Transcript

Rob

Hello and welcome to another edition of the Mental Wealth Podcast. Its Rob and Mukund here today. We are so excited to welcome Emily Pabst of remaketherules.com in this episode we discuss online dating, how modern communication is changing, how we date and meet our partners.

Emily shares powerful and practical insights from her work with clients to help you find more meaning, make better decisions, and ultimately build stronger connections to others in the world around you. All right, enough of the hard sell. Let’s dive right in.

Emily, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate your time.

Emily

Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here and to be talking with you both.

Rob

Could you give a little bit more of a background of remaketherules and what brings you here today.

Emily

Sure, absolutely decision making, let alone making good decisions, is more complicated, more difficult and more frustrating than ever. That is not because people are dumb or lazy. Is because we are existing. In an informational environment that human beings have never experienced before. So yes, a lot of our older strategies for making choices simply don’t work anymore. We have to figure out a new way. That’s what I do. Emily passed, founder of remake the rules and I teach people and organizations how to modernize their decision making for the information age. So essentially, I help people figure out how to integrate information technology, their digital technology tools in a way that actually supports their goals, supports their lives. And because digital technologies are so pervasive in our world now. The problems I work on can be almost anything. From these very large scale administrative analytical systems, all the way to one of my favorite problems which is online dating, what we’re going to be talking about today.

Rob

That’s the perfect segue to my first. I really appreciate that it makes it easier for me when guests do that. My first question, when we sort of looked into your background a little bit, Is we’re. That people are obviously using apps more for dating. How do you think the switch to apps from meeting people in person and the switch to apps and text based is changing how we date changing?

Emily

Certainly. Well, there is definitely a really strong relationship to the way in which that apps are changing, how we date and the Internet is just changing how we live our. So both systems are kind of part and parcel of the same changes. And those big changes, which is our ability to connect and communicate with people all over the world in real time. Means that there is a lot of change that is happening in the world too. Not just because of that capacity, but because of the impacts of that capacity. People are able to learn and think and see and question things like they’ve never been able to do before. So we’re we’re kind of having this huge shake up that’s happening and that shake up is happening in dating. 2:00 so we see folks who are encountering people and ideas through dating apps that they maybe would not have been able to otherwise. It is just challenging to try to negotiate that right. Is all. These are new negotiations, new communications, new encounters that people are having, and to that end, it is. Just a skills issue. This is not outside of people’s capacity to do well. Just all new. So so folks. Just figuring it out on the.

Rob

So looking at how the decisions are made online and how people are using apps to to meet people. Do you think? These apps are having a general positive influence in society. Influence on the world around us.

Emily

I don’t think we know yet. I think that it is going to take a while to see whether or not we figure out how to really harness the incredible potential of this tool in a way that is really serving a majority of people. So. What I do believe in now that is the case is that dating apps have extraordinary potential and how we use them is going to be whether or not that potential is going to be negative or positive either. On individuals or on society as a whole? So if we are able to use them to connect with people in ways we never have before, to have more supportive and fulfilling relationships, and to grow support and love incredible right? Benefits to the individual and to society. If we are not able to figure out how to use them for that and we find ourselves in this cycle of. Problematic. Greater frustration, greater isolation. It is not going to be good for anybody.

Rob

That’s. And I’m wondering also, how do you make sure that you are using these apps in the right? I know for remake the rules you you help people make better decisions with the technology of themselves when you’re teaching someone to make better decisions individually, relationship wise, what is what is one of the major stumbling blocks that people have with technology. And when it comes to D.

Emily

You know, one of the real double-edged swords with these digital technology tools is that they usually provide feedback very quickly, right? Just operate very quickly. You can swipe and swipe and text and swipe. Meet people. And as you are swiping as you are texting as you’re meeting people, you are getting feedback. That as. So then the question just becomes. Right. What are you doing with that feedback and how is it supporting your future? So what I see and what I work with people on is that everyone has patterns of behavior that create a greater likelihood of the same outcomes happening over and over again. And what we want is to recalibrate those patterns so that you get your desired outcomes over and over and over again instead of the outcomes that you don’t want. So in the context of dating apps, that’s going to be going on. Bad dates over and over and over. There is definitely a population of people that’s going to. We can’t totally get rid of anything like that because humans are complicated and sneaky. But we can lean into a pattern of behavior that will result in better days.

Rob

And what is? How can an individual start that process? Do you like? You see that from an individual standpoint where you can sort of change that behavior or is it more of a long term thing where you can have a back and forth conversation and you can change it overtime. Someone listening to this right now can go. I’ve been out with these losers the last couple of times I’ve. Dates. How do I switch my thinking? My decision making so that I can align myself with a more positive outcome in the future? There an answer to that that may be a very convoluted question, I apologize.

Emily

No, I got it. And here. I’ll, I’ll give you 2 pieces of. Yes, that is something that people can do, I think quickly in most cases and can continue to grow on over time. Because everybody is different and everybody’s relationship goals are different, I implement. This process that I call. Roar, reflect, observe, assess and realign. So this is going to be an iterative process where me and whoever I’m working with are actually observing their decision making process as they move through the app. So how they are choosing to construct their profile? How they were choosing to swipe, how they were choosing to engage in conversations and who they choose to go out. And we’re just about what each of those choices is actually producing in this sort of downstream process that will eventually lead them to either continue a connection with this person or not. So that’s kind of the broad overview of how I work with people through this and how other people can work through it with themselves, kind of think about what they’re doing, work with it, with friends, family, whatever. But to get to a very specific pattern that I see frequently is that in my experience, most people swipe in two different ways. They either swipe right on literally everyone. So willing to meet this person, I’m matching matching matching matching matching. Or they swipe right only if they believe that that person is going to be a high compatibility probability, right? That they think that likely they are going to achieve whatever their relationship goals are, right? This is spouse material that this is whatever good date material. Then they swipe left on everyone else. And I think that both of those strategies do not work because of the information environment available on data gaps. So do not do either of those strategies and instead focus should swipe left on people that they strongly believe they are incompatible with and swipe right on everyone else. So the reasoning behind that is because dating app profiles do not have information that is strong enough to determine compatibility.

It almost never actually exists inside of a dating profile, so the fact that a person is already making decisions about compatibility, we have a mismatch, right? Are making choices with information that is not powerful enough to tell us that. But I argue that dating apps often can tell you if a person is incompatible, so you should be swiping based on incompatibility. Exactly, yeah.

Mukund

So it’s more of the process of elimination is what you’re talking about.

And how would somebody eliminate somebody with misinformation, or rather lack of information? Because it go both ways, right? Lack of information, so they’ll be making the wrong choice if they swipe right. That will also mean lack of information, meaning that they’re making the wrong choice by swiping left.

Emily

Yes, so. And here like we can get into sort of probabilistic thinking of it all is where we’re trying to decrease the likelihood of type 1 and type 2 errors and what’s happening with like, you’re right, we won’t know.

Anything for sure, based on a person’s profile. But my argument is that compatibility is much more complicated and involves a lot of different qualities and pieces of information to determine. You can determine a single piece of incompatibility a lot more easily, right? There’s one thing about a person that could make us strongly incompatible, and I’m not talking about small annoyances or minor icks or whatever. Mean incompatibility and that information can be present on a profile.

Mukund

Now, what do you think is an incompatibility?

Emily

So on strong potential incompatibility if someone’s relationship goals, whether or not they want to get married and be a monogamist or not, right? If I am someone that wants to be monogamous and wants to get married.

 And someone is stating that that is not their relationship goal. Then we are incompatible. I am sleeping left, right, right. Do I know that we are then compatible and that we will become life partners? I do not know that right. But I am at least creating a candidate pool that is closer and closer to a higher likelihood of compatibility.

Rob

So you’re increasing your chances of finding the right person by immediately getting rid of people that are incredible. A great way to look at. I always think of it as like the Netflix versus blockbuster thing, where you see you go to a blockbuster video. Would have maybe 3 movies to choose. Now you have Netflix where you can basically choose from. 10,000 things that you definitely are incorpor.

Emily

I think that is such a good and important thing to think about, too, is that technology? Kind of. It hands us incredible positive potential while also making it more challenging to take advantage of that positive potential because. It kind of scrambles our brains. We are not used to thinking on these scales to having to ingest this level of information and make those decisions on the fly in a way that will eventually culminate into this complicated social outcome, which in this case like finding someone that we want to spend an evening. Let alone a lifetime with and. I’m trying. To combine these mathematical information science concepts to the digital technology part of it, because it really is necessary to navigate those types of tools while also keeping it very human. Because that is really what is most important here.

Mukund

Very fascinating. How do you think this transition happened before this explosion of dating apps? And, you know, web-based meeting people? Is swiping right or left? Nowadays.

Emily

Sure. You know, as you’re asking that question, I’m thinking back to sort of my own life. So I’m an elder millennial, you know, which means that I kind of came of age with the Internet too that that there was a before time. Yeah, it’s. It’s definitely a very interesting pocket to be in.

Mukund

I met my wife in college, so it was 100% in person.

Rob

I met my wife online, but it was a. It was back in the dark ages of meeting on a website rather than an app, so.

Emily

Yeah, there we. And like dark ages is exactly it. Know before smartphones. Before, we had kind of moved to these mobile devices and mobile apps. Everything was of course like desktop based web-based and and and it was not cool. For most people, and in most situations. Like I remember folks, myself included, who were kind of messing around in those mid aughts, right at the very beginning and of sort of the greater increase in these sorts of dating platforms. And it was weird. You know, people would have questions. And and now it is dominating the scene. Just absolutely dominating and I think that the dominance is certainly partly due to the normalization.

Not just of online dating, but of solving problems through. Digital technology. Often times that is the first solution that we go to. Now that that is just how we solve all manners of problems. And part of that is again, because the potential is extraordinary, right? That doesn’t mean that we are always able to to reap the benefits of that potential. We’re still working on it. Still figuring it out. And I think another part of that is. We humans generally culturally believe that the more options that we have, the better. So this is a. Of getting at greater and greater and greater options. Which for many people, especially people who feel like they’re not well understood within their smaller communities, this this is great for them, which is wonderful, right? This the strength of the support and the connection is is really the priority and that being said, we humans also have harder time managing more. So we are simultaneously giving ourselves more options, which for many people are probably better options, but making it harder to parse through those options just because of the volume. This is the. Over and over again, right that we’re encountering and that I’m trying to help people.

Rob

Now that you say that, I’m almost thinking it’s like this sort of the mindfulness movement where people are sort of trying to get away from distractions and the the noise of all this bombardment of information. Find out what brings them happiness and joy. And engagement and fulfilment. It’s very interesting that more people are meeting online and not in person where a lot of my friends are solely using technology today and not meeting people in person anymore. Not sure whether that’s your experience, but what do you think about that sort of that trying to find that balance?

Emily

Sure. I mean, it balances it, right and it’s different for everybody based on what they want in the situations that were there in. I think the way that I end up talking people through this is that. Every decision has a consequence and not necessarily good or bad, but there is an outcome to it. And it’s whether or not that is going to be a greater support or lesser support to whatever your goals are. You know, so if today I were to say I’m giving up on my dating entirely, I exclusively want to meet people in person. Is absolutely something that I can do and that I am welcome to do. But also it means that I will be giving up the potential of this huge candidate pool that I can access.

And if I am super well aligned and have great access to these social situations with people who are unlikely to be compatible with, that will not be much of a negative consequence for me, right? But if I happen to live in a place. Where I do not feel well understood, I do not. Well supported. I do not think that I am going to get along with the folks and I am meeting in person. That is not going to work for me, right? We are creating a dead end for my goals. So it it really is just about where a person is trying to get and the situation that they currently find themselves in. And of course there’s like the capacity to do a hybrid, which people are doing all the time. Organizing these events for like minded people to all show up at the same space in. Same time. Great. You know, necessitates that you have a large enough population that’s able to do that and those kinds of things. But we have so many avenues and opportunities now and it’s just figuring out what will work.

Rob

So I’m wondering whether AI has had any influence on your work and what you’re seeing with your clients in particular.

Emily

I definitely think that there is an AI creep happening. I don’t think it’s like turn the page 9. We have a totally different environment, yet certainly the impacts in pretty much every facet of our lives is going to continue to. So I do think about that quite a lot, but but I tend as I do to think about it more from the perspective of the decision making that’s happening as part of incorporating AI into our. As opposed to sort of the product, the end result that we get out of. So I think that’s kind of where a lot of the conversation sits. The fact that we can have it produce conversations for us or produce profiles or produce photographs for us. And certainly there are sophisticated and nefarious reasons why people are doing that on dating apps. But there. Also. These more sort of benign and hopeful reasons why people are doing that and it’s to appear better it is to appear like a more desirable.

Rob

It’s kind of like the first image you put on your on your dating profile is always going to be the the best image of you. Sort of more updated version of that right when we used to use online dating profiles, you wouldn’t put the worst photo up. You always want to present yourself in the right way, and maybe as you’re saying, technology is helping us do that in a more effective and efficient way.

Emily

Yeah, such a good example. Because since we’ve been creating dating apps, and certainly before that, but we’ll stay in the context of this online dating, humans have been using our own brains to think through these things and to decide what is going to make me more desirable. What is going to make me.

Whatever. I’m going to put my best foot forward. What I think my best picture is for or what I think other people will think is my best picture forward. So all of this decision making is happening, right? Are doing. It is not new, but now we are outsourcing it to a. And that is really what I find most interesting is the choices that we make to outsource our own decision making. For these really critical social questions, you. If. Using AI to like edit a paper, change colours on a pic, you know it’s happening, there’s going to be consequences. But the fact that we are more than likely going to start using AI to make. Critical life choices for us is something that I think is a bit of a different level and and something that I’m going to be. Cautioning people again that this is sort of the rehumanizing, the recentering, that those are decisions that we probably will want to own and that we will probably want to dictate ourselves. And again, these things are tools, right? Are not dictating our. So how to find that balance between it being a useful tool that is actually our goals and what we want versus sort of being pushed? By it.

Rob

Yeah, it’s a great. It’s almost allocating your resources in the most efficient way, but maintaining control over the direction the directionality of your decisions is a great point about it too, in terms of online dating, there’s always that big question of it’s so different between men and women, how men and women. Meet each other and how they use these apps. From what I noticed from my friends is my male friends are saying to me I can’t meet people. This is impossible. Is just a numbers game. I don’t know how to meet anyone, whereas my female friends seem to have more opportunities and more dates. Sort of a very sort of. Catch all way of looking at it. That’s not going to the same experience for everyone. That’s the. That’s the general. Do you see a difference for your male and female clients and how they use the technology?

Emily

Certainly. All across the world, through all cultures, gender socialization is incredibly. And it has kind of pushed us into these patterns of belief and behavior that oftentimes are not really supportive to the individual. And more than that. Are like really struggling to hold any water now that we have changed society so much with all these digital tools, right?

So. Yes, there are differences, much like in in so many parts and choices of our life. Because of that gender. And also yes, there is a lot of frustration that is coming out of that because the friction that that socialization was intending to decrease. Ways to set up who talks to who 1st and what expectations are going to be and who decides what. But are now falling away. Because we are sort of reinventing so many of these rules about ourselves and what we want and how things work together. So so I understand the frustration there and also I see the big potentials right for people to be able to sort of break free of these patterns and expectations that they are doing just because they were kind of told to do so. And in some ways, this sort of wrote scripting is a way to keep people from connecting because they end up connecting as scripts, right? Not as individuals. But certainly I see patterns there and and I certainly see opportunities for people to make choices about what parts of those patterns work for them and that they want to commit to and what parts of those patterns don’t, and that maybe they can start exploring with and exper.

Mukund

So the people you talk with do more men want to meet in person versus more females. Because everything is online now. I just wanted to see if there’s still a preference to meet in person. So who prefers it more?

Emily

Most of the folks that I work with and talk with it is kind of through the lens of the dating app. I end up talking to more folks like. And then as far as who is really shifting and pushing away from it? I mean, it does feel like there is a desire from all different kinds of people to figure out something that works better, that there is an acknowledgement that. In most cases, online dating does not work well and sort. My argument is for those that have done it successfully, myself included that it kind of often works out. And not because there is a good design. Make it work. Like Lucky you just happened to meet someone that you like, right? That you actually had a good system. Getting to them.

Rob

It’s a. Point the algorithm brings you together, but it’s almost like the work you put into yourself is obviously the most important part of it. Not the actual tool itself that’s doing the work. It’s interesting to be talking about meeting online. It feels like there was a Harvard. I read that there’s a loneliness epidemic where I think it’s something like 1/4 of 1844 year olds say they are either. Feel loneliness every day, or they feel a sense of. Personal loneliness. Often, how can someone who right now who says I just trying to figure this out? Trying to. Out how to find someone online? We always. We have access to all these this. We’ve got app overload now where we have all these places to meet each other except and now people more lonely than ever before. Can someone do in that? It’s one of those big things that I know people are listening right now because people out there that are just experiencing that, I want to find someone that I connect with. What can they do in that situation?

Emily

Yeah, you know, I I would say for folks who are lonely, struggling with loneliness, loneliness, they wanna be more disconnected than they wanna be. That I think a very powerful reframing that folks can do is to. Think about that as something that they want to change in their lives. Period, right? That they want to feel more. Connected. Not necessarily that they want to feel more connected in a connection that looks precisely like this because we are kind of pushed into a lot of expectations about what relationship should look like, what connection should look like, what. Our lives should look like. Make it difficult for us to just pursue the things that are available in front of us and work for us, right? Do you want a life? Sure, maybe we can absolutely continue to pursue that. But are you also just feeling disconnected and lonely? Let’s look at those friendships. You know, let’s let’s work on managing sort of the core of the problem and not just the singular solution that is making it feel worse or more hopeless or whatever. And I’m very agnostic on what that connection looks like, right? If that is about. Disconnecting from digital tools and spending more in person time with your friends and family. Wonderful if that is creating more meaningful relationships with people online that just aren’t romantic. Wonderful. Let’s do that too, right? Again, so many opportunities, it’s just. Being able to sort of rearrange the way that we think about them and that we incorporate them in our lives. So that they really support us, so that they really work for us.

Rob

I was fine with social media, especially negative feelings tend to be amplified. You see that with Twitter, for example. You you see the loudest voices, obviously the the one that is the most extremist is amplified. You see from your clients, not just in terms of dating. Now in terms of social media. Do you see that same connection? And then how they can use social media to benefit their day-to-day experience? There something that they can do to find other groups online? Is that something that you would recommend as a first step or would they recommend going to an individual like yourself to find the best way to go about meeting people? Achieving that particular goal.

Emily

Well, I think that this right, this is like the blessing and the curse of the situation that we find ourselves in. We have lots of great opportunities for moving forward. Are lots of avenues that a person can take to get them to where they want to go. But it can also be really overwhelming to try to parse through and figure out what the handful of really effective avenues. Going to be. That, to me, is the real crusher of social media, right? That again, we have created these digital tools that are giving us access to information that our brains are not evolutionarily well equipped to manage, right? So in order to stay alive, we have to spend a lot of time thinking about who am I. AM. What is the situation at hand? What? Is my situational relationship to. Everything and now instead of sort of this in person environmental situation that we are trying to ingest all the time, we are creating this way bigger informational environment through social media through whatever technology tools that we’re using to ingest a lot of information and it is causing a. Of challenges for us. Situate ourselves and that is causing a lot of discomfort and uncertainty in and of itself. So yeah, that analysis paralysis is now happening when we are just like, I wonder what everyone that I went to high school is up to, right? Yes.

Mukund

Reunion is coming. So what have I done the past 20 years?

Emily

Yeah, right. I was like, oh, no, I know we’re spiraling. OK, great. Great.

Rob

So Emily, we’ve talked quite a bit now about the different apps on both Mukund and I, but certainly for myself have learnt a lot about digital communication and about decision making online and we really appreciate your time. I just want to make sure that we have sort of a summary note we can provide. To an audience now dealing with the digital communication challenges that we’ve discussed.

Emily

Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the biggest takeaways is that all of these new and confusing and powerful digital technology tools are just that. They are just tools. They are to help us live our lives. They are not living a life in and of themselves, right? It’s OK. Take a step back. Do less. They are there to support you and if they are not doing that then then you are allowed to do something different.

Mukund

It’s like taking and if you guys see the office where the map leads Michael into the lake. So you know, if you’re seeing, you know, do not do that, right in real life use your common sense. You know, if it’s a.

Do not follow the map.

Rob

Don’t drive into the lake, Emily. Really appreciate your. Thank you so much for joining us and educating us on this. We’d love to learn more about remaketherules, and we’d love to learn more about your work with. It’s fascinating stuff, and I think the way technology is evolving, people like yourself with this sort of data expertise are only going to become more important in day-to-day. I was again. I really appreciate your time. You so much for joining us?

Emily

Thank you so. It’s really been a pleasure. People can find me online. Emily Pabst, that remake the rules, remake therules.com or on? Instagram. YouTube. Set stack. You can find me all over. Remake the rules.

Mukund

Definitely. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming and hope to have you again soon.

Emily

Thank you.

Rob

Thank you, Emily. Appreciate it. Bye bye.