sam: Well, now that people have heard about why they should reconsider Boromir’s role in the trilogy, what I wanted to end with is where you and I started. There are many areas of overlap that we have, but one of them, I think, is a shared disillusionment with purely quantitative ways of knowing. I know you and I have been trying to push this book, We Built Reality, by Jason Blakely. We read it, share it with everyone, and no one else reads it. But we love it. So I think the question I want to get us towards ending with is: what’s at the heart of this disillusionment for you? I’m curious how this experience with this project shaped your perspective around that, if at all.
Soren: Yeah, I do feel very strongly about that, and you should read that book if you’re listening. Before all this, years ago, I was an interrogator in the Army for Special Operations. But there’s a big struggle in the intel world, not just ours but broadly, about this idea of, “Oh well, everything’s online and digital now, so that’s the way you can collect all this intelligence.” And the fight between quantitative and qualitative actually started there for me, about 15 years ago. Sure, you can hear somebody’s day-to-day conversations if you want, but you only learn so much from just hearing them talk. There is no substitution for speaking to them and asking questions. And you learn there’s this depth of knowledge and information and texture and color that you get from a long one-on-one conversation with somebody that you just cannot get through surveys or polling. It just doesn’t come across. Now, those things serve a purpose. They’re a very fast and relatively cheap way to get that information, but they don’t bring you everything. And when you’re trying to study really thick, thorny, hard-to-wrangle social questions like this, or in politics especially, surveys are just very shallow. The world has changed so much over the last 20 years, and to think that we’d be able to answer really profound questions about what people are thinking, what’s in their mind, how they feel, through impersonal surveys — it’s just not there. We’ve really committed to worshipping at the shrine of the linear regression as this crystal ball that will tell us what’s going on, but it only does so much. And I think we should really look at returning to some older ways of getting this information.
Sam: I think what we said at the outset is that the experience of isolation and disconnection can make you functionally invisible to the outside world. Because your relationships are what make you visible — you are seen by another human being — what we wanted to do was make the invisible visible. And we wanted to take guys who were often talked about but weren’t often heard from directly, and hear from them to humanize their lives, provide texture to their lives, and do so in a way that got into the complexity, the messiness, the confusion of it all. This project emerged from that 2024 survey report that I thought was useful information: It was able to show in pretty clear detail what this class divide looked like overall. But then to be able to go and get into the thorny messiness of it with people, with these guys who were again willing to share some of the most intimate details of their lives — I just feel a sense of responsibility to hold these stories and make sure that they are stewarded as effectively as they can be. I also feel a great sense of richness and of understanding that we’ve even hit on throughout this conversation. What the experience of men without degrees, and the threads of that experience that were consistent look like. We would not have been able to get into it had we relied on just top-line survey questions.
Soren: One of the best examples of this was the gap between the amount of guys who said that they had close friends versus the amount that said they had them once we started doing the interviews. The definition of close friends, when you’re answering a survey, might be there in a single line, or might not be there at all. There’s a ton of qualification that they need to provide for that answer. And then when they get in front of somebody who defines what a close friend is and digs in, it came out that for a lot of the guys that were in that data set who answered “yes” on the survey to having multiple close friends, when I talked to them, it was one, maybe two, people that they had met online, that they had never met in person, and talked to about once a month. I believe that friendship meant a lot to that person, but I would not consider that a close friend. And that’s very hard to come across in a survey, and you would never have learned that without going and talking to those folks. So it’s a “yes, and” to use your line.
Sam: Well. Soren, this project started based on a close friendship, and at the tail end of it, it hasn’t yet wrecked a close friendship. And I’m grateful to do this with you.
Soren: Yeah, me as well. It’s been a really interesting journey.
