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Based Camp: Friends are a Pointless Indulgence
Malcolm and Simone outline their theory of friendship and the four main "friend models" they've observed. Convenience friends are tied to a specific time or place like school or work. Character friends reinforce your desired self-image. Utility friends provide tangible benefits. And cultural friends share your niche interests or lifestyle. They emphasize optimizing your limited time by evaluating your friendships based on the value and role each person plays. Understanding these models helps maximize the usefulness of your social network.
Malcolm: [00:00:00] The really important thing to remember about this is that while you and everyone else. Is the protagonist of their own story, you are a side character in the story of everyone else you will ever meet. And so a lot of people say I just want people to see me for who I am.
Malcolm: That is far too nuanced to be a good side character, right?
Simone: Hi, Octavian.
Simone: Do you want to say hi to YouTube? Yeah. Okay, say hi, YouTube. Hi.
Malcolm: So we had one person on one of our videos saying you guys can do more interviews when you start running out of interesting things to talk about.
Malcolm: And I love this because they don't, I am on easy mode with YouTube. My wife told me one day, cause she goes, Malcolm, if you don't find an interesting thing. to discuss with me because every morning we do a strategy walk and we walk together for about an hour. If you don't think of an interesting thing to discuss with me before I wake up .
Malcolm: My life is the framing device for Arabian tales. That is my life. [00:01:00] I have to keep this woman happy or she'll kill me. And I have to keep her happy with controversial, weird takes. You guys are just getting the dregs of these morning
Simone: walks.
Simone: Yeah, you're having the microwaved leftovers from my first take. My prima nocta. What can we say? Sorry, guys.
Malcolm: Yes.
Simone: I love it. Oh, God. Anyway today I thought we could talk about our theory of friendship, which we actually developed pretty early on in our marriage.
Simone: And this was a listener
Malcolm: request. Yeah. And it comes down to the thought of what use are other people to us? Um, More specifically, what I mean is. If you're going to go out there and you're going to engage with people and you're an extreme introvert, you really need a specific motivation to do that.
Simone: Specifically as extreme introverts, we really need a reason to interact with people. But we also think that Everyone actually interacts with people for a reason. They don't just, quote unquote, need friends. And so we built a model to [00:02:00] determine what types of friends there are, which can also make it much easier to determine whether a friendship is worth keeping.
Simone: And really help you understand the dynamics of the friendship. But more importantly, if you want to have friends, it's really helpful to understand what kind of friend you are to them, what your value proposition is to them as a friend. And that actually has helped us a ton because there are all sorts of people that we like to be friends with.
Simone: And we need to understand what it is in their lives that we're going to fill in. If we are to take that position to earn it, essentially
Malcolm: treat their friends very differently, depending on the value proposition that you're providing.
Simone: Exactly. So let us start. There are four types of friends, by the way, per our model.
Simone: We will also discuss in this conversation, people's other complaints and suggest
Published on 2 years, 5 months ago