Today's episode of topics is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio.

For a free trial and 10% off, go to Squarespace.com and use offer code show Walter. It's topics, the podcast where two comedians discuss serious topics in a serious way.

Although if something funny happens, that's fine too.

I'm Michael Ian Black, joined as always by Michael Schoelalter.

It's great to be here.

Great to be here with you.

And we're going to do something unusual today, something we've never done before.

And I'm looking forward to it.

Before we get to it, however, let me just quickly go over the rules.

There was only one rule.

There are no rules. I've said it before. I'll say it again. You may think I'm being flip about that, but I'm not. What's most important in this podcast is that we let the discussion range as far and wide as it wants to go. And if something funny happens, great. If there's a belly laugh, terrific. But we're certainly not going for that. We have a guideline. The guideline is we try to discuss 80% of any

given topic, which leads to the recommendation, which is that for whatever percentage we did not discuss,

we encourage you the listener to meet with your study groups and complete the discussion.

Yeah.

And we actually,

I thought you made a really interesting point on listener mail, the listener mail episode that we recorded a few

days ago, um, that if in your study group, you're able to get to 100% and you still have

time left, keep going. Think of a new topic. Let the topic, uh, generate a new topic and continue talking because this is not a

numbers game.

This isn't a contest.

We're not in the business of thinking and talking.

And with that, I want to jump into today's topic.

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