Back to episode — Episode 913 Scott Adams - Was LIVE
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not the real problem for China. You know it's bad to have a bad reputation but isn't this going to cause all of the major countries that were victims of this to decouple? You know the United States I'm sure is going to decouple. I don't know how quickly, you know who's gonna pay for it, what it looks like, but it's the beginning of the end. There's not any question that the United States is going…
← Previous segment →rgive each other for all of our honest mistakes during the fog of war. Because let's admit there's always somebody's gonna be right but only because there's always somebody on every side of every issue. So somebody's gonna be right by luck but nobody knows what's the right thing to do. Nobody really had quite the right information in the early days. Nobody's smart enough to know what's the exact right thing to do and the right time to do it.
So whether we got things right or whether some people got some things wrong, they're both luck. The things we did right, a little bit of luck. The things we did wrong, bad luck. Because you know you just can't be smart when you don't have data and you don't have a way to get it. But that's what I'm talking about: honest mistakes. If you make honest mistakes I think we should just forgive each other. But we should not forgive dishonest mistakes. And I don't have any evidence that anybody involved in this country has made a dishonest mistake. I know you're gonna think so-and-so lied blah blah blah and I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think some people had bad information and took bad information forward but I don't know that anybody had bad intentions in this country.
However China made a different kind of mistake as far as we can tell. Now apparently the president is gonna withhold funding from the World Health Organization until he gets an answer and maybe that'll tell us whether China did something let's say intentional versus unintentional. But it's certainly looking every bit as if China made a dishonest mistake. In other words they just lied to us and knew it. So under those conditions I don't think we have to yell at them and call them names. We don't have to disrespect them. But it wouldn't make any sense to have a future with them in which we're continuing to trade because they don't have a system that's compatible with our system.
So whatever it is about their system, I don't even need to judge it. I'm not going to say it's a good system. I'm not going to say it's bad. I'm not going to say that the Chinese government is good or bad. I don't, you know, I mean I have an opinion but it doesn't matter for what I'm gonna say next. And certainly I don't think the Chinese people are anything except awesome people. Everybody I know from China is pretty amazing. So you know but still we can say no hard feelings but our systems don'
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t work together. Whatever it is that we're doing, you know this democracy capitalism, you know as much transparency as you can, it just doesn't fit with the "we'll get away with anything we can and we're gonna hide as much as we can." Those two systems don't work. Now if they were both the same system I don't know, would that work? Who knows. Maybe you would both be okay with it because you're bo…
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