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

Malcolm: or like a minority who somebody has friends with just so people don't [00:06:00] call them racist.

Malcolm: And what we need to make clear with this type of friend is , it's not everyone who happens to be like, the gay best friend of a woman falls into this category, or not every minority of person is friends with, are they friends with to prove that they're not racist.

Malcolm: But there are some people in the world who choose friends because they fit these roles. And you can play yourself up to fit these roles better. Sorry, I'm gonna say that better, because this is something that's really important that we say earlier in the video, so we don't look like we're saying all...

Malcolm: Okay. To be clear here, we are not saying that gay people who are someone's best friends fit this narrative. What we are saying is people who choose a friend specifically because they fit some gay archetype, that is this type of friendship. So for example, a gay person may not fit this archetype even if they are gay, if they aren't like the...

Malcolm: The sassy, whatever, because that's what's needed to fill this role in [00:07:00] the person's story that they're trying to tell. And a lot of people in the world are just essentially trying to create character sheets for themselves. That is their primary driver in life. It's not to affect some change upon the world, it's they have a story of who they want to be, and often they pick that story up from media, and now they're trying to tell that

Simone: story.

Simone: Yeah, I think it's, it cannot be understated how much of a role popular media plays in character reinforcing friends and the type of friends they want. So I also do think that understanding Really like top sitcoms, dramas, movies, et cetera, will help you understand the sorts of characters supporting roles.

Simone: Of course, people are looking for and help you understand what kind of person you might need to be to fit in that role. You can also look at, for example, people's life stages. Because that can also really influence what people are looking for in certain stages of their life. If you really want to be friend people who are more mature.

Simone: In their life, maybe 50 [00:08:00] years plus and really successful in their careers. People in those positions often really have self images or characters that are mentors that are wise, that give people advice. So coming to them as an acolyte in the right kind of way could get you a good position in their life, for example.

Simone: So I think looking at. life stages and also what seems to satisfy people the most and how they like to see themselves the most in those life stages is really important. So sometimes I think maybe for like girls in their early twenties, they want like a wing woman, like a girl who they can like travel and party with.

Simone: And we go on adventures and we have. fun. And we have spa days. And for guys like a good wing man who like, brings an adventure and supports them and like has their back and pushes them a little bit, like those kinds of characters make a lot of sense. So when you are looking, we'll say you have a target, you have a target friend, you have to look at their age, you have to look at the media they consume.

Simone: And this is actually pretty easy to do with social media as long as someone's online.

Simone: So essentially, when it comes to the character reinforcing fran there's this concept that we're [00:09:00] all, I think, pretty familiar with where everyone is the protagonist in their story.

Simone: But to be a protagonist, you need supporting actors, you need extras, you need the right kind of set dressing to be who you are.

Simone: Why this is really useful to know about is if you understand the kind of character that somebody else wants it to be, you can figure out how you would help them complete that character. And if you help them complete that character in some way, You have an instant VIP location in their friendscape. And

Malcolm: 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: Yeah Yeah,

Malcolm: Yeah and what we mean when we say a convenience friend who your friends was after the convenient period as a character reinforcing friend,

Malcolm: [00:10:00] what we mean is the primary reason you haven't dumped them as a friend is because you don't want to be the type of person who dumps friends. So really, the reason you haven't dumped them as a friend is because of the narrative they tell you about who you are as a person, which is a really silly reason to stay friends with someone.

Malcolm: And a lot of people are like, Oh they don't care. They've got other friends. And frankly, it's healthier for them to make new friends who are better fits for them, given where they are in the world, at that time. So

Simone: true. They're almost like friendship blackmail. Because it's like this dirty little secret that you don't want to have out that like you dump friends or that you're like a heartless person who leaves your childhood friends behind.

Simone: And it really, I think can make people feel bad and feel a lot of cognitive dissonance. Cause they're why am I spending my time? Or, I think this also, it doesn't just happen with people that you move away from or grow apart from. But from, with friends who become toxic and I think toxic friends actually use this dynamic.

Simone: Like they subconsciously understand it and they [00:11:00] use this dynamic to twist the knife and stop friends from dumping them. \

Simone: So another way this bad dynamic shows up is I think a lot of toxic friends or friends who are becoming exploitative actually subtly or subconsciously understand this dynamic and leverage it.

Simone: Like, how dare you're abandoning me just because I'm deeply depressed and in need right now, like, how could you possibly forget my birthday, et cetera, et cetera, and they use that because they understand that you see yourself as a good person, as a good friend as a caring person, and they frame you as not being caring.

Simone: When you don't meet their unreasonable demands. Understanding that as well, understanding that people are manipulating you along those grounds, they're manipulating you by taking something that matters a lot to you, which is your personal character. And trying to put it in danger, hold it hostage, essentially.

Simone: It's hopefully that would make it. easier for some people to drop toxic friends. Although I guess it's hard to recognize in the moment, but that's still something it's definitely a real dynamic that is leveraged [00:12:00] by a lot of people. I think the same happens sometimes with family members, et cetera, like how could you do this?

Simone: Ultimately they cause a lot of harm. Anything more about characterism enforcing friends? I would just add one more note, which is that. Malcolm's point that everyone wants to be this like complicated subtle person cannot be emphasized enough. We've had people who really take our advice on being a two dimensional character to heart.

Simone: And they'll send to us their draft character sheets and ask us, Hey, what do you think? And their draft character sheets have 15 attributes that are positive, like three that are negative, but they're actually really positives. I don't think. It cannot be overstated how simple is, you've got three positive attributes and three negative attributes that are super clear and actually really negative.

Simone: That's it. Like you have to be so two dimensional. So I think that should also be emphasized because I think people just can't get over the fact that they're so [00:13:00] unique and special and nuanced that it's hard to. Understand that you have to be an extra on somebody else's performance.

Simone: So our favorite type of friend, Malcolm, is the utility friend. Yes.

Malcolm: Yes. This is just someone who's directly useful to you in some way.

Simone: And so in childhood, this might be like the kid with the best video game console. Right.

Malcolm: It could be somebody who intellectually pushes you forward. It could be somebody who gives you access to additional things.

Malcolm: It could be somebody who gives you new ideas. It could be the point is that you are receiving. Some sort of a tangible or mental benefit from being

Simone: friends with this person. Yeah. So examples of utility are they go all over the place. One could be like, honestly, like they're wealthy. And when you're with them, you get to do fancy things, or maybe they're really attractive and you just want to be around someone attractive.

Simone: Or maybe they're a boyfriend or girlfriend and you just want sex from them. Maybe it is because, yeah, like Malcolm said they teach you something new. Our favorite types of utility friends are people who [00:14:00] expose us to new ideas and intellectually push us. So that's of course the first thing you would go to Malcolm.

Simone: I think for most people, utility friends. Are the type of friend who manufactures popularity. And by that, they are the type of friend who organizes the gatherings. They organize the group vacations, they organize parties, they invite people like they make everything happen. So the utility that those people offer is literally providing opportunities and organizing opportunities for socializing because so few people actually take the initiative to do that.

Simone: And one thing that we're gonna be teaching our kids so early is that like the key to popularity has very little to do with necessarily charisma. You obviously can't be like the worst socially, but really the key to popularity is being the person to make something happen. If you are taking the initiative and getting people together to go somewhere or to come to your house, you host you, you do things, you keep the conversation going in a group thread, you [00:15:00] are the popular one because so few people take initiative.

Simone: So that, that is one of the easiest ways to become a utility friend. But I think understanding. What people want, what matters to them, what challenges they're facing, make it really easy to understand how you could be a utility friend to them. And to be honest with you, because we really value this type of friendship the most, whenever we meet new people and we like them and we want to be friends with them, we're always like, what do you need right now?

Simone: What do you want? What type of interest do you need? Because we want. This is a two parter. Like one is we want to be useful to them. If we are utility friends to them, we will be friends with them. But also every time that we are useful to them is an excuse to reach out to them, to engage, to talk, et cetera.

Simone: Yeah.

Malcolm: And being the connector is a very useful way to be a utility friend, as Simone was saying. Because whenever you connect to people like, I connect a startup with a venture capitalist, right? And it's a verified connection. I am doing a favor to both of those individuals. And they both really value [00:16:00] that favor.

Malcolm: And I'm getting like two social credits for that. And the key to being this type of a connector, especially if you're young now. Really make sure you take notes on the people you're in conversations with. You should have a list of all of the people you've talked to their contact information, and everything you know about them.

Malcolm: And then occasionally hit up the people on this list who are most likely to be useful to other people who are part of Sort of your cloud of individuals. Because that's a very low cost way, both low cost socially and financially to be a good utility friend. And outside of that, hosting parties is a very low cost way to be a utility friend to a large group of people to the extent where even though we're very introverted, we have found a system for, going to Manhattan once every other month and hosting a party there.

Malcolm: Just to stay of utility and top of mind to people who we're interacting with. What's the final type of friend simony? So there were

four.

Simone: Yeah. So in the [00:17:00] past, we've only discussed three and we've only come up with three, but I want to propose one bonus one because I want to prime. Everyone who might leave comments on additional types that like, Hey, anyone can contribute something and I'm going to throw something out and knock them and you can pull it apart and either say this is a legitimate addition to the canon or not.

Simone: Sound good. Okay. Okay. I'm going to propose the fourth type of friend is a. We'll say a culture friend. So this could count as someone who's also a fan of your top baseball team. Someone who's a member of your religion. Someone who is also a really huge fan of some subculture. Basically someone with whom you share a culture.

Simone: I'll never forget my mom explaining to me in part her love of baseball. She later in life became a huge fan of the San Francisco Giants and would wear a Giants baseball cap had a Giants t shirt and she talked to me a couple of times about how awesome it felt to go to a game and feel just so united with a bunch of people that she had [00:18:00] no other shared background with.

Simone: And also she would walk around with her like Giants signaling stuff and immediately she would have friends and it wasn't because of some character reinforcing thing. say I think it's really different. I think it's because whatever. No. Hold on. Let me make my case. The cultural signifier that you're wearing, whatever that may be tells them immediately that you have a shared context.

Simone: You have a shared language and you are a safe place for each other. So I think often people get really stressed going out into the world. It can be, everything is uncertain, unpredictable. Sometimes it's really hard to predict people. So especially in a really diverse heterogeneous society, like in the United States, going out and interacting, people can be tough because you don't know where they're coming from.

Simone: You don't know what their expectations are. Social contracts are very mismatched in many places. So you're going to get some form of conflict or you're going to insult someone by mistake. When you know someone has a shared culture with you, be that a sports team or a fan universe, like you see that like they have some Naruto [00:19:00] pin or something.

Simone: You're like, Oh my God, so scary. Like then like suddenly. That tension goes away and you are instant friends on this thing. And there's this camaraderie that shows up.

Malcolm: Okay. I will. So I'd say that really it's either utility friend or a character reinforcing friend seems to be what you're describing, but I will say that it's derived enough that you could potentially consider it a new category.

Malcolm: With this understanding that, for example, you think about us, trying to create a culture of aligned families who are having a high number of kids. So our kids grow up understanding our cultural values, understanding that they're not just completely weirdos. Because the other families that were part of this group was they also do weird things, like name their kids weird things.

Malcolm: They also, they're very interested in deviating from society. They're also very pro natalist, very focused on, on success and cultural acceleration ism. In that they're really like technophilic people. They're really focused on how do we move forwards to whatever comes after this stage of [00:20:00] society.

Malcolm: So they're really and we do that because that's useful. And I would imagine, if you're a conservative. Jew or you're a conservative Catholic people in your Catholic community or people in your Jewish community would feel very different from you and have an intergenerational utility to you.

Malcolm: But because that utility is so unique and so non direct, I can say, okay, yes. And then the sports fan thing that you're mentioning is if the healthy version of this is religious communities or cultural communities that would be like the pornography version of this where it's just faking what it feels like to have a community that would be of any utility to you.

Malcolm: It's just masturbating this idea of I'm part of a cultural group when it's not really, it's just a sports team. It's not going to, help impart like. to your family or your kids. But it is fulfilling sort of an ancestral need there. Okay. I'll agree

Simone: with that. [00:21:00] I would also say it warrants a separate category because the tactics in terms of tapping into that are quite different.

Simone: So it's about finding the right signalers and of course, bonus points. If it's like a deep cut signaler that only. Insiders would know. And you see this a lot, for example, with cryptic bumper stickers that people put on their cars. And I see these all the time. And I'm like, I know that this is this kind of thing.

Simone: And I wish I knew what it was. And I always try to Google them and it's really annoying. Or you even see this with cultural groups, like Mormons with garments where if you know what to look for, you can tell someone's wearing their garments. But you probably don't know if you're an outsider.

Simone: So you feel this extra camaraderie . It's a powerful dynamic.

Malcolm: Yeah. One thing I wanted to close this out with because I think a lot of people, they hear this and they're like. Oh, that's like an overly utilitarian way of viewing other humans.

Malcolm: That's really immoral to just put people in these simplistic categories. And I think that's very much a character reinforcing friend [00:22:00] attitude. The type of person who over associates with character reinforcing friend. Classic. Right. But I guess what I'd say is I actually think it's very immoral to take that position.

Malcolm: Because I think that a lot of people get the aesthetic of being a moral person. confused with actually doing good in the world. Our lives are very short. Every unit of time we have, every interaction we have is an opportunity for us to enact the sort of change in the world we want or make the world better along some specific lines.

Malcolm: You get so many units of good you can do for the world a day. And that is, I think what a person's quality of character should be modeled off of, especially when they do things that seem to hurt in the moment or that would cause a negative judgment. So I'd say it's very much if you're in a relationship with someone but you know that relationship is toxic and hurting them the right thing to do is to leave that relationship.

Malcolm: The wrong thing to do is to stay in that relationship [00:23:00] because that's what a quote unquote good person, the aesthetic of being a good person would do. Yet I think that All of our friends, even the ones that aren't actively toxic, if you're in a relationship with them for a character reinforcing reason because you're doing it to tell a story of how you're a good person, then that, that is...

Malcolm: taking from you optimization that you could put into the world towards making a world concretely a better place. And I think that some of the worst types of people if you want to know the people who are able to commit often the most evil are the ones who have in their brain, I am a good person.

Malcolm: Ask, what does a good person do in this moment? Yeah, right. Because what you are asking when you ask that is what does narratively a good person do in this moment? Yeah, really dangerous thing about having that mindset is you begin to Define the types of things you have done in your past and the types of things people in whatever cultural group you're in [00:24:00] As axiomatically good, which can make it impossible to see when the group you're in begins to do evil things.

Simone: So here's the one last thing I'd like you to help me work through. And actually maybe you won't be able to, but other people can, if they watch this and help us in the comments. One of our friends who I really love and respect mostly because she and I hold super different views, who I'm talking about.

Simone: We love her so much. She was like. When I told her this model of friendship, what about love? There are just some people that I unconditionally love for who they are. And I, we

Malcolm: talked about it. So love is an emotion. We evolved as part of our, from our cultural perspective and emotion, you evolved is something that can fire randomly, basically love can force you to form a pair bond with someone and.

Malcolm: I guess you could like, I don't want you as a kid in the room, use the M word, but you could M that, that emotional subset. But that is really [00:25:00] not meaningful, not in a wider context. And we talk in our books about how love actually works, right? Love appears to be emotion that originally evolved to get us to not kill our genetic offspring, basically form sort of long term relationships with someone.

Malcolm: Then it got hijacked because evolution is a cheap programmer. So it'll just hijack a preexisting system. When we started forming monogamous pair bonds to reinforce those, we go into this in other podcasts or we'll do a whole podcast just on how love works. But the reality is love is an emotion.

Malcolm: It's an emotion that we feel today because our ancestors who felt it when in. When presented with certain environmental stimuli, had more surviving offspring than the ones that didn't. It is no true mystical Norse compass to anything. If

Simone: anything, then to summarize, you would argue that what she is really experiencing when she maintains friendships because she loves them, for her, it is the [00:26:00] utility of experiencing the good feeling of love.

Simone: Well,

Malcolm: I would argue it's more of a cultural thing. So keep in mind the friend that she's mentioning here is a secular Quaker. She came from a Quaker tradition and Quaker tradition sees truth is coming from your emotion as coming inside you. So it would be perfect sense that somebody of the Quaker cultural tradition would see your emotions, especially a strong emotion, like love as a sign of something beyond that emotion, a sign of some almost.

Malcolm: Supernatural truth to the relationship whereas we coming from a Calvinist cultural tradition and seeing both positive and negative emotions as things that can lead you astray would not, we'd have a high level of suspicion for that.

Simone: Yes. I love you and I love that little bumper car rider behind you.

Simone: I can see the lights going. [00:27:00] I really like talking about this. I love this theory of friendship and I'm keen to add to it, like three seems like so few, so we'll see what we can add to the canon over time. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Maybe that means to be something for like parasocial

Malcolm: forms of friendship.

Simone: I feel like... We hopefully over time can add more to the canon. It feels like there, there could be more than just three categories. So I love talking about this because we always have a chance of finding something new when we do. But yeah, let's hopefully talk about

Malcolm: it. Allow our friendship.

Malcolm: To be perverted by love.

Simone: Let's never let that happen. I love you, Malcolm. Even though we don't value it. Even though

Malcolm: I don't value it. I, for whatever reason feel that way about you. It's only natural, right? We've been in a relationship for a long time. Love

Simone: breaks down marriages. Yeah, it's only match.

Simone: That's the problem. That's the problem, Malcolm. It makes me feel

Malcolm: good to say that. So I'm just using you to, because we're all wretched, we're [00:28:00] all fallen. We all bend our ideal moral framework due to the fact that, we're still human. And we shouldn't overly. beat ourselves up for being human.

Malcolm: And we should allow ourselves to indulge in little emotions here or there, if overall it increases our efficiency. And that's what I tell myself. That's the wretched little lie I tell myself when I say, Simone, I love you. And I'm really happy we did another fun episode.

Simone: I love you too, Malcolm, and it's disgusting.

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