Today, I'm going to be talking about morality
from a very personal kind of lens. Like, I am going to talk a lot about personal
anecdotes, but also about more, you know, systemic political kind of stuff.
Um, yeah, morality and specifically instrumental harm, which is
specifically, you know, how much damage are you willing to do to other people for some
greater good.
And this is something I have a lot of thoughts about.
It's something I've been trying to figure out for a pretty long time.
And, I mean, that's why I thought it's rather important to be worth making this video.
Uh, I did have some fairly recent stuff that came up and maybe that is why I'm also
motivated to, you know, talk about this, but, like, this has been coming for some few
months now already. Like,
I've been thinking about this for...
well, thinking about this, you know, all my life, but,
uh, the specific set of ideas I might present today, I've been thinking about them for at
least, like, many months, at least more than a year, some of them.
So, like, this video is definitely coming, it's not just because of something that
happened recently. This is definitely something I want to be talking about anyway.
And I think there's a few important disclaimers that I have to give as
usual, because, you know, it's a public video, therefore I have to give a bunch of
disclaimers.
Um,
yes, so the first disclaimer is, yeah, I mean, there are some aspects of this discussion
that are fairly sensitive in the sense that it would not
be very safe for me to even talk about them upfront.
Uh,
in particular... sorry, yeah, in particular, I think there are aspects around, you know,
religion and how religion affects morality, which I'm not going to talk about.
I have a lot of unpopular thoughts, sorry, unpopular thoughts on religion, which I'm
not going to share here or anywhere else for that matter.
So,
I'm just going to keep that aside,
uh,
because I mean, like, a lot of religions do just straight up tell you, you know, "Look,
here's the moral code, you need to follow it blindly, don't think about it." That's it.
It's for, you know, atheists like me who have a lot more confusions about morality
on average.
Like, if I go and walk up to a person and I tell them, "Look, I have all these deep and
fundamental confusions about morality." If they're an atheist they are more likely to get
it,
basically. Like, they might disagree with me, but at least they get why this is a
sensible thing to
ask.
Whereas
with a religious person, it's more likely they just straight up don't get what I'm trying
to do, like, "Why is this a question in your head, Samuel?" You know, "What are you
planning?"
Like, at least that's, you know, my simulation of
them, my simulation of them, you know, simulating me again, like how I'm...
I'm viewing myself through their lens.
Um,
so,
yeah, but I mean, in practice, obviously even religious people of various religions are
faced with various moral dilemmas in their life and they make different choices, you
know.
Just because someone's religious doesn't mean they're
following the exact code which is written, you know, in their exact religious book.
Uh, that doesn't always happen.
So,
yeah, uh,
did you see there's already a contradiction there?
There's like, look, the book says there's a straightforward moral code, but in practice,
you know, religious people does, will feel... do, do still face moral dilemmas.
And I have a lot to say on that, but I'm just going to avoid that whole topic because
it's kind of sensitive and
I don't right now have the skills or techniques to,
you know, talk about that in a way that doesn't, you know, get me in danger
and therefore I'm just going to not talk about religion at all.
So that's my first disclaimer. Yeah.
Uh,
and the second disclaimer, and this is maybe more of a tactic, uh,
like,
I think you need to make this discussion a little bit impersonal in order to have it
safely.
So for example, I can't in this video, you know, be issuing death threats
on people, like saying, you know, "In X, Y, Z situation, I will murder this person," or,
"In X, Y, Z situation I will do this particular thing in my career."
Like,
uh,
I'm not saying you can never do that.
I'm just saying you need to think a lot more before you say things like that, like before
you threaten to cause harm to others
when there are actually specific people in the real world who might even end up watching
this or, you know, maybe directly or indirectly get the information from this video, you
know, maybe through an AI or whatever.
Uh,
so I'm going to avoid, you know, naming any specific people,
be it in my personal life, be it professionally.
I'm also not going to talk a lot about my work.
Yeah, I think that's the third disclaimer.
Uh, I'm not going to talk too much about my work directly, like what I'm working on right
now,
even though I think that is where this is actually important.
Like,
there's a difference between discussing morality as a bunch of theoretical, like a bunch
of, you know, thought experiments the way, you know, modern philosophers would do,
versus, you know,
here is my career, here is... or, you know, my relationships or whatever, here are the
specific moral dilemmas I'm actually facing in the real world right now,
not just, you know, some thought experiment
and how do I navigate this? And
I think this ac-... like, uh,Morality makes more sense when discussed in the context
of actual decisions people have in their lives but at the same time, it makes it more
difficult to discuss, like,
again, because
like I said, it becomes, you know, public statement that,
well, if I, you know, threaten a friend on this video, that friend in my life actually
realizes that they, you know, send me this issue near death.
Or if I talk about, you know, something work-related, like, let's say, you know, I
threaten Sam Altman in such and such way, you know, there's a possibility one day I get
popular and Sam Altman is actually watching this video, you know? So...
See, I'm going to avoid naming specific names.
I'm going to avoid talking too much about
my career-relevant decisions, even though I think those were important.
I'm going to keep it a little bit abstract, uh, but not too abstract.
I think going too abstract is bad. Like, it's
one of the fundamental failure modes you can have as a person when you think about what
your values in life are, is to be too abstract about it and not practical
enough.
Uh,
if you're following... If you're from, you know, the AI safety kind of crowd and you're
following me, uh, I think utilitarianism is one of those things.
And maybe I'll get to that separately.
Yes, so the way... One thing I...
Okay, so one way I have of navigating this, like, how we talk about or even think about
morality
is instead of say, you know, here is this other person, you know, I will hurt, you know,
I will lie to them, I will steal
their stuff, you know, I will threaten to kill them, I will actually kill them, like,
instead of talking about it in the context of another person, like, imagine that person
is a clone of you and then think what would you do.
Uh, so I'll give a very concrete example, a pretty serious example.
Uh,
if there was a button in a room and, you know, you press the button and you become like a
permanent world dictator, you just get complete control over the universe,
and you put me and, you know, my clone in the same room but both of us don't
know we are, we are like perfect clones.
Actually, maybe even if we know. Okay. Consider two situations.
One is we know that we're perfect clones, we just somehow magically know, and
another is
we think we're similar. We look at each other, "Okay, we, this guy looks similar," we
look probably similar but we're not actually sure.
So I think,
in practice, what usually is the truth is you're not actually sure. You...
It's very rare for you to know for 100% certain, you know, this other person has
the exact same, you know, values, behaviors, likes, dislikes as
me.
In practice, we are always at least a little bit unsure.
Maybe that's, you know, a 50% unsure, maybe that's a 1% unsure, but there's at least some
uncertainty.
So yeah, you put me in a room with a button that makes the person who presses that button
first, you know, a permanent world dictator.
Uh,
so there's two people, you know. Who presses it first?
They become
the most powerful person ever. Like, I'm pretty confident the conclusion to
that is just
the two of us literally fight to the death, you know?
One person ends up with his throat slit, the other person has, you know, a lot of serious
injuries but they pressed the button.
Like,
I would kill my perfect clone to get this done knowing that there's a 50% chance, you
know, I'm also going to be murdered. Like,
if that person is equally strong as me, they have thought through everything as well as I
have. You know, I'm expecting, you know, there's a 50% chance
I'm the one dying here but I will do it anyways. Like, fight my clone to the death.
And...
yeah, and I bring this up, I've thought a lot about this because I think this is an
actual thing that can happen in the actual real world, which is,
yeah, around super intelligent AI. If you're,
like, very close to building super intelligent AI and you know it's going to be aligned,
like,
whoever puts the rules for the AI controls the universe, uh, or at least,
they at least control all of human civilization.
Now, beyond that, you know, how much of the universe they're going to conquer, that I'm
not sure. But
at least they become the most powerful person in human history.
Uh...
yeah. If you're about to reach that place where, you know, there will be this kind of
power in literally one guy's machine,
uh,
it can start making a lot of sense for even the people in that very small group of people
to, you know,
break the law and take these types of very extreme actions against each other.
Like,
when you have that kind of
power to compete for and you know,
you know, once the AI is aligned to you, you have power to get away with anything.
And
actually, there's a lot of nuances here.
So, it depends, you know, how fast the takeoff goes, like how fast does the AI become
powerful enough that you can in fact get away with it.
But yeah, generally I do see AI as one of the situations where
they're just building a hugely concentrated amount of power in one room and
if a lot of the normal
rules of, you know,
okay, we will get you arrested and, you know, your reputation will be
damaged
and,
you know, you will lose your friends, your family, like, all of those things straight up
don't matter anymore in that type of situation.
Like, you can just
create new friends and family, you can create, you know, parallel civilizations.
Um...
You can edit yourself. You can edit out the parts of yourselves that you don't feel
morally
wounded.Yeah.
Okay. I think I
took a
(laughs) fairly extreme thought experiment.
This is one of those things I think can actually happen, although that's my own
misconception. I don't mean it likely, but I mean it's possible
that, you know, literally in the AI companies there are people literally, you know,
murdering each other.
Uh,
but anyways, look, the
point I'm bringing... So here I could bring up this example without talking about, you
know... without naming any specific person and saying, "I will go and kill this person."
I just said, "I will kill my own clone."
And
I view a lot of the world this way. Like,
uh, imagine you know Samuel,
but he had a billion dollars, how would he behave?
You know, imagine Samuel, but he grew up with, you know, no money like in...
like
in a small village, you know, to a farmer family and how would they behave? Behave?
Imagine Samuel grew up, you know, with a lot more interest in art, how would he
behave? You know, Imagine if Samuel was really good at persuading others, how would he
behave? Like,
a lot of specific decisions I've made in life
s- seem to just be downstream of arbitrary things, like, you know, I was born into a
certain family, in a certain country, with certain or I happen to
like certain things and therefore I got good at them and it became a compounding loop
that...
Now I will by default, for example, look at, okay, software is a way to influence reality
just because I happen to know a bit of software, even though I'm not really good at it,
but just the fact that I know it at all
means... Okay, I see, okay here is the lever I pull and, you know, the world moves as a
result.
Whereas
if Samuel was just someone who just did not enjoy writing code and
enjoyed, you know,
I don't know, public speaking instead, maybe Samuel would be going for the route of
trying to become a politician.
Like...
Yeah.
Again, it's just routes to power, right? Attention versus capital.
It's just certain people are predisposed to have skills that will make them acquire
attention and certain people have skills that will make them be disposed to acquire
capital.
And both of these give you fundamentally different ways of thinking about politics,
like...
I... I am biased towards attention by the way.
I think if you just want to be super effective, like acquiring attention is
more valuable. You know, become a politician, don't become a billionaire. I...
I just think this.
Uh, uh, sorry, I'm going all over the place.
I think I'll keep that politician/billionaire point separately.
Let's shove that aside for now. Let's talk about what I actually wanted to talk about...
Yeah. Which is...
Yeah, if I imagine Samuel, but with
just different lives compounded over, you know, 10, 20 years.
It's just that other version of Samuel just ends up in a very different life trajectory.
And
when I look at a lot of people around me, I honestly wonder, you know, is this guy just
Samuel with less money? Is this guy just Samuel but he
got good at trading? Is this just
Samuel, but he happened to be in, you know, a family that taught him XYZ values, not
ABC values?
Or
s- I mean, for example, I think people who grow up as orphans are more morally kind of
free in life.
Like, I have actual examples of this. Uh...
No, I have lots of these examples. I don't have them off the top of my head right now.
(sighs)
And, uh, most recently I g- I can just think of Julian Assange because he's someone I've
been reading a lot about for, you know, related reasons,
which is... Yeah. His parents did not have a great marriage, if I
remember, and...
So... See, for example, if your parents don't have a great marriage, that means, you
know, most probably your dad is telling you to follow one set of values and your mom is
telling you to follow an entirely different set of values,
and that will disorient you in the sense you'll realize, okay, neither of these sides is
obviously correct.
Or maybe some people do. Maybe some people just side with one parent, but that's the type
of thing that can just destabilize your sense of... Okay, hmm, uh...
You know, I can't trust either set of values. Like, I had a similar thing, by the way.
Like,
not... Not divorce, but the basic idea of like,
lots of events, you know, in my childhood that just destabilized my sense of, "Okay,
I can't trust anyone around me to, you know, tell me what my values should be."
Like...
I had a bunch of that going on. So, sorry, I'm getting distracted. The point was...
Yeah, I mean,
yeah, family background obviously affects your values too.
So when I look at another person, often wonder was this just, you know, Samuel with a
different family situation, for example? Maybe that's why they ended up the same. Like...
Yeah. And I honestly wonder how much of politics is just explainable using
this. Like...
No, it's just there are so many examples, I don't know where to start.
Okay, maybe I... Maybe I'll then just share some of my own political opinions.
So,
I don't know. I have a fairly "might makes right" view of history, basically.
And I have written about this more on my blog.
If you want more nuanced stuff, you can go and read there.
But yeah, basically, I think generally over the long run,
if-Lots of people have the power to get away with something, some of them will get away
with it,
so basically put it that way.
Like if you have power you can kind of
get away with anything but there are nuances to it, it's not as simple as you can get
away with anything. It's...
Yeah, there are a bunch of nuances here and I have covered this better on my website.
I'm wondering if I should actually talk about it here. I think, but it seems relevant.
Uh, yeah, I think balance of powers
an important way in which how...
Uh, morality of
various cultures gets decided like,
so know you, you might actually end up copying the morality of, you know, your parents,
your friends. You know, the people you see around you in your society,
but your society has been shaped from somewhere.
Your society did not just drop out of the sky 100 years ago.
And, you know, people 100 years back, even in your own village or town might have had
different values from your
city or town or wherever today.
Like, on long horizons, long-time horizons, you know, values get shaped from
somewhere.
Oh, yeah, and the common mistake people make here is thinking...
Basically conspiracy theory, you know, there is this, you know, secret evil guy at the
back who just controls everything and this guy has, you know,
shaped the morality of the whole world.
You know, this could be,
like more recently, I guess, the WEF is popular, like I guess Klaus Schwab and
stuff. Uh,
I have my own set of kind of conspiracy theories which I believe are some truth in, on
you know, Allen Dulles and Henry Kissinger and, you know, the US intelligence community
and how they've shaped the values of the world.
Uh, what other conspiracy theories are there?
Uh, yeah, I think they directly, indirectly insert either distrust of companies or
distrust of, you know, government. Like your political orientation at this point is, like
a huge part of your political orientation is just do you trust companies, yes or no?
Do you trust governments, yes or no? So if you are like, "Yes and yes," that's one
orientation. If you're "Yes and no," that's one orientation.
If you're "No and yes," that's another orientation.
If you're "No and no," that's another orientation. Uh... Why am I bringing all this up?
Yeah, I was talking about basically, uh, you can't assume that, okay, the values of the
entire world
were
designed
secretly by one guy at the back,
but you can find predictable trends that
exist
in how values of a society have changed over time
and also help you create the future proof.
So yeah, I think I do want to have somewhat of a timeless view on,
of morality myself. Like, I don't want to be trapped by, you know,
what do people of the upper-middle class in India with X, Y, Z child would think in
2025. Like,
I want to know what people think about it in 1900.
I want to know what I would have thought about morality if I grew up in the US.
I want to know what I would have thought about morality...
Like, again, I'm sorry, I'm just repeating my point but, yeah, I don't want to be trapped
by the morality of the people around me basically.
And
I have a lot of
theoretical and very personal reasons for that.
Yeah, I think my, what I wanted to say today was lacking structure but now I kind of see
the structure. So the structure is look,
here is a bunch of things that happened in the past.
This is why they broke me as a person and made me not
want to follow
common morality as people around me anymore.
And then there is like, you know, here is all the exploration I'm doing about, you know,
my values
in the future and a lot of thoughts around that.
So there's the past thing, there's the, you know, present is just
not fitting in with values of people around me, and then there is, you know, future
thing.
So...
Yeah, so I think I've directly started jumping to the future thing because that's where
my head is at, that's what I'm trying to figure out, you know, how this balance of power
works.
I think some of what I'm going to say will make more sense to people if they go and see
two resources. One is, uh,
Meditations of Moloch by Scott Alexander.
Uh, two is Rules for Rulers
by C.G.P. Grey.
If you watch these people,
you'll understand a lot better how power works
and how morality works. I think you, you can't separate those
two from each other. Like you can't have a discussion of power without
morality. You kind of can, but not really.
And vice versa, you can't have a discussion of morality without power, at least in my
world view it's just morality and balance of power are just so fundamentally kind of
interlinked with each other.
Uh...
I'm not sure, should I be talking about the past or should I be talking just right now...
Maybe I'll just complete what I was talking about, you know, balance of power.
So I'll give just a bunch of examples on why I think balance of power is important.So,
the first and maybe the most important of all of these is, even today in 2025 society, I
just see a huge
difference between how different classes think about morality.
So,
we can talk basically, you know, lower class, middle class, upper class.
So,
I think lower class is kind of stuck in the sense that people of the lower
class don't have the option to escape their friends and family even if they want to.
And therefore, the only morality becomes one of accepting that, you know,
you know, your fri- friends and family are here, they are always going to be here, you
are going to be in this house from when you're born 'til when you die.
And
because everyone is stuck in the same place, they also kind of have to get along with
each other,
and they might get good at it. You can build very strong reputations in a world where,
you know, you can't just escape. Like, you can't just disappear and go and, you know,
scam someone else. You end up building reputations.
You can have a lot of trust,
as a result, lots of people can trust each other a lot.
So, there is, one is that kind of morality, which is I think most prevalent in lower
class. And
there's also country-wise variations, you know, a middle class, an Indian person in India
and a middle class person in the US are going to think differently about morality, but I
think there's some commonality even across countries.
Just, you know, how much money you have.
And this is the first and biggest way in which I would...
well, I don't know biggest, but this is a major way in which I would say just how much
power you have changes your, your morality.
Then we can come to, you know, middle or upper-middle class kind of values which are more
kind of individualist basically,
uh,
first of all you are more likely to only relate to, you know, like a nuclear family, your
immediate parents, your immediate set of friends, and less,
you know, maybe your extended family, maybe, you know, broader community of thousands of
people, you know.
Maybe your family shifts for work. Maybe you shift for work.
Maybe
your
other people in your community, you know, they shift for various reasons.
Like, everyone has more ability to exit situations that don't suit them,
and everyone else has more advantage to do it.
Like, if you're in a middle- middle class, basically now you have
the ability to make money by selling your knowledge.
Like,
you're not doomed to, you know, die a farmer just because you were born a farmer.
And now you have options in life, and
sometimes you might pick those options over, you know, living in the place where, you
know, the rest of
your,
you know, extended family is for example.
So,
I think middle class makes you more individualist, uh, and the more you work, you know, I
have a lot of high resolution view of this because I am sitting in this kind of upper
middle class which is
like the peak end of
individualist but still middle class always of, you know, valuing knowledge over, you
know, actual power, actual attention, or capital.
So, I have a fairly high resolution view of this because I have seen a lot of these
examples in my life. Like,
you know, class blindness is a thing.
You don't know much about the classes you're not a part of.
So, there's that and then there's, you know, the upper class which I think is just more
consequentialist, more utilitarian.
Uh,
like if you are running, you know, an entire branch of government, it's obvious to you
that,
you know, you are going to fuck up sometimes.
You are,
the bureaucracy under y- you is going to fuck up sometimes.
They are going to, you know, damage people's lives which obviously you- you can't just go
publicly say whatever the hell you want because that will have actually actual
implications and you know failures of hundreds of people with...
It'll have implications on, you know, which other people in government can coordinate
with you, which other, you know, geopolitically, you know, which people of the other
countries can coordinate with you, you know, all the businessmen who are funding you, you
know, it'll have implications in that.
So,
you know the idea of "I'll just go on YouTube and say what the hell I want" is
not something you're going to do if you're, you know, you're a politician and you're
ambitious. Uh,
I haven't... I have an entire article on this, you know, like
my thoughts on elite class values.
And a bunch of it just seems explainable by their situation, like
obviously you're going to be okay with some amount of damaging some people if,
you know,
in the end it kind of works out.
So,
uh,
yeah, I think there's also a thing where
it is seen as more morally okay if a powerful person causes harm versus if, you know, a
middle class person causes harm.
Uh,
I mean you can, you can Google this and a lot of examples, you know, let's say it could
be trading, you know,
middle class person does insider trading, ends up, you know, 20 years in prison, you
know,
billionaire does insider trading and gets to keep the money.
Or
I don't know, middle class person writes an encryption tool, he ends up in
prison. Uh, like what was his, uh, guy's name?
Uh,
so Tornado Cash is this, uh, Ethereum protocol that lets you
basically anonymous, like anonymously move Ethereum around and that
guy was put in prison just for writing this protocol.
Whereas, you know, Vitalik is not in prison, for example.
Uh,
like if Vitalik wrote this protocol himself, Vitalik would definitely not be in prison,
so you
know.I
think these are not the best examples. There are better examples than this.
Oh. I have a lot of fairly back stuff on, you know, war versus terrorism, where, you
know, if, if you're powerful, it's called war.
If you're not powerful, it's called terrorism.
(laughs) And, you know,
like the consent of the people means nothing in either case.
It's not like okay, if you're declaring war, you somehow you have the consent of your
people. Like, usually they just... You manufacture that
and...
Oh, why do I think people who start wars with manufactured consent, they don't obtain it?
Uh,
you'll have to read again a bunch of historical examples for this. Uh...
Yeah, I think some of these things, like, if you've not actually read a bunch of history
or not read, you know, books in political science, it's just not going to make sense to
you. Like,
like, like say for example, the extent to which politicians are obsessed with, you know,
not always but often,
with controlling the media. Like, they're obsessed with having specific relationships
with specific people at specific media organizations.
Like,
this happens in every country but, you know, recently I was
reading... Who was the thing in the US? Like, I think John F Kennedy.
And by the way, sorry, I don't know a lot about US politics.
I just read but I have a very half-assed kind of understanding of a lot of this.
So please forgive me if I'm wrong about some of these things, but...
Yeah, I think John F Kennedy said specifically about one particular, you know,
uh, TV news... Not TV, sorry for saying
this. One specific reporter. Maybe it was newspaper.
Yeah, I think newspaper that, you know, "If I lose, you know,
the support of this particular newspaper reporter, I have lost, you know, this fraction
of the US population as, you know, my support."
And
so if I grew up in, you know, a politician or billionaire family, I had, you know, these
types of people in my friend circle, like all this would just be
pretty fucking obvious to me. Whereas if I'd grown up, you know, as an upper middle
class, I might
go my entire life without ever realizing this, that,
you know, if you're a politician, you're probably obsessed with more specific people in
media organizations then.
And yeah, this I think comes back to the class blindness thing about, you know, you don't
know how people in other classes think.
Yeah. So that was the first moral difference, you know, like
community values versus individualist.
Uh, kind of deontological values versus, you know, individualist, uh,
consequentialist values.
That's the first difference. Then there are differences, you know, around geography
where, you know...
So Genghis Khan grew up in Mongolia because Mongolia is a landlocked kind of place.
I don't know. I'm not sure if all of these are 100% true. It's...
Like, if you actually debate the details of all, every single example, I don't know if
you know, maybe some of my examples will end up wrong but
I don't think all of them will end up wrong.
If all of them end up wrong, maybe you should be telling me but if m- examples are mostly
correct and one or two are kind of off, you know, I'm okay with that.
You can still tell me but yeah, that won't invalidate my actual point.
You know, Genghis Khan
grew up in Mongolia which is, you know, landlocked, which means constant threat of
invasion from all sides. You know, from...
Well, today it's Russia and China but at that time...
Yeah, at that time the kingdoms were different.
Like, China as a kingdom definitely still existed.
I think Russia
was kind of different. I don't actually know much about back then what did Russia look
like. Like, what was the context of Russia at that point?
But yeah, the broader idea is we're just in a landlocked area, therefore the only person
who gets good at
war is the one who survives
and
lot... That forces you to innovate. Like, I think war forces you to do a lot of
innovation. Like,
World War II led to huge amount of innovation.
Like,
l- literally, you know, hundreds of billions.
Like,
that time's equivalent of... Like today hundreds of billions of dollars, whatever the
equivalent of that was in that time, was just poured into, you know, technology
in World War II like this. You can just google "World War II technologies".
There's an entire list of technologies that got invented in World War II, because...
Yeah, because war is the mother of a bunch of invention basically.
So Genghis Khan did that too, you know, with horseback archers and...
Yeah, had
basically
rigid rule of, you know, either you submit to us and you'll be spared or, you know, we
literally slaughter all of you. We rape all your women and we bury all of you
and...
That was, you know, his kind of morality whereas if you look at maybe a sea locked nation
like say the UK. So you know how Britain colonized, you know, half the planet?
But the way they did it was kind of different.
It was not,
you know,
constantly going and threatening each land border and saying, you know, "Submit or we
will join yourself." It was more, uh...
First of all they used technological strength obviously, you know.
Because
Britain was sea locked and I, I am aware these are from different time periods.
You know, Mongolia- Mongolian empire and British empire are from different empi- are from
different time periods, I am aware but I am just comparing, you know, landlocked versus
sea locked. Landlocked colonizers versus sea locked colonizers.
So Britain first of all
had,
you know, ship building capacity that was among the most advanced in the world.
Again, partly because they were sea locked.
They had to innovate on
how do we get better at ship building because that affects, you know, trade, you know,
how much resources we create. It affects our, you know, military capacity.
Therefore,
we have to get good at this.
And,
yeah, Britain followed more of a policy of divide and rule.
Like, they were savvy at politics basically.
(laughs) Like if you read Indian his- like, history of India you- you get to read a lot
of divide and rule politics that Britain has played, you know, between, you know, Hindus
versus Muslims, you know, India versus Pakistan,
between even various empires within India.
So yeah,
British was also savvy at politics, you know, historically.
They were also good
at accounting and trade.
So you know those double ledger accounting.
Not double. What do you call it? Sorry.
Double entry book keeping
was invented...
Well, I'm not sure why, when it was invented but it was very popular in Britain at that
time
when, for example, a lot of
British colonies did not have that concept.
Like, trades existed, loans existed, debts existed but the,
the more, you know, financialization that happened of, you know, there will be account-