Overnight cessation: a two-week pause in Iran
Economist Podcasts
The Economist
4.3 • 5K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2026
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With little time to spare before a threatened civilisation-ending attack, America agreed a pause in fighting with Iran. We ask how the temporary deal was reached and how likely a permanent one is. China has an ever-expanding, state-led IVF programme: can that actually reverse a deepening demographic crisis? And the right way to think about AI’s entry into literature.
Guests and host:
- Gregg Carlstrom, Middle East correspondent
- Carla Subirana, news editor
- Andrew Miller, special correspondent
- Rosie Blau, co-host of “The Intelligence”
- Jason Palmer, co-host of “The Intelligence”
Topics covered:
- Iran war, Donald Trump, ceasefire
- China, demographics, IVF
- AI, literature
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist. |
| 0:10.3 | Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. |
| 0:14.1 | And I'm Rosie Bloor. |
| 0:15.2 | And I'm Jason Palmer. |
| 0:16.6 | Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:25.6 | IVF is used the world over to help couples have babies. |
| 0:28.6 | Now, more people are turning to it in China, where fertility rates are falling. |
| 0:33.6 | Question is, how far can medical intervention change a society-wide situation? |
| 0:40.3 | And we look at the next group of humans worried about AI. |
| 0:46.3 | Authors. The bots can write plausible prose, but naysayers, including us, reckon that much of it is crap. Thing is, so is plenty of the humankind. |
| 0:57.0 | But first... |
| 1:06.0 | ...one short day ago, we asked Greg Karlstrom, our Middle East correspondent, whether the most likely course of the Iran war was towards peace or towards a wider conflict. His answer, escalation. By last night, the threatened scale of that possible escalation was as grave as any outlined by any American |
| 1:29.0 | president ever. A whole civilization will die tonight. Donald Trump flippantly tapped out on its |
| 1:35.4 | phone. But then, an entirely unexpected turn, a snapping of that tension. |
| 1:41.4 | This is one time when I'm very happy to have been wrong. |
| 1:44.9 | I did not think there was going to be a diplomatic off-ramp here, and it looked that way |
| 1:49.2 | until about 90 minutes before Donald Trump's deadline last night. |
| 1:53.0 | It seemed as if he was going to go ahead with these chilling threats that he issued. |
| 1:56.9 | But at the last minute, to everyone's relief in this region, they announced a ceasefire. |
| 2:03.3 | And talk me through it. What is the structure of that ceasefire? This is a very bare-bones agreement. |
| 2:09.5 | It halts the fighting for two weeks. It calls for negotiations, which are meant to begin on Friday |
| 2:16.0 | in Pakistan, where they will talk about a permanent |
... |
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