July 21, 2024 • 36 mins
What is Safe Worlds, the business that Alan Metcalfe proposed would be bigger than Google and resurrect the entire world economy? Was he truly a genius or was the idea little more than a pipe dream?
The Missing $49 Million is an eight-part investigative series by news.com.au, hosted by award-winning finance reporter Alex Turner-Cohen.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, I'm back. This is Alan Metcalf. Artificial intelligence has
been difficult to find because it is like a green
bird in a green tree. It's difficult to see that
bird until someone shows you where it is, and then
it's easy to see.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
So keep watching it.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
I'm going to show you how to see the green
bird in the green tree.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Alan Metcalf certainly had away with words. David Richardson, the
Channel nine journalist who looked into Safe Worlds, thought so too.
Here's how he put it.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
It was almost as if he was, you know, like
a medieval monk who had claimed to have discovered angelic
script to the language of angels, as if it was
something new.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
The language of angels is defined as them transmitting their
speech through humans, and in the same token, Alan thought
he'd found a way to transmit human thought into computers.
He called it universal logic, or the law of thought.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
To be ultimately effective, computers must mirror the human mind.
This means that they must be made artificially intelligent. This
is why my discovery of the law of thought is
so important, because it explains how the human mind works
(01:23):
so that it can be artificially reproduced in computers.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Alan sounds impressive, but I'm trying to get to the
bottom of what he actually means and how he managed
to convince so many people to invest their life savings
solely on the basis of what he said, What was
safe worlds? And could it have ever been viable. I'm
Alex Turner Cohen, a finance and investigative reporter from news
(01:50):
dot com Dot are you and you're listening to the
Missing forty nine Million? This is episode three, Language of Angels.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
It helps me to stay the distance if I think
of it like building Noah's Ark. As I see the
flood of electronic information inundating the world and the increasing
confusion of all the computer languages that are involved. I
remember Biblical Babylon, it is clear to me that the
end of the world as we know it is nigh.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
The voice you're hearing is an artificial intelligence program we've
used to recreate Alan Metcas's voice to read out all
the emails he sent. The AI software used other videos
of Alan to stitch together his new digital version. We'll
be hearing a lot of it this episode. It's different
to the YouTube videos from earlier, even though it sounds
(02:53):
uncannily similar here's Ai Alan again.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Our belief is that the Internet of Things will kickstart
the lackluster world economy, and that Safe World's TV will
be an important catalyst in making this happen.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
According to Alan, Safewoards was going to be a combination
of Google, Amazon, YouTube, eBay, and PayPal. It was going
to be a hub where videos could be posted to
advertise and sell products, all with its own currency system,
and it was also going to have its own phone
like Skype, only it would be better than all its competitors,
(03:32):
way better.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Safe Worlds has better search capabilities than Google because of
universal logic. I do not believe that any company in
the world has more experience with AI than we have.
In computer science, it's the holy grail.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Alan claimed to have discovered an algorithm which mirrored the
human mind. This would allow him to, in his own words,
monetize the Internet, as his software would know exactly what
everyone wanted. At the same time, the Safeworld's platform would
link computers together all over the world. It would be
in a private, safe place on the Internet, hence why
(04:11):
he called it Safe Worlds. He estimated the whole thing
was worth ten billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
This is not multi level marketing.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Alan wrote that in an email in all caps to
investors in two thousand and eight, in the early days
of him selling Safe Worlds, I've already touched on the
fact that Alan encouraged investors to preach the Safeworld's gospel
to their friends and family. That's one of the hallmarks
of a multi level marketing scheme, and from there it's
a slippery slope between that and a pyramid scheme where
(04:43):
the money from new recruits is used to pay out
older investors until they run out of new victims and
the whole thing implodes.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
The business sells actual products for actual businesses.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
This was one of the reasons Alan gave for why
Safe Worlds was legitimate. Despite insisting it wasn't a multi
level marketing scheme, he did acknowledge the importance of his
recruiting tactic.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Thanks particularly to those shareholders who keep recommending our company
to their friends. We could not survive without you, guys,
so on behalf of all shareholders. Thank you. You are
truly angel investors.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Safe Worlds evangelists were even handsomely rewarded with a commission
for their.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Work for a minimum investment of two thousand dollars. Safe
World's TV shareholders and their introduced friends will get two
thousand Safe Worlds TV shares valued at one dollar each,
plus a bonus of one thousand founders preference shares.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
The actual Safe World's website worked in a similar way.
People needed a referral to join up, and those sending
out the referrals would make an easy commission. One document
I found estimated that these referrers, called master distributors, could
make one hundred and eighty nine thousand dollars in a
year if they got one thousand people to sign up.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
You should think of your master distributor network as a
fish trap. The more arms of your fish trap that
you extend into the sea, the more fish you will catch.
This is how the system is designed to make money
for you, even while you sleep. We want you to
be rich, but it isn't magic.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Alan told investors they had to get in quick.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Safe Worlds was going to list on the US Stock
Exchange and soon they'd all be rich, he said. First
he promised this would happen in two thousand and seven,
Then he pushed it to two thousand and eight. But
Safeworlds didn't end up floating as Alan promised. Instead, the
company went bust through a complicated process called Chapter eleven bankruptcy.
(06:56):
Safeworlds was resurrected in twenty ten technically as a newcomery.
Alan then began pushing for more money so that it
could once again float on the Stock Exchange, but it
never quite came to fruition, always just out of reach,
tantalizing investors like a piece of forbidden fruit. Alan acknowledged
their frustration in yet another email.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
I am sure that to some of you this sounds
like another episode of a long running radio sitcom saga.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
In twenty sixteen, right before his death, he pushed one
more time for another five million. I still don't really
know what Safe Worlds is. I want to talk to
someone in the know who's seen the code up close,
to learn if the tech could have ever delivered on
its promises. I'm here in Mount Glorious, about one hour
(07:53):
outside of Brisbane. I'm about to meet one of the
employees of Safe Worlds who's very keen to chat. I'm
sitting on a park bench after a long taxi ride,
waiting for Tarlie Joy Grace Tarlie worked as a senior
software developer at Safeworlds from June twenty thirteen to February
twenty fourteen. Before joining Alan, she'd been a software developer
(08:16):
for eighteen years, most recently in the oil industry. In short,
she knew her stuff. So how did Tarlie end up
at Safeworlds.
Speaker 5 (08:26):
I saw it on Sikh, looked a bit, Oh, this
looks interesting, but there's not much information on the ad.
So I looked up the company online and saw the
big bosses name. So wrote my cover letter with his
name on it. Sold how some of my work in
the oil drilling industry fitted with his concept of universal logic.
(08:49):
And then Alan saw it and he thought, how did
you get my name? Because he accidentally seid it to me.
So obviously Alan was impressed that I did some basic
research on the company and put it into my cover letter.
He was very sociable, very extroverted, you know. He gave
off that really nice, charming personality that if he wasn't
(09:12):
so fat, a lot of ladies would go for him.
He just wanted to make you feel good about yourself,
very charming. And so I took the role from there
because I needed the.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Role an accidental CC a pretty basic blunder from the
head of a tech company, and it wasn't the last
red flag Tarlie would get at Safe Worlds.
Speaker 5 (09:35):
The product was completely rubbish, so it was really badly designed,
so it was like black on white sort of text.
It was had a very poor user interface, and it
was using quite out of d technology. And not only that,
it was like the culture of Safewold's TV. Like Alan,
you could just tell was a bit of a narcissist
(09:56):
and if you told him what he wanted to hear,
you know, if you sucked up to him, he'd absolutely
love you. And I wasn't sucking up to him. But
somehow he figured out because I'm a Christian, that I
could be one of his right hand men.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
One day, Tarlie knew that Alan had a devoted following
of true believers, but she didn't see him the same way.
Speaker 5 (10:19):
Well, he definitely wasn't a genius. He was a scammer
and a lunatic. He was basically version point five of Trump.
As a question, everything that Alan was looking back after
Trump got burted out reminded me of Donald Trump. So
Alan had the same sort of narcissistic. Everything should revolve
(10:42):
around me attitude as Trump. Alan was just as fat
as Trump, so Allan is almost aff at the foretelling
of Donald Trump.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
In a way, Alan's deeply religious Pentecostal mannerisms made their
way into company life. Tarlie's transgender and she uses she
they pronounced, but she kept this side of herself hidden
at work because she wasn't sure how Alan would react.
Speaker 5 (11:09):
It was almost like Alan was trying to run, you know,
a quasi sort of Christian style cult then an actual,
you know, Christian group. In a way, it came across
in his personality as being one of these dodgy far
right questions. They have a certain kind of personality to them.
It's really hard to describe. And just in some of
(11:30):
the writings he was putting in so and the way
he was approaching me, saying thanks for your good work
in the church. You know, I know we can do
things for Jesus with you.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Tarlie was also skeptical about the product itself, so in a.
Speaker 5 (11:46):
Gist, what it sort of felt like was trying to
do a half fast combination of Amazon and YouTube, so
having lots of videos and selling products attached to those videos.
But what the product really was was some way to
suck money out of gullible investors and out of gullible
(12:06):
you know, far right investors in the States. Officially it
was Amazon and YouTube put together, and that's how I
explained it to people in the industry, but unofficially it
was something that read propaganda to far right Christians and
Trumpers in the States. Everything the way the product was
(12:27):
designed was designed to suck up to those people, and
it performed very poorly, so it would take like five
minutes sometimes to actually load up the web application. Alan
felt that the big selling point of it was this
universal logic, but no one could quite explain what universal
(12:48):
logic was. It was just some mystical, magical concept that
was going to revolutionize the world economy. But what it
was in reality, when I know snucked into the code
base for that, that was just a glorified, crappified version
of Google, no search index that barely worked. It was
(13:10):
nothing fancy that made me start questioning that this is
a bit dodgy. Within a few months, I realized it
was all just a big scam and I wanted to
get out.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
While Tarlie started to suspect this was a scam. Not
everybody shared that view. A senior university lecturer from Queensland
spent more than fifty hours going through various documents and
he concluded that Safeworlds had merit. He wrote a report
which was touted around to many potential investors, lending weight
to the company. But this man didn't want to talk
(13:45):
to me, and he didn't even want to be mentioned
by name in this podcast, as he says he's received
threats from angry shareholders. So I ask another expert.
Speaker 6 (13:54):
My name is Asara Shudozhan. I am senior addicted at
the University of New Science.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
While many of the documents on the Safeworld's code base
have been lost in the passage of time, I gave
her just enough to form a preliminary opinion. I meet
her at her office in eastern Sydney, overlooking the main
university thoroughfare. We can hear students walking and talking below
us as we discussed the complexities of AI, the.
Speaker 6 (14:21):
Idea, their methods and you know proposed in this document.
They are all based on reliabilary sources. I can tell
you at this stage that my conclusion is that the
idea had the merit, but it was very, very ambitious
for that time.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
What did you think about the AI element? Was there
anything kind of cutting edge about his discovery?
Speaker 6 (14:47):
He talks about AI in different ways, and it's not exactly,
you know, clear which AI algorithm he is referring to.
Does he know what is AI? Actually? I felt he
had some ideas for AI, but he may not sure
what is exactly the algorithm he was thinking about, because
(15:09):
there are many AI algorithms.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
I asked Sarah for her thoughts on Alan finding the
secret code in the Bible. She says, it's not a
very academic way to make a breakthrough. Did you understand
exactly what universal logic was?
Speaker 6 (15:24):
I didn't understand from the documents that they had. I
didn't understand what he meant where it's our logic.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
So Alan may have had it the code to cracking AI,
but exactly what it was no one knew, and Alan
wasn't willing to share that information.
Speaker 7 (15:47):
Let's see if this guy's got what he claims he's got,
this could change the world.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
This is a high flying businessman who asked to keep
his name out of it because he's embarrassed to have
been involved with the Safe World project. We'll call him Jason.
He's a busy man, tapping the table a lot while
I chat to him in Brisbane after I managed to
catch him between meetings.
Speaker 7 (16:10):
My natural inclination is, don't tell me, prove it to me.
I need to see it, show me, show me how
this thing works. And I kept saying to him, I
don't want to see your algorithm. That's irrelevant. But I'd
read that there's some basic testing that you can do,
some really simple things. I said, let's run through that.
But he wasn't prepared to do any of that.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Jason stumbled across Safe Worlds through a chance LinkedIn message.
One of his old friends had put some money in.
The two had lost touch and reconnected over the social
networking platform. Given his background in business, Jason was asked
to help reel in some big investors and he agreed.
Alan paid Jason in Safe World shares for all the
(16:52):
work he did, about one hundred thousand dollars worth. But
soon things weren't making sense.
Speaker 7 (16:59):
Didn't stag up at all, to be frank, I mean,
there was just other than this gentleman. Alan Metcalfe saying
that he had something that was really unique and telling
a really really good story. There was nothing to support
or substantiate what he was claiming. Nothing, So very early
on I was pushing back respectfully. He was an elderly gentleman,
(17:22):
he was enough fellow. But I just said, no, this
is not going to go anywhere. You know, there's a
term we used to use about lifting the skirt, So
let's see what this is all about. Are you prepared? Yeah? Yeah,
if I meet with the right people, I will let
people get behind this and understand it. I said, great,
then I'm happy to make some introductions for you, which
I did, and of course he wasn't prepared to divulge
(17:45):
all as you would say. Is I have this. It's
come out of the Bible. That's it.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Now.
Speaker 7 (17:49):
People in the main were trying not to laugh, and
in the end I started to feel embarrassed about the
introductions I was making, so I stopped doing it. I
just said, Alan, this is just crazy. I can't do this.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Efforts were frustrated at every turn. Every potential investor he
introduced to the scheme walked away. Their questions aren't answered.
Speaker 7 (18:09):
Now I'll just met you, and you want me to
give you money into I'm going to start asking some
really basic questions. What is the purpose of this, What
am I investing in? Where is the money going, Who's
going to monitor it, what are the processes involved? Does
it sit in trust? Is it in escrow? What's the
money going to be spent on? Don't just say on
(18:30):
this on AI specifically? What further development? There was no milestone,
there was no plan, there was nothing. I introduced him
to some very very intelligent, senior people with deep pockets
that he was the problem that he wasn't prepared to answer.
What are basic questions for someone looking for equity.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Some of the people Jason introduced Alan to were high up,
really high up. I'm talking US Defense Force. But Alan
would always sabotage these meetings.
Speaker 7 (19:07):
I said to Alan, from a credibility perspective, I'm going
to introduce you to people, and for your own knowledge,
they are all believers in God like I am, So
don't run down that rabbit hole. I'm introducing them because
I know, like and trust these people. So we don't
need to talk about the religious piece. Let's stick to
(19:30):
the number of this, which is you have general artificial
intelligence or true artificial intelligence, and that's what they'll want
to focus on. So that was his.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Strict instruction, and did he follow that instruction incapable.
Speaker 7 (19:44):
So the first question, when we were over the pleasantries
and everyone's got their cup of coffee or water, is
do you believe in God? And I looked at this
gentleman because I thank God I've prepositioned him, and said, mate,
you may get up and pays this question. Gains are well,
and I'll answered honestly. So he said, yeah, I do.
You know, I went to a Catholic school and I'm Catholic. Yeah,
(20:05):
I do great, and then started to proceed to talk
about doing the good for the world, what artificial intelligence
can do for the world, what his grand plan is
for the world in terms of helping those less fortunate,
all of which was great, and everyone's going, yeah, yeah,
we agree with that. We agree absolutely great. So okay,
(20:27):
let's get back to what have you got an explain
it to me? Let's see it. Can we test it? No? No,
no no. So it just kept on this religious piece
and an end, you know, the guy that had done
the initial introduction to me, his head hit the ground.
I couldn't stop laughing. He split his head up and
on the boardroom table because he just said, oh my god.
We warned him and warned him not to go there.
(20:48):
He did, and then he just couldn't pull back from it.
Just it becomes a conversation about God, not about the product,
the outcome, the purpose, where the money comes from, where
it's going to go. It was unbelievable, but that must
have been his motus operandi, and it had worked for
him in the past. But you know, I'd like to
say that once you start playing at my level with
(21:10):
the people I was making introductions to, you know, we're
respectful of God, but hey, out of the way, we
need to know this, is this a deal or not.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
What little Alan could show him, Jason recalls, was pretty worrying.
Speaker 7 (21:24):
And I kept saying, you know, which is the old
bank thing. I want to see three way fully integrated budgets.
I want to see a balance sheet. I want to
see where the cash has moved, where's it gone to.
Someone explained this to me, No one, nothing would give
you nothing. It's just in vaporized. The money vaporized because
people said, no, it's been invested into the technology. Well
they show me the technology. No, we can't. There's nothing
(21:45):
then I kept getting shown some YouTube thing. I don't
know if you've seen it, but it looks like seriously,
it looked like someone was doing Lost in Space or something.
You know what I mean. It's just delusional.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Several people have mentioned this YouTube thing to me now.
It was a test run of the Safeworld's TV product
and has been described as terrible, atrocious, and outdated. If
you try to find the safe World's website now it's
long gone. You can't even view it on the wayback
machine as it requires downloading an outdated software, so I
(22:17):
can't actually see it for myself. But I find the
next best thing someone who had tried it out called
a beta tester. This is a video of an investor
testing out Safeworld's TV when it briefly went live in
twenty fourteen. You can still find the clip online. It
shows a panel that kind of looks like YouTube with
(22:38):
different video clips running down the side.
Speaker 8 (22:41):
Today we're just looking at basic running of this, which
is an interest distributor channel. And being a distributed channel,
I can encourage businesses to download free software to make
Internet TV channels for their business. And I can do
that last and go to this button here get free
(23:02):
channel and on their computer they will download the free
software and set up their own channel. So you just
click on the video you want to watch and it
loads up. Now, if it happens to come up with
saying here that this video does not exist, and sometimes
it does because it isn't embedding, probably just given another
(23:23):
couple of clicks on the button it's cell phon, it'll
come up.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
If at this point you still don't actually understand what
Safeworlds was or did, don't worry. You're not alone to
try to find out. I went to meet the woman
in the video, Kim and her husband Roy. They live
an hour outside of Sydney and didn't want to share
their last names. When I arrived, two massive piles of
paper greet me on their outdoor table. They've printed out
(23:49):
every email they've ever received about Safe Worlds jating all
the way back to two thousand and seven. Some of
the documents have coffee stains, and others are so fade
I can barely read them. They let me borrow their files,
and when I go home it takes me weeks to
pour over them. So you were one of the first
beta testers, so were you handpicked? Did you volunteer. Did
(24:12):
he send out a call out asking for help.
Speaker 9 (24:14):
We were still working back then, We're still run a
business and everything, but I used to just do it
in my free time. I felt like we didn't have
big money to invest, but I did have time and interest,
so that was how I was contributing. Yeah, but he
did ask and I said I'd do it. There was
that old fashioned feel to it, but I put that
(24:36):
down to the fact that it was mostly run by
old white men who Christian so to speak, so they
were terribly traditional, and in my mind, I just used
to think, once it gets a little bit more worldly,
then it'll modern up.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
Sounds like you spent a lot of time, like if
you had to go back. Were we talking like over
one hundred hours or over months and months of kind
of yeah, years? Okay, Yeah.
Speaker 9 (25:10):
I think the worst part for me personally was when
he promoted for us to go out and find local
businesses and try and interest them in getting their own channel.
And I did do that. And I'm an introvert and
a shy person and I don't talk much, so this
was a big effort for me. But I did it
(25:31):
because I wanted to get prosperity for our family, and
at the time I still believed that it was happening,
so I involved a lot of people and tried to
interest other people in joining in. It was embarrassing when
I look back.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
We did put a big sign on the wall of
our business which faced McDonald's, who were next door to us,
something to the effect of, how would you like to
have your own TV channel? And we had inquiries about it.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
While his wife Kim was beta testing the product. Royce
saw a lot of the program and Alan over the years,
and he formed his own opinions.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
He was comparing himself to people like Edison and Einstein,
you know, and people that had discovered penicillin, and you know,
like he was making a comparison that he had just
as a normal man, had discovered this law of thought
that governed how he built an AI system and claimed
(26:32):
that he was the savior of the or could be
the savior of the world if it all turned out
right for.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Him, you know and for us, like a kind of Messiah.
Speaker 4 (26:40):
Yeah, it really really and that put me off of
h you know, I thought it was rather clunky the
whole thing and kind of outdated. It wasn't like a
modern issue. You couldn't you couldn't put any of the
data on your phone or anything like that, you know,
And I thought, well, if they're going to introduce AI,
they should be upgrading everything to make it modern, you know,
(27:04):
because people are going to take one look and go
this is rubbish.
Speaker 10 (27:06):
You know.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Even though I contacted them out of the blue, Kim
and Roy were very keen to chat. The couple are
now retired. They've been waiting fifteen years since they first
put money into Safe Worlds. They're tired and they want
answers or at the very least closure about what's happened.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Looking at the platform, it was diabolical.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
This is Mike Brooke recalling the first time he saw
Safe Worlds. His parents put money in, as well as
some other extended family members. We're speaking in his Melbourne home.
The IT professional is in the process of moving, so
we use a cardboard box as a table between us
in an otherwise empty room.
Speaker 11 (27:52):
It didn't run on modern devices, so at that stage
the devices that were current it didn't work in the
hours are on those that needed a legacy version. Those
sorts of things are immediate red flags when you are
looking at something new. A product has to continue to
be developed. My background in having worked for a startup
(28:14):
is you cannot ever take your foot off accelerator. You're
always building, building, building, iterating and improving your product.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
Mike's family members told him they'd invested and asked him
if he wanted to get involved too.
Speaker 11 (28:27):
I was sent some information to say, you know, look
into this. This is something that you should invest in.
It's going to be the next YouTube. Slash eBay, slash Amazon,
slash PayPal was how it was introduced to me. I
was given information and endorsement by a very senior Hewlett
Packard employee in the US as well as to why
(28:49):
he thought it was a good platform. I was not
convinced because I looked at the technology and it just
didn't make sense to me. So I actually reached out
to that HP employee and he actually said to me
that he's not endorsing it, it's just he has invested
money in it. So it was very different from what
I had seen in the email about this guy was
(29:12):
believed in the technology. He was very much pulled back
from that, and just you know, I just happened to
have some money in it. I don't like fraudsters, and
I don't like things that seem to be too good
to people, that are too good to be true. My
first step was to reach out to my family and
tell them that I don't think.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
That this is real.
Speaker 11 (29:33):
And after that, I was just using a blog spot
or a Google Blogger website of that stage, and I thought,
you know what, I'll start to write some things about this.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
This is actually how I heard about Mike. His blog
posts from twenty thirteen are the only things on Google
casting some doubt on Safe worlds in Alan Metcalf. Although
Mike came onto my radar early on in my investigation,
it was a few months before we were able to
meet because he was in Melbourne. Mike received angry messages
from a lot of people and even one person threatening
(30:06):
to do him harm. But Alan wasn't shying away from criticism.
He responded directly to Mike's blog comments via email and
even offered Mike a discount if he wanted to buy
Safe World shares.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
I think he always thought he could bring me around
to what it could be, but he did actually answer
my arguments in an email back to me initially and again.
I responded to those and they were on the blog site. Again,
they were not clearing up anything, they were just ambiguous.
Speaker 3 (30:39):
Alan didn't stop there. He extended another offer to Mike.
He wanted Mike to debate his blog comments against one
of Alan's biggest supporters, who was a highly decorated lawyer
known as a queen's counsel.
Speaker 11 (30:53):
My problem with that is that I'm not a queen's
counsel and my opponent was going to be a queen's counsel.
So I knew that to do that with editing would
just reinforce what he was saying about the platform. So
it did not make sense to do that. My background as.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
A technical and a cybersecurity consultant, and I knew that
I would be out of my debt trying to argue
something with somebody with that experience.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
By this point, Mike's family wanted him to stop blogging.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
They were not happy about what I was doing. But
what I was doing was to stop other people investing.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Did that cause any kind of conflict?
Speaker 2 (31:35):
I think it did. Nobody said anything directly, but I
believe so. There were some quiet Christmases. But again it
was to stop more people investing, but also if they
are family to stop them putting more money in because
it was not a product that was ever going to
be a product.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
Despite Mike's criticism of Safe Worlds, his family kept investing.
Professor Clinton Free, the white collar crime expert I spoke
to last episode, offers an explanation on why people keep
investing in stuff like this.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Fraud is most possible where the person does have a
relationship of trust, and I really like that idea of
some cost fallacy in economics. I think once people have
committed a certain amount of money, they end up having
a bit of a blind belief in the merits of
what they're doing, and they're much more likely to continue
on a pattern of handing over money than one off
(32:34):
transaction might be. So I think one of the things
that we see in this case is repeated going back
to people for investments with escalating claims about what was possible,
and that fear of missing out on the next Google
you know, once in a lifetime investment opportunities, I think
is very powerful. I think when you attach that to
(32:56):
a setting where people trust each other, touch that to
the church and religious morality, that's a pretty potent cocktail
of forces that I think people would be seduced.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
By Alan drew on religious people and tech experts and
sporting personalities to pull more investors into his orbit. In
a previous episode, I discovered how he used the name
Michael Blake, a former all time great footballer, and he
wasn't just doing it in his home country Australia. This
(33:30):
was an international operation chasing the biggest market of all,
the US. He brought on celebrity sport host Paul Higgins
from ESPN, a major cable sports channel. Here's Paul doing
a promotional Safe World's video.
Speaker 10 (33:45):
Oh everyone, I'm Paul Higgins, and welcome to safe world TV.
The global marketplace, the world leader in Internet TV and
semantic search, the home a free enterprise, a level playing
field that all.
Speaker 6 (33:58):
The world can use.
Speaker 10 (34:00):
Electronic business. We seek World's TV. Every business in every
country of the world can now be involved in the
world economy today.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Paul works as a sports anchor at a channel in
southern California. I spend months chasing him for a response,
sending emails to his company, contacting him on social media.
Finally he gets back to me. Paul says that he's
no longer involved or employed by Safe Worlds. He says
he's not privileged with the information as to where the
(34:31):
investor's money is, So who does have that knowledge? That
is the forty nine million dollar question.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Keep the faith, our day will come.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
That's how Allan signed off most of his emails to shareholders.
He also told his followers.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
There is no greater power in this world than belief.
There is no greater gift in life than to encourage
people to believe.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
If you believe in something hard enough, does that make
it real? Was Alan's idea at best a delusion. It's
time for me to follow the trail of investors to
go to Alan's mecca and see his biggest disciple. That's
next time on the missing forty nine million.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
You know, when you meet someone who's a true believer
in something and there's not a touch of cynicism in
there at all.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
And I suppose if good salespeople are like that.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
It was a bit of the fervor of the converted
fanatic or something, you know. I remember he did try
to trail something on the computer, but he couldn't get
it work, and probably blame telture or something.
Speaker 7 (35:37):
But anyway, so he just kept talking about how great
it was.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Maybe they're not actually shareholders, like maybe they just took
their money, took their money, took their money. Thanks for listening.
A new episode is coming out weekly. Wherever you get
your podcasts, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss
an episode. Head to news dot com dot Au to
read more of my reporting on this story. Do you
(36:02):
know more? Get in touch through our dedicated tip inbox
Missing Millions at news dot com dot au or contact
me directly on Alex dot Turner Dash Cohen at news
dot com dodau or look me up on Twitter to
get my details. I'm your host, Alex Turner Cohen. Nina
Young is the executive producer, sound design and editing by
(36:23):
Tiffany Dimack. Our editorial director is Dan Box. Grant McAvaney
is our legal advisor, and Kerry Warren is the editor
of News dot com Doreau.
Hello, I'm back. This is Alan Metcalf. Artificial intelligence has
been difficult to find because it is like a green
bird in a green tree. It's difficult to see that
bird until someone shows you where it is, and then
it's easy to see.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
So keep watching it.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
I'm going to show you how to see the green
bird in the green tree.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Alan Metcalf certainly had away with words. David Richardson, the
Channel nine journalist who looked into Safe Worlds, thought so too.
Here's how he put it.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
It was almost as if he was, you know, like
a medieval monk who had claimed to have discovered angelic
script to the language of angels, as if it was
something new.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
The language of angels is defined as them transmitting their
speech through humans, and in the same token, Alan thought
he'd found a way to transmit human thought into computers.
He called it universal logic, or the law of thought.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
To be ultimately effective, computers must mirror the human mind.
This means that they must be made artificially intelligent. This
is why my discovery of the law of thought is
so important, because it explains how the human mind works
(01:23):
so that it can be artificially reproduced in computers.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Alan sounds impressive, but I'm trying to get to the
bottom of what he actually means and how he managed
to convince so many people to invest their life savings
solely on the basis of what he said, What was
safe worlds? And could it have ever been viable. I'm
Alex Turner Cohen, a finance and investigative reporter from news
(01:50):
dot com Dot are you and you're listening to the
Missing forty nine Million? This is episode three, Language of Angels.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
It helps me to stay the distance if I think
of it like building Noah's Ark. As I see the
flood of electronic information inundating the world and the increasing
confusion of all the computer languages that are involved. I
remember Biblical Babylon, it is clear to me that the
end of the world as we know it is nigh.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
The voice you're hearing is an artificial intelligence program we've
used to recreate Alan Metcas's voice to read out all
the emails he sent. The AI software used other videos
of Alan to stitch together his new digital version. We'll
be hearing a lot of it this episode. It's different
to the YouTube videos from earlier, even though it sounds
(02:53):
uncannily similar here's Ai Alan again.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Our belief is that the Internet of Things will kickstart
the lackluster world economy, and that Safe World's TV will
be an important catalyst in making this happen.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
According to Alan, Safewoards was going to be a combination
of Google, Amazon, YouTube, eBay, and PayPal. It was going
to be a hub where videos could be posted to
advertise and sell products, all with its own currency system,
and it was also going to have its own phone
like Skype, only it would be better than all its competitors,
(03:32):
way better.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Safe Worlds has better search capabilities than Google because of
universal logic. I do not believe that any company in
the world has more experience with AI than we have.
In computer science, it's the holy grail.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
Alan claimed to have discovered an algorithm which mirrored the
human mind. This would allow him to, in his own words,
monetize the Internet, as his software would know exactly what
everyone wanted. At the same time, the Safeworld's platform would
link computers together all over the world. It would be
in a private, safe place on the Internet, hence why
(04:11):
he called it Safe Worlds. He estimated the whole thing
was worth ten billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
This is not multi level marketing.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Alan wrote that in an email in all caps to
investors in two thousand and eight, in the early days
of him selling Safe Worlds, I've already touched on the
fact that Alan encouraged investors to preach the Safeworld's gospel
to their friends and family. That's one of the hallmarks
of a multi level marketing scheme, and from there it's
a slippery slope between that and a pyramid scheme where
(04:43):
the money from new recruits is used to pay out
older investors until they run out of new victims and
the whole thing implodes.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
The business sells actual products for actual businesses.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
This was one of the reasons Alan gave for why
Safe Worlds was legitimate. Despite insisting it wasn't a multi
level marketing scheme, he did acknowledge the importance of his
recruiting tactic.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Thanks particularly to those shareholders who keep recommending our company
to their friends. We could not survive without you, guys,
so on behalf of all shareholders. Thank you. You are
truly angel investors.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Safe Worlds evangelists were even handsomely rewarded with a commission
for their.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Work for a minimum investment of two thousand dollars. Safe
World's TV shareholders and their introduced friends will get two
thousand Safe Worlds TV shares valued at one dollar each,
plus a bonus of one thousand founders preference shares.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
The actual Safe World's website worked in a similar way.
People needed a referral to join up, and those sending
out the referrals would make an easy commission. One document
I found estimated that these referrers, called master distributors, could
make one hundred and eighty nine thousand dollars in a
year if they got one thousand people to sign up.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
You should think of your master distributor network as a
fish trap. The more arms of your fish trap that
you extend into the sea, the more fish you will catch.
This is how the system is designed to make money
for you, even while you sleep. We want you to
be rich, but it isn't magic.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Alan told investors they had to get in quick.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Safe Worlds was going to list on the US Stock
Exchange and soon they'd all be rich, he said. First
he promised this would happen in two thousand and seven,
Then he pushed it to two thousand and eight. But
Safeworlds didn't end up floating as Alan promised. Instead, the
company went bust through a complicated process called Chapter eleven bankruptcy.
(06:56):
Safeworlds was resurrected in twenty ten technically as a newcomery.
Alan then began pushing for more money so that it
could once again float on the Stock Exchange, but it
never quite came to fruition, always just out of reach,
tantalizing investors like a piece of forbidden fruit. Alan acknowledged
their frustration in yet another email.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
I am sure that to some of you this sounds
like another episode of a long running radio sitcom saga.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
In twenty sixteen, right before his death, he pushed one
more time for another five million. I still don't really
know what Safe Worlds is. I want to talk to
someone in the know who's seen the code up close,
to learn if the tech could have ever delivered on
its promises. I'm here in Mount Glorious, about one hour
(07:53):
outside of Brisbane. I'm about to meet one of the
employees of Safe Worlds who's very keen to chat. I'm
sitting on a park bench after a long taxi ride,
waiting for Tarlie Joy Grace Tarlie worked as a senior
software developer at Safeworlds from June twenty thirteen to February
twenty fourteen. Before joining Alan, she'd been a software developer
(08:16):
for eighteen years, most recently in the oil industry. In short,
she knew her stuff. So how did Tarlie end up
at Safeworlds.
Speaker 5 (08:26):
I saw it on Sikh, looked a bit, Oh, this
looks interesting, but there's not much information on the ad.
So I looked up the company online and saw the
big bosses name. So wrote my cover letter with his
name on it. Sold how some of my work in
the oil drilling industry fitted with his concept of universal logic.
(08:49):
And then Alan saw it and he thought, how did
you get my name? Because he accidentally seid it to me.
So obviously Alan was impressed that I did some basic
research on the company and put it into my cover letter.
He was very sociable, very extroverted, you know. He gave
off that really nice, charming personality that if he wasn't
(09:12):
so fat, a lot of ladies would go for him.
He just wanted to make you feel good about yourself,
very charming. And so I took the role from there
because I needed the.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Role an accidental CC a pretty basic blunder from the
head of a tech company, and it wasn't the last
red flag Tarlie would get at Safe Worlds.
Speaker 5 (09:35):
The product was completely rubbish, so it was really badly designed,
so it was like black on white sort of text.
It was had a very poor user interface, and it
was using quite out of d technology. And not only that,
it was like the culture of Safewold's TV. Like Alan,
you could just tell was a bit of a narcissist
(09:56):
and if you told him what he wanted to hear,
you know, if you sucked up to him, he'd absolutely
love you. And I wasn't sucking up to him. But
somehow he figured out because I'm a Christian, that I
could be one of his right hand men.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
One day, Tarlie knew that Alan had a devoted following
of true believers, but she didn't see him the same way.
Speaker 5 (10:19):
Well, he definitely wasn't a genius. He was a scammer
and a lunatic. He was basically version point five of Trump.
As a question, everything that Alan was looking back after
Trump got burted out reminded me of Donald Trump. So
Alan had the same sort of narcissistic. Everything should revolve
(10:42):
around me attitude as Trump. Alan was just as fat
as Trump, so Allan is almost aff at the foretelling
of Donald Trump.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
In a way, Alan's deeply religious Pentecostal mannerisms made their
way into company life. Tarlie's transgender and she uses she
they pronounced, but she kept this side of herself hidden
at work because she wasn't sure how Alan would react.
Speaker 5 (11:09):
It was almost like Alan was trying to run, you know,
a quasi sort of Christian style cult then an actual,
you know, Christian group. In a way, it came across
in his personality as being one of these dodgy far
right questions. They have a certain kind of personality to them.
It's really hard to describe. And just in some of
(11:30):
the writings he was putting in so and the way
he was approaching me, saying thanks for your good work
in the church. You know, I know we can do
things for Jesus with you.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Tarlie was also skeptical about the product itself, so in a.
Speaker 5 (11:46):
Gist, what it sort of felt like was trying to
do a half fast combination of Amazon and YouTube, so
having lots of videos and selling products attached to those videos.
But what the product really was was some way to
suck money out of gullible investors and out of gullible
(12:06):
you know, far right investors in the States. Officially it
was Amazon and YouTube put together, and that's how I
explained it to people in the industry, but unofficially it
was something that read propaganda to far right Christians and
Trumpers in the States. Everything the way the product was
(12:27):
designed was designed to suck up to those people, and
it performed very poorly, so it would take like five
minutes sometimes to actually load up the web application. Alan
felt that the big selling point of it was this
universal logic, but no one could quite explain what universal
(12:48):
logic was. It was just some mystical, magical concept that
was going to revolutionize the world economy. But what it
was in reality, when I know snucked into the code
base for that, that was just a glorified, crappified version
of Google, no search index that barely worked. It was
(13:10):
nothing fancy that made me start questioning that this is
a bit dodgy. Within a few months, I realized it
was all just a big scam and I wanted to
get out.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
While Tarlie started to suspect this was a scam. Not
everybody shared that view. A senior university lecturer from Queensland
spent more than fifty hours going through various documents and
he concluded that Safeworlds had merit. He wrote a report
which was touted around to many potential investors, lending weight
to the company. But this man didn't want to talk
(13:45):
to me, and he didn't even want to be mentioned
by name in this podcast, as he says he's received
threats from angry shareholders. So I ask another expert.
Speaker 6 (13:54):
My name is Asara Shudozhan. I am senior addicted at
the University of New Science.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
While many of the documents on the Safeworld's code base
have been lost in the passage of time, I gave
her just enough to form a preliminary opinion. I meet
her at her office in eastern Sydney, overlooking the main
university thoroughfare. We can hear students walking and talking below
us as we discussed the complexities of AI, the.
Speaker 6 (14:21):
Idea, their methods and you know proposed in this document.
They are all based on reliabilary sources. I can tell
you at this stage that my conclusion is that the
idea had the merit, but it was very, very ambitious
for that time.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
What did you think about the AI element? Was there
anything kind of cutting edge about his discovery?
Speaker 6 (14:47):
He talks about AI in different ways, and it's not exactly,
you know, clear which AI algorithm he is referring to.
Does he know what is AI? Actually? I felt he
had some ideas for AI, but he may not sure
what is exactly the algorithm he was thinking about, because
(15:09):
there are many AI algorithms.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
I asked Sarah for her thoughts on Alan finding the
secret code in the Bible. She says, it's not a
very academic way to make a breakthrough. Did you understand
exactly what universal logic was?
Speaker 6 (15:24):
I didn't understand from the documents that they had. I
didn't understand what he meant where it's our logic.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
So Alan may have had it the code to cracking AI,
but exactly what it was no one knew, and Alan
wasn't willing to share that information.
Speaker 7 (15:47):
Let's see if this guy's got what he claims he's got,
this could change the world.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
This is a high flying businessman who asked to keep
his name out of it because he's embarrassed to have
been involved with the Safe World project. We'll call him Jason.
He's a busy man, tapping the table a lot while
I chat to him in Brisbane after I managed to
catch him between meetings.
Speaker 7 (16:10):
My natural inclination is, don't tell me, prove it to me.
I need to see it, show me, show me how
this thing works. And I kept saying to him, I
don't want to see your algorithm. That's irrelevant. But I'd
read that there's some basic testing that you can do,
some really simple things. I said, let's run through that.
But he wasn't prepared to do any of that.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Jason stumbled across Safe Worlds through a chance LinkedIn message.
One of his old friends had put some money in.
The two had lost touch and reconnected over the social
networking platform. Given his background in business, Jason was asked
to help reel in some big investors and he agreed.
Alan paid Jason in Safe World shares for all the
(16:52):
work he did, about one hundred thousand dollars worth. But
soon things weren't making sense.
Speaker 7 (16:59):
Didn't stag up at all, to be frank, I mean,
there was just other than this gentleman. Alan Metcalfe saying
that he had something that was really unique and telling
a really really good story. There was nothing to support
or substantiate what he was claiming. Nothing, So very early
on I was pushing back respectfully. He was an elderly gentleman,
(17:22):
he was enough fellow. But I just said, no, this
is not going to go anywhere. You know, there's a
term we used to use about lifting the skirt, So
let's see what this is all about. Are you prepared? Yeah? Yeah,
if I meet with the right people, I will let
people get behind this and understand it. I said, great,
then I'm happy to make some introductions for you, which
I did, and of course he wasn't prepared to divulge
(17:45):
all as you would say. Is I have this. It's
come out of the Bible. That's it.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Now.
Speaker 7 (17:49):
People in the main were trying not to laugh, and
in the end I started to feel embarrassed about the
introductions I was making, so I stopped doing it. I
just said, Alan, this is just crazy. I can't do this.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
Efforts were frustrated at every turn. Every potential investor he
introduced to the scheme walked away. Their questions aren't answered.
Speaker 7 (18:09):
Now I'll just met you, and you want me to
give you money into I'm going to start asking some
really basic questions. What is the purpose of this, What
am I investing in? Where is the money going, Who's
going to monitor it, what are the processes involved? Does
it sit in trust? Is it in escrow? What's the
money going to be spent on? Don't just say on
(18:30):
this on AI specifically? What further development? There was no milestone,
there was no plan, there was nothing. I introduced him
to some very very intelligent, senior people with deep pockets
that he was the problem that he wasn't prepared to answer.
What are basic questions for someone looking for equity.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Some of the people Jason introduced Alan to were high up,
really high up. I'm talking US Defense Force. But Alan
would always sabotage these meetings.
Speaker 7 (19:07):
I said to Alan, from a credibility perspective, I'm going
to introduce you to people, and for your own knowledge,
they are all believers in God like I am, So
don't run down that rabbit hole. I'm introducing them because
I know, like and trust these people. So we don't
need to talk about the religious piece. Let's stick to
(19:30):
the number of this, which is you have general artificial
intelligence or true artificial intelligence, and that's what they'll want
to focus on. So that was his.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Strict instruction, and did he follow that instruction incapable.
Speaker 7 (19:44):
So the first question, when we were over the pleasantries
and everyone's got their cup of coffee or water, is
do you believe in God? And I looked at this
gentleman because I thank God I've prepositioned him, and said, mate,
you may get up and pays this question. Gains are well,
and I'll answered honestly. So he said, yeah, I do.
You know, I went to a Catholic school and I'm Catholic. Yeah,
(20:05):
I do great, and then started to proceed to talk
about doing the good for the world, what artificial intelligence
can do for the world, what his grand plan is
for the world in terms of helping those less fortunate,
all of which was great, and everyone's going, yeah, yeah,
we agree with that. We agree absolutely great. So okay,
(20:27):
let's get back to what have you got an explain
it to me? Let's see it. Can we test it? No? No,
no no. So it just kept on this religious piece
and an end, you know, the guy that had done
the initial introduction to me, his head hit the ground.
I couldn't stop laughing. He split his head up and
on the boardroom table because he just said, oh my god.
We warned him and warned him not to go there.
(20:48):
He did, and then he just couldn't pull back from it.
Just it becomes a conversation about God, not about the product,
the outcome, the purpose, where the money comes from, where
it's going to go. It was unbelievable, but that must
have been his motus operandi, and it had worked for
him in the past. But you know, I'd like to
say that once you start playing at my level with
(21:10):
the people I was making introductions to, you know, we're
respectful of God, but hey, out of the way, we
need to know this, is this a deal or not.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
What little Alan could show him, Jason recalls, was pretty worrying.
Speaker 7 (21:24):
And I kept saying, you know, which is the old
bank thing. I want to see three way fully integrated budgets.
I want to see a balance sheet. I want to
see where the cash has moved, where's it gone to.
Someone explained this to me, No one, nothing would give
you nothing. It's just in vaporized. The money vaporized because
people said, no, it's been invested into the technology. Well
they show me the technology. No, we can't. There's nothing
(21:45):
then I kept getting shown some YouTube thing. I don't
know if you've seen it, but it looks like seriously,
it looked like someone was doing Lost in Space or something.
You know what I mean. It's just delusional.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Several people have mentioned this YouTube thing to me now.
It was a test run of the Safeworld's TV product
and has been described as terrible, atrocious, and outdated. If
you try to find the safe World's website now it's
long gone. You can't even view it on the wayback
machine as it requires downloading an outdated software, so I
(22:17):
can't actually see it for myself. But I find the
next best thing someone who had tried it out called
a beta tester. This is a video of an investor
testing out Safeworld's TV when it briefly went live in
twenty fourteen. You can still find the clip online. It
shows a panel that kind of looks like YouTube with
(22:38):
different video clips running down the side.
Speaker 8 (22:41):
Today we're just looking at basic running of this, which
is an interest distributor channel. And being a distributed channel,
I can encourage businesses to download free software to make
Internet TV channels for their business. And I can do
that last and go to this button here get free
(23:02):
channel and on their computer they will download the free
software and set up their own channel. So you just
click on the video you want to watch and it
loads up. Now, if it happens to come up with
saying here that this video does not exist, and sometimes
it does because it isn't embedding, probably just given another
(23:23):
couple of clicks on the button it's cell phon, it'll
come up.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
If at this point you still don't actually understand what
Safeworlds was or did, don't worry. You're not alone to
try to find out. I went to meet the woman
in the video, Kim and her husband Roy. They live
an hour outside of Sydney and didn't want to share
their last names. When I arrived, two massive piles of
paper greet me on their outdoor table. They've printed out
(23:49):
every email they've ever received about Safe Worlds jating all
the way back to two thousand and seven. Some of
the documents have coffee stains, and others are so fade
I can barely read them. They let me borrow their files,
and when I go home it takes me weeks to
pour over them. So you were one of the first
beta testers, so were you handpicked? Did you volunteer. Did
(24:12):
he send out a call out asking for help.
Speaker 9 (24:14):
We were still working back then, We're still run a
business and everything, but I used to just do it
in my free time. I felt like we didn't have
big money to invest, but I did have time and interest,
so that was how I was contributing. Yeah, but he
did ask and I said I'd do it. There was
that old fashioned feel to it, but I put that
(24:36):
down to the fact that it was mostly run by
old white men who Christian so to speak, so they
were terribly traditional, and in my mind, I just used
to think, once it gets a little bit more worldly,
then it'll modern up.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
Sounds like you spent a lot of time, like if
you had to go back. Were we talking like over
one hundred hours or over months and months of kind
of yeah, years? Okay, Yeah.
Speaker 9 (25:10):
I think the worst part for me personally was when
he promoted for us to go out and find local
businesses and try and interest them in getting their own channel.
And I did do that. And I'm an introvert and
a shy person and I don't talk much, so this
was a big effort for me. But I did it
(25:31):
because I wanted to get prosperity for our family, and
at the time I still believed that it was happening,
so I involved a lot of people and tried to
interest other people in joining in. It was embarrassing when
I look back.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
We did put a big sign on the wall of
our business which faced McDonald's, who were next door to us,
something to the effect of, how would you like to
have your own TV channel? And we had inquiries about it.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
While his wife Kim was beta testing the product. Royce
saw a lot of the program and Alan over the years,
and he formed his own opinions.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
He was comparing himself to people like Edison and Einstein,
you know, and people that had discovered penicillin, and you know,
like he was making a comparison that he had just
as a normal man, had discovered this law of thought
that governed how he built an AI system and claimed
(26:32):
that he was the savior of the or could be
the savior of the world if it all turned out
right for.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Him, you know and for us, like a kind of Messiah.
Speaker 4 (26:40):
Yeah, it really really and that put me off of
h you know, I thought it was rather clunky the
whole thing and kind of outdated. It wasn't like a
modern issue. You couldn't you couldn't put any of the
data on your phone or anything like that, you know,
And I thought, well, if they're going to introduce AI,
they should be upgrading everything to make it modern, you know,
(27:04):
because people are going to take one look and go
this is rubbish.
Speaker 10 (27:06):
You know.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Even though I contacted them out of the blue, Kim
and Roy were very keen to chat. The couple are
now retired. They've been waiting fifteen years since they first
put money into Safe Worlds. They're tired and they want
answers or at the very least closure about what's happened.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Looking at the platform, it was diabolical.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
This is Mike Brooke recalling the first time he saw
Safe Worlds. His parents put money in, as well as
some other extended family members. We're speaking in his Melbourne home.
The IT professional is in the process of moving, so
we use a cardboard box as a table between us
in an otherwise empty room.
Speaker 11 (27:52):
It didn't run on modern devices, so at that stage
the devices that were current it didn't work in the
hours are on those that needed a legacy version. Those
sorts of things are immediate red flags when you are
looking at something new. A product has to continue to
be developed. My background in having worked for a startup
(28:14):
is you cannot ever take your foot off accelerator. You're
always building, building, building, iterating and improving your product.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
Mike's family members told him they'd invested and asked him
if he wanted to get involved too.
Speaker 11 (28:27):
I was sent some information to say, you know, look
into this. This is something that you should invest in.
It's going to be the next YouTube. Slash eBay, slash Amazon,
slash PayPal was how it was introduced to me. I
was given information and endorsement by a very senior Hewlett
Packard employee in the US as well as to why
(28:49):
he thought it was a good platform. I was not
convinced because I looked at the technology and it just
didn't make sense to me. So I actually reached out
to that HP employee and he actually said to me
that he's not endorsing it, it's just he has invested
money in it. So it was very different from what
I had seen in the email about this guy was
(29:12):
believed in the technology. He was very much pulled back
from that, and just you know, I just happened to
have some money in it. I don't like fraudsters, and
I don't like things that seem to be too good
to people, that are too good to be true. My
first step was to reach out to my family and
tell them that I don't think.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
That this is real.
Speaker 11 (29:33):
And after that, I was just using a blog spot
or a Google Blogger website of that stage, and I thought,
you know what, I'll start to write some things about this.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
This is actually how I heard about Mike. His blog
posts from twenty thirteen are the only things on Google
casting some doubt on Safe worlds in Alan Metcalf. Although
Mike came onto my radar early on in my investigation,
it was a few months before we were able to
meet because he was in Melbourne. Mike received angry messages
from a lot of people and even one person threatening
(30:06):
to do him harm. But Alan wasn't shying away from criticism.
He responded directly to Mike's blog comments via email and
even offered Mike a discount if he wanted to buy
Safe World shares.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
I think he always thought he could bring me around
to what it could be, but he did actually answer
my arguments in an email back to me initially and again.
I responded to those and they were on the blog site. Again,
they were not clearing up anything, they were just ambiguous.
Speaker 3 (30:39):
Alan didn't stop there. He extended another offer to Mike.
He wanted Mike to debate his blog comments against one
of Alan's biggest supporters, who was a highly decorated lawyer
known as a queen's counsel.
Speaker 11 (30:53):
My problem with that is that I'm not a queen's
counsel and my opponent was going to be a queen's counsel.
So I knew that to do that with editing would
just reinforce what he was saying about the platform. So
it did not make sense to do that. My background as.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
A technical and a cybersecurity consultant, and I knew that
I would be out of my debt trying to argue
something with somebody with that experience.
Speaker 3 (31:19):
By this point, Mike's family wanted him to stop blogging.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
They were not happy about what I was doing. But
what I was doing was to stop other people investing.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Did that cause any kind of conflict?
Speaker 2 (31:35):
I think it did. Nobody said anything directly, but I
believe so. There were some quiet Christmases. But again it
was to stop more people investing, but also if they
are family to stop them putting more money in because
it was not a product that was ever going to
be a product.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
Despite Mike's criticism of Safe Worlds, his family kept investing.
Professor Clinton Free, the white collar crime expert I spoke
to last episode, offers an explanation on why people keep
investing in stuff like this.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Fraud is most possible where the person does have a
relationship of trust, and I really like that idea of
some cost fallacy in economics. I think once people have
committed a certain amount of money, they end up having
a bit of a blind belief in the merits of
what they're doing, and they're much more likely to continue
on a pattern of handing over money than one off
(32:34):
transaction might be. So I think one of the things
that we see in this case is repeated going back
to people for investments with escalating claims about what was possible,
and that fear of missing out on the next Google
you know, once in a lifetime investment opportunities, I think
is very powerful. I think when you attach that to
(32:56):
a setting where people trust each other, touch that to
the church and religious morality, that's a pretty potent cocktail
of forces that I think people would be seduced.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
By Alan drew on religious people and tech experts and
sporting personalities to pull more investors into his orbit. In
a previous episode, I discovered how he used the name
Michael Blake, a former all time great footballer, and he
wasn't just doing it in his home country Australia. This
(33:30):
was an international operation chasing the biggest market of all,
the US. He brought on celebrity sport host Paul Higgins
from ESPN, a major cable sports channel. Here's Paul doing
a promotional Safe World's video.
Speaker 10 (33:45):
Oh everyone, I'm Paul Higgins, and welcome to safe world TV.
The global marketplace, the world leader in Internet TV and
semantic search, the home a free enterprise, a level playing
field that all.
Speaker 6 (33:58):
The world can use.
Speaker 10 (34:00):
Electronic business. We seek World's TV. Every business in every
country of the world can now be involved in the
world economy today.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Paul works as a sports anchor at a channel in
southern California. I spend months chasing him for a response,
sending emails to his company, contacting him on social media.
Finally he gets back to me. Paul says that he's
no longer involved or employed by Safe Worlds. He says
he's not privileged with the information as to where the
(34:31):
investor's money is, So who does have that knowledge? That
is the forty nine million dollar question.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Keep the faith, our day will come.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
That's how Allan signed off most of his emails to shareholders.
He also told his followers.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
There is no greater power in this world than belief.
There is no greater gift in life than to encourage
people to believe.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
If you believe in something hard enough, does that make
it real? Was Alan's idea at best a delusion. It's
time for me to follow the trail of investors to
go to Alan's mecca and see his biggest disciple. That's
next time on the missing forty nine million.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
You know, when you meet someone who's a true believer
in something and there's not a touch of cynicism in
there at all.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
And I suppose if good salespeople are like that.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
It was a bit of the fervor of the converted
fanatic or something, you know. I remember he did try
to trail something on the computer, but he couldn't get
it work, and probably blame telture or something.
Speaker 7 (35:37):
But anyway, so he just kept talking about how great
it was.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Maybe they're not actually shareholders, like maybe they just took
their money, took their money, took their money. Thanks for listening.
A new episode is coming out weekly. Wherever you get
your podcasts, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss
an episode. Head to news dot com dot Au to
read more of my reporting on this story. Do you
(36:02):
know more? Get in touch through our dedicated tip inbox
Missing Millions at news dot com dot au or contact
me directly on Alex dot Turner Dash Cohen at news
dot com dodau or look me up on Twitter to
get my details. I'm your host, Alex Turner Cohen. Nina
Young is the executive producer, sound design and editing by
(36:23):
Tiffany Dimack. Our editorial director is Dan Box. Grant McAvaney
is our legal advisor, and Kerry Warren is the editor
of News dot com Doreau.
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