Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive August 22, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
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opes. I have become somewhat known for saying that slippery slopes don't exist. They are imaginary. And the reason I say that is that whenever you have a slippery slope and things are going in one direction, you always have a counterforce that pops up to respond. So if it looks like it's going to be a slippery slope forever, you're always missing the most important thing, and that is if everybody…

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handle you if you don't follow the basic rules of society. You can't even sell tickets on our site. And so they reversed. They reversed.

Now they tried to sort of get around it by having a white person voluntary contribution. Okay, if it's voluntary, voluntary, I'm not going to worry about that. But here are two good examples of where the slippery slope always leads to a response and you could depend on that.

All right, it's enough about that. So women's soccer. What a good world it is. What a good country it is. What we're talking about: pay equality for women's soccer after the American women just repeated winning the World Cup. I mean seriously, how about the fact that the most famous and celebrated member of the women's team is a lesbian? You couldn't have a healthier country, right? Literally this is the best bad story you could ever have.

So it's a story because there's some bad news in it, right? The bad news is that you know Megan Rapinoe maybe doesn't want to visit the White House and doesn't like Trump. And then their salaries for the women's players are far lower than for the men's. So if that's your worst story, that a lesbian incredible athlete just led American women's soccer to the highest level of success and that's our bad news, you know I get that the other issues are fun but if that's your bad news, man, are we doing well.

Of course the issue with women's soccer pay is that women would like to get as much as men get. But I don't know how they're counting this stuff. Most of you who are economists and objective would say to yourself, hey, shouldn't the women only make some similar percentage of the overall money that's produced by their sport? And if men are producing more money for their sport and they're getting the same percentage, let's say, if that big basket isn't it the percentage that matters? You know if they both had, let's say if the players had, I don't know, 20 percent of the money that was coming into their sport, wouldn't that be fair? And if the women get more viewers then they could ask for more money.

Now some people would say that's fair. But I don't think you should look at this as necessarily an attempt at fairness. Sure there are some people who are putting it in those terms. But I think you have to see this as a negotiation. I think you have to see it as a negotiation. Meaning that women can probably get a better deal by claiming that there is some unfairness. It's a real good negotiating strategy.

So if you are the women wh

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o are trying to get higher salaries you should act as though it doesn't matter how much your sport is making because that works against your argument. So I'm also loving the fact that women are negotiating so effectively. That's good news. Women are taking every lever they can pull, every button they can push. If women are negotiating aggressively for greater pay and let's say they're using a litt…

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