Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 22, 2026
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Back to episode — Episode 741 Scott Adams - Hong Kong, Kamala Harris, Google Bias, and other Disasters

Context —

All right. Dr. Robert Epstein, you might remember him. He did some testifying in Congress about Google's potential bias. So now he's operating a study in which he has a whole bunch of people that are identified only within the study but not publicly, who are simply using Google and using regular search terms and stuff. And they're trying to see if they can get different results over time as the el…

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There's a report that the Kamala Harris campaign is totally falling apart. And I guess Mike Bloomberg just hired one of her top campaign advisors. As I suspected, you know how I was telling you that Kamala Harris seemed like a talented politician but I couldn't understand why her campaign was the worst I've ever seen. The worst. Just the worst. There's no campaign that's ever been as bad as Kamala Harris's. And I had speculated that the campaign staff was bad and I learned at some point I learned that her sister was, I guess, the chairman of the campaign or something. But today I learned it's even worse than that. So indeed Kamala Harris's sister is a leader of the campaign but there's another leader. So the other leader is apparently associated with the political advising company that brought Kamala Harris to the Senate and got her to this point. So she's got two advisors that are not on the same page and she can't really get rid of either one of them because one's a sister and one is this political group that got her where she is now. And I guess she's running out of money and people aren't talking and coordinating and their message is bad and their slogans have changed. Basically it's just a complete mess.

Now it kind of highlights the problem with a senator running for president. Senators don't do a lot of hiring and firing. Yeah they do some but it's not like running a business. Trump is famous for firing like crazy. Fire, fire, fire. And one of the smartest things I ever heard, this is something that Naval says, that the real talent in hiring and firing is the firing part. Because when you hire people you know they usually look good on paper, maybe they can get through the interviews, but you don't really know how they're gonna do in your company. You can sort of find out how they did in their past jobs but you don't really know how they're gonna do in your company. So the real skill, given that hiring is a lot of guessing, the real skill is firing. So if you can do it quickly and kindly in a way that doesn't make you enemies for life then you're a good manager. So you look for the firing skill as the real skill. It's sort of, you know, look for the blank space situation.

Does Trump have good hiring skills? Well a lot of people would say no but that's mostly guessing, right? Does Trump have good firing skills? Well his firing skills were a lot better than his hiring skills and the firing skills are more important. So Kamala Harris has apparently no firing skills because she's got two people in her campaign that either one of them needs to be fired or both, probably both. But certainly her sister, no doubt about it, her sister needs to be fired. I mean that's what it looks like from a distance.

So there's some talk that Harris won't even make it long enough to get into any kind of a brokered convention because she's running out of money and she's got no message, no nothing. I feel as if I could fix her whole campaign in like an hour. You know if she spent an hour with me I feel like I could fix all of that. All she needs is a better message and to ignore her advisors and just take on a better message because she's got everything else. She's got the Democratic Party likes her. She's got the right Democratic thing. She's the right age. People are saying don't do it, don't do it. Well I don't think you have to worry about her contacting me for advice. I would say the odds of that was very low. Very low.

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Somebody's saying why she'll smoke all your weed. Somebody said you don't like to lose do you? No I don't like to lose. Yeah you know when I predicted that she would be the nominee I don't think anybody could have predicted it would be the worst campaign staff in the history of all campaign staffs. I mean I didn't see that coming. So you're right it is tempting for me to want to fix her just well…

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