We all love our friends (for the most part), but how often do you actually stop to think deeply about friendship itself? How did you meet your closest friends and how much thought did you put into who became your friends? In this episode we discuss social circles, mimetic theory, the true value of going to a good school, the unfortunate importance of random circumstance, the influence of the pandemic on friendships and how all of this can be contextualized by Personality Vectors, an elegant social (and mathematical) theory by Vincent Yang (https://www.yangvincent.com/resources/personality-vectors/).

0:00 Intro

0:49 You are the average of those who you spend time with, what defines your individuality is your choice in who these people are.

7:13 Who you put high quality time into is who you become close to - time can either be intentional or by chance.

14:23 How do friend groups change? Shared stories don't evaporate.

19:20 Different friends have different roles in your life.

21:51 Andrei took a test to see how funny he is and he got 3/100 (https://principlesyou.com/).

23:15 "nice", "cool", "chill"

25:58 Pessimistic mindsets are a turn off.

30:34 A framework to approach and understand friendships applied to the question: surround yourself with the same or different values as you? Two opposing frameworks that seem to work, how do you decide which to pick and when?

36:09 How do you approach finding new friends today? Pre- & post- college friend making is very different.

41:18 Money could change the dynamic of a friendship.

45:17 How could a new person enter your friend group? 

More about us:

- Wing (https://wingvasiksiri.com): "Founder and Managing Partner at iSeed SEA"

- Ivan (https://ivanfj.com): "PhD researcher in Biodegradable Plastics at UC Berkeley"

- Andrei (https://andrei.ai): "PhD researcher in Machine Learning at University of Cambridge"