Good-day, humans.

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.

You may not be aware, but I've been on holidays.

We banged a bunch of episodes and through the miracle of posting things in advance,

you've been receiving your constant stream of fabulous, uncomfortable conversations, even while I was lasin around on my big

fat dairy air in Bali and Singapore, it was delightful. For those of you in the Northern

Hemisphere, I sympathize with the Arctic blizzards you've been enduring. I don't mean to rub it in,

but I do have a gorgeous tan if you're not watching this, if you're listening to it instead.

So I hit the ground running today and Honelli is there a lot of news.

There's a lot going on. It's hard to know exactly where to start with the news out of the United States,

with the shootings by ICE officers of protesters in Minneapolis, the Epstein files,

growing authoritarianism in the United States.

But I felt that today, when I'm back in the saddle, so to speak,

I should focus on something where maybe the rest of the media isn't covering it quite as much

or quite as thoughtfully.

And it's something in which I have an interest. And if you listen to this show, you too have an interest, which is

the freedom of the press and having a media that is courageous enough to have rambunctious

and playful and bullshit-free conversations. And so what sort of piqued my interest in recent days

out of Minneapolis was specifically

the arrest of Don Lemon. Don Lemon worked as a CNN anchor for almost a decade. He was a correspondent

for NBC. He was a regular on the Today Show, regular on NBC Nightly News. He was fired from CNN and went on to independent media now

has a big show on YouTube and does that usual trajectory that we know so well, not naming any names.

...