07/30/2021 - There Is No Mean Reversion (Except for Bennifer)

DAN RICHARDS: Hi, there. I'm Dan Richards. I'm the producer of "Mark and Carrie". If you like this show, check out the Watson Institute's other podcast, "Trending Globally". Each week on that show, we talk with leading experts about some of the biggest issues in politics and public policy today.

You can listen by subscribing at "Trending Globally" wherever you listen to podcasts. Again, that's "Trending Globally". All right, on with the show. Thanks.

CARRIE: Well, hello there, Mark. How are you?

MARK: I'm still stuck in my basement, as you can see.

CARRIE: I feel like we've never moved.

MARK: I've been avoiding the floods. It's been pissing down here for three weeks, which I suppose is better than everything being on fire. But we'll get to that in a minute.

CARRIE: Hard to know. Are you building your arc?

MARK: No. No, I'm not. I'm building just a bonfire just to be done with it. So what have you been up to?

CARRIE: Yeah, we're in the dog days here in summer where it's 1,000 degrees and everything just feels like it's sticky all the time, the humidity and everything. I'm a big-- I know we're going to talk about this-- but I love the Olympics. I've been watching a lot of Olympics and I imagine myself in a nice cool Pacific Ocean.

MARK: Which is warming all the time, but we'll get to that. So where do you want to start? Let's start with the virus. What's been going on with the virus?

CARRIE: Well, I mean, of course, it's the delta variant everywhere. And so what's interesting to me-- so I'll start with the politics of this, let me be organized about this-- is that where the delta-- where you see big spikes for the delta, of course, is in-- not of course, but is in red states.

MARK: It's in the Mississippi Delta. There's a signal in that.

CARRIE: Yes. When you look at the political maps, it's the Trump states versus the Biden states, the red states versus the blue states. So 35% vaccination rates in Arkansas, even lower in Mississippi and Alabama.

So you see the map of the US. And the real hot spots are in those areas. And the stories that you hear on the news and elsewhere, they're just heartbreaking of people who don't believe the virus can save them, or help them, or they want to take it and it's too late, and just how this is ravaging those who have not taken it.

MARK: Yeah, I mean, it's not as simple as red, as blue. A lot of it has to do with the historic mistrust of government institutions by minorities, particularly African-Americans, et cetera.

But at the same time, we can make too much of this. We've had a media which is one part of which has basically said, this is all fake. This is all part of the giant con that you're living under.

And interestingly, I heard the story that last week, either Biden himself or someone very close to Biden had a one to one with Rupert Murdoch. And basically, had a phone call-- Did you hear about this?

CARRIE: No, I didn't.

MARK: They had a one to one where basically it said, look, it's your people who are dying. So what do you want to do about it? And oddly enough, that very evening, all of the anchors on that news network suddenly changed their tune.

If that doesn't tell you that this is a propaganda outlet, I don't know what it is. Because, basically, that guy has control of what counts as news. But very interesting that they all changed their tune, reportedly, after this phone call.

CARRIE: Well, I did hear about Tucker Carlson-- this might have been before this-- about how he's literally killing people for his ratings. And I think it was Tucker and one of the other anchors-- this might be the pre-phone call-- are vaccinated. You know they are or they've given enough indication that they are, but won't admit it on the air.

MARK: But they refuse to say if they are or not, absolutely.

CARRIE: But I did wonder what that change in tone was, because I did sort of see the headline that Fox is now starting to say a few more positive things.

MARK: So apparently, it was a phone call behind it. So I'll jump to the UK for a minute. So a great example of Boris snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and then claiming victory again, probably prematurely, have you heard of the pingdemic?

CARRIE: I know this.

MARK: So the pingdemic is brilliant. So basically, they've made this line in the sand. We're going to have Freedom Day, which is going to be July the 19th. So once you've said Freedom Day, you can't back off of Freedom Day. It doesn't matter.

Literally, the world could be on fire and you'd be like, well, it's Freedom Day, so what can you do? So they decided one of the ways that we would deal with this is by having a proper contact tracing app.

Now you could have went out to Singapore or Vietnam where these people have already got it before, but then there's data privacy and security and all that stuff. You need to build your own. So they finally built their own and it works.

But it works too well. So if you're in a high density area like London, and somebody in an apartment above you has a COVID test and it's positive, and you've got your app on, and your app is a GPS locator, you end up pinging the whole building.

So what was happening was in highly populated parts of Britain, which is almost everywhere, hundreds of people were being pinged as you need to isolate. So basically, large parts of the labor market were collapsing.

And what happened was young people basically just started deleting the app, because it was just too crazy. But then the government tried to enroll themselves into a pilot scheme where they wouldn't have to quarantine.

Because, basically, the app worked so well that I think it was the health secretary got COVID and consequently the entire government was told to go into quarantine. So I mean, it was a complete farce.

So anyway, they've been working through this. Now interestingly, the British numbers have been going down. This is too early to account for what's happened after Freedom Day. So we'll see if it goes up after that.

But is this classic sort of shambles. Omnishambles is a good way to think about what they're doing. They have opened up the airline routes again to Americans, even if Americans haven't opened up to the Brits. So suppose the Brits are playing nice without one trying to save British Airways.

But yeah, it's a usual mess. In terms of vaccines, interesting, the French are being typically French and moving towards mandates. You will do this or you don't have a job anymore.

And the Germans are bending themselves seven ways to Sunday to basically say, well, mandates maybe, but at the same time, it's part of the liberty. But your choices are not the only important thing. So it's becoming a bit of a political shit storm there as well. So we'll continue to see how it plays out.

CARRIE: Well, and I was-- sorry, the three different thoughts I'm trying to keep them all in my head at once. The business part of the airlines opening up, I do-- or the US not taking those from, I think, from the UK and even continental Europe still is political.

So if the delta continues to spread and Republicans that then point to the Biden administration say, oh, but you let in all these people that we're coming with the delta, even though it's here.

MARK: No, absolutely. You can see how it gets played out.

CARRIE: And then what's interesting about the app is that technology can save us all. And if we just had a dashboard, or an app, or whatever, we would know all this stuff and everyone would be saved. And yet, you see in that example. Then I always think-- I mean, I blame Mark Zuckerberg for the misinformation.

MARK: For everything.

CARRIE: Yes. Well, for everything. But all the disinformation and misinformation that has been allowed to flourish on Facebook and that has just kept this whole thing with steam, if you will, around the vaccination.

And just how egregious that behavior has been. So I always like to take a hit or like to see technology and that it's going to save us. There's still a human side to this too.

So Biden today, actually, just-- and this happened with the veteran fairs-- is going to require civilian federal employees to have the vaccination. And this seems like a major step forward.

Although, as you have said and many others have said, you are required to have vaccinations to do a number of different things as employees, or as going to school, what have you. So that seems to be sort of a test balloon for really making mandatory vaccines a thing.

MARK: I was thinking one of the main objections to not doing it is, well, we don't really have the data. We don't have the test results. We don't really know how safe it is. And I was thinking, when they brought in the polio vaccine and they managed to vaccinate all of New York in six weeks, did they have the data then?

When they did the measles vaccine, did we have 20 years of data before we put it out? No. You are the data. You need to take the risk. And so far, it seems to be very, very high pay off, very low risk at a population level.

CARRIE: And then you just think, well, if there were data, would you even be persuaded by that data, because the science itself isn't there. I know, then it just becomes a big cycle.

MARK: It's a loop, absolutely.

CARRIE: OK, Blyth, what is going on with the economy? It's going too fast, too hot, like inflation? What is happening?

MARK: Anything you want. You can stick your finger in anywhere in the pudding and tell any story you want. So let's start with the following. Quarterly report from alphabet, which is Google, Apple, and Microsoft. They made $57 billion in profits.

CARRIE: For over the last week? I mean, that's insane.

MARK: No, over the past-- I think it was three months. Yeah, three months. It's totally insane. So the funds continue to dominate the stock market. The stock market has a tiny wobble, everybody poops themselves.

And no, actually, it's fine. It mean reverts. We're back there. It's all good. Let's see, inflation, there was the spike in inflation. A lot of it is a base effect, as we explained before. And it's not really the nineteen-seventies again and it's just not happening, et cetera.

And you see this, because bond yields-- which are usually sort of a marker of future inflation-- have gone down. So again, you've got that one. At the same time, you can pick any set of prices you want, particularly real estate, and say, but, clearly, it's such an important part of people's consumption basket, the actual inflation rate is higher.

Right. But then you can strip out other things and it lower. So the bottom line is, nobody knows. I think part of this is-- I was thinking about this the other day. Since about Two Thousand Eight, at least, since Two Thousand Eight, what we've done is we keep hearing this phrase or some version of this phrase, getting back to normal.

CARRIE: Oh, yeah.

MARK: So Two Thousand Eight, basically, the extraordinary interventions by central banks chucking money all over the place, et cetera, saving the financial system, that'll end and then somehow we'll get back to normal.

And that was meant to be, for example, the Fed ballooned its balance sheet to $3 trillion and is going to sell it back. Well, it's sold back some stuff, but it really can't shrink a balance sheet that size. So they're not going back to normal.

The Fed's been doing this thing called the reverse repo. Let me explain what that is. So basically, every night, they credit the accounts of big banks with tons of treasuries. And then they buy them back the next day for a few cents less.

And they're using this to help put a floor under interest rates. They went from doing 0 to I think it was something like $900 billion a day in these swap arrangements. And that's not normal. That's totally not normal.

And there's all these things we keep seeing, like the pandemic. So after this, we'll get back to normal. It's already changed all our working practices. It's already changed our psychology of what we expect from jobs, et cetera, et cetera.

And the big one, of course, that we never seem to adapt to is the whole of the west is on fire and running out of water. Germany has got floods in it that would make Noah go, hold on, I need a bigger arc.

Siberia is belching hundreds of millions of tons of methane, let alone, carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And, of course, we just discount this all the time and start saying, we have extreme weather. No, you're in the middle of a not going back to normal.

You couldn't have a bigger concatenations of not going back to normal than this. And yet, every time you switch on the TV, it's like, when do we get back to normal? It's like, there's no normal. But we keep doing it.

CARRIE: Well, and just the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest where air conditioning isn't prevalent in homes, they're like, once in a lifetime, just to your point. And then you see once in a lifetime is now twice, three, now it's every year in a lifetime.

And the heat wave is about to start, I think, again in the Pacific Northwest. Though, of course, it's not as hot. But you're still like-- is there a big difference between 99 and 102? I'm not sure that there is.

MARK: Canada is not meant to be 40 degrees Celsius. Siberia is a metaphor for bloody freezing. It's not meant to be 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Yakutsk. And that's what it is. So we're already there. And we're like, when do we get back to normal?

It's like, you're already in a different space. You are in that tipping point. And nobody wants to deal with it. So what happened, your bit of disappointment this week was at the start of the week or was the end of last week, the G20 met to say, hey, it really looks like things are going to shit in terms of the climate. Maybe we could have more aggressive targets or at least aggressive targets?

And they went, no, we can't agree on that. Poland held over coal. The Germans, who talk such a good game on green, basically are under investing, because, of course, they're terrified of spending money.

And also, the guy who's going to take over from Merkel actually authorized a coal mine. So it's just 75 levels of hypocrisy while talking a good game.

CARRIE: He's like one of the 12 beige guys. They're all kind of look the same.

MARK: I thoroughly expect the aliens that have been watching us for a long time to just come down and just go, right, time out. You had your chance. We gave you a very nice planet and you cannot even agree that there's a problem. So you're done. You're out of here.

CARRIE: Well, I guess, it still, even though it doesn't, it is still surprises you just as a spectator, as an observer, that the countries can't say, wow, we have to do something.

We're already late to do something. We're not going to solve anything. But we should at least symbolically try to do something. And they can't even agree to symbolically do anything.

MARK: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can set all the targets you want. You have to set about achieving them. You can't do any of this, for example, without totally unproven technologies, like carbon capture and storage.

But as my friend Brendan Greeley put it the other day, he says, if you think about it, the number one objection to a lot of these sort of carbon capture technologies is they're not economically effective.

Well, so long as they're effective in the sense that it works, who cares how much it costs? You can print more money. You can't print more planet. So there's no excuse for not doing this other than elections, and votes, and people caring about the short term, and all the usual stuff, and getting back to normal, because we all want to go back to normal.

CARRIE: Well, I think that's such an interesting point, the getting back to normal. Because it's like, oh, the way it was during these golden glory days of a year and a half ago. It's not even fill in the blank years. A year and a half ago, it was basically the same, or three years ago, or whatever the period was.

MARK: Well, go back beyond Two Thousand Eight, then we had the Iraq War. Do you remember driving down the road and having color coded emergencies? All that nonsense? I mean, what exactly is this normal that we're trying to get back to?

CARRIE: Well, and having to take off every piece of clothing the as you go through the scanner at the airport.

MARK: Right. Exactly. Which is still there. So anyway, let's change the tune. It's all so very depressing. Let's celebrate the positive aspects of humanity. Oh, that would be the Olympics. Over to you, Carrie.

CARRIE: Well, I was thinking of talking about something that economically works, the Olympics. Yes. Well, I have Olympic fever. I love the Olympics. This is a big part of my childhood when there were only three channels. And what did you watch except the Olympics in the summer?

And so now that there's 58,000 channels, I get to watch every surfing, for example, and skateboarding as Olympics start or as Olympic sports. But, of course, it's COVID. There's no one there. Corporate sponsors are sad, because they can't reap all their dollars. NBC paid $11 zillion for it.

MARK: Then nobody cares.

CARRIE: I don't know if they'll make their money back. Yeah, are you watching?

MARK: No, I only ever watch one thing, which is soccer. So of course, what I was watching was the European Championships. And we can get into that if you want. It's a little bit of ancient history now.

But there's my whole sort of fractured relationship as a Scot, but also as a Brit, basically, just waiting for the English to go completely mental about how they're absolutely going to win this.

They lasted until the semifinal. And then that was it. It just went completely mad. And, of course, the Italians know how close out a game. And that was the end of that.

CARRIE: But this was the game with the players-- this is the game with the three Black players, right? And then they got totally--

MARK: Yeah, they all missed their penalties. And they shouldn't have been the ones taking the penalties. And instantly, a tsunami of racial abuse hits Twitter. Yeah, it's the usual.

And then there's the whole thing about basically getting into the stadium, and rushing the stewards, and overwhelming the police. And it's like, yep, you are a bunch of morons. That's all that I do at the end of it. Well, what can you do?

CARRIE: It's good to know this exists across the UK as well.

MARK: Oh, everywhere. Absolutely. But anyway, the Olympics. So anyway, I don't watch it. But it must be a nightmare when basically the TV draws, for example, Simone Biles basically says, I'm done. I don't want to do this shit, just that. And she walks off. That means nobody watches that thing. The corporate sponsors must be going mental.

CARRIE: Well, I've thought a lot about this in terms of the athletic sporting side of things and then also as a Black woman who's 24 years old. And you just forget that the athletes themselves are in their early 20s, late teens.

There is the-- oh, gosh. I'm going to screw up her country. She's 46 years old. She is competing in gymnastics. She was from one of the stands. I'm sorry that I can't remember. And she was celebrating, because she's 46 at the Olympics.

But you just realized how young-- in stark contrast, how young the Olympians are and just the pressure that they feel. And so I thought a lot about it. Because you're exactly right, the people on both sides were like, how could you do this? And good for her.

And there's the cynical-- her corporate sponsors, obviously, weren't supporting her. I don't know if she talked to them beforehand. But one might think that was some consideration.

But really thinking about those Black athletes and athletes of color and how it is that NBC pushes them as the face of the Olympics. Because, of course, NBC sucks on all this stuff. They have Matt Lauer with a button that keeps women in the office.

And they have, I think, 8% of NBC News is a person of color for a total of 30%. They have no show with a person of color, all of this stuff. So they can push this one woman forward as the face of the Olympics.

And she did. She talks about the weight of the world on her shoulders and she's the savior of USA Gymnastics that, of course, is part of a huge sexual abuse scandal.

MARK: I totally get it. Absolutely. Do you remember Bode Miller?

CARRIE: I do. Yeah, the skier.

MARK: Right. So Bode Miller is an interesting counterpoint to this. For those people who don't remember, the only bit of the Olympics I ever watch is the Winter Olympics. I like to watch the skiing.

So a good 10 years ago, maybe more now, there was this American wunderkind called Bode Miller. And the way they set this up, I mean, it was unbelievable. He's going to win everything. He could win 10 medals.

He can win-- and basically, he didn't sort of say-- because nobody said this at this point in time-- look, this is too much for me. I can't deal with this pressure. I need a break. I'm out.

Basically, he just kind of switched off and didn't give a shit and he kind of lost everything. And when he lost these first two events, everyone was like wagging the finger, and he's not serious, and how dare he, and all the rest of it.

And eventually, him or one of his people close to him just came around, what is it to you? He's the one who's done the hard work. If he's mentally up for it, he should be up for it. And if he's not, then no.

Who are all you people investing your lives in this person through this sport? This is ridiculous. Go away. So yeah, we've seen this movie before.

CARRIE: Yeah. I think, though, for Black women, especially, because they are carrying so many different weights on their shoulders that it's even more intense. Because she's saving USA Gymnastics.

She's showing the world that Black women can do these amazing things. She's supposed to be the face of racial reconciliation for the United States for the past 240 years.

MARK: Does she know she's actually signed up for all these jobs? I mean, there's a big question there. Again, we can project this on to her. But maybe it's as simple as she just-- whatever her regime is has been knocked out and she just doesn't feel that good. And that's all there is to it.

There's a whole bunch-- there's a bunch of European athletes who are basically like, some of the supplements that athletes can legally take are actually illegal in Japan. So some people have had their meds knocked out of order.

Who knows what's going on with people? But it's interesting the way, to me, in a sense, we are doing it. We're basically saying, well, this person, look at all the pressure on this person. Yeah, I'm sure that that's there.

But it's also amazing that we do that. If you just step back from it, we invest so much in these people. And it's like, well, why? And precisely as you say, because it saves gymnastics, the NBC, and the republic. It's ridiculous.

CARRIE: Yeah. I do think, just in comparison, there should always be that normal human that tries to do-- I mean, average human that tries to do like a cartwheel or swim one length of the pool in comparison, just so we can see how extremely, incredibly talented these athletes are.

Because I love the swimming part of things. So just to see like a normal person ski down a ski slope or swim two lengths of the pool and to see just how incredibly fast they are in comparison, maybe we wouldn't do that. Because we're like, oh, someone-- of course, Bode Miller is supposed to win. And you're like-- but he's also flinging himself downhill at like 500 miles an hour.

MARK: Right. And we all have off days. Simple as that.

CARRIE: Here's my economic question for you in the Olympics. Do you think that any other country other than the US, or China, or some other really rich country will ever host the Olympics? It's not like Jamaica is ever going to be able to. Does it just become this whole--

MARK: Well, here's the interesting thing, so the official word on this is you never make any money off of it. So Canada is still paying back the Nineteen-Seventy-Six Olympics and all the rest of it.

But at the same time, London hosted the Olympics. What it did was give them an excuse to clear up all this toxic land that they ended up building the Olympic Village on. That's all been knocked down and there's housing now.

So it depends on how you do it. So it's not clear to me over the very long run you necessarily make a colossal loss of this. You can do, but it's not written in the stars.

I think the other side of this that's really interesting is the World Cup. So if you look at the way the World Cup's awarded and think about the way the Olympics are awarded, I'm not casting aspersions on any, but let's just say there are significant questioning about the award process that gave it to Russia, which was a great success, by the way, and now Qatar.

Now you can see that Russia has a footballing history, but you cannot say that Qatar has a footballing history. It is an environmental disaster and thousands of people, migrant workers have died building these stadia, which will be used for six weeks and then-- literally, at one point, they were planning to put them on barges and ship them out into the world, because it goes, what people really need is another stadium they're not going to use.

So somehow, they think it's worth it. They are obviously spending an absolute ton of money to do this, even if it sits in malodor, they think it's worth it. So maybe there will be other countries that think it's worth it.

CARRIE: Think about other hotspots around the world and I just-- I chuckle only because it's the continuation of the theme of wild fires, civil wars. I mean, it was bizarre.

The assassination of the Haitian president was so strange in that the Colombians and Haitians, I guess, were the assassins. And they got into his bedroom and shot him and then just like kind of walked out of the house. It was just such a strange series of events.

I never really caught what the motivation was to assassinate him. And of course, tons of conspiracy theories around, who's actually behind it, and was US led, or some other--

MARK: Well, whenever anything happens in the world, basically, there's a reasonable number of people that will say, well, it was obviously the CIA. And it may have been in some instances. But there's a weird thing, the British intelligence used to call CIA Caught In the Act, because, honestly, a lot of times, they weren't very good.

Yet, at the same time, there are people who think that every single thing that happens in the world is a CIA plot. And again, I always found it fascinating. It's a bit like the sort of the view of the world you get with a lot of the left wing Brits and French about the United States.

330 million couch potatoes sitting on the couch unable to move, all clinically obese, all addicted to Fox, whatever. And at the same time, the most Machiavellian foreign policy apparatus the world has ever seen. And it's like, well, where are they getting them from? Because they can't be off the couch. How can you have both of these things at the one time?

CARRIE: I love that image of bingeing the Olympics when we can't even a walk a half a step and also being the masterminds of the world.

MARK: And it's not even as if we are alone in being sort of a enormously large country now. As usual, America has led the way and everybody else is doing it too. So basically, Haiti is kicking off and you don't know why. What do you think about South Africa?

CARRIE: South Africa is-- that just feels like desperation. Huge protest, fires setting stores and the like on fire. I think at one point, of their neighbors, Eswatini, had declared martial law.

I think South Africa also connected to COVID, like the Tunisian-- president sacking the prime minister in Tunisia over COVID. But South Africa seems to-- it's happening in Durban.

MARK: This is Jacob Zuma. This is basically the judiciary going after Zuma. And basically, Zuma supporters don't believe the judiciary. As a warning here for the United States, essentially, this is what happens when you have a president that's removed from office and the supporters don't accept it.

And then when you find a legal ruling against the president, they all go completely mental. So there's a nice warning here for the United States and the games that you can play.

But what's shocking about it, as many commentators have said, is the level of violence in this has really surprised everyone. And also, sort of the level of looting that has gone on as well just from small businesses, local businesses that are just everybody just clearing out. And this is what happens when you have a completely polarized, highly unequal country. Oh, I wonder who that sounds like?

CARRIE: People are just pissed. Everything is just like--

MARK: I did write a book about that, you know.

CARRIE: I didn't realize that.

MARK: Yeah, exactly. What was it called again? Anyway.

CARRIE: Actually, on this point, we should-- this is a little bit of fun stuff-- but Jeff Bezos and his spaceship to the wherever he was going.

MARK: Go on, say it. You want to say it. You want to say it. Go on, say it.

CARRIE: He rode what looked to be a part of the male anatomy into the sky. You couldn't even make that up. And you're just like, did you notice the design of this, Jeff Bezos, as you wear your cowboy hat?

MARK: He wanted big windows on the top.

CARRIE: I guess. And just the point that you're reading about that the economic divide. Could there be any more--

MARK: Oh, yeah. What is the carbon footprint going to be of every space tourist who spends a quarter of a million dollars to do this for 10 minutes? This is just ridiculous.

I posted one on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. I don't know if I mentioned this already the last time we spoke, but this one just blew me away.

So there's a private equity firm. The private equity firm buys a power station, like a shitty old coal fired power station that nobody wants, because it's obviously a stranded asset and you can't get loans to redo it, whatever. They're like, we're going to buy it.

They then buy a coal mine to power the power station. Why are they doing this? Because everything's linked up to Bitcoin machines. The net value of that for humanity is [? zeeting-- ?] negative billions. But you'll make billions out of it. Talk about the incentives just being completely wrong.

CARRIE: But then, Blyth, he says, you as an Amazon customer, or whatever, paid for this trip. You're like, yeah, we did. Even the like-- I don't know what that is. Is that total just arrogance? I don't know what that is.

MARK: You have to hand it to Bezos, I think Bezos is one of those people that we must have been teased about his name growing up. Bezos whatever. I don't know why, but it seems like something to be teased about.

And he's developed a kind of like, I really don't give a shit what anyone thinks attitude. So he just decided at some point he's going to go into space, and you people keep using my stuff, and I'm worth $200 billion and that's it. And that's all I've got to say about it. And he's impervious to shame.

CARRIE: OK, yeah, he put on his cowboy hat and that was that.

MARK: Well, Branson did the same thing as well the week before. And it's just like, think about it. Here are these entrepreneurs, these leaders, these captains of industry.

And basically, rather than doing anything to actually solve the massive problems we have, let's just spend a quarter of a million dollars each and go to space for 10 minutes and then drink some champagne. It's just like, really? This is the best we can come up with?

CARRIE: Yeah, I know. Well, since we're on this topic-- I don't know-- we were talking about books-- will you be buying Prince Harry's memoir, which he is "I am writing is not as the Prince I was born, but as the man I have become"?

MARK: Well, first of all, that just sounds like a line from "Game of Thrones". You've got to do it in a "Game of Thrones" accent. I'm writing this not as the Prince I was born, but as the man I've become.

CARRIE: At some point, I take him seriously. But then at some point, he just kind of becomes a joke unto himself too. He takes himself very seriously.

MARK: It was quite-- look, obviously, he was like, I want out the farm. I want out of the nut house. I'm not going to do this anymore. I married this woman. She has the not unreasonable point of view that having to surrender my passport and have someone drive me everywhere for the rest of my life is more than a little screwed up.

So maybe we should get out of this. Now what are the assets that he's bringing to it? What are the assets she's bringing to it? You have the immediate notoriety. She could immediately go back, I suppose, to acting, et cetera. They've cut their deal with Netflix or whatever.

But what does he have? He has one thing. He has that story as an asset. I'm surprised he's-- I think I mentioned this before-- I'm surprised he's doing it this early. I thought he'd would wait a little bit. Maybe running out of cash, because, apparently, they spend a lot on security and he needs the cash. And you'll get like $50 million or $100 million advancement.

But it depends on what he actually says in it. If he sort of like blows the lid on the horrors of the firm, fair enough. But if it's just an anodyne sort of like, yes, they were really cruel to my mom, it's like, well, yeah, we know, whatever.

Anyway, I never read these books. I just like to read the commentary on these books when they come out. So you can tell me all about it.

CARRIE: I like to watch the movie based on the book. It really cuts to the chase.

MARK: So to close it all out, we were talking about getting back to normal. And one of the things that made me actually feel that we are getting back to normal is, of course, the rebirth of Bennifer. That's it. When Ben Affleck is back with Jennifer Lopez, then we're back to normal. This is a mean reversion.

CARRIE: That's right. So they're taking us back to the early two thousands. The world can be on fire, but we still have-- they're back together, so we can--

MARK: Yeah, we've got loads of time to deal with things. Sure, we'll get round to it. It's not as if we're going to get to Twenty-Twenty-One and the world's on fire. We haven't done anything. That would be ridiculous. So we can all just go back 20 years and pretend everything's fine.

CARRIE: Well, it was great to see you. I think we'll be back for the end of the summer wrap up, hopefully.

MARK: Oh, yeah. We may be in a tipping point, but we've got a few iterations before the planet actually destroys our ability to record podcasts.

CARRIE: Well, before the aliens come down and take over microphones too.

MARK: Yeah, let me just say for the record that I don't actually really believe there are those aliens. But if they were there, then they'd have every right to be pissed off.

CARRIE: Well, thank you for listening. We will talk to you all soon.

MARK: Bye.