Over the moon: Artemis II launches

Summary

Economist Podcasts — "Over the moon: Artemis II launches"

Date: April 2, 2026
Host: Rosie Blore
Main Contributors: Oliver Morton (Planetary Affairs Editor), Dina Musa (Science Writer), Gabriel Crossley (China Correspondent)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores three compelling stories:

1. Artemis II Launch: The historic return of American astronauts to lunar orbit for the first time in over 50 years, examining the launch, its significance, and the geopolitical undertones.
2. AI Language Gaps: How AI models still falter across languages, posing critical challenges as they're rolled out in health and professional settings worldwide.
3. China’s “Influencer Officials”: The unusual rise of social media–savvy civil servants in China and what it means for party politics.

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Section 1: Artemis II Launch – Humanity Returns to the Moon

Launch Play-by-Play and Significance

With Oliver Morton (Planetary Affairs Editor, The Economist)

• Timestamps: [02:00] – [12:05]

Key Discussion Points

• The Artemis II mission marks the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo, with a launch using NASA's most powerful rocket.
• The first phase includes a high looping Earth orbit, then a figure-eight trajectory around the moon, returning to Earth on day 10, splashing down near San Diego.
• Significance lies in venturing “beyond the shallows" of space for the first time in decades—moving from low Earth orbit (the "beach") to deep space (the "Channel").

Launch Highlights

• [02:00] NASA launch audio dramatizes the moment:
  "Booster ignition and lift off. The crew of Artemis 2 now bound for the moon. Humanity's next great voyage begins."
• [03:14] Ollie explains "Max Q," the phase of maximum aerodynamic pressure where the spacecraft endures the greatest stress.
  • “It's the point at which the system's under the greatest stress.” — Oliver Morton
• [04:17] Discusses the separation of solid rocket boosters, referencing Challenger: “It's always nice to get rid of them.”
• [05:16] As the spacecraft "Integrity" proceeds, the crew enjoys a moonrise:
  “It's nice that one of the coincidences of the way that you have to launch to get to the moon... you can see where you're going.” — Oliver Morton

Mission’s Purpose & Geopolitical Context

• [07:02] Rosie asks: “What's the point of the Artemis 2 mission?”
  • Oliver: "The point of Artemis II is effectively the Artemis III mission. The point of Artemis III is the Artemis IV mission."
  • Future missions will attempt a landing and establish an enduring moon presence—potentially a moon base akin to Antarctic research stations.
• NASA's program, reignited in 2017 under President Trump, has faced delays, with upgrades under administrator Jared Isaacman aiming to increase mission frequency.

Why Return to the Moon?

• [08:43] Morton draws a contrast with 1960s Apollo:
  “The moon missions of the 1960s were effectively a sort of Superpower Flex.”
  • 1960s goal: Beating the Soviets to the moon.
  • Today: Twofold—the end of the current space station era and a response to China's rapid moon program, which aims for a human landing by 2030.
• Current urgency (since Chinese robotic and upcoming crewed missions) is both strategic and symbolic; prestige is at stake (“a hedge against the loss of prestige”).

The New “Space Race”?

• [10:58] Rosie: “So is this really just old fashioned space race stuff again then?”
• Oliver:
  "Part of it is just, yeah, we can do that and you can't. But there are also ideas about what sort of civilization you want to be... national self assertion, trying to be an America that many Americans would want America to be... a moon base sort of speaks to that because it can be seen as this, like, reopening of the frontier."
  — Oliver Morton [11:20]

Notable Quotes & Moments

• [07:57] On mission return: “People have flown this trajectory before, but they haven't done it for more than 50 years... this is going a bit out into the ocean.” — Oliver Morton
• [11:51] Rockets into deep space:
  "Integrity 75 miles in altitude, 330 miles downrange, approaching 10,000 miles per hour." — NASA Launch Commentator

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Section 2: AI Language Gaps and Real-World Risks

With Dina Musa (Science Writer)
Timestamps: [13:10] – [19:13]

Key Discussion Points

• Modern AI models (LLMs) can give vastly different answers in different languages, sometimes dangerously so.
• Example: A pregnant woman asking about swollen legs may get life-saving advice in English (“warned about preeclampsia”) but only reassurance in Swahili (“just be told not to worry”).
• [13:55] Stakes are high as LLMs are deployed professionally:
  • Gates Foundation and OpenAI’s $50 million project in African clinics could risk lives if advice is subpar in local languages.

Why the Disparity?

• [14:36] Data and design:
  • Most LLMs are primarily trained on English, with less data for other languages.
  • Tokenization—the way models break down text—is designed for English. This makes them inefficient and less accurate in other languages, and costs more per query outside English.

The Size of the Gap

• [15:36]
  • Studies on African languages: Top models performed 12–20 percentage points worse than English. In worst cases, dropped from 75% to 23% accuracy.
  • “The gap gets wider the more dissimilar a language is to English... Igbo or Yoruba see much larger drops than Spanish or French.”

Is the Gap Closing?

• [16:37] Progress is real, but slow:
  • LLMs are improving, but language gaps haven’t narrowed significantly in recent updates (e.g., GPT 5.2 ≈ O3).
  • “Progress has stalled on multilingual accuracy in the last few iterations.” — Dina Musa [16:57]

Are Multilingual Models Better?

• Even models designed for multilingual use (like Meta’s Llama) often default to answering in English first, then translate—losing accuracy in the process.
  • Mandarin/Korean: Under a quarter of factual questions answered correctly, despite possessing the relevant knowledge in English.

Solutions & Outlook

• [18:14]
  • Adding even small amounts of high-quality non-English data can help—related languages provide positive spillovers.
  • Deeper fix would be redesigning tokenization for linguistic diversity.
  • However, these changes require labs to prioritize non-English accuracy, which isn’t currently the case.
  • “Right now... the people with the most to gain from these tools who are in developing economies, are the least able to use them.” — Dina Musa [18:57]

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Section 3: China’s “Influencer Officials” — A Social Media Revolution in Governance

With Gabriel Crossley (China Correspondent, Beijing)
Timestamps: [19:30] – [23:56]

Key Discussion Points

• Young Communist Party officials are increasingly using social media to broadcast their dedication amid pressure from both the public and the party’s leadership.

Why Social Media Now?

• Officials face complaints of being lazy and out of touch; President Xi Jinping campaigns vocally against “bureaucratic laziness.”
  • New anti-corruption focus now includes laziness, making it imperative for young officials not only to work, but to be seen working.

What Kind of Content?

• Examples:

  • Officials like Pang Fuqiang post videos giving noodles to villagers.
  • Others film themselves managing local issues—traffic control, produce—and are highly responsive to comments.
  • Many of these “influencer officials” work in rural areas, featuring local fruits and vegetables in their content.

• [22:15] A viral example—Lin Yang Duo, “China's hottest village cadre,” smashes persimmons with his biceps: “He calls his follower 'babe.' ... He became famous by posting videos like this of him squashing persimmons, which are a local specialty, on his biceps.”

Does the Party Approve?

• [23:01]
  • Party higher-ups approve: Social media–famous officials are more likely to get promoted and attract state investment.
  • There are risks: Some officials take bigger, riskier stunts; in one tragic case, an official died filming a horse-riding promotion.
  • Some party critics argue this distracts from real governance, but for now, “influencer officials” enjoy support. Trends could change quickly.

Notable Insights

• Crossley: “For now, the party does seem supportive, but what's more popular today can quickly fall out of favor.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On moon launches:
  "This is going a bit out into the ocean. Our colleague Tim said that it's the difference between going 40 meters off the beach at Dover and swimming the Channel." — Oliver Morton [07:57]

• On the moon as a prestige project:
  “There's a lot of ideological weight in America that says, yeah, we want to be people who go forth and do stuff that no one else has done before... a moon base sort of speaks to that because it can be seen as this, like, reopening of the frontier.” — Oliver Morton [11:20]

• On AI language risk:
  “The people with the most to gain from these tools... are the least able to use them.” — Dina Musa [18:57]

• On China’s influencer officials:
  “Some officials been doing more and more extreme stunts to get views... Some party critics say that this sort of thing is distracting officials from real work.” — Gabriel Crossley [23:30]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [02:00] – Artemis II launch and live commentary with Oliver Morton.
• [07:02] – Mission aims and America’s lunar ambitions discussed.
• [13:10] – Dina Musa on AI language gaps and health risks.
• [19:30] – Gabriel Crossley on the rise of “influencer officials” in China.
• [23:54] – Closing remarks and cross-promo to Drum Tower (China podcast).

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Final Thoughts

This episode of The Intelligence reminds listeners that the stories beneath the headlines—be it a new space race, the quiet risks in AI, or shifting forms of statecraft in China—are shaping the future just as much as the “main events.”

Transcript

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[Oliver Morton]

The economist foreign.

[Rosie Blore]

Welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. We keep being told that AI models are getting better and better, and they are, up to a point, but their use and accuracy may depend on what language you ask for help in. And most Chinese officials try to avoid publicity. But now there's a surprising trend. Social media is turning civil servants into video stars. We consider the influencer official. First up though,

[NASA Launch Commentator]

Gls, go for your left. Great call out. The rocket is on its own. Four brave explorers ready to ride the most powerful rocket NASA has ever launched. 10, 9, 8, 7 RS 25 engines lit. 4, 3, 2, 1. Booster ignition and lift off. The crew of Artemis 2 now bound for the moon. Humanity's next great voyage begins

[Oliver Morton]

on Wednesday evening at around half past six local time. The wildlife and the observing people at Cape Canaveral heard sounds that they have not heard for decades.

[Rosie Blore]

Oliver Morton, our planetary affairs editor, has also written a book about the moon.

[Oliver Morton]

It was a heavy lift launcher built by NASA that was taking people back to the moon for the first time in over 50 years. The name of the mission, as everyone now knows, is Artemis 2.

[Rosie Blore]

So it's taking off. I mean, that just looks amazing.

[Oliver Morton]

That is quite cool. So what you would need to watch out for is a bit after a minute in, it goes through what's called Max Q, which is when the pressure on the spacecraft is greatest. It's going faster and faster, so that's building up pressure, but the air is getting thinner and thinner, so that's taking pressure down. So Max Q is the bit where those two things balance out

[Rosie Blore]

and presumably that's a Dangerous moment.

[Oliver Morton]

It is the point at which the system's under the greatest stress.

[NASA Launch Commentator]

Mission elapsed. Time passing one minute, approaching max Q.

[Oliver Morton]

Gotta say, though, SpaceX has higher production values, they do their video better

[NASA Launch Commentator]

communication signal transform confirmed. As integrity and its crew go supersonic.

[Oliver Morton]

This is the bit that one really breathes a sigh of relief over.

[NASA Launch Commentator]

Solid rocker booster separation expected at the 2 minute 9 second mark.

[Oliver Morton]

It's the solid rocket boosters that took out Challenger.

[Rosie Blore]

Right.

[Oliver Morton]

It's always nice to get rid of them. And there they go.

[NASA Launch Commentator]

Confirmed separation.

[Rosie Blore]

Oh, those are the rocket boosters.

[Oliver Morton]

Those are the solid rocket boosters. And you can just see the two rocket boosters left behind it. Guidance converged. Performance nominal. Upper stage RCS ready. Copy. Integrity.

[NASA Launch Commentator]

SM priming complete.

[Oliver Morton]

Integrity is the name of the spacecraft.

[NASA Launch Commentator]

Three minutes into the flight. Integrity.

[Rosie Blore]

Oh, wow, that's a beautiful shot.

[Oliver Morton]

And then there's a lovely shot of the stage separation after Miko, which is main engine cut off.

[Rosie Blore]

So we're seeing amazing shots of the Earth.

[Oliver Morton]

Outstanding stand.

[Capital One Advertiser]

We see the same and we have

[Oliver Morton]

a beautiful moon rise.

[Capital One Advertiser]

We're headed right at it.

[Oliver Morton]

It's a sort of like. It's nice that they've come around to see the moon because, you know, they launched in late afternoon and now they've come round the Earth into the night as they're going east. It's nice that one of the coincidences of the way that you have to launch to get to the moon favors, certainly for a mission like this, launching at full moon and so you can see where you're going.

[Rosie Blore]

I always think a moonrise is a beautiful term.

[Oliver Morton]

It is, it is.

[Rosie Blore]

Ollie, that was super cool. Tell me what we've just watched.

[Oliver Morton]

Well, that was the launch of the first crewed mission in the Artemis program. And so the first time that that large rocket has actually taken a crew into orbit and it will take them into orbit around the Earth. And then about a day and a bit into the mission, they'll go from this high looping orbit around the Earth into a much longer loop that will form a sort of like figure of eight around the moon. And so they'll be taken around the moon and back to the Earth. And then they're about on mission day 10, they'll re enter the Earth's atmosphere and splash down somewhere in the vicinity of San Diego. People have flown this trajectory before, but they haven't done it for more than 50 years. This is the first time that a mission has gone beyond the low Earth orbit where the space station and other things like The Hubble Space Telescope that needs servicing. They all live, really, in the shallows of space. This is going a bit out into the ocean. Our colleague Tim said that it's the difference between going 40 meters off the beach at Dover and swimming the Channel.

[Rosie Blore]

Ollie, don't get me wrong, I loved watching that. I think it's amazing. It's fantastic to have a good news story. But what's the point of the Artemis 2 mission?

[Oliver Morton]

Yeah, that does bring one, as it were, down to Earth a bit. The point of the Artemis II mission is effectively the Artemis III mission. The point of the Artemis III mission is the Artemis IV mission. Artemis IV will have a crew that will go up, as we've just seen the crew of Artemis II do. They will then dock with a separate spacecraft that's designed to land on the moon, and they will then land on the moon. This was a goal that was reset to NASA in 2017 by President Trump. And they've been, frankly, lackluster in their performance in trying to get there. The original idea was that we'd be at this stage of the program something like five years ago. They're hobbled by having equipment that was, to some extent, foisted on them by Congress that really doesn't allow you to do the job particularly well. But they are getting there. And they have the advantage that in a new administrator, Jared Isaacman, they actually have someone who seems to really want to make this thing effective, to try and increase the tempo at which missions to the Moon are launched. And as he was announcing last week at an event rather, rather portentously called Ignition, he wants to build a moon base for Americans to make missions to the Moon part of an enduring process that will lead to something sort of analogous to one of the research stations on Antarctica. I guess.

[Rosie Blore]

It's all very impressive, but NASA's done this before, so what's the difference and why are they doing it again?

[Oliver Morton]

You've got to remember that the moon missions of the 1960s were effectively a sort of like Superpower Flex. Russia had got into space first. It had put a man into space before America had been able to. America fell itself behind in the space race. So it said, double or quits. We'll do something more dramatic. We'll go to the Moon. And they did, and it was very impressive. They didn't really have any rationale or any particular pensions or the money to keep doing that or go on any further. And so that became, as it were, the high watermark of the space program. After that, NASA concentrated on doing Things in low Earth orbit, having a space shuttle. And then once it had a space shuttle, it used the space shuttle to build a space station. That space station, which it built with international partners including Russia, is now coming to the end of its life. So NASA needs something else to do, because no one wants to just say, oh, yeah, space, we've done that, that's over. So they have a new objective. So the objective is either Mars, which is really difficult, or the moon, which is less difficult. And in 2017, President Trump chose moon, and they were sort of like dawdling along, as I said, rather ineffectually getting towards a moon mission. And then they realized that the Chinese, who are an increasingly serious space power, had a structured moon program that was landing little lunar robots, bringing back samples. And the Chinese said that they were going to put people on the moon by 2030. And suddenly it all became a little bit more urgent and NASA's rather complicated plan started looking a little bit raggedy. And so in the last year or so, you've seen more urgency. Mr. Isaacman, administrator for NASA, who's himself an astronaut, he's actually paid for two space missions of his own, is a serious man about trying to get these things done and trying to get back to the moon. And as he puts it this time to stay. Whether they can actually beat China back is still fairly up in the air because although things seem a lot more ship shape, there's an awful lot of engineering to get done before you can actually land people safely on the moon and indeed bring them back.

[Rosie Blore]

So is this really just old fashioned space race stuff again then?

[Oliver Morton]

I do think that the main thing is it's a hedge against the loss of prestige of not being on the moon when the Chinese are there. But you've got to remember the space race stuff is kind of layered. Part of it is just, yeah, we can do that and you can't. But there are also ideas about what sort of civilization you want to be and whether you want to embody some sort of like outbound urge. And there's a lot of ideological weight in America that says, yeah, we want to be people who go forth and do stuff that no one else has done before. And so that's sort of like superpower prestige, but it's also sort of like national self assertion, trying to be an America that many Americans would want America to be, I think. And a moon base sort of speaks to that because it can be seen as this, like, reopening of the frontier.

[Rosie Blore]

Ollie, thank you very much. Great to talk to you.

[Oliver Morton]

Really nice to talk to you, Rosie.

[NASA Launch Commentator]

Control Houston. Integrity 75 miles in altitude 330 miles downrange approaching 10,000 miles per hour.

[Oliver Morton]

Integrity Looking good at six minutes. Same on board, Stan.

[NASA Launch Commentator]

Good trajectory and engine performance.

[Capital One Advertiser]

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[Dina Musa]

If you ask an LLM the same question in two different languages, you might get two different answers. And in some cases that can be dangerous.

[Rosie Blore]

Dina Musa is a science writer.

[Dina Musa]

So imagine a pregnant woman asking a leading model what to do about swollen legs. If she asks in English, she'll probably be warned about preeclampsia, which is a complication that is responsible for over 70,000 maternal deaths every year. But if she asks that same question in Swahili, she might just be told not to worry. And that kind of disparity is plausible given the research and potentially dangerous. The stakes of this difference are only getting higher by the day.

[Rosie Blore]

So why are the stakes getting higher by the day?

[Dina Musa]

Yeah, increasingly these tools are moving beyond personal use. They're being deployed professionally in settings like medical care in developing countries. For example, in January, the Gates foundation and OpenAI announced $50 million plan to roll out AI tools across a thousand primary health clinics in Africa for patient triage and medical advice in local languages. And that's a situation where getting the answer wrong is more than an inconvenience. With the current language gap, those patients would be getting an inferior product to the one that we use in the US today.

[Rosie Blore]

So why is there such a disparity?

[Dina Musa]

Yeah, there are really two aspects to this, and the first and the most obvious one is training data. So these models are predominantly trained on English language text, and so they simply know more in English. The second problem has to do with how LLMs parse language. So before a model does anything with text, it breaks it into small chunks called tokens. And because tokenization is designed based on English, non English text gets broken up into inefficient fragments. So that means it takes more tokens to convey the same amount of meaning or to say the same thing. And that matters both because it indicates that the model is less efficient at understanding the language, it takes more energy to do so, but also practically because developers pay per token, and so the same query can cost significantly more in another language other than English.

[Rosie Blore]

Dina, you gave us an example at the top about the difference in advice we might get in two different languages. Just how big is that gap?

[Dina Musa]

More generally, I would say it's larger than most people assume. So researchers recently tested some frontier models on reasoning and medical knowledge across 11 African languages and found that even the top scoring models perform between 12 and 20 percentage points worse than they did in English. One of the authors said that they saw performance as at the level of an English language model from five years ago in terms of accuracy. And I think all of us who have been tracking AI models over the past 5 years know what an enormous difference that is. In the worst cases, it can be even more dramatic. One model that correctly answered about 75% of questions in English dropped to about 23% in other languages. And that gap gets wider the more dissimilar a language is to English. So with the exact same data per language, a model would handle Spanish or French better than it would Igbo or Yoruba, for example.

[Rosie Blore]

As you say, we know that AI models are getting better. Does that mean the gap is closing?

[Dina Musa]

Yeah. So the authors of that same study that I mentioned released a formal benchmark, essentially a standardized test for how well LLMs handle other languages to be able to track this for future models. And researchers at Stanford have since used it to evaluate some models as they've been released. And those newer systems do perform better than the ones in the original study. So there is progress, and I think this is a pretty important caveat. They still don't perform nearly as well as they do in English. So, based on OpenAI's own benchmarks and the model cards, for example, progress has stalled on multilingual accuracy in the last few iterations. So GPT 5.2 is roughly on par with models like O3, which was released about eight months earlier. So I would say the improvement is real, but the gap has not closed and has not been significant in the last eight months or so.

[Rosie Blore]

And what about models that are designed to be multilingual.

[Dina Musa]

Yeah, you would think that they might be immune, but unfortunately they're not. There's a study that focused on Meta's llama model, which was built for multilingual use and found that even when asked a question in another language, it often retrieves the answer internally in English first and then translates at the last step. And every extra step just adds opportunity for error. So the failures were most pronounced in languages like Mandarin and Korean, where the model got fewer than a quarter of factual questions right, even when the internal representation showed that it actually found the right English answer. So it had the knowledge, it just got lost in translation.

[Rosie Blore]

So what's the answer? What can be done about this?

[Dina Musa]

There are a few different levers here. I would say the most tractable in the near term is data. So even adding small amounts of high quality non English data can make a meaningful difference. And interestingly, adding a language that is related also helps. So you don't need perfect coverage of every language. As long as you have something that is at least quite similar, you can get positive spillover effects. The more intensive fix would be rethinking tokenization. So deliberately training models on more linguistically diverse data so that non English text is represented more efficiently from the ground up, that's harder, but it would address the structural problem. But I think both of these would require labs to see this as a priority. And right now it isn't clear that it is. Currently, I would say the people with the most to gain from these tools who are in developing economies, are the least able to use them. And until that changes, some of the deployments we're seeing in health settings, like in African health clinics, can carry real risk.

[Rosie Blore]

Dina, thank you very much.

[Dina Musa]

Thank you.

[Gabriel Crossley]

Young Communist Party officials are always under pressure to show they're working hard, and recently they've been doing so with the help of social media.

[Rosie Blore]

Gabriel Crossley, our China correspondent, is based in Beijing.

[Gabriel Crossley]

This is wu Shaoyu, a 36 year old village official from Hainan Province in China's south. She's standing in Tiananmen Square during a recent session of China's parliament and making a video for her 240,000 followers. She looks straight into the camera and. I will devote my heart and soul to being a good representative of the people. Videos like these are becoming more and more common and turning officials like Wu Shaoyu into social media stars.

[Rosie Blore]

Gabriel, this sounds quite unusual. Chinese officials tend to stay under the radar, so why are they now turning to social media?

[Gabriel Crossley]

Party officials are facing a Lot of extra pressure to perform these days. So this is from ordinary Chinese people complaining that they're a little lazy and out of touch. And also, Xi Jinping, the country's leader, often rails against bureaucratic laziness. And his anti graft watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, has in the last few years widened its focus to investigate laziness too. So these days, it's not just enough for officials to do the usual parts of their job, but they must be seen being busy doing it. And social media really helps here.

[Rosie Blore]

So what kinds of videos are these influencer officials making?

[Gabriel Crossley]

It varies a lot. One fairly popular official called Pang Fuqiang. He's an official from the inland province of Shaanxi. He's become famous by posting videos of himself going around his village offering steaming bowls of noodles to grateful elderly residents. Other officials make videos about seemingly quite humdrum topics like traffic control. And they respond to all the comments underneath and make sure the local residents feel happy with how they're dealing with it. A lot of these social media stars officials live in the countryside, so there's a lot of content about local fruit and vegetables.

[Rosie Blore]

So traffic control and local produce doesn't exactly sound like material for hit content. Yeah.

[Gabriel Crossley]

Let me show you something. Take a look at this.

[Rosie Blore]

Wow, that was pretty unexpected. A very fit man holding a persimmon between his biceps and then tasting it. What is going on here?

[Gabriel Crossley]

Yeah, this is a guy called Lin Yang Duo. He's one of the more popular official influencers. He's in China's eastern province of Zhejiang. Sometimes he wears a tight fitting top, as you saw. Sometimes he wears a Mao suit. He calls his follower babe. And he became famous by posting videos like this of him squashing persimmons, which are a local specialty, on his biceps. Fans have called him China's hottest village cadre. And he has about half a million followers on Douyin, China's version of TikTok.

[Rosie Blore]

This isn't typical Communist Party fare. How is the party responding to this type of content?

[Gabriel Crossley]

They seem to like it. The higher ups. One study showed social media famous officials seemed more likely to get promotions, and they also got more state investment flowing into their jurisdictions. The party likes it when party officials really show the masses that they're up to stuff. On the other hand, the trend does bring some risks. Some officials been doing more and more extreme stunts to get views. One official in Xinjiang made dramatic horse riding clips intended to attract tourists. And she sadly died earlier this year following an accident. And there are some critics within the party, too. They say that this sort of thing is distracting officials from real work, so certainly young influencer officials should be careful how to tread that line. For now, the party does seem supportive, but what's more popular today can quickly fall out of favor.

[Rosie Blore]

Gabriel, thank you very much for talking to me.

[Gabriel Crossley]

Thank you for having me.

[Rosie Blore]

And you can hear more about social media and what you can see on the Chinese Internet on this week's episode of Drum Tower, our China podcast. You'll need to be a subscriber. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

[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 episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.