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I have come across it in Crash Course World History. It is at around 10 minute and 9 second. Here it goes:
I just hate when people, and also microbes, are super self-involved. Like, don't tell me you got to take a day off to go to your mom's birthday party, Stan. That is not imagining me complexly. I have got needs over here.
Could anyone please tell me what the presenter meant by that?
This I think is intended to be humorous word play. This portion of the video is "an open letter to disease", and disease is often caused by single celled organisms (microbes). A single-celled organism is "simple" and a multi-celled organism with differentiated tissue types is "complex" in biology.
He's complaining that microbes are "putting themselves at the center of human history" and they don't even care about history. So they are "self-involved" and, like Stan, don't consider the effect that their actions have on other creatures.
Apparently "to imagine complexly" is a phrase used to exhort people to be civil and see other people as complex individuals instead of negatively stereotyping them. This phrase was mentioned in a speech by John Green, who is also this host of the video.
In a speech written for the ALAN Conference, author John Green expanded on the importance of seeing others as complex individuals. Civility issues, misunderstandings, and discomfort on Wikipedia can sometimes arise from a failure to imagine others complexly.
Microbes don't respect the people they are infecting (parasites live in "hosts", so maybe that is another layer of word-play) and Stan didn't respect the "needs" of the show's host, so the host is saying "that's not the way civil people behave Stan!" and at the same time making a reference to simple microbes infecting complex organisms like him. The host isn't serious about this - he's just teasing someone he works with in a good-natured way. Because "imagine complexly" is a concept that the host came up with, he may also be making fun of himself.
From the context the presenter appears to mean:
...that's not considering my requirements
although it's a convoluted way of saying so.
He/She clearly feels that Stan's mum's birthday doesn't justify Stan taking the day off when his/her needs should come first.
The suggestion is that Stan is not thinking deeply enough (about the presenter's situation).
I have never come across complexly before although it's easy enough to understand the sense and to find on the internet.
