The Economist. Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

It's getting harder to keep track of all the tie-ups between AI model makers and chip makers and old-school blue-chip tech firms. We pick through the shifting network and ask how it's

all likely to shake out.

And in other news about an unstoppable future, those who send holiday cards should start thinking about going digital.

There'll soon be at least one place where the paper kind just won't get delivered.

Thank you. where the paper kind just won't get delivered. First up, though. We talk a lot on the show about what's happening to Iran, about the now long-defunct JCPOA nuclear deal,

how in June American forces tried to destroy its nuclear sites with airstrikes, how its proxies

in the region, the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah have been weakened in recent years.

But really only rarely do we talk about what's happening in Iran.

The last best look we got was in 2019, when my colleague Nicholas Pelham was detained,

imprisoned for a few days and then, oddly free to wander around for seven weeks after a daily interrogation.

Now he and our digital editor Adam Roberts have gone back and were given a rare on-the-record interview with Abbas Arachi, the foreign minister.

What they saw is that Iran has changed, is changing, and its leadership is sending signals to the West that should be heated.

It was different to the Tehran that I remembered six years ago,

when after the initials that are harrowing three days of detention,

I was largely left to my devices and able to run the streets.

This time we were much more controlled.

The busking seemed to be much more sparse, the traffic was more sparse.

I didn't have a sense of a city which was anything like as thriving and throbbing and vivacious

as the one that I remembered. It was more somber, it was a bit more dour,

and there was something of a kind of city that was struggling to retain appearances.

My reaction was quite different, and I'd never been there before.

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