The Press Box - Facebook in the Hot Seat and the Problem With ‘The Simpsons’ | Damage Control (Ep. 453)

Episode Date: April 12, 2018

The Ringer’s Justin Charity and Kate Knibbs break down Mark Zuckerberg’s week testifying in front of Congress (2:04) and what the legislators questioning him were missing (14:03). Then, they discuss the backlash against the ‘Simpsons’ character Apu (18:07) and how the series decided to address the controversy this week, which caused even more outrage (20:19). More from The Ringer: A Visual Guide to the Facebook Congressional Hearing Five Pressing Questions About Facebook’s Future ‘The Simpsons’ Decides There’s No ‘Problem With Apu’ ‘The Problem With Apu’ Wonders How to Rehabilitate the Embarrassing ‘Simpsons’ Character Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control. Wait, wait a minute. Who's Kate Nibs? Wait. I'm your co-worker. Who is Kate Nibs?

We got to take this again. Kate Nibs. My colleague, Kate Nibb. Yes. Staff writer at the ringer, Kate Nibs. Hi. I'm here. I'm not Cam.

You're not Cam. He left us, but we love him. Cam went to Vanity Fair. But also, we're never going to speak of him again, and I'm here now. I'm going to speak of Cam a lot. For now, Kate Nib. Let's take it again. I'm Justin Charity.

And I'm Kate Nibs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. Tradition forbids me even to speak to the woman I'm about to spend my life with. Has the whole world gone crazy? Nah, just your screwy country. The problem with Apu!

This week we're talking about the Simpsons' long-anticipated response, delivered Sunday night, to the comedian Hari Kondabolu's racial critique of one of the show's most beloved. loved, but also most cringeworthy characters. But first, Mark Zuckerberg went to Washington. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Zuckerberg spent more than eight hours this week, sitting before U.S. lawmakers in two very long televised hearings.

We're going to talk about the future of Facebook, the nature of Facebook, and how it has made all of our personal data its business. Would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night? Um, uh, no. If you've messaged anybody this week, would you share with us the names of the people you've messaged? Senator, no, I would probably not choose to do that publicly here. I think that may be what this is all about.

Your right to privacy, the limits of your right to privacy, and how much you give away. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went to Washington this week to face questions from Congress about how Facebook handles people's personal data. Journalists had proven that Facebook allowed a third-party developer to access the data of around 87 million people and then sell it to a political data firm called Cambridge Analytica, which was then used by the Trump campaign in the 2016 election. This scandal sufficiently pissed off the general public enough that it convinced Congress, Facebook finally needed a public reckoning.

And that's how Zuckerberg ended up in the hot seat. facing hours of questions on Capitol Hill. Let's talk about the stuff we actually did learn this week and what we still want to know. What did you think? I was kind of stressed out by how Zuckerberg answered questions. I was stressed out by everything about it. Okay, yeah, you're right.

It's like the aesthetics of Zuckerberg on Capitol Hill in general are kind of overwhelming. But he specifically, whenever he would address a senator, he would address them like he was talking to Siri or Alexa. He would say, Senator. It was like he was about to ask for a cappuccino. It was very strange.

Yeah. I'm honestly a little bit surprised that the Cambridge Analytica scandal is this climactic moment for Facebook. Something about it seems wonky to me. It seems like for all of the Facebook scandals, through all of the years. Yeah. It's weird that this is the one that sort of results in the congressional showdown. It's weird because to me, I don't mean to downplay the seriousness of it of Cambridge Analytica,

but it seems way, way worse that Facebook helped foment a literal genocide in Myanmar than this. And some of the congressmen did ask questions about that. But this personal data scandal seems to have piss people off more than actual ethnic cleansing, which is sort of just an example of how it's not necessarily direct, like the severity of the transgression is not necessarily directly connected to how the public freaks out about it. Well, I don't know. I guess it's because the Cambridge Analytica scandal has this very formalized, like red versus blue, Democrats versus Republicans, the Trump campaign is involved.

I think maybe that's why it's accessible to an otherwise sort of like tech illiterate legislature. Yeah, and I think interest is still super high in Trump, Russia. Right. And since it feeds into that scandal, it sort of all connects back. People are still angry at Facebook for the 2016 election. And so this sort of taps into their anger. Right. And I think if it had happened in a, without all the stuff that happened before, no one would have cared that much.

It was like people were getting. Facebook didn't care that much. Facebook definitely. Yeah. It was just people got mad about enough things to make this the tipping point. Right. Did you think Zuckerberg did a good job? That's a hard question.

I know. It's not as simple as like, okay, he goes to Capitol Hill, faces critical questions. Does he answer the questions well? Because it's, now I'm just stuck in thinking about the nature of the questions and whether the questions were even good. I feel like in the past few years, there have been moments where Congress has had to recruit itself into some sort of like assessment of like technology culture. And they've seemed to have come a long way from like the famous Ted Stevens moment like a decade and some change ago where it's like Ted Stevens is in that one congressional hearing and he describes the internet as a series of tubes. But they described the internet as a series of pipes this time. Right. That's the thing. That's the weird thing about this hearing is that the Facebook hearing was the first moment in a long time where I was like, oh, never mind.

Like, Congress has not come far at all from Ted Stevens. Yeah, I will say. There was a lot of tech illiteracy on display at the hearing. There was. And so in that sense, it kind of made Zuckerberg look good. Like, even when he is evading questions and not being totally transparent and frankly, kind of contradicting the way that I think. younger, like, younger journalists know Facebook to work. It's just clear that he's sitting in front of a bunch of people who really aren't equipped

to contradict him. Yeah, there was some instances where he would say something that sounded dubiously true at best. And then, you know, a quick Google would reveal that he was maybe not outright lying, but twisting things in a way that looked good for him. And I felt like no one was really equipped to push back. I saw some people praising Kamala Harris for her questions. She was a lot more cogent and pointed than most.

But I mean, her questions were sort of standard fine. They didn't really reveal anything. Right. Okay. What did you want to know? The tech journalist of our time, tech team, ring her tech team. Like, what did you want to, I don't know, what did you want to know? Like, were you, were you that excited by the idea of Congress finally having this moment to sort of like open up on Zuckerberg?

I mean. There's something about it that seems like it should be climactic. And it just, I mean, it. I'm worried that it will be climactic. And this will be all that happens to him. That's why I didn't want to get too excited. Like, it's sort of nice to see this dork who's in charge of all of our lives getting yelled at. But if that's all that happens, then I'm not satisfied.

I didn't necessarily even care what the Senate, the senators asked because he's, he's already told less what Facebook is and what Facebook does by doing what he's done. Besides the sort of spectacle of Zuckerberg squirming, I don't think that the hearings really accomplished that much. My hope is that they brought the need for Facebook to be regulated and questioned into the public eye more. And my other hope is that the hearings maybe will inspire members of Congress. to act in regulating Facebook.

But yeah, the hearings themselves seem more like a theater. Right. I'm having a hard time understanding, like, what regulating Facebook looks like practically. I mean, there have been a lot of different suggestions. It was interesting. So Senator Lindsey Graham directly asked Zuckerberg whether he thought Facebook was a monopoly. And Zuckerberg said no. And that's not true.

He kept, Zuckerberg kept saying that, you know, oh, we have competitors. People use an average of eight apps, completely failing to mention that like Facebook owns many of those apps, like Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger is a separate app. I personally think that they probably need to be broken up. Like there needs to be antitrust legislation or lawsuits. What's the chance of that? That's the thing. It's like a lot of the Republicans started telegraphing their resistance to regulating Facebook.

And that's, I have a hard time gaming. That's what I have a hard time wrapping my mind around is like what the Republicans even make of all of this. That's why I'm surprised that this is what of all things is culminated in the hearings. Because sort of at the top of the hearings, there did seem to be this like bipartisan hunger to interrogate Zuckerberg. But at the same time, it became. became clear through the hours of questioning that the Republicans are trying to find a way to avoid this becoming a like communications regulation issue. And I'm not sure. I mean, for one, I'm not sure why that's their, I guess like in a basic ideological sense, I get Republicans not wanting to regulate something. But I can't really flesh out like what the Republicans want to do about Facebook, if anything. One of the things I noticed was that no one was really getting to the heart of how powerful Facebook is. Like Zuckerberg was saying, oh, we'll have artificial intelligence to root out hate speech.

And that's insane because that means that Facebook is going to be deciding what is hateful and what is not hateful. That's an enormous responsibility. And Congress should be asking whether they even want this private company to be deciding what speech is going. and want speech is bad. That wasn't brought up that much. Well, I would say it was brought up a lot, but it was brought up in the more frivolous context of like, does this mean you're going to punish Breitbart?

You know what I mean? It was brought up in an unsurious context. Yeah. As opposed to what you're saying, right, is it's like, yeah, when you have the massive global scale of Facebook and you're saying, don't worry, we're going to have an AI determine. Yeah, I wanted so much more pushback on that. I'm like, well,

what is the AI going to use this criteria? We need to know that. Otherwise, a lot of speech is going to be suppressed. Like, I do think, you know, the Republican Congress people have a point when they're, when they're, you know, highlighting the fact that Facebook is making these determinations. They're just, they're putting the emphasis on a stupid thing. Right. There was this one thing that I got really irritated during the hearings that Zuckerberg kept coming back to. And it was him stressing, and it was always when he's talking to a Republican senator, him saying, you know, I'm very aware of the fact that Facebook is in Silicon Valley and people are very left leaning there.

And I want to be very careful that our bias isn't about rooting, you know, rooting out conservative speech and things like that. And I understood what he was saying. But to me, the real thing about Silicon Valley that I'm more afraid of than like left thought. I don't think it's a bastion of left thought, really. It's libertarian. Right. Well, it's libertarian. But the other thing I thought is like the real vulnerability for Facebook isn't left thought.

It's the fact that Silicon Valley is just bad at thinking about politics in general. It just seems like these companies always run into some permutation to the same problem, which is they didn't think hard enough about politics. And so in Zuckerberg's answer to what are you going to do about hate speech is we're going to make it. Yeah, algorithms. It's just like, see, that's the answer of a guy who has not thought hard enough about not just national U.S. politics, but global politics and how complex those systems are going to have to be. Yeah, it was, that was disturbing. I was getting the most annoyed when he kept saying, we're an idealistic company. Not because I think he is lying.

I do think that Zuckerberg is like a true believer in Facebook. I just think he's so incredibly wrong. And also the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And like, I don't care if they're idealistic if their ideals are bad. And their vision for a utopia is a world dominated by Facebook. Like, I don't know. Okay. Well, the main thing standing between us and that is it feels like, or Congress posited itself, right?

So this week, Congress posited itself. as the thing standing between us and Facebook and between Facebook and weird global network dystopia. Unfortunately, I don't have much confidence in their ability. Yeah. I don't know. What is your sense, though, of like, of Capitol Hill's relationship to tech? And it's sort of competence and fluency in, in, like, digital technology over the years.

Because it is weird. like we were saying at the top that like something about these hearings seemed like a step backward in terms of just elected officials being able to step up to a microphone and ask a coherent question about how the most popular social network in the world works. It was a step back, but I do think not to defend Congress, but to defend Congress, Facebook is super hard to comprehend at this point. It is so many different things. It is the biggest media company in the world and needs to be regulated as such, in my opinion. But it is also, you know, a way for people to send money to each other. It is a marketplace. So I guess I would say in the Congress people's defense, I have trouble understanding Facebook sometimes

or trying to figure out what I should be the most worried about in regards to Facebook. So remember when everyone thought Zuckerberg was going to run for president. Oh, my God. I feel like half of, I feel like we've, maybe both of us have written about. Yeah. Like, I would say a year ago, definitely you and I had to have written about Zuckerberg's presidential prospects.

I always thought that he was not running for president, but I did. Because why would he want to be present? He's a dweeb. No, he's got his eye on the globe. Like he has global aspirations. I don't only think he wants to get bogged. down and governing one country? Yeah, I think that's like a wise way of looking at it, but I also don't think of

Mark Zuckerberg as wise. There's some part of me that thinks that Mark Zuckerberg would run for president, if only for like bad, vapid reasons. I think that's why. I think people, I always had a hard time figuring out less whether I thought he would run. I thought I was kind of like not that likely he'd run. And then he was really sort of hiring, polling. analysts and things like that, more so for corporate.

He was just like repurposing political infrastructure for corporate purposes. But it is weird that there did at one point seem to be a real popular appetite among, like, Democrats for him to run. Did I make that up? Was that just in my head? No. I mean, it was not in your head. It freaked me out, though.

I think it's his money. I think it was just a sign of how desperate people were for someone who might be able to to challenge Trump. Right. But now we have Cynthia Nixon. Well, hold on. Cynthia Nixon has the one for governor for you. Yeah, first.

You just, oh, man, you're just pulling Obama over here. I don't know. But yeah, I don't think he's, I definitely don't think he's running for president anymore. Okay. But no, did you think he was running in the first place? No, but I still don't think he's running. I also don't think he might have been able to win before. I don't think he would be able to win now.

Fair. He's tarnished. Okay. What would you have asked Mark Zuckerberg if you were a lawmaker? My Facebook account has been deactivated for like two years. So I don't have no questions for him. I have no user complaints. I am not a Facebook user.

What would you have asked him? If he was wearing a diaper. Oh, my God. How did he hold it for so long? I would not have that bladder control. Zuck, that was the first time Zuck went to Congress. He's not running for anything. I don't need to see him in Congress again.

Yeah, I don't know. Does he dipe, though? Oh, my God. I'm sick of you. A congressperson should have asked him that. Yeah. Oh, well, lost your chance. In November, the comedian Hari Kondabolu released a documentary, the problem with Apu,

where he scrutinizes what is to his mind the Simpsons' most embarrassing character, Apu, the Indian immigrant, who runs a Quikkimart in Springfield. Now, mind you, Apu, who speaks with an accent, is voiced by a white guy. Hank Azaria. And Kandabalu has described his area's performance as a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father. So that was all in November. Now, fast word to last weekend, Sunday. The Simpsons finally responds to Kondabolu with an episode called No Good Read Goes Unpunished.

And in the episode, Marge rediscovers her favorite childhood book, it's this fictional book called The Pondobalo. princess in the garden, and she excitedly decides to share the book with Lisa, but gradually it dawns on Marge that the book, which is this colonial fantasy novel centered around a young white heroine, is filled with all of these unsavory racial caricatures of brown people. So Marge and Lisa talk about the characterizations in the book, and they both conclude, kind of strangely, that those characterizations, those stereotypes, are essentially. to the appeal of the book. Well, what am I supposed to do?

It's hard to say. Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do? Some things will be dealt with at a later date. If at all. And the camera's cutting to this photo of Apu that's on Lisa's nightstand. And so that's the moment where the audience is, you know, meant to realize that this

conversation about this fictional book is actually a conversation. about Apu and how his character has aged in the quote-unquote era of political correctness, that phrase we all know and love. So a lot of people online have thoughts about this episode. What? No. I should say like a lot of, you know, Kondo Ballou's documentary was a pretty small-scale thing. I mean, I wrote about it for the ringer in November.

when it was first released. A lot of people are sympathetic to Kondobolo in the documentary. I actually think the documentary is pretty complicated. It gets very... Kondobolo is a fan of the Simpsons. He identifies as a fan of the Simpsons. He doesn't go in and it's not a documentary. He's just like, Apu sucks.

White people suck, blah, blah, blah. He's going, he makes his documentary as a fan of the Simpsons. And he really is trying to come up with like half measures of how you would deal with Apu. He's sort of thinking through, what if he was voiced by? not a white guy, for instance. There are other people in the episode, most notably Cal Penn, who come on and tell Harry Condo Bolo that he's crazy

for liking The Simpsons. Like at one point, he's literally having to defend The Simpsons to Cow Penn. It's great, because Cal Penn's like, no, fuck the Simpsons. Fuck Apu. I watched this episode of television, and I thought even better of the documentary

than I thought of when I reviewed it. I thought that the episode was kind of intellectually lazy and kind of like, it was just very defensive and felt almost mean spirited. I, I mean, I completely agree. It was weird. It was weird to watch. I mean, I hadn't, I haven't regularly watched The Simpsons in years, but it was one of my

favorite shows growing up. Lisa was my favorite character. You are literally Lisa Simpson. I'm literally sitting across from you and you are. I'm very offended by the fact that they. use this character to make an argument she never would have made. Tell to me about Lisa. Let's talk about Lisa Simpson.

Because she becomes the vessel for the defense of Apu. And it makes absolutely no sense because Lisa, I mean, I realize that the Simpsons has had like approximately two million writers' rooms at this point. And Lisa Simpson, 2018, might not bear resemblance to the Lisa Simpson I remember. But she was always sort of the show's conscience. She espoused a lot of progressive values. There's this really great episode called Lisa versus Malibu-Stacey, where she basically rails against sexist Barbie dolls. So it was really jarring to have Lisa be the character coming out and saying, well, looking back and reassessing outdated racist culture is stupid.

Like, it just didn't make any sense. Right. Well, it also does it make sense because they're characterizing. The episode is sort of, it's making this critique by way of like the colonial novel. That was so weird. I'm like, why is the Simpsons coming out like as a Rudyard Kipling stand? Right. Right, right, right.

I mean, right. I'm like, are you advocating that like everyone go out there and and kip it up? But it's also, it's also weird because the. The episode doesn't, the episode's kind of making fun of Roger Kipling. But it's also like the Simpsons is not a 19th century novel. That's the thing. They sort of availing themselves of this defense that like, well, Apu, what do you want us to say? Like he was a character that was first developed at a totally different time.

He's like, I don't know that Apu. This is not a totally different era of culture. It's still on television. It's now. Right. Right. Right. I don't think this instance should like go back and delete a poo from old episodes. No one is arguing that. That has never been argued.

I just feel like it's really, really dishonest to sort of pretend that asking a television show that's on in 2018 to consider a harmful caricature that it's using is the same thing as dismissing colonial literature for children. Like it's a really bizarre argument. Yeah. In the Harry Kondobola documentary, he's really having a broader conversation about black and brown racial caricatures and culture generally and how that affects how black and brown actors get jobs, but also how black and brown audiences see themselves by way of American culture, right? And it's just the documentary happens to hang on Apu, and it happens to hang on Apu because Kandabalu is a fan of The Simpsons. So in the documentary, Condoleu makes a strange decision, which is he's, he basically turns it into an activist documentary

where he's campaigning. Yeah. And he's campaigning specifically for like an interview with Hank Azaria. He's basically lobby, of all the people, think of like how big the staff of the Simpsons is at this point. You have producers who used to work on the show.

You have the current producer. You have, you know, you have the original creative team. You have the voice cast. And the person he, the person Kandabalu fixates on is Hank Azaria. Hank Azaria's involvement in the character really is that he's just, he's the voice actor for the character.

And for like more than a dozen other characters on the Simpsons, right? And so Azaria and the documentary comes off as this conflicted person who kind of wants to talk to Kondabalu, but also recognizes that he's about to walk into like a shit show. And so by the end of the documentary, he sort of avoids being in the documentary. He sends an email and he's sort of like, yeah, I regret. You know, I can't be on camera.

Like, can't wait for the documentary to come out. You know, maybe we can do a live event and talk about this. He sort of, he has this note of like, I understand what you're trying to do. And I'm sympathetic. And I hope this produces a great conversation. But he's saying that as the person who has the least, I mean, this is, Azaria has more power over the Simpsons than Harrikanabalu, certainly, but it just seems like in the context of the Simpsons,

Hank Azaria has maybe the least amount of power over that character. And so it's like, that's what created this buildup between the documentary and now, where it's like, what are the people who actually have power in this show going to do? And it's interesting that the show's official response seems so much more bitter and so much more entrenched and incurious than Azaria's response seems. And it's interesting that Azaria was not voicing a poo in this episode. Right.

So that's the weirdest thing about the episode is that it's not, I don't want to characterize the whole episode as if it's, the whole episode is not designed to respond to Kondobala. It's just that there's this, the thread, this sort of colonial literature thread of the episode, is one specific thread of the episode. and it gets deployed as a response. So it's almost, in a certain way,

it's almost kind of an afterthought, or at least a kind of like cheeky writer's room aside, right? Yeah. So it's not as thoughtful as if The Simpsons had done a whole episode about this. But yeah, it's weird. It's like all of the very oblique secondhand stuff you hear from Hank Azaria in the documentary. It's just so much more thoughtful

than this Simpsons response. I don't think we should let him off the hook. I mean, he could stop doing the voice, and he should stop doing the voice. But I do think I really enjoyed the documentary. I don't think it needed to hinge on his area. The most interesting parts of the documentary sort of were everything else but that.

Like the discussion around the connection between Apu and Minstroyo was really good. He made some really, really good points. He didn't necessarily need to have it be focused on a showdown between him and his area. Like, because it really touched on a, it was bigger than that. Right. Can I run something about you? Yes. So the two times I've written about this, one when the documentary came out and one, when the Simpsons episode aired this past weekend.

I feel like the main pushback I get from people. And I've heard like a lot of very helpful and constructive thoughts from people. who I wouldn't even describe as defending Apu but just fans of the Simpsons who like they feel complicated or they haven't you know been offended by the character

in the same way that Condobolo is people who aren't white who have complicated feelings about Apu I grant that there's a range of feelings one could have about that show and one could have about Apu I feel like the most sort of entrenched

kind of response I get whenever I write about this show is people saying that's just how Simpsons characters work of saying that like well all of the characters are stereotypes

and it's hypocritical to be offended by Apu but then like to not be offended by Barney or any of the other characters on the show or Flanders you know what I mean and I do

I have like immediate responses to that but I'm curious what you make of that as a sort of defense of that kind of character construction of like it's just a bunch of stereotypes playing off of each other in a sort of equal opportunity way. I don't think that's a good defense of Apu at all because first of all, Apu in a way that most of the other characters are not. One of the jokes about Apu is his voice. And his voice is a like overtly racial caricature.

Right. Like Barney and Flanders, that's not the case. And, okay, I know that I've seen some people be like, well, what about that Italian chef guy? But, like, you also have to look at the harm it causes, a community. And, like, Italian people are not feeling bad about themselves because of the Italian Simpsons guy. Right, right. Whereas— The Italians aren't haunted by the Simpsons.

Yeah. Italian children aren't haunted or Italian-American children aren't haunted by the Simpsons in a way that Condiolulu and, like, CalPen are saying, that a poo is more insidious and has more of a, like, practical effect. Yes. Right. He's harmful to children who are Indian American. I'm not all, but some, obviously, because that's what the documentary is about. There's a reason why this documentary is about Apu.

And there isn't a documentary about the Italian dude and, like, drunk Scots people haven't, like, protested groundskeeper Willie. It's just not the same thing. I think the most insidious thing that the episode does is, I want to quote back that line, Lisa says one more time, something that started decades ago and was applauded and an offensive is now politically incorrect. So the thing that is disingenuous about the whole Roger Kipling jungle book bullshit that the episode pulls is that the difference is that the phrase political incorrectness predates The Simpsons. You know what I mean? It's like the idea that like, whoa, you know, how would how did we know that? one day Apu would exist in this PC culture. It's like people have been complaining about PC cultures since before, like slightly before the Simpsons existed.

And that's, I think that is, I have, there's a sense in which when I interact with people online who are defending the Simpsons and who are mad at me for being critical about Apu. There's a sense in which those people sincerely believe that someone invented. It's like overnight someone invented being offended. by or maybe thinking like this particular characterization is distasteful. And it's like people can't wrap their, people can't wrap their heads around the idea that like maybe this thing has just always been distasteful. It's not that it became distasteful in 2017 or 2018. It was always distasteful.

Yeah. I want to say like tastes do change. It's always been racist. And it's always been. It's always been racial. Yeah. It's like, right. But people have less of a tolerance for it now than they did in the early 90s.

Like the distaste, the distaste for Apu has been growing. But that's not because anything has changed about the situation. It's because people are taking, hmm. People who didn't have a voice or didn't have as much of a voice, certainly in media, I would say, have more of a voice now. Yeah. And people are hearing the. those voices and taking different perspectives because they're hearing these. Like, honestly, when I was growing up as a kid, I didn't really think about a poo.

As a, like, white girl, I didn't, I wasn't like, oh, that is probably really hurtful to someone. It just didn't cross my mind. But after watching this documentary, it's obviously harmful because I heard this voice that didn't get to speak in the 90s. Right, right, right. The Simpsons has been on way too long. I feel like in the long, like in the mid-near term, the Simpsons is not going to have much of a choice, frankly, in the fate of Apu, or in the fate of that show. More like, thank you.

Don't come again. Kate, please leave the studio. Please leave. Please leave. All right, I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs. And that's it for damage control this week. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again in two weeks.