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?
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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.
So keep watching it.
I'm going to show you how to see the green bird in the green tree.
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.
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.
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.
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 so that it can be artificially reproduced in computers.
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 dot com Dot are you and you're listening to the Missing forty nine Million? This is episode three, Language of Angels.
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.
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 uncannily similar here's Ai Alan again.
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.
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, way better.
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.
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 he called it Safe Worlds. He estimated the whole thing was worth ten billion dollars.
This is not multi level marketing.
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 the money from new recruits is used to pay out older investors until they run out of new victims and the whole thing implodes.
The business sells actual products for actual businesses.
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.
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.
Safe Worlds evangelists were even handsomely rewarded with a commission for their.
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.
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.
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.
Alan told investors they had to get in quick.
This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.
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. 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.
I am sure that to some of you this sounds like another episode of a long running radio sitcom saga.
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 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 for eighteen years, most recently in the oil industry. In short, she knew her stuff. So how did Tarlie end up at Safeworlds.
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. 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 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.
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.
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 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.
One day, Tarlie knew that Alan had a devoted following of true believers, but she didn't see him the same way.
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 around me attitude as Trump. Alan was just as fat as Trump, so Allan is almost aff at the foretelling of Donald Trump.
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.
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 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.
Tarlie was also skeptical about the product itself, so in a.
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 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 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 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 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.
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 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.
My name is Asara Shudozhan. I am senior addicted at the University of New Science.
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.
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.
What did you think about the AI element? Was there anything kind of cutting edge about his discovery?
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 there are many AI algorithms.
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?
I didn't understand from the documents that they had. I didn't understand what he meant where it's our logic.
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.
Let's see if this guy's got what he claims he's got, this could change the world.
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.
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.
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 work he did, about one hundred thousand dollars worth. But soon things weren't making sense.
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, 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 all as you would say. Is I have this. It's come out of the Bible. That's it.
Now.
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.
Efforts were frustrated at every turn. Every potential investor he introduced to the scheme walked away. Their questions aren't answered.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Strict instruction, and did he follow that instruction incapable.
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, 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, 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. 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 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.
What little Alan could show him, Jason recalls, was pretty worrying.
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 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.
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 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 different video clips running down the side.
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 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 couple of clicks on the button it's cell phon, it'll come up.
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 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 he send out a call out asking for help.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 that he was the savior of the or could be the savior of the world if it all turned out right for.
Him, you know and for us, like a kind of Messiah.
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, because people are going to take one look and go this is rubbish.
You know.
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.
Looking at the platform, it was diabolical.
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.
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 is you cannot ever take your foot off accelerator. You're always building, building, building, iterating and improving your product.
Mike's family members told him they'd invested and asked him if he wanted to get involved too.
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 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 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.
That this is real.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By this point, Mike's family wanted him to stop blogging.
They were not happy about what I was doing. But what I was doing was to stop other people investing.
Did that cause any kind of conflict?
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
The world can use.
Electronic business. We seek World's TV. Every business in every country of the world can now be involved in the world economy today.
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 investor's money is, So who does have that knowledge? That is the forty nine million dollar question.
Keep the faith, our day will come.
That's how Allan signed off most of his emails to shareholders. He also told his followers.
There is no greater power in this world than belief. There is no greater gift in life than to encourage people to believe.
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.
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.
And I suppose if good salespeople are like that.
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.
But anyway, so he just kept talking about how great it was.
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 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 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.