ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:00:00
Welcome everyone to the better love movement podcast, where you will finally learn how to intentionally do dating and relationships. Right? My name is Anita stout Meyer, and I’m a licensed professional therapist and your personal love mentor. I’ve worked with thousands of singles and couples giving them the skills needed to attract and keep the amazing love they desire. It’s my heart to work, to help people to get the skills needed, to not only become the very best versions of themselves but to help them grow and evolve emotionally and relationally, you can absolutely have the romantic relationship of your dreams come and let me show you how
00:00:45
Hello everyone. And welcome back to this week’s episode of the better love movement podcast. My name is Anita stout Meyer. I am your resident love mentor and licensed professional therapist here hosting this week’s podcast and every week’s podcast. This episode is number 1 26, and it is entitled. Prioritize your safety when dating online today, I am talking to Mark Brooks, a dating industry expert from real meat. Let me tell you a little bit about the mark. So Mark Brooks is real me’s dating industry expert. Mark has been working in the online dating world since 2005 and has worked with 110 dating companies and service providers throughout his career. He is also the founder of IDEA idea, which is the internet dating excellence association, an organization that helps online dating companies evolve and grow. Let me tell you a little bit about real me. So Real Me is an online reputation platform dedicated to cultivating safety and trust online, building a new era of trust and transparency across the U S internet real means integration empowers users with a trustworthy reputation and background information profile verification through instant access to more than 275 million verified reputation profiles. Real me’s platform uses public records to source background information that can include criminal financial legal records, sex offender, status, personal reviews, and more to make online interactions and transactions safer while empowering consumers to manage their own online reputation. Welcome Mark.
MARK BROOKS
00:02:50
Thank you, Anita. Great to be here. Thank you for having me on. Yes.
ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:02:54
So mark, welcome to the podcast. Tell my listeners a little bit more about yourself.
MARK BROOKS
00:03:00
Well, I’ve been immersed in the business of love and internet dating since well. It’s over 20 years now. And I originally got involved by starting the adventure club in Silicon Valley and a strange thing started happening. People started getting married. It wasn’t really a singles club, but it turns out it was a singles club that would admit to being a singles club. And I thought, well, that’s a lot of responsibility. It’s, it’s really quite impactful what I’m doing here, bringing people together like this and 95% of the club was single and it just got me hooked and I’ve been hooked ever since. I can’t really focus on anything else because nothing else I can think of has more impact. So I got rolling in the dating industry, worked with some, actually worked with friends two years ago, and then I went to work with friend finder and then I was Cupid and then I got three job offers and I took them all and started an agency back in 2005 and never looked back. And now I’ve got a team of people that I’ve recruited over the years. We’re entirely myopic to the dating industry and we help out internet dating companies and some online social communities. And they also help best-in-class vendors, which is what real money is. And we’re helping them get around the industry. I’m proud to be working with them and helping them make the web a safer place.
ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:04:17
Awesome. Because I know here on my platform, I’ve talked to my ladies quite a bit about utilizing online dating and dating apps, but doing so safely, that is super, super important is that especially, you know, most of my listeners are women. So I tell them you’re going to use all of the tips and tools that you have at your disposal to make sure that you’re staying safe while you’re out there interacting with people.
MARK BROOKS
00:04:44
Gotcha. Yes, absolutely. It’s paramount. It’s, it’s a funny thing, actually. What the differences between a social network and a dating app, social networks introduce you to what will keep you in contact with people you already know. And the difference with internet dating apps is that we’re introducing you to new people that you do not know they are not connected with, that you might not have a friend who’s connected with. Right. So that’s the key differentiator for the entire industry is that our dynamic is different. And of course with that comes some responsibility because, well, you don’t know who these people. Right. And there’s a lot, there’s a very high emotional, you’re really putting yourself out there, right? There’s vulnerable. When you go and meet someone for the first time, there is an element of vulnerability there and it’s our responsibility, our key driver to keep our users safer. In fact, there was a survey that, that real me did have over a 1000 internet dating executives and they found that, you know, safety and so safety and security are paramount. And the number 2 most requested feature, what for them that recognized was, was a verification checks basically. Just making sure people who say they are, who they say they are, you know, nothing can foul a date faster than showing up on a date and not recognizing the person in front of you. Right. And, you know, that’s the, that’s what we try and help people with.
ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:06:20
Okay. So tell me more about real me and how their service works in particular.
MARK BROOKS
00:06:26
So, you know, America’s a very interesting place in that. A lot of your records are public. You know, I’m talking to you with an English accent. It’s a little different than England. I actually spent most of my adult life in America. So, so I could do the English accent, the American accent, putting the American hassle on there. I must say, it’s interesting that a lot of this information is publicly available, but it’s a real hodgepodge, right? So if you want to know if someone is who they really are, you can do that with a very high certainty in the USA. And if you want to know, if someone is a felon, you can do that with a very high certainty, also sex offender database. There’s a very well-established right, but it’s a real hodgepodge of databases. And, and, and so what the real me has done beautifully is brought this hodgepodge of data together.
MARK BROOKS
00:07:14
And they’ve, they’ve brought it together under there under real me, there are 275 million people that they’ve got records on and constantly building. And so what they’re trying to do, what they do is provide some certainty, some verification, some authentication of the person they’re about to meet. I w you know, we all think that that’s super important in this particular context of dating, of course, because you are putting yourself out there and you don’t really know who you’re meeting. So it’s our responsibility within the dating industry to help people have more reassurance. And it’s not really something that is entirely within the remit of a dating app, because, you know, I’m putting two hats on here. I represent the dating industry, but I also represent the real me. So I’m pretty much on dating, dating hat on. We know we should be doing this, but we’re not sure the right tools to be doing this.
MARK BROOKS
00:08:08
And it’s something that’s like, it’s a lot of responsibility. And so what real means done is come in and said, well, we can help dating apps, take this responsibility, very high responsibility area of responsibility and deliver data on a very, you know, qualified historical they’ve. They’ve got the ability to pull this hodgepodge of data together. So it’s meaningful within the dating context. So basically in the future, we hope there are a couple of apps that it’s live on now, by the way, bristle or mingle too. But basically in the future, we hope that you’ll be able to go on a dating app and look at a profile and say, you know what? I’m not going to search on Google. I want to search on this little link here on the profile, which gives me more shorts and Google. We were just looking on Google. Yeah.
ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:08:57
I mean, is that the best place? Right? And I mean, that’s, that’s where I’d tell a lot of my ladies to go or to hire a place that does background checks. I do encourage them to, at minimum, you should be Googling. You should be searching all of the social media platforms. What I like about that is you can at least find out it’s to me, some very basic information. Like if the man is married to me, if you find him on Facebook and it says married, and there’s a picture of him with a woman, like, that’s probably the case. So at minimum now, like you were saying, I want my ladies to dive deeper. I want them to know if this person is a felon, or if this person’s on the sex offender registry, if they wanted to know if he had any major liens against him or tax liens, you know, I think that’s good information to know, but I always say at a minimum, like you said, here in America, a lot of this information is public record. You can kind of look it up, but I like the idea of, like you said, it’s all there in one place. You don’t have to go to a lot of different places. You can just click on that link and the dating profile. So I love that.
MARK BROOKS
00:10:11
We’re in the information age. Yeah. We should be providing more information.
ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:10:14
So. I agree. I agree. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
MARK BROOKS
00:10:19
In the USA, it’s out there. Some many countries it’s not, but yeah, it’s, it’s almost irresponsible not to make this available.
ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:10:29
Really. Right, right. So do you have any personal tips or tools as a dating expert for my listeners just to keep them safe while they’re dating online, what are some of the tips that you have?
MARK BROOKS
00:10:42
Well, there are tips and there are tools. I gave you one tool, real meat, right? That’s an absolute background. If, if you can find a dating app, that’s got real me on it. I recommend using it and using the resources that are available with romaine. Now, when it comes to tips, there are a few basics that people sometimes get wrong. I think it’s very easy to let your guard down. Right. You’ve been chatting with somebody for a while through the app. Ideally, one thing that, where really all dating apps really want you to stay on the app as it’s not just so they can monetize you. It’s actually, because we can keep you safe. Right. Right. And here’s why scammers are on dating apps. And the first thing a scammer will try and do, if they’ve got you on the hook gets you off the dating app.
MARK BROOKS
00:11:30
Right. The reason what they want you off the dating app is so that they can do their thing and they can reel you in over the period or month. And a dating app has no clue, right? We, we do have the ability to look at forms of communication. We, you know, we look at certain patterns like wire, for example, we see the word wire. Right. And that this is not a word that you use when you’re talking to someone that you’re trying to date.Right.Right.Right.You’re right. So the keywords and bad words that are super easy for it to look for as a flag, as a matter of course. Right? So basically there are 4 forms of abuse on dating apps as a scam, as that spam as the obscene, and they have noxious. And there’s 2, 4, there’s really, there’s a couple of ways that we look for these roguish behaviors.
MARK BROOKS
00:12:19
And that is with automated routines. We’re looking at bad words, we’re looking at behavior patterns. Then we’re also looking at user flagging, right? So their users had a bad experience. I can flag. I have the worst thing for us is when someone has had a bad experience, but they’re six months down the road. They’ve been off the app. They’ve been chatting with someone for six months. They’ve been thoroughly real. Then they’ve even done video calls on Skype. And then the asks start happening. You know, it could be as simple as I’m really I’m, I’m short on funds this week. I got something terrible happened. I need a hundred bucks, right? Once a wallet is open, then the wallet gets levered open further. And it’s a slippery slope basically. And some people have lost six figures and they can go into that bad because it’s, there’s been that long time of investment of emotional involvement, you know, and scammers are very good at what they do.
MARK BROOKS
00:13:09
And, and unfortunately, there are, there are more scamming activities as a cottage industry. And unfortunately, it’s not, there’s not leaped to that. There’s more of this happening. So in short, the tip is just, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Be careful with that, stay on the app so that we can do our job helping you and also helping others. If you’ve had a bad experience, indicate that so that others do not right. It’s kind of a statistical thing for us. If a number of people have a bad experience, we know we got to either a move that bad actor very quickly, or we’ve at least got to quarantine them, right? So we look at their behaviors. We kind of, okay, a number of people are complaining about this particular person. We’re going to quarantine them and we’re going to hold them back from really getting involved with more people until we just make sure are they good or bad?
MARK BROOKS
00:14:04
And if they’re bad, we kick them off. And then here’s the kicker. We have ways to make sure that they don’t come back on. So all of that, we’ve got so many protections. We have to do so much work to keep our users safe. It’s a crying shame. When people jump off the app, we’ve got no recourse. We’ve got no visibility on what’s going on and we can’t protect the future users. So number one thing, stay on the app, right? Then we can do our job. We can protect you. We can prep the protect, the people that come after you more, most importantly, and we keep the entire platform safer. So that’s a, that’s a biggie. The other thing is when you’re going out on a date, let someone know where are you going to go? Where roughly, when do you think you’d be home and arrange for that call, arrange for that call, you know, an hour into the date.
MARK BROOKS
00:14:50
They used to be a wonderful app, which I thought was quite amusing called get Mo. And it’s, it’s sort of forget me out of here. It, yeah. To call you at a certain time and say, oh, the house is on fire. You’ve got to go, come back. Right. Actually say that on the phone, it’d be recorded messages. And so that you had the option of getting yourself out of there. Yes. If you’re not having the best experience, it gives you the exp the opportunity when you get an incoming call, oh, I’ve got to just take this. And then you can either continue with the date and dismiss the call, or you can dismiss yourself out of the day to have that. Get me out of here. The app is gone, unfortunately, but there, but the tip isn’t, it’s not a bad thing to do to let someone know where you will be, who you’ll be with when you’ll be back.
MARK BROOKS
00:15:45
When you, when you’d like to have that call. So you’ve got the get move, call, lined up safety call. And if they don’t pick up well that, you know, you’ve got someone at least who knows who you’re out with and where you were. Right. You’ve got a little bit of, you’ve got a bit of a safety net there. Don’t meet. Don’t make that first meeting somewhere. You know, you’re not going to have people come to your apartment. You can write in a public place with people around you. Exactly how much you think, you know that person, you don’t really know them until you met them. Even when you met them, you don’t really know them. Right? So don’t let your guard down too soon. Let things take a natural course, meet some other friends, perhaps, you know, you let your gut tell you what to do.
MARK BROOKS
00:16:35
Not your heart. Right. Slow down a wee bit. Right? Right. And don’t give out personally, identifiable information too soon, your telephone number, your home address, your work address. It’s the generally expected thing from a good interaction. You know, you meet someone online, you spend a bit of time with them, and then you build up and not too longer period of time to an actual face-to-face meeting. Right. Now, thankfully as we’re coming out of this pandemic, that’s possible, but still keep the, the PII, the personally identifiable information to yourself until you’re good and ready until your head is telling you is screaming at you it’s like, this is good. This is not your heart because your heart may well mislead you.
ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:17:19
It can, it can great tips. We have talked about a lot of those. One of my favorites is I have my girlfriend’s screenshot. The man’s like profile, right. The screenshot the man’s profile. They send it to me. Here’s I’m going out with him tonight. We’re going here. And I have it. Like I have a picture. Yeah. I mean, and I’ve been encouraging women to do that, which is just going the app screenshot that profile pic, or, you know, some, a little information that’s in there. Send it to your friend. Hey, this is the guy I’m going out with tonight at this time at this place. And if she does not come back, you have at least a starting point, which is that person’s picture and some information on his profile. Yep. But I’ve been encouraging women to do that. More share, you know, your experiences on dating apps, share those profile pictures if you’re going out. Because again, for my lady listeners, I want them to stay safe. That is, to me, the number one priority. Yeah. You might go out and meet your husband, but I need you to be safe doing it.
MARK BROOKS
00:18:33
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. Paramount. Isn’t it? Yeah. It’s one of those things. It doesn’t happen so often, but when it happens, it’s very impactful. And so you kind of tend to let your guard down because you go on a few good dates and maybe I don’t need to tell my best friend I’m going, but ultimately it makes for a good conversation.
ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:18:54
After it. It does. Going on
MARK BROOKS
00:18:56
A date. Your friend’s going to want to hear about it anyway. Right. You might as well share the information. And it was like, you know, you’ve got the photograph for them to comment on and get a bit of advice. It’s nice to get a third person, you know, trusted person to give you feedback on what they’re seeing in the photograph and what your experiences are afterwards. So why not just send that beforehand?
ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:19:19
Okay. And I have one question that, you know, is going off script a little, but I’m just curious about your thoughts. A lot of folks are talking today about this, this new way of meeting people through online dating or dating apps. And some people believe that we, we may be struggling to have good healthy relationships now because we have too many options. What do you think about that?
MARK BROOKS
00:19:44
Well, it’s called the paradox of choice. It’s actually a, it’s a very clear effect in the world. And in some ways, the dating industry is guilty of heightening this effect, because if you think about our incentive, our incentive is, yeah, we feel good when our users meet people that they have beautiful, loving relationships with and go on to have many happy years with and have families with that. That’s feel-good. I think that’s what many of us are in the industry for, but when it comes to keeping shareholders happy, you know, we’ve got to monetize, we’ve got to show, you know, the rubber is hitting the road and we’re making sure that people are getting value and fun, you know, paying for that value at a, at a fair level. So our incentive really what makes us feel good is when people have these beautiful, loving relationships, but also we’re going to keep the shareholders happy.
MARK BROOKS
00:20:44
Well. There’s 2 schools of thought you’ll get eat harmony. They used to serve at very few, you know, just a smattering of connections every so often. I think you look at other apps, they serve up a myriad of choice, so much choice. We are drowning in choice, and it’s a game, right. And you’re swiping and that’s very good for keeping you in the app. It turns out, keep giving you lots of choice. We’ll keep you around longer. Right. Right? So it’s the paradox of choice be aware. And it’s terrible in some ways, cause you, you know, I think of matchmakers, actually. There’s a funny story from matchmakers. So I, I, I make it my business to know the matchmaking side of the house as well. Right. You’ve got on internet dating, which is all on the apps. And then you’ve got real-world matchmakers who actually talk to you and they advise you and introduce you to people.
MARK BROOKS
00:21:37
And it’s like, this is a very different industry. It’s a very old industry. And, and so I talked with matchmakers quite a lot of matchmakers over the years through the matchmaking Institute and their conference. And one of the things that’s always funny is if a matchmaker sends a client on, on their best possible date, first up, that’s a recipe for terrible. It’s a recipe for failure simply because typically when a matchmaking client comes on board, they’re getting like a year and they’re getting a dozen, two dozen matches as part of their agreement. So if the matchmaker sends them on the very best date, the person that is most ideal on that database is terrible. Because the other part that they’ll typically say, this was great. What’s the next day going to be like for the first one, number three, it’s good to send them on the best date 3m. Okay. We’ll say so. Yeah. I mean the paradox of choices alive and well, even in the matchmaking circle, which has very limited choice, there are not so many people that they have in their databases and yet they suffer from it or suffer from it. They do suffer from it because they want people off their books, which is interesting dynamic dating industry does not you to stick around once. You’re happy, but we want you to happy dating. Right?
ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:22:57
Right. That is so interesting. I never thought about it that way because yes, people are always telling me, you know, I think it’s because we just have too many choices. People are not able to really decide or commit to any one thing. Or like you said, they’re waiting for the next thing that what’s, what’s, there’s got to be the next thing that’s better than this, you know? And that just keeps happening. So it’s a little disheartening to me because I want to see people being happy, healthy, thriving relationships, marriages, but I’ve had some clients of mine who’ve been single for some time now. So. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s, that’s an interesting way of looking at it. Okay. I think back.
MARK BROOKS
00:23:40
To my club and there’s still people from my club, you know, I was running it in my twenties. I’m just turning this year. And there’s still people from my club that were in the twenties and thirties that are, they’ve not pulled the trigger. And that some stage you got to kind of sort of pull the trigger. And, and we do have an interesting dynamic in this day and age where people have had more choice and availability than ever before. And it’s a conundrum, it’s a conundrum. I mean, you’ve got to go with what feels good, but you know, another effect is the, the halo effect, right? One of the things that we know is if you go on a profile and you see it’s a moderate length profile and you see, Hey, he, or she likes dogs as well. Right? We like dogs, you love dogs, you’ve got a dog, you’ve got three dogs.
MARK BROOKS
00:24:36
Right. You meet someone. Oh, they’re like, there must be okay. There is a dog lover as well. Right? So with a moderate length profile, you’ll tend to look at things that you like and then fill in the blanks on other stuff that you’re not sure of, that isn’t clear that isn’t in the profile. And so, so the effect is you’ll tend to go on that date. You’ll tend to give that person a shot. We know if we do super long profiles, people put more information in there and people then become more eliminatory and it’s, there’s less of a chance of feeling engaged with someone with a long profile because you’re finding stuff that, oh, it’s a dog lover, but oh, I don’t like this. And the opposite thing starts happening. So yeah, I mean, the reality of it is that the dating industry has set up a rubric for decision-making.
MARK BROOKS
00:25:27
That can be quite impossible for people to pull the trigger off. Right? We, we give people an opportunity to have a long list. So don’t be a list ticker, you know, we, there’s a lot of things that are important. There are showstopper criteria, key ones are, I am married. Right. You want to have kids, you want to get married is a case stoppers, case showstoppers. Yup. And these questions we allow people to ask early on which is fantastic. Just if we did nothing else, other than allow people to get their showstopper questions out of the way, right up front, we’ve done a great job. That’s a great thing. That’s right, that’s right. Awesome. But people go a lot deeper than that.
ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:26:08
Right. Right. So I just want to say thank you so much for taking time out today, to talk with us and, and educate us on all things online, dating and safety. That is super, super important. Thank you so much, mark, for being on the show today, is there a product or service that you would like to tell us more about or promote to the listeners?
MARK BROOKS
00:26:31
Well, I’d recommend, I keep keeping an eye open for the real me.com on your favorite dating app. And if you don’t see it, maybe ask them why not. And you can check out more on the real me by going to the real me.com forward slash dating and get out.
ANITA STOUDMIRE
00:26:50
Great. Thank you so much. So ladies, if you are not subscribed to the podcast, I don’t know why I don’t know what’s happening in your world, but please, please, please consider subscribing to the podcast and you can watch the podcast and the video to this on my YouTube channel, better love movement. So head on over to YouTube, subscribe to the channel, click that bell icon. So you can be alerted every Monday morning when new podcast episodes come out. If you would do me the biggest favor ever, and please rate and review the podcast as your ratings helped me to grow the podcast and offer more free content to you. If you have a question you would like to have answered on the podcast, you can email it to me@infoatbetterlovemovement.com. And you can also reach out to me, find out about my products, my services, the brand new book that is out on Amazon. Now it is called choose well, a simple formula to determine the best man for you, but you can learn more about all of my products and services over at my website, www.betterlovemovement.com. Thank you so much for listening to this week and as always stay open to love.
00:28:15
Thank you for listening to today’s podcast episode. If you are enjoying this podcast, please leave me a five-star rating and review your ratings and reviews. Help me to continue to bring you more great content, head on over to YouTube and check out the better love movement channel. There’s more video content there, and you can subscribe to be notified when a new video is posted. If you have a question that you would like to have answered on the podcast or in a YouTube video, please send it to me@infoatbetterlovemovement.com. You can also connect with me directly on the magnify app to have your dating and relationship questions answered. That’s M a G N I F I, and it’s available on iOS and Android. You get your first five minutes for free. So give me a call and let’s chat.
