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- [00:01]
Jason Palmer
This is ndomic and Su from the no Free Lunch Podcast Ever. Feel like your workload is out of control? Like you're wearing every hat and expect it to be everywhere at once? Running a business means juggling books, payments, leads, payroll, basically everything. But with Intuit QuickBooks your workload gets unloaded. QuickBooks gives you access to Intuit's powerful AI agents and trusted human experts who work together to handle the tedious stuff so you can get back to what actually grow grows your business. And because everything's streamlined on one platform, your customer management, accounting, expenses and payroll all work seamlessly in one place. So go ahead, outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. Get 50% off QuickBooks online for three months. Terms and conditions apply. Feature availability may vary by product. Visit QuickBooks.com for details. Everyone deserves to be connected. That's why T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. So switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com switch and now T mobile is in US cellular stores. Savings versus Comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits, plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required. The economist.
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Rosie Blore
Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore.
- [01:44]
Jason Palmer
And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.
- [01:53]
Rosie Blore
When Western dating apps tried to woo India, they crashed and burned. Now, a raft of homegrown matchmakers hope they can help romances blossom online.
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Jason Palmer
And if you're a hungry predator on the savannah, where do you look for dinner? Wherever there's water. But what if you're in the jungle where it's water, water everywhere? Scientists now have a better answer about popular dining spots. First up, though.
- [02:42]
Rosie Blore
This European political leader is speaking of how astonished he is that those who claim to be the most vigilant against foreign interference are engaged in blatant interference with the affairs of a nation state. He says President Trump was returning to the Monroe Doctrine and acting in the economic interests of an American oil company. Sophie Pera is our Paris bureau chief. On Greenland. He said Trump's recent claims constitute a real danger to the sovereignty of a European state. You might expect such strong words from a European liberal democrat, but I was sitting in Paris listening to Jordan Bardella, head of France's populist Right national rally. He's the leader of a party that has drawn Inspiration from Trump's re election and his potent blend of country first anti immigrant nationalism. Sophie, is it really so surprising that Bardella should be criticizing Trump in this way and so explicitly? Yes, I think it is in several respects. One of them is that the party is inspired by Trump's reelection and also by the message that he managed to convey America in the United States. But the national rally in France's message effectively adds up to a France first program. So it has a distinctly Trumpian echo. But it's more than that. It's also because MAGA networks have been forging links with the populist right in Europe and not just in France. If you take for example, the new ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, he is a real estate associate of Trump's and father of Jared, his son in law. And one of the first meetings he hosted just a few months after arriving in Paris was with Marine Le Pen and her colleague Jordan Bardella, both of the National Rally. This relationship between MAGA and the populist right, it's not just France, is it? No, it's not just France. If you look at the national security strategy that America published last year, it made it very clear that the strength of what it called patriotic parties in Europe was a source of great optimism. And we saw J.D. vance, who went to Munich last year, and he didn't meet the German Chancellor while he was there, but he did meet Alice Weiss, who is the AfD co leader and criticized the firewall that keeps her party isolated in German politics. And if you just look at the guest list for Trump's inauguration last year, it was almost a who's who of the populist right. There was Italy's Giorgia Meloni. There was Britain's Nigel Farage. There were representatives of Germany's AFT and of various far right parties in France. And yes, it sounds like that relationship's now under strain in France. What about elsewhere in Europe? Well, it's been interesting if you take Germany, where the Trump administration has been most closely identified with building those links. Alice Vidal of the AfD actually declared that Trump had violated his fundamental campaign promise not to interfere in other countries with his threats over Greenland. So what you're seeing in Germany is actually the worsening of divisions within the party. There are some who think that support from magaworld is so valuable that it's self defeating to to publicly reprimand America for these sorts of threats. But others on the party's anti American wing feel that this is reviving their old concerns about Germany becoming a vassal of America. It's not just about Greenland though, is it? It's not about Greenland per se, no. Because if you take Jordan Bardella, he was critical of Donald Trump over Venezuela as well. The core of the issue for the populist right in France and elsewhere is the question of sovereignty. And if it's all about France or America, first, ultimately, therefore cannot condone an attempt to interfere in or take over or annex another sovereign state. And that is where the clash between the MAGA movement and the populist right in Europe becomes so acute. But not all of the populist leaders of Europe have spoken out. So what's going on there? No, it's interesting. I mean, Britain's Nigel Farage has done. But if you take other transatlantic leaning countries like Poland, the nationalists there have been very quiet about it. And I think that the concern in those cases, if you take Poland for example, is that they don't want to jeopardise their country's very strong transatlantic links and they think that if they are outspoken, that will undermine those ties. You've seen that also in the Netherlands, for example. And are these populist parties worried about the electoral implications of these threats? Well, I think they are. If you look at what happened in Canada, for example, at the election last year, Trump's threats to annex Canada led to the defeat for Pierre Poiev, who was the populist conservative candidate who was leading, had a huge poll lead ahead of Mark Carney. So the European populace are obviously concerned and particularly those in France who are looking ahead to presidential elections next year, they do not want that to happen. They currently have a very strong poll lead and they don't want to lose it. But more than that, they are hoping to build beyond their base on conservative right wing voters who are more Trump skeptic. So I would say that even though MAGA is clearly seeking to help these parties on the populist right, the more brazen that Trump's threats become, the greater a political liability he could be for them. Sophie, thank you very much for talking to me. It's always a pleasure, Rosie.
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Jason Palmer
Foreign. Hey, I'm Elise Hu, host of the podcast TED Talks Daily. Did you know Paylocity offers one platform.
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Guest/Correspondent (e.g., Sidharth Mangaram or other interviewees)
For HR finance and it that means.
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Jason Palmer
Innovative solutions like on demand payment which offers employees access to wages prior to payday, flexible time tracking features which enables staff to clock in through their mobile device and numerous other cutting edge integrations are available to all your teams in one single place. Learn more about how Paylocity can help streamline work and bring teams together@paylocity.com 1 Everyone deserves to be connected. That's why T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com switch and now t mobile is in USA cellular stores savings versus comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits, plan features and Texas and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits credit stop if you cancel any lines, qualifying credit required.
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Rosie Blore
Compromise and be flexible then your life will go smooth.
- [10:19]
Guest/Correspondent (e.g., Sidharth Mangaram or other interviewees)
During the pandemic, the work was treated to dating advice from Seema Aunty Kira.
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Rosie Blore
Huyu is our Asia correspondent.
- [10:26]
Guest/Correspondent (e.g., Sidharth Mangaram or other interviewees)
She was the politically incorrect star of Netflix's hit reality show Indian Matchmaking. 60 and 70%.
- [10:34]
Rosie Blore
If if you're feeling it's okay, you.
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Guest/Correspondent (e.g., Sidharth Mangaram or other interviewees)
Must proceed, she explained. People won't get 100% match. It's not good to be too picky with expectations. Her frustration with compromise averse clients was pretty evident, and so was a generational shift in how young Indians think about romance. Western dating apps came to India about a decade ago intent on changing Indian culture. Understandably, this strategy failed. Now Indian dating apps are trying to help singles navigate a new world of romance. When Western dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge first launched in India, the market looked absolutely incredible. You've got 1.4 billion people with a growing middle class, you've got a median age of 30 and you've got dirt cheap mobile data. But instead of trying to understand the existing market, Western dating apps tried to shape the market that they wanted to serve. They essentially tried to make Indian dating culture into Western dating culture. Their business model was trying to get Indians to be more liberal around taboos like sex and divorce and sexual minorities. And the response, unsurprisingly, was not what they'd hoped for. And so a swiping fatigue setting globally. This really was no different in India. This has left many young Indians feeling more frustrated than ever. I recently spent a Saturday night at the five star Oberoi Hotel in Delhi at the launch event for a new dating app in India.
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Jason Palmer
Men see a lot of dating apps.
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Rosie Blore
As a place where they kind of.
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Guest/Correspondent (e.g., Sidharth Mangaram or other interviewees)
Meet women and I mean, I wouldn't say objectify them, but they go on dating apps with a lens of objectification. One woman in her late 20s was frustrated about creepy daters on the apps. So I think that is a bit.
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Rosie Blore
Hard to really meet people who are.
- [12:40]
Guest/Correspondent (e.g., Sidharth Mangaram or other interviewees)
There for truer connections as opposed to something more flimsy. Stalking is sometimes almost romanticized in Indian pop culture, which often makes being on apps and meeting people quite difficult, especially for women. India's male to female ratio on western apps has at its worst skewed to 95 men to five women, according to some internal figures that I was shown. Part of this is that western apps became inadvertent havens for hookup culture in a country that very much still considers casual sex taboo.
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Jason Palmer
I'm a sucker for exclusivity. Like, I love that. I love that stuff. I love it when I'm like, oh, only I can be on it.
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Guest/Correspondent (e.g., Sidharth Mangaram or other interviewees)
That's great.
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Jason Palmer
Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I'm very vain person.
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Guest/Correspondent (e.g., Sidharth Mangaram or other interviewees)
MC Soupy has been on Raya, a very exclusive membership app, which he enjoyed being a part of. But he also explained how even for men, western digital dating culture can feel unnatural and awkward.
- [13:39]
Jason Palmer
We didn't grow up with that kind of like that mindset of like a flirtatious culture or that's like, you know, you know, just a chat, you know what I mean? So expecting them to then be like suave and smooth over a digital screen with a stranger is insane. Like this. It's not gonna happen very easily.
- [14:00]
Guest/Correspondent (e.g., Sidharth Mangaram or other interviewees)
But where western apps have flopped, a bunch of Indian dating apps are trying to meet the market where it is actually. The country now has the most matchmaking startups anywhere in the world and they have fewer illusions about revolutionizing dating culture. Instead, they are trying to get Indians to make an awkward cultural transition. It does make sense to focus on a particular demographic and a certain class so that your chances of succeeding are.
- [14:28]
Jason Palmer
Higher because you're not trying to be everything to everyone.
- [14:31]
Guest/Correspondent (e.g., Sidharth Mangaram or other interviewees)
Sidharth Mangaram is co founder with his wife Simran of the now defunct dating platform Flow. And he says India is not one market. It really differs wherever you go, what social class and caste you come from. And so curation is key. You need to find people from similar demographics cohorts and this increases your chances of meeting someone and decreases your chances of developing swiping fatigue. And We Met, which is an online platform for urban professionals, asks applicants to declare their income bracket and university degrees and to write a small story on how you explained the concept of privilege. Flutter has seven languages, a profanity filter and an AI tool that composes love poems on behalf of tongue tied suitors. One thing that not even Indian owned dating apps seem to have been able to crack yet is the political economy of dating. India has the highest number of matchmaking startups anywhere in the world. Like I said, but the country has only won about $17 million in funding over the past decade for these kinds of startups. That's about 2% of the money doled out to Chinese and American competitors. My guess is these funders know the mindset of the Indian single. Simran Mangaram, a dating coach, spoke to me about the penny pinching Indian consumer. I think, you know, our tolerance for pain is so high that we would.
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Rosie Blore
Suffer like a free hat and then.
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Guest/Correspondent (e.g., Sidharth Mangaram or other interviewees)
Try to pay when we really are.
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Jason Palmer
Like at the end of our tehra.
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Guest/Correspondent (e.g., Sidharth Mangaram or other interviewees)
So that's a cultural thing. Maybe Seema aunty was focusing on the wrong advice in Indian matchmaking. Instead of telling Indian youngsters to be less picky, perhaps she should have advised them to become less stingy instead.
- [16:36]
Jason Palmer
With all of modern life's seeking and climbing and attempts at self actualization, it's easy to daydream about a simpler existence. Like in the animal kingdom, your needs could be so straightforward. Food, water, a mate, not too much else. Wherever those resources are plentiful, that's where you go. Find an oasis in an arid region and you'll find other animals right there with you lapping it up. But even that basic story comes with a few complexities. So researchers for years have been wondering where animals congregate in jungles. We know that in the savannas of Africa they congregate at watering holes. But in rainforest, where water is everywhere, where do they go? Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent for the Economist. There's been anecdotal evidence for a while that they might be going to places that are rich in minerals, but no one's really been sure. When you say rich in minerals, what are we talking about? So the thing that your body really needs among the minerals we're talking about is salt. Your brain doesn't function without its you depend upon it for blood pressure. I mean, if you don't have salt at all, or if your salt levels are really low, your blood pressure plummets and you have fainting episodes, it's bad for you. In a lot of places like the savannas, you have plants that effectively collect salt because rainfall tends to be lower and they're drawing it out of the soil and it accumulates in their leaves. In the rainforest, you have such an immersion in water. There is so much of it that any minerals get diluted almost immediately. So animals living in places that have lots of water and not very much salt tend to go towards places in the soil where salt is found. As a rock or a mineral, and they can lick it up, sometimes even eating the dirt itself. So the idea of these researchers was that they wanted to find out if the salt acted as the kind of oasis that we see in the savanna where water is the thing animals are looking for. That's exactly it. There were big questions about whether or not the desperate need for salt leads animals to congregate at places where salt is found in the ground. And so this group of researchers set up camera traps at areas called salt licks. They're just mineral outcrops, usually mud or dirt, that just happens to have a lot of salt in it. And the camera traps were all established so that they would take clicks of animals video footage for a short period, anytime they detected movement. And so what did they find? Oh, boy, did they find a lot of stuff. I mean, Jason, the footage is unreal. There are video shots of ocelots swatting parakeets as they come down from the air to consume the dirt. They've got video footage of tapirs coming up. And as the tapirs are paying attention to the salt, they don't notice the vampire bats that are hopping up on the ground to create little incisions on the tapir's ankles and drink their blood. They've got tree boas, which are snatching fruit bats out of the air. In one video, there's an ocelot that attacks a howler monkey. As a howler monkey is coming in to consume some of the salt, and the ocelot pounces on the monkey, and the monkey is just not having any of it. It turns on the ocelot. You can see in slow motion, that howler monkey smacks the ocelot across the head. The ocelot turns towards the camera with this look of panic and flees for it. That's not just enough for the howler monkey. The howler monkey turns kind of roars and chases after the ocelot into the shrubs. I mean, it's astounding. It's the Discovery Channel, but saltier. Yeah, it's the Discovery channel, but saltier. But we're talking about minerals on a larger scale. And it's important to remember it's not just salt. There's a mineral called kaolinite, which is actually pretty useful for a lot of these herbivores because they're consuming a lot of plants that have toxins in them. And kaolinite helps them to neutralize those toxins in their guts, which makes it easier for them to digest them. So while we're gonna talk a lot about salts. There are other minerals in these places that these animals are picking up that are serving useful purposes. And we're only beginning to hit the tip of the iceberg on all of that as to what the value really is. Sufficient value that they may be risking their very lives. Matt, thanks very much for joining us. My pleasure, Jason. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow. Everyone deserves to be connected. That's why T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com switch and now T Mobile is in US cellular. Store yours savings versus comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits plan features in Texas and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping using self reflection and layered.
- [22:38]
Rosie Blore
Reasoning with live API checks.
- [22:40]
Jason Palmer
It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love, it helps schedule a.
- [22:43]
Rosie Blore
Test drive, get pre approved for financing and estimate trade in value.
- [22:47]
Jason Palmer
Advanced, intuitive and deployed.
- [22:50]
Rosie Blore
That's how they stack.
- [22:51]
Jason Palmer
That's technology at Capital One.