In a way, it is heartening that I've never been good at the annual podcast tradition of Williams-Sonoma Catalog Price Is Right. This year marks my seventh attempt at it, with the only exception being the part of 2019 and 2020 in which I had neither jobs nor a podcast. I only do it once a year, and I am not otherwise in the market for ultra high-end espresso machine gewgaws or premium heat-and-eat hors d'oeuvres, but also seven times is a decent number of times to do something and absolutely suck at it roughly as bad each time. But as we kept reminding The Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman, our guest for this year's edition, it's not a competition. It's more a formatted indictment of the current phase of capitalism we all inhabit with some guessing-game aspects.
That's why I have chosen to be heartened by being lousy at this, even after all these years. To learn how much an exquisite cashmere throw costs, and then to retain that information, would be a difficult defeat to swallow. After a brief chat with Matt about the state of The Simpsons, the tyranny of The Eight Seasons, and the challenge of writing in what he called the post-post-post-Simpsons universe, we turned to the challenge at hand. Matt, who lost his house in this year's Los Angeles fires and is currently in his Not Accumulating Shit era, came in with a unique perspective and an admirably insouciant approach to playing the game at all.
Most of the episode, with some delightful and unmotivated interruptions from Matt to tell stories about a dispute over double boilers in the writing room of a 1990s sitcom, and played-out podcast tropes relating to Halloween candy, is just It Not Working. We guessed the prices on fancy stand mixers and considered the markup on cotton from Turkey's famed Denizli region. We stared into the abyss of the SMEG x Porsche blender collaboration, did our level best to assess the cost of making "parlor-style desserts" at home, and encountered a coffee doodad called a "milk cooler," which cost much more than seems possible.
"Most of the time, this is like a sports podcast, right?" Matt asked near the end of the show. He already knew it wasn't, and I answered "no" so quickly and so firmly that I was startled upon listening to it. But this time as on his previous visit, he had some sports takes that he needed to get off his chest, and the last 10 or so minutes of the show is that, beginning with his horror that contracts are seemingly not real anymore for college football coaches—he did allow that the writing room he oversees couldn't come up with a better name for a villain than Lane Kiffin. We continued into a discussion of Tommy Tuberville's unique legacy in this space, and the future of free movement in college sports. It's hard to say if the podcast was on or off the rails at this point. Once you have considered the possibility of a "milk cooler," such concepts start to seem abstract, even meaningless. This will be our last podcast of 2025, and it seems like a fitting place to leave this stupid year: a lot of nonsense technology and useless luxury, some jokes at their expense, some numbers that don't make much sense, and a broad consensus on the Lane Kiffin issue. We'll have an episode on New Year's Day, and we can start fresh then.
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