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- [00:00]
Capital One Advertiser
With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking. With Capital One, if he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends it's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com bank capital1NA member FDIC. This intelligence podcast is sponsored by Back Market, the leading global marketplace for refurbished tech. When the kids need phones, laptops or tablets for school, buying refurbished tech makes sense for families trying to save money without sacrificing quality. At Back Market, tech costs up to 50% less compared to new. All devices have been professionally refurbished and come with a 1 year warranty and 30 day return policy. Start saving money. Visit Backmarket or the Back Market app to shop now.
- [01:06]
Sam Colbert
The economist.
- [01:13]
Rosie Blore
Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore. Today on the show, the world's first sanctuary for captive whales. And our journey down Route 66 takes us into its commercial history. First up, though, Last night Marine Le Pen, leader of the populist Right National Rally Party, said she will run in France's presidential election next year. Back in 2025, it looked like Le Pen's political career might be over. She was convicted of misusing European Parliament funds for her party and banned from running for elected office for five years. Yesterday, a court of appeal in Paris upheld Le Pen's conviction, but crucially, it lightened her sentence, freeing her to run the vote in April 2027 may be nine months away, but the presidential campaign has now started.
- [02:31]
Sophie Pedder
Le Pen's decision to run ends 15 months of uncertainty for her party, the National Rally.
- [02:39]
Rosie Blore
Sophie Pedder is our Paris bureau chief.
- [02:42]
Sophie Pedder
It sets France up for a very unusual election campaign because the candidate he has now been convicted twice in the first and second instances, although she's appealing. A lot of twists and turns in the day, but at least now the campaign proper can begin.
- [02:59]
Rosie Blore
Sophie it's been something of a saga getting to this point. Just talk me through the details of exactly what happened yesterday.
- [03:07]
Sophie Pedder
Yesterday the Court of Appeal in Paris upheld her conviction. It handed her a three year jail sentence. Two of those are suspended and one is to be served with an electronic ankle test attack. But crucially for Le Pen, and this is what really made the difference, is that the court shortened her ban on running for office and ruled that she'd already served the ineligibility penalty, so that freed her to run. Le Pen said last night that the ban had posed an enormous democratic problem and that she said it was now up to the people to decide. She continues to claim she's innocent and she has said that she will now take her appeal to the highest court, the Cour de Cassation.
- [03:56]
Rosie Blore
Okay, Sophie, so that's all very complicated, but the main thing is that she is running. Can you just remind us why she's such an important figure in French politics?
- [04:06]
Sophie Pedder
It's an extraordinary story. It's the story of a family. Her father, Jean Marie Le Pen, co founded the National Front, as it was known then in the 1970s. He stood in elections from 1974 up till 2002. Only one he didn't stand in. So you've got over half a century of a member of the Le Pen family standing in French presidential elections. There's no other family that has represented anything of the sort. She inherited a party that was xenophobic, anti Semitic, and she has really brought it closer to respectability. It's now considered by a lot of voters in France as a party like any other. She has been on a quest to sort of earn it, this mainstream polity. And that is why she, I think, wants to prove that now she can do it.
- [04:53]
Rosie Blore
And now that we know that she's running, how will that actually shape the campaign?
- [04:58]
Sophie Pedder
Well, it definitely marks the start of the presidential campaign. It is providing some clarity for her opponents as well. They know now who they will be up against. And that matters because up till now, for the last 15 months, it hasn't been clear. It also enables her to really shape the policy direction that the party's going in. She has some fairly left leaning views, which is quite unusual for a hard right populist politician on things like lowering the pension age or protecting people on low incomes. She has her base in the northeast of France. She's a deputy for the mining basin and she very much bases her support on the working class electorate. And that is where she'll be concentrating most of her appeal.
- [05:44]
Rosie Blore
And Sophie, what happens to Jordan Bardella, who was expected to run if Le Pen was barred? Who has been Le Pen's protege? Will they be able to work together now?
- [05:55]
Sophie Pedder
Well, what a story for him. I mean, there he was looking at the prospect at the age of 30 of making a presidential bid himself on the assumption that the ban would still be in place for Marine Le Pen. And when I interviewed him in Strasbourg not so long ago, he was clearly preparing himself for that, mentally getting into his head the idea that it would be him now it's not him. That puts him back into second place. And it also brings into question, I think, the strategy he had been embracing, and that is one of trying to both use Marine Le Pen's working class base, but also widen it out to a more middle class electorate which is more interested in a business friendly, fiscally responsible program, slightly more liberal sounding at least. That will now be up to her whether she wants to take any of that on board. The two of them say they're gonna work together and today they're off campaigning in a market together. They are definitely making those sounds, but I think there's inevitably gonna be tensions between them now that it's Marine Le Pen who's the boss.
- [06:54]
Rosie Blore
And Sophie, we're talking here about a presidential election in April 2027. Who else is likely to contest that race?
- [07:03]
Sophie Pedder
Well, Rosie, honestly, if you look at the list, you wouldn't believe how long it is. There are at least 30, even 40 candidates who say they're going to run. So it's very messy and very crowded at this point. I think what you need to focus on are the leading characters and in the center, that's the succession space to Emmanuel Macron. There are two prime ministers of his, Edouard Philippe and Gabrielle et al. Both have declared they're running and they are campaigning. At the moment we have Jean Luc Melanchon on the populist left who has declared that he's running again. Then there's a candidate on the centre right and there's a bunch of candidates among Socialists and one Green. So too many candidates at this point. We don't know how that'll filter out in the end. But for now, at least they know who they are up against and what kind of campaign they have to shape.
- [07:52]
Rosie Blore
So a long list of candidates at the moment and far out. But is it possible that Le Pen could win?
- [07:59]
Sophie Pedder
If you look at the polling for the first round, France holds a two round presidential election. The first round she has a crushing lead. And these are polls that were taken before the verdict. So we'll need to look at how they look afterwards. But the lead in the first round voting is absolutely clear. And it made no difference whether it was Jordan Bardella or her. She's at around 30% in the polls with the next place candidate no better than about 20%. That would be someone like Edouard Philippe. The thing about the French election is that it all hinges on the second round. Once you've got yourself a second round place. You've got to get 50% and that's where it's more difficult. The polls are not clear at this stage. They were a little bit clearer for Jordan Bardella, but with Marine Le Pen, they're not so clear. They're always around just over 50%, so it's going to be extremely tight. But at this point, we are still nine months out from the election and I would say polls in the past have often been wrong, so there's really everything to play for.
- [08:53]
Rosie Blore
Sophie, thank you very much.
- [08:55]
Sophie Pedder
Thank you. As always.
- [09:12]
Capital One Advertiser
With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking. With Capital One, if he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep. Even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com bank capital1na member FDIC.
- [09:43]
Rosie Blore
Summer smells like citrus in the sun. Turn your home into a daily getaway with Pura's new summer collection. Find your flow and fragrance and explore the scents@pura.com.
- [10:09]
Sam Colbert
These are the girls. That's what their carers call them. The girls. Their names are Little White and Little Gray. They are beluga whales.
- [10:19]
Rosie Blore
Sam Colbert is a senior producer on our podcast series.
- [10:23]
Sam Colbert
Belugas are pale gray and chubby, with little black eyes, bulging foreheads and big smiling mouths. They might look babyish, but they're incredibly intelligent. These two were caught in Russia when they were still small, then sent to a theme park in Shanghai. There they grew up performing tricks for paying audiences. Now they're the subjects of a bold experiment. They live here in Iceland at the world's first sanctuary for captive whales. And what happens to them could determine the futures of thousands of other whales and dolphins still living at theme parks and aquariums. Yes, sir, that's our baby. Watch her.
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John Fasman
She swims like crazy.
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Lee Woods
Shamu.
- [11:12]
Sam Colbert
She's our baby whale. And dolphin shows became popular in the 1970s 60s, thanks to SeaWorld's Shamu the orca and TV's Flipper the dolphin. They enjoyed success well into the 2000s. But then public opinion started to shift. We need so to respond for a dead person at SeaWorld. A whale has eaten one of the trainers.
- [11:46]
Sophie Pedder
A whale ate one of the trainers.
- [11:49]
Sam Colbert
That's correct. We just need to be out there. More and more horrible incidents at parks like SeaWorld in Florida were in the news. And the darker sides of whale and dolphin captivity were dramatized in documentaries like the COVID and Blackfish.
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Sophie Pedder
All whales in captivity have a bad life. They're all emotionally destroyed. They're all psychologically traumatized.
- [12:11]
Sam Colbert
Protests from animal rights groups grew.
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Capital One Advertiser
Social media exploded with calls for SeaWorld boycotts.
- [12:23]
John Fasman
If you were in a bathtub for
- [12:24]
Sam Colbert
25 years, don't you think you'd get a little irritated, aggravated, maybe a little psychotic? Eventually, SeaWorld had to adapt. Faced with nose diving, visitor numbers, and increasing pressure from politicians and campaigners, the company says it's phasing out the performances. By the end of this saga, Western audiences had soured on whale and dolphin shows. In the last few years, several governments in Canada, Mexico, Belgium and Switzerland have passed laws to phase out keeping them all together. Today, over 3,700 dolphins, porpoises and whales live in captivity around the world. But as regulations tighten and attendance falls, some of the parks and aquariums that house them are shutting down. And that's led to a new problem. Those bans on captivity make no provision for what happens to existing animals.
- [13:28]
Rosie Blore
Marineland says they are bankruptcy out of cash and could be forced to euthanize 30 of their beluga whales.
- [13:35]
Sam Colbert
At Marineland in Canada, 30 belugas have been living in decrepit pools almost two years since any tourist has visited. At another park on the French Riviera, two orcas have been circling dirty tanks, still a year and a half after the place closed. Both species can live for over 50 years, so what should happen to them? Releasing them is not a viable option. Whales in human care lose their survival skills. Most scientists agree that if you left them to fend for themselves in the ocean, the animals would struggle to survive. Another idea is to send them to parks that are still open in other parts of the world. That's mostly what's been happening. But simply relocating their confinement doesn't feel like a real solution. Which brings me back to Little White and Little Gray, the belugas in Shanghai who moved to the world's only whale sanctuary. They found a third option. I traveled to Iceland to see if it was working. The sanctuary is on a small island off the south coast of Iceland. As you approach its harbor from the sea, you pass a bay formed by a horseshoe of sheer cliffs. In the world of whales, this is a special place. As our boat enters the bay, Jana Sarova, a conservationist and my chaperone, points out a metal plate fastened to the rock face.
- [15:10]
Jana Sarova
So that's the Caicos chain.
- [15:12]
Lee Woods
Oh, yeah.
- [15:13]
Sam Colbert
And that's all that's left of it, is it? Keiko is probably history's most famous orca. He played Free Willy in the 1993 film. After retiring from the silver screen, he was brought here. And that chain once supported the underwater net that kept him penned in for four years. A team here slowly rehabituated Keiko to life in the wild. And in 2002, they finally released him into the open ocean. It didn't go well. The next year, he developed pneumonia and died in a Norwegian fjord. Observers considered the project a failure. But what about Keiko's four happy years in Iceland? Maybe that was the model to replicate. So, nearly two decades later, a charity called the Sea Life Trust tried to build on that legacy. They brought Little White and Little Grey to the same bay in Iceland. The two belugas would receive round the clock care in a netted portion of the bay. They'd never be fully released, but they could live out their remaining years in this bigger and more natural setting. Well, that was the idea. When I visited the island this spring, the girls weren't in the bay. They were in another indoor pool in the island's fishing village, about the same size as the one they'd left. It's been seven years since they arrived here. What happened? In the beginning, the team was waiting for a months long stretch of good weather. The whales hadn't been outside in eight years, and their first taste of freedom should be a positive one. And when they first went out into the bay in the summer of 2020, Jana says the signs were encouraging.
- [17:00]
Jana Sarova
They would hunt, fish around and swim after things. They interact with the birds. They try to snap at the little feet of the puffins, so the puffin would swim, you know, and they have the little legs. They're just messing with it.
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Sam Colbert
But the team also saw less encouraging behaviors. The whales showed signs of stress. Little Gray developed stomach ulcers and stopped
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Jana Sarova
eating something that they've been living with for a very long time and gets set on by changing diet. Or it could be they get spooked because there's fireworks. It's different scenarios may set it off.
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Sam Colbert
So the girls return to the indoor pool for the winter to recover. Then the pandemic set things back another year. But by the summer of 2022, the team had made some improvements and were ready to try again.
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Jana Sarova
But then a boat sank two days before the move day.
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Sophie Pedder
Gosh, yeah.
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Jana Sarova
So this oil spill from the boat and everything. So we had to clear up the debris because it Just sank right here, right here.
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Sam Colbert
Another summer gone. But then finally, in 2023, the girls returned to the bay.
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Jana Sarova
Gray went through the gate and then started to explore. And she was having such a great time out there. It was lovely to see.
- [18:13]
Sam Colbert
The first spell in the bay lasted four months, and the second just four weeks. Each time, the whales seemed happier back in their indoor safe space. By one metric, this has not been a success. The whales are, after all, still in a concrete penny. But while critics want to declare this project dead, that conclusion feels premature. Exploring whether this can work while keeping these animals healthy is going to require patience.
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Jana Sarova
You want to give them the best possible life, so doing it right and doing it by them is the most important for us in this facility. Definitely.
- [18:54]
Sam Colbert
Is it ever difficult to hold on to the conviction that the bay is the best place for them? You know, if you kind of see them doing, you know, well in here and happy in here, and then they go to the bay and they look
- [19:03]
Sophie Pedder
a little upset, I still believe that.
- [19:06]
Jana Sarova
And, and why I believe that is because what I seen in Gray when we moved in 23, she was just having a blast out there, like genuine blast with starfish and flatfish and just having such a great time with the team. And there were moments that I would just never forget for the rest of my life. And I think we can definitely do the essence. We just need to give them a really, really good chance, that's all.
- [19:29]
Sam Colbert
In the seven years they've been here, the team has learned a lot. They've been making improvements to the bay infrastructure to make it more comfortable for the whales and safe for the humans who look after them. And this month, they will try bringing the whales out again. Several other whale and dolphin sanctuary projects are now in development around the world. They'll all need funding and staff and workable locations. It won't be easy, but their biggest hurdle is here in Iceland. This summer, Little Gray and Little White will need to show everyone that whales can and should be set free.
- [20:11]
Rosie Blore
And you can hear more from Sam and his pursuit of sea life on our recent episode of the weekend, Intelligence. The Last Whales at Marineland. You'll need to be a subscriber. I put a link in the show notes.
- [20:36]
John Fasman
What's the weirdest museum you've ever been to?
- [20:39]
Rosie Blore
John Fasman, our senior culture correspondent, is spending this week journeying down America's Route 66.
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John Fasman
A few months back, I went to a sparkling water museum in Brooklyn. A couple of decades ago, I lived across the street from a musical instruments museum in Moscow. All I remember is dozens of goofy banjos under bad lighting. I'm still kicking myself for missing the Spam Museum the last time I was in southeastern Minnesota. But the American Giants Museum has them all beat.
- [21:07]
Lee Woods
Hey, my name's Lee woods at American Giants Museum here in Atlanta, Illinois.
- [21:12]
John Fasman
I'll let Lee explain what it is.
- [21:14]
Lee Woods
Pretty much statues, fiberglass figures from the mid early 60s in here that we found out in the wild and brought back in here to show people.
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John Fasman
These are huge fiberglass figures that businesses along Route 66 use to advertise. The museum is in a former Texaco station restored to gleaming white. On one side is a giant policeman with his hand raised, either in friendly greeting or about to absolutely wallop someone with a karate chop. On the other, a giant Viking, cowboy, astronaut, mechanic and Native American stand in a loose circle. Across the street, another giant in blue jeans and work boots is either offering or preparing to club passersby to death with a huge hot dog. It's all charming, but a little creepy. It kind of feels like the bucolic, pre mayhem opening scene of a horror film before they come to life. And these statues were all to advertise?
- [22:16]
Lee Woods
Advertise? Yeah. Yeah. The more kind of quirky or weird it was, the better. People would pull in there and see what they had going on. So back then they worked real good back then. So everybody was trying to get one and try to come up with something different. So like our mascot out there is a Texaco Big friend. Texaco ordered 300 of those in 66. The problem is they was putting them out on a cart system and rolling them out towards the street and everything. And they'd have winds or storms come, they'd fall over and fell on cars. People was getting hurt, they was getting sued, which I didn't even know. People knew what suing was back in the 60s, but that's what happened. So Texaco deemed them all to be demolished and everything. So now there's only six known to exist, and we have two of them.
- [23:13]
John Fasman
Do you have a favorite one here? They're a reminder that Route 66 hasn't always been just a quirky little byway. It was built for commerce. It connected the Great Lakes in Chicago with the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers in St. Louis and Tulsa and the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica. It transported goods as well as people. But how did people decide where to stop? Remember, this was before the flourishing of chain restaurants and hotels and before we could call up reviews on the supercomputer in our pockets. Owners competed for drivers Attention and wallets with eye catching displays like neon signs, painted billboards, and yes, giant fiberglass statues, all of which blur the line between art and advertising. But they're not really advertising anything anymore. Now they're just kitschy art. And they highlight the extent to which Route 66 has become an incubator of delightful, specific, out of the way weirdness. I stopped at one old service station in rural Oklahoma and he said, you know, there's a guy you should talk to about 17 miles up the road. His house has a car coming out of its roof and there's a big sign for UFO parking. And if his gate is open, it means he wants to talk about Route 66. Unfortunately, his gate wasn't open and I had a schedule to keep, so I missed him. But I've done a lot of driving on modern interstates and not once have I been excited to talk about the highway with strangers. But Route 66 is different. I'll give Lee the last word.
- [24:44]
Lee Woods
That's what I like. You see, See, everything's different. Everybody's got blinders on now. And when you. I think when you travel Route 66, they come off. And you see how. I ain't gonna say it was easier back in the mid-50s because that's what I look at Route 66 is like 50s and 60s vibe. That it was simpler. You know, people went to drive in diners and everything. They ordered the food took probably 30, 40 minutes to get made. They're out there socializing with everybody. But that's what I like about it. Just every state's different. Every town's a little different. You know, everything's a little different. Adds the further you go.
- [25:57]
Rosie Blore
That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.
- [26:20]
Capital One Advertiser
With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com bank capital1na member FDIC.
- [26:51]
Rosie Blore
Summer smells like citrus in the sun. Turn your home into a daily getaway with Pura's new summer collection. Find your flow and fragrance and explore the scents@pura.com.