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