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 suggestions that there are other types of friends and we will attempt to refute them. Of course, if you have additional ideas of types of friends that exist, share them in the comments and we will see just. How much we agree with you or not, but I bet that this model can be expanded.

Simone: So honestly, we'd like your feedback. So first type of friend trash friend, as [00:03:00] far as we are concerned. Although you probably have friends like this and you are an idiot for having them. This first type of friend is the convenience friend.

Simone: What is a convenience friend? It is someone who in the show Parks and Rec they are referred to as workplace proximity associates rather than friends, . Because this is someone who you are friends with nearly because they are there. and sometimes because you want company.

Simone: So great examples of friends who are convenience friends or workplace proximity associates are classmates, roommates, neighbors, people who go to the same church as you, people who are in clubs with you co workers who you like and hang out with after work. People that you've met a long time ago that you've just kept up with.

Simone: A good way

Malcolm: to think of this group is the people who you are adjacent to in life, whether it's in school or in work. These are not people that you've really sorted for, right? It's just a random assortment of the population generally.

Simone: You get along, like you're not convenience friends with everyone.

Simone: You're convenience friends with the people [00:04:00] you're compatible

Malcolm: with. You will inevitably sort for the top, let's say, 20% compatibility people within your adjacent environment. Whether it's neighbors, schools, anything like that. And those people will become your friends and those are convenience friends that convenience friends make a lot of sense.

Malcolm: I almost everyone always has some convenience friends and they are of high utility to have in the moment if they exist within your current. Context. So if you are currently at a company or currently at school, it's very useful to have convenient friends within that context because it's useful in playing into the larger social hierarchy of a school. And to that extent, they might be a different type of friend that we'll get to next, but, broadly speaking, they make sense. Where convenience friends become really toxic is when you have a convenience friend that is from a stage of life that you are no longer in. These would be like friends from high school that you're still friends with as [00:05:00] an adult. There is no reason that those people in high school, unless you had a really unique childhood, would be optimized out of all the people in the world to be like high match friends for you, right?

Malcolm: In reality, we would say that what is happening when somebody still stays Friends with somebody who was originally a convenience friend is they move into the next category of friendship, which we call self image reinforcement friends or character

Simone: reinforcing

Malcolm: friends. Yeah. Or character reinforcing friends.

Malcolm: And these are friends who you are friends with because they help reinforce some image you have of yourself. The most classic example here would be the. Like gay best friend a woman may have because she thinks she needs like a gay best friend to fit some stereotypes she saw in media.

Simone: Adding to the gay best friend example is like the high powered business women that you meet with and have cocktails with because you see it done on sex in the city.

Simone: And you're like of course I need that. I need my girls today