Matt Kaplan

speaker

87 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 16 Jun

Matt Kaplan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Local, an aesthetic: the deglobalisation of fun · 16 Jun 2026 podcast

I know that smell means food and went for it, as opposed to going for the unprotected hand, which they didn't have the deet odor, therefore their association wasn't in play, and so they weren't going for that blood meal instead.

Not necessarily.

The question is, is this happening in the wilderness?

And presumably it could happen in the wilderness.

For example, you spray on DEE in the morning and you go hiking through the jungle all day.

By three o'clock, if you've been sweating in the hot tropical sun, a lot of that deet will have dripped off.

So you now have a weak layer of DEET on you, and that provides the

Environment whereby conditioning could happen.

The mosquitoes know there's blood, they're hungry, and there's a weak odor of DEET.

So therefore they go and make the bite and they start to learn: okay, weak odor of DEET means there's food here.

How long they maintain the memory, we don't know yet.

But that's a situation whereby this could occur in the wild.

A similar condition could occur with somebody being

Being sloppy about putting on DEET spray in the morning and simply not putting on enough and providing that perfect learning experience for mosquitoes to make a bite on someone who's weakly protected.

If the protection is ample and you've got a lot of DEET on, the opportunity for the learning to occur is gonna be significantly reduced.

So DEET is still the gold standard, it's the best we've got.

But there is the potential for it to be beaten by people who've sweated a lot or not put on enough in the morning, providing mosquitoes with the opportunity to learn.

Thanks very much for joining us, Matt.

Hey, my pleasure, Jason.

The Intelligence from The Economist · No big deal: murky Iran-war negotiations · 26 May 2026 podcast

The main problem the black grouse face is that they have a habit of flying into chairlifts, breaking their necks and then falling to the ground dead, which is obviously bad for the black grouse, but it's also surprisingly bad for the ski resorts, which would rather not have a bunch of dead birds underneath their chairlifts for skiers to look at because it doesn't make anybody happy.

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