Welcome, one of all people of Earth to Next Up. I'm Mark Cowpern, your host. I serve as the editor-in-chief

of the live interactive video platform two-way, and I host this here program for you called Next

Up with Mark Kalprin. Thank you for being here. Great show today, two wonderful guests,

both of whom appear on television on a daily basis and

are spectacularly smart people. Not everyone who appears on TV is smart. I'm sorry to break that

news to you. Many just read the teleprompter, not these two ladies. Katie Pavlage, host of Katie

Pavlige tonight on News Nation every weeknight at 10 p.m. And Morgan Radford, the anchor of NBC News Daily on the NBC Network and also the author of a new book called Now Then, it's a novel.

And really looking forward to having you hear my conversation with Morgan about not just the book, but about parenthood and everything else she's got going on.

Looking forward to having both these ladies on the program and talk about journalism and

writing and everything else.

Before they're here, though, this week's reported monologue.

There's a lot of news this week, and I haven't had the luxury of focusing on just one topic,

talking to sources in and out of the government about both things. And so I'm going to do two different topics here in the reported

monologue. And the first is the Iran war, as the president considers his options. Had a bit of an

epiphany in the last 24 hours or so about where things

stand.

We've been, for the last several weeks, we've been kind of on a knife's edge between thinking

maybe they'll be a negotiated settlement to end the war in Islamabad where they have one

meeting and maybe, as the president

has said, the Iranians will give in. And then on the far end, worries about World War III,

where it does not appear that they're headed towards an agreement. The ceasefire has largely held.

The blockades, you know, the dueling blockades have largely held and the world economy

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