Losing the plot: Brazil-US relations tested

12:08host unknown:to choose your trail and know what to expect. You can also download the map in case service gets spotty. Plan and experience your next hike with AllTrails, the app for exploring the outdoors. Download it today and find your outside.

12:25Julian Fellowes:Hi, I'm Nick, co-host of The Best One Yet. You optimize your workouts, your portfolios, and that rando startup idea that hit you in the middle of the shower. But if you're not hydrated, you're already playing catch-up. So we keep a stash of Liquid IV in our studio. One stick mixed into 16 ounces of water is clinically demonstrated to hydrate faster than water alone with three times the electrolytes of the leading sports drink, plus eight vitamins and nutrients. Whether you're traveling, exercising, or podcasting, the best business news ever, Liquid IV makes it easy to stay hydrated wherever life takes you.

12:53Julian Fellowes:So shop now at liquidiv.com. Liquid IV hydration that goes wherever life takes you.

13:03host unknown:Some of the craziest action I have ever seen. It was personal. Time is running out. Oh, no. The clip you're hearing right now is from a World Chase Tag competition.

13:15Julian Fellowes:Carlos Subirana is a news editor at The Economist.

13:18host unknown:It's a simple game. Two athletes crouch inside a kind of jungle gym full of bars and rumps. And when the buzzer goes, one sprints off, and the other has just 20 seconds to try and catch them.

13:31Julian Fellowes:Listen to the reaction from the fans.

13:34host unknown:World Chase Tag has basically turned a playground game into a professional sport. There are referees, sponsors, even TV deals. Millions have watched. It's on ESPN in America and Channel 4 here in Britain. And tag isn't the only niche sport getting that kind of backing. ESPN has bought a minority stake in the main lacrosse league. And CVC, a private equity giant, has pumped more than$300 million into a new venture called Volleyball World that runs the sports commercial side. It's really paying off. The Nation League, volleyball's main tournament, saw its audience jump by more than 40 % last year.

14:16Julian Fellowes:So I'm still struggling with the idea that tag has been turned into like a professional sport. Why are all of these, any of these niche sports getting such attention and cash?

14:24host unknown:I know these sports can sound a bit ridiculous at first, but they're really booming, both in popularity and in money flowing in. And a lot of the momentum goes back to the pandemic. When the big leagues shut down, lockdown audiences went looking for anything else to watch. And then that gave smaller sports a chance to break through. And then once things reopened, people wanted those shared in-person experiences again. So this boosted attendance in smaller sports. So for example, last year, a women's volleyball match in Nebraska pulled in more than 92 ,000 fans. And that set a world record for attendance at a women's sporting event.

15:06host unknown:And then streaming is a big part of this too. Because unlike TV channels, which only have so many slots to fill, streaming platforms can have unlimited amounts of content. That gives smaller sports a chance to sit alongside the big ones. and find their own audiences.

15:22Julian Fellowes:Well, what are those audiences, though? Is there a particular demographic that's gotten into these weird little sports?

15:27host unknown:They're mostly designed with younger audiences in mind. So traditional sports like golf or tennis are really struggling with aging fan bases. But these newcomers, they don't have to stick to old rule books, so they can redesign the whole product for digital natives with shorter attention spans. So take the King's League in Spain, for example. It's five-a-side football, but the game has lots of wild rules. Like, for example, fans get to vote online for rule changes during the match. And then that helps keep people engaged. Or take TGL, a new golf league set up by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. The matches are staged indoors and the players hit into computer simulators and then finish the holes in person on a live putting green.

16:14host unknown:and its audience is on average 12 years younger than the PGA Tour, the sports main circuit. And then another thing that has pulled younger audiences in is that the atmosphere in those events often isn't like a traditional match. So they're more like a festival with music, light and a party vibe that attracts young fans.

16:35Julian Fellowes:And where lots of fans go, lots of investors follow, you're saying?

16:39host unknown:It actually really started with the big mainstream sports. So franchise values in the NFL, the NBA, European football all shot up in recent years. And so then investors realized that sport itself had become an asset class and then everyone wanted in. But the chances to buy into those top leagues are rare. So stakes hardly ever come up for sale. So with all this capital chasing limited opportunities, investors have started looking into smaller leaks instead. So for them, these sports are kind of a way to get a foot in the door. The idea is that if you can launch a leak from scratch and show that you understand how the business works, that gives you the track record to invest when the bigger franchises eventually let investors in.

17:25Julian Fellowes:But still, in terms of relative income investment interest, these are still small leaks, right? They're not going to catch up with your NFLs and your NBAs.

17:34host unknown:Yeah, smaller leagues actually rely on the same three revenue streams as the big ones. They rely on media rights, ticket sales and merchandise and sponsorships. But the difference is that the mix looks very different. So in the NFL, for example, about half of the income comes from broadcasters. And then with the smaller sports, it's often the reverse. So some leagues charge tiny fees or even nothing at all just to get airtime. And then early on, most of the money comes straight from fans. So social media is a key part of that. For example, if you get a viral clip on TikTok or Instagram, that can quickly turn into jersey sales or even ticket sales for an event coming up.

18:14Julian Fellowes:And how much of this do you think is just interest in something that's new and niche? How much of it might be a fad or is this the way of sport now?

18:21host unknown:Well, there is a risk here, which is that only a handful of new leagues will be able to hold people's attention in the long term. So in some sports, the rush of capital is already creating chaos, with rival leagues competing for the same tiny pool of fans. Pickleball in America is a good example. At one point, there were three different official circuits, which just ended up confusing audiences. And some of the new leagues are struggling. Just last month, Grand Slam Track, which is a new kind of athletics league which introduces teams and shorter contests, admitted that it was late paying athletes their prize money because funding hadn't come through.

19:01host unknown:But the appeal is strong, so if you happen to back the next Major League Soccer or UFC, the returns can be huge. And for now, that prospect is enough to keep investors in the game.

19:14Julian Fellowes:Thanks very much for your time, Carla.

19:16host unknown:Thank you, Jason.

19:34Julian Fellowes:For all of us, in all our lives, we must be prepared to change if we want to hold on to what we care about. The reigning bard of the eternal English subject of class, Julian Fellows is the writer and creator of the Downton Abbey saga.

19:52host unknown:Andrew Miller writes our backstory column.

19:55Julian Fellowes:Her smash-hit story depicts the noble Crawley clan facing up to the social changes of the 20th century. Downton Abbey, the grand finale, the last instalment in the extended Downton universe, is out in cinemas now. Once again, the Crawleys are adapting to modernity, led by Lady Mary, the story's tough-nut heiress.

20:18host unknown:Families like ours must keep moving to survive.

20:22Julian Fellowes:I met Lord Fellows to look back on the triumph of Downton, and the twists and turns in his own life that led to it.

20:32Julian Fellowes:Ennobled in 2011, Lord Fellows was born a son of the landed gentry. By his own account, he was a plain and timid teenager who reinvented himself on an oil tanker bound for South America. I realised that I could be whoever I wanted to be when I got off the boat because they have no previous knowledge of me as an adult. The newly gregarious version of him studied at Cambridge and danced at coming out balls. If you have the misfortune to be born into a generation which must earn its living, his father advised him, you might as well do something amusing. Lord Fellows took him with his word and went on to drama school.

21:11Julian Fellowes:Being a jobbing actor was perfect training for screenwriting, he told me. It gave him a new perspective on the rarefied world he'd grown up in, and it involved a lot of what he called rescue work on dodgy scripts. I think I learnt in those years what is sayable and what is not sayable.

21:34Julian Fellowes:Now, there are two legendary moments in his life after that. First, he proposed to his wife, Emma Kitchener, a relative of the First World War titan, Lord Kitchener, 20 minutes after they met. She wrote in her diary, a funny little man asked me to marry him. And as I pointed out, I had the last laugh because she did. Then, in 2002, he won an Oscar for the screenplay of Gosford Park, a country house film directed by Robert Altman. After that came Downton Abbey. Who, critics wondered when it first aired in 2010, was still interested in the tiny, aloof British aristocracy. An awful lot of people, it turns out, who tuned in around the world to follow the lives and loves of the Crawleys from the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 to 1930, and across six TV series and now three movies.

22:26Julian Fellowes:Partly that's down to the modern storylines about love and feelings and scandal, but in a period setting. Then there's his artful balance between the upstairs lives of the Toffs and the downstairs servants. And there's a mix of seismic events like war, epidemics, ruin, and everyday challenges, such as in the new film, planning a country fair. Someone once said of life, it's the business of solving problems and then you die. And on the whole, that's true of all of us. To its detractors, Downton offers an overly rosy view of a stratified era. That's a bit of a simplification, I think, because angst lurks amid the turrets and frocks, especially for gay characters and women of all classes.

23:17Julian Fellowes:What is true is that, as Hugh Bonneville, one of the stars, put it to me, Lord Fellows writes from a default position that people try to be good. No one and no social group is all bad, nor immune from hardship. Speaking of the actors, Maggie Smith, as the Dowager Countess, became the supreme goddess of the Downton cult. She died last year and appears only in flashback in the new film. In the role, Lord Fellows told me, she was perfect.

23:49Julian Fellowes:Lots of American viewers loved Downton, maybe because its social hierarchy is soothingly benign. Now, Lord Fellows has adapted his upstairs-downstairs formula in The Gilded Age, another multi-series hit. This one set in the 1880s, among New York's robber barons and their servants. Well, I'm up against all these fellows with money and position. Well, you have position, even if you don't have money. But that's the thing, without money, you just don't count.

24:16host unknown:Well, then you must find a way to make some.

24:20Julian Fellowes:In The Gilded Age, there's a writer character who publishes a tell-all book about high society and is banished. I wondered if Lord Fellowes had suffered any pushback for lifting the veil on the Uppercrust world. Yes, he said, at the beginning. A fellow guest once questioned him at a house party. When you're writing the dialogue, do you write what the ladies say as well? Of course, I wanted to say certainly not, but I did admit to writing that Minus Thallow, which rather shocked him. Lord Fellows is to the posh what the naturalist Sir David Attenborough is to guerrillas, if Sir David were a guerrilla himself, an expert insider guide to dinner placement, shooting parties, and the gap between what nabobs say and what they really think.

25:10Julian Fellowes:but he knows that in modern Britain, poshness is rarely conducive to popularity. Everyone tries to persuade you that they're working class, even if their mother was the daughter of a duke. I think that will pass. It's a kind of rather silly naivety. Perhaps surprisingly, he's wryly sceptical about the whole concept of class. It's a natural arrangement, he thinks, but also in part a confidence trick, as he put it, played by the elite on the masses. It seems to me that his own life conforms to the system and confounds it. Combining a lucky start with hard work, risks and talent, he struck me as that English oxymoron, a self-made toff.

25:56Julian Fellowes:Before we said farewell, I asked where this genial arbiter of etiquette and protocol would put me on the class spectrum. He politely declined. What rank am I, do you think? Oh, no, I never get anyone else set rank. I don't have to figure it out for myself.

26:21host unknown:That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

27:05host unknown:We'll see you next time. Black Friday in July, ends July 27th. Shop today at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home.

27:14Julian Fellowes:Hi, I'm Nick, co-host of The Best One Yet. You optimize your workouts, your portfolios, and that rando startup idea that hit you in the middle of the shower. But if you're not hydrated, you're already playing catch-up. So we keep a stash of liquid IV in our studio. One stick mixed into 16 ounces of water is clinically demonstrated to hydrate faster than water alone with three times the electrolytes of the leading sports drink, plus eight vitamins and nutrients. Whether you're traveling, exercising, or podcasting the best business news ever, Liquid IV makes it easy to stay hydrated wherever life takes you.

27:43Julian Fellowes:So shop now at liquidiv.com. Liquid IV hydration that goes wherever life takes you.