The Unofficial Transcripts of the Green Bible Lectures
Sam Ursu
The Unofficial Transcripts of the Green Bible Lectures
by Sam Ursu
Copyright
The Unofficial Transcripts of the Green Bible Lectures
By Sam Ursu
© 2012 Sam Ursu
All rights reserved.
Author: Sam Ursu
Contact details: samursuauthor.grunt941@passinbox.com
Book cover, illustration: Sam Ursu
Editing, proofreading: Sam Ursu
This e-book, including its portions, is protected by copyright and may not be reproduced, resold, or redistributed without the permission of the author.
If you liked the e-book, recommend that your friends buy a personal copy. A big thank you for respecting the author's work!
Table of Contents
Copyright
Table of Contents
Notes from the Transcriptionist
Berlin
Slavery
Prague
Medicine
Salacgrivas
Wipeout
Gomel
Grass People
Chernihiv
Depression
Tiraspol
Civilization
Adana
Farming
Pyatigorsk
Fire
Ganja
Teenagers
Bukhara
The Time Machine
Thimphu
Writing
Nay Pyi Taw
Captain Dunbar
Chiang Mai
Elites
Vientiane
Population Bomb
London
Beer
Notes from the Transcriptionist
I have been a professional transcriptionist for more than 20 years. Over the course of that time, I have primarily worked in the medical and legal fields. I have prepared over 15,000 different documents in my career. Most of my work is done with legacy clients, a mix of government and quasi-governmental agencies, but I also do some occasional freelance work.
In October of 2017, I was logged onto my freelance work platform when I got a direct message from a new client. He had selected me because of my high rating and reviews and asked if I would be willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement in exchange for a much higher rate of pay.
I immediately agreed. The client then told me the file was in 14 parts and gave me a download link. According to our agreement, I transcribed the first section and then uploaded it to the platform. The client was then supposed to pay me for this milestone, but he or she did not pay me. I sent several messages but got no reply.
My plan was to delete the files and move onto other work after adding this client to my blacklist. But the words that I had transcribed in the first part stuck with me, and, out of curiosity or intrigue, I then listened to the second file in the batch. Over the course of the next few days, I downloaded and listened to all 14 sections.
Following this, I faced a real dilemma. My professional history and personal self-honor forbade me from sharing the contents of those files with anyone per the non-disclosure agreement that I had signed. But the terms of the NDA were vague about whether or not the NDA was still binding if the client failed to honor their side of the contract and pay me.
After sending more than a dozen messages over the course of a few months, I received nothing but radio silence from the client. I then decided to share the download link with a friend, but the link no longer worked.
It was at that point that I decided to type up all of the audio files that I had downloaded. What you will read in this book is verbatim, without any alterations or additions on my part.
-Sam Ursu
Berlin
October 11, 2015
Berlin, Germany
(light applause)
Tomer Brinks: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for coming. Ah, yes, I'm glad to see a few familiar faces.
My name is Tomer Brinks. Maybe you can tell by my accent that I am Dutch. I apologize for any mistakes in my English, as I am a little nervous. For most of my life, I spent a rather lonely existence. From childhood, I loved computers, and it wasn't long before I became what the news would call a "hacker."
I never liked that term, but I don't want to get involved in a long story that's probably only interesting to me.
(scattered laughter)
Ah, thank you. Yes. Ever since I was a young man, I was interested in how computers worked. To me, every computer that I explored was a special kind of adventure. I never once took advantage of computers that I gained access to, but I know now that simply by being there, I was invading those people's privacy.
My hacker name was.... well, I'll spell it out for you.
(long pause)
Using just three letters, I made what I thought was a hilarious pun on the popular Star Wars robot C3POWNU. By calling myself C-3-P-O-W-N-U, I felt like a true badass. And there wasn't a computer out there on the internet that I couldn't hack my way into.
But I'm not here to talk about me. This is not my story. I am here tonight, ladies, and gentlemen, to tell you about a book that I read.
(audience murmurs)
One day, while searching through a government database, I came across a strange file type that I'd never seen before. It was inside a large cache of data that one of my custom programs had siphoned off a database. The mysterious file was roughly 21 megabytes in size and yet my computer couldn't figure out what type of file it was.
I went online and poked around on some forums, and ultimately discovered that the file was a mirror of an old Apple computer running System 7. Since it was released in 1991, it was no surprise that I'd never encountered a file like that before.
It took me some time, but in the end, I was able to extract the files and rebuilt the original Apple computer in a partition on one of my drives. But what confused me was that, for all intents and purposes, it looked like a completely brand-new Mac set-up.
Everything from the icons to the apps were all a standard, right out of the box set-up for a brand new Apple computer in 1991. Yet I knew that someone had gone to great lengths to stash this file in a highly secure, encrypted government database.
Call it the hacker nerd in me, but I just couldn't let this go. My gut was telling me that there had to be a reason why this odd file existed. After going line by line through every piece of the computer's code, I finally discovered one discrepancy. Stashed away in a remote directory, I found this.
(long pause)
That's exactly how it looked, just a green square with no title. The rest of the file was all text. It was a book. A quite long book, actually. Some of it was slightly garbled with nonsense characters because of the de-packer program I used to unstuff it from the original format, but I was able to read most of it.
Initially, I was just expecting to skim through it to see what I had discovered after so much hard work and effort. But right from the beginning, the words caught me and somehow sunk into my consciousness or something.
That first night, I stayed awake until three or four in the morning, unable to put it down. I found myself nodding over and over again in agreement, stunned yet filled with incredible optimism that I was, perhaps for the first time in my life, understood.
Everything I was reading seemed to make total sense, and I kept pausing and looking up, shocked that I hadn't realized these truths for myself. Once I read them, they seemed incredibly obvious, and yet I'd just somehow never connected the dots before myself.
But it was a long book, and so eventually I had to stop reading and get some sleep. The next morning, I was very sleepy, but I felt this strange positive energy fill my body. It wasn't the kind of energy like from caffeine, more like a deeply relaxing yet stimulating positive warmth flowing all through me.
After that, I went to town and ran a few errands. When I came home, the police were already there, executing a warrant. They took my laptop, and I didn't see it again for more than six years.
In the meantime, I had to go to court to defend myself against some completely fabricated charges. Since this story, again, isn't about me, I'll just skip to the end and say that, in the end, I finally got some justice.
When I got my old laptop back, I immediately went through it to see if the text file was still there. I had never forgotten the portion that I had read, and I was salivating at the thought that I could now finish it.
(long pause)
It wasn't there. Somebody, somewhere, took it. And that made me want to read it even more. I'd only gotten through maybe a third of it, and I had found it to be the most amazing and uplifting thing I had ever read. So what could possibly be in the rest of the book that would make people want to censor it?
(extended pause)
If this were a work of fiction, this is when I'd now regale you with how I managed to finally get the book back. But this is real life. I've looked everywhere I can think of, but I've never found another copy of it. Maybe the one I discovered all those years ago was the only one.
I didn't write the book. I don't pretend to be an expert on what's written in that book. I am just a humble messenger. I truly believe that the wisdom and power located just in the portion that I read is worth me traveling across the world and speaking to people about. I do.
Real truth, deep truth, hard truth - these are all rarer than gold. And even then, it usually comes in tiny drops just here and there. But this was something different. This was like drinking deep from a flowing fountain of deep, hard, authentic truth. The kind of Truth that deserves a capital T.
Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I am here to share that Truth with you.
(many simultaneous utterances from the audience)
Long before I got my laptop back from the government, I wanted to write down what I remembered about the book before I began to forget the details.
I am able to speak English good enough, I think, but I knew I was unable to write what I remembered in English well enough to capture the style and the beauty of what I had read.
After thinking about it a while, I came to the idea of making some videos that I could upload on a social media site. It took me a while, but once I got going, I ended up making around 50 total videos. None of them exactly went viral, but I felt a lot better knowing that I had shared what I read with the world.
Even though I had a grand total of fewer than 1,000 views for all of my videos, I got an email informing me that I had violated their policies. All of my videos were removed. Supposedly, I was able to click on a link and contest their decision, but the whole process was bullshit and so I quote unquote lost.
Honestly? When I first came up with the ideas of doing the videos, I wasn't sure if that was the right thing to do. Yeah, I understood why the book I had read was of such value. But me? I was just repeating, in bad English, a little bit of what I had read.
Once they moved to block me, then I immediately grew confident. I knew I was doing the right thing because why else would they be trying to stop me from sharing the message? If it was just some harmless, hippy-dippy fluff, why go to such extreme measures?
As a hacker for more than 20 years, I knew that there was no point in trying to communicate what I wanted to say over the internet. Anything that flows through computers is subject to monitoring, and they'd move to block me no matter what I tried.
That left me with just one option - to do things the old-fashioned way. Face to face. No social media. No text messages. No notifications, swipes, or clicks. No battery needed.
(scattered laughter)
That's why every single one of you in the audience tonight is much more than just a passive witness. Yes, I'm standing here on the stage, but your mere presence here in this forum is defying the system of those who want to censor and control your reality.
There are truths out there, hard truths, good truths, ones that cut to the bone but also remove the infection of doubt, anxiety, and confusion. Sometimes, the doctor has to use the scalpel and spill some blood.
That's what governments and those who want power over us don't understand. They think that, if they don't stage manage your reality, you'll choose one that is self-harming. That you're so incompetent that, upon hearing the Truth, you'll somehow fuck it up.
(audience crosstalk)
Literally, that's what they believe. Better a smooth lie. Better a sweet lie. Better a little something to make you drowsy and confused. Because the Truth won't let you sleep. The Truth won't let you sit there, passive, doing nothing, hopeless and helpless.
The Truth gets you out of bed and running through the streets proclaiming the good news if that's what it takes.
There's no sleeping on the job when the Truth electrifies you. There's no finding new ways to kill time. There's no more waffling between different paths, each one more confusing than the last.
Once the Truth wakes you up, there's no going back to sleep.
I wish it were my truth. But it's just a book that I read, a book I call the Big Green Bible. And tonight, I'm going to tell you about what I read in Chapter Three.
Slavery
Chapter Three was titled Slavery. It gave a brief overview of historical slavery, which, of course, was quite awful. But right when I expected the text to start getting political, the author asked a question.
Why has slavery disappeared?
Yes, of course, a few unfortunate souls are still being held in bondage around the world, but historical slavery is pretty much a thing of the past. People in chains, sold at auctions like property, all that thing is gone. Why?
And my reaction, immediately, was something like - well, we all just became better people around the world.
But then the author laughed in my face. Are you kidding me? People do horrific things to each other on a daily basis. Why then would they suddenly grow a conscious and realize that enslaving people is a bad thing to do?
(pause)
In school, I never paid much attention to history. But even I remember that every ancient society had slaves. In the Bible, the ancient Romans, the Greeks, everybody. Asians, Africans, Aztecs, and Pacific Islanders all had slavery. And not just a few people here and there but thousands and thousands. I think I read somewhere that ancient Athens from the quote unquote Golden Age was approximately 80% slaves.
Ancient Egypt and the pyramid. Where did the slaves all go? And really, why would humanity unite against this practice when it'd been a quote unquote normal thing to do for literally thousands of years?
Ladies and gentlemen, I'll admit to you that I was stumped. But once I read the next part of the text, I got that dazed feeling like I had been kicked in the head.
Slavery didn't get wiped out because people grew a conscious. Slavery got priced out of the labor market by fossil fuels.
(audience murmurs)
Just as industrial robots have replaced human workers, and just as self-driving cars are predicted to replace millions of human drivers, the same thing happened with slavery and machines powered by fossil fuels.
In your history books, there's a period called the Industrial Age. But what it really should be called is the De-Slavery Age. Everywhere you look, the moment the coal-powered, gas-powered, kerosene-powered machinery arrived, slavery began to fade away.
But wait, hold on a second! Even I knew that working conditions in the early Industrial Age were horrendous for the people. I have read my Charles Dickens. But that's when the author reminded me that while, yes, those conditions were bad, they were a step up from slavery.
In my mind, I was picturing a ladder as I read. At the bottom is chained up, no rights slavery. One step higher is working in a sweatshop factory. One step higher than that is clocking in for a 14-hour day. A step higher is working an eight-hour day. Next step, working a four-hour day.
And each step - so far - has been powered by fossil fuels.
(sound of throat clearing)
According to the author, the best way to understand what happened is to picture everything that fossil-fueled machines do today and then realize that those were formerly the tasks of slaves.
Turning a wheel, plowing a field, making cloth, weaving, knitting, preparing food, cooking food, pumping water, milking cows, harvesting crops, all these things are now done by fossil fuel-powered machines.
There is a machine to wash your clothes, a machine to heat your water, a machine to clean your floors, a machine to sew your clothes. In Roman days, rich people had a slave to do every single one of those tasks.
Slavery ended in England decades before it did in the United States. Why? Britain industrialized first. All those little Dickens kids in the mills and coal mines were one step up the slavery ladder than African Americans working the cotton fields.
And so, if you keep looking, you'll see that the author was right. Enslaved humans and enslaved animals once did all the work that was done by machines.
And now there is work going on to develop artificial intelligences, a new kind of slave. A digital slave.
Computers are being fed data in order to learn on their own, recognizing patterns, and developing autodidactic practices.
(long pause)
And I'll tell you what I thought when I read that. Frankly, it got me scared.
Even the most comfortable of those among us from wealthy, Western countries where life is pretty good, we still complain about being obligated to do distasteful tasks. We complain when we're forced to push buttons, to wait 60 seconds for something to load, to have the air temperature one degree outside of our comfort zone.
What's going to happen when AI assistants start taking care of all of that for us? We just speak a command, and our command is immediately executed. The ultimate slave.
A lot of people are talking now about some kind of revolution, the computers growing too smart and then deciding to take over. But I think that's unlikely.
What I'm more worried about is what will happen to humanity when it has ever more efficient and sophisticated slaves. Put your AI buddy in a robot shell and you've got an android, a partner, a butler, a maid, a chauffeur, a cook, a laundress. Between smart machines and android creatures, humans won't have to work at all.
Maybe work in 10 years will be lying on some couch and speaking to your AI assistant. And people will complain about that too, I'm sure of it!
(light laughter)
Oh Sharon, work is such a draaaaag. I had to tell my AI assistant what to do for a whole 10 minutes. Planning a wedding is SO hard!
(scattered laughter)
Sorry. I am not good at voices.
(extended throat clearing audible)
When I first read the text all those years ago, artificial intelligence seemed more like a science fiction thing than a reality. Sure, there were primitive programs that would turn speech into text. And I'd played around with optical character recognition myself.
I guess it's obvious that I'm even more impressed now than when I first read the book at how eerily accurate all the author's predictions were. It was like she could just see the future with a clear light.
But now that the future is here, or coming soon, so to speak, I wonder. Will humanity turn into lazy blobs? Will everything get delivered to our houses one day?
Maybe just a minority at first, but surely, some people will figure out a way to never leave their home. They can work, pay bills, earn money, and order everything. Drones or self-driving vehicles will deliver food, clothes, anything. You won't have to see a real human being for days, weeks, months, maybe years.
Become some kind of avatar out there in a digital world. Maybe you're several avatars. Maybe they're three-dimensional avatars. Maybe you're wearing some kind of high-tech goggles or maybe it's an implant, but you can blink and you're in this other world, a customizable world.
And while you're there, wherever there is, the machines take care of everything here in the boring old meat and bones world. Maybe we'll be like space astronauts, machines exercising our limbs just enough to prevent our bodies from atrophying.
And yes, I realize that's an extreme vision.
(scattered laughter)
And like I said, maybe just a few people would do it at first. Maybe you're a rebel, and you only spend 99% of your life indoors. Maybe once a week, you walk outside to a real park with real trees and real grass. And, of course, you blast it or broadcast it or snap it or fling it to the digital world. The world that feels more real to you because it's where you live.
Honestly, I don't know what the future will bring. But the chapter on slavery in the book really struck a chord with me. Maybe that's because I was a hacker, I'm not sure. It's a strange feeling to admit that I've spent most of my adult life sitting in a chair pressing buttons when my great-grandfather was toiling away all day in a field doing hard physical labor.
And if you keep going back in time, my great, great, great, great grandfather's great grandfather was probably a slave. Either owned a slave, which statistically isn't likely, or was a slave. Spent his entire life as property of another human being, forced to do a hard, unpleasant job that he did not want to do.
(short pause)
In conclusion, I want to thank all of you for coming. As always, if you recognize any of the text and know where I can find a copy of this book, please email me.
Thank you, and good night.