Buckle up and get set for some serious bloviating. Your bald host, Mookie Spitz reconnects with coiffed musician, psychologist, and desert van-dweller Reza Ziai for a wild ride full of paywalls, pop stars in space, and why Elon Musk might be the messiah—or a Bond villain with ASD and excellent connectivity. They unpack why Iran still doesn’t have nukes and what should and shouldn't be done about it, whether AI will wipe us out or simply ignore us, and why cultural appropriation might actually save humanity.

Along the way:
– Was Beck right in that taco stand when he equated art and money?
– Can space travel solve existential dread or at the very least make Oprah cry?
– Might porn, pokemon, pizza, and Palantir targeting bring peace to the Middle East?

This one’s got it all: geopolitics, space dicks, Nietzschean game theory, and quarter-tone Iranian Beatles covers. No script. No mercy. No hair! And yes, great wifi from Reza's van...

The Guest

Reza Ziai is a musician (over 35 years of experience), a recording artist, and a psychology professor (over fifteen years of experience in higher education).

He recently quit his full-time position and has been living in his mobile home recording studio writing music deeply influenced by his Iranian-American background and his passion for free expression.

As a deep thinker and an artist, Reza has devoted his life to the relentless pursuit of creating music and making meaning in a sometimes seemingly meaningless world.

His Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/Ziai

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Mookie Spitz dives headfirst into his manic creative process — from obsessively shaping his sci-fi novel Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine into rigid three-line paragraphs, to pulling off an audacious stunt: tweeting out the entire damn book, line by line, every hour, for 200 days.

This is part confessional, part masterclass in embracing constraints to spark creativity. Mookie breaks down why arbitrary rules (like limiting prose to OCD-tight paragraphs) forced his writing to be sharper, more playful, and weirdly alive — a strategy born from wrestling with his own tendency to ramble into oblivion.

He also gets into the nuts and bolts: transforming his manuscript from Google Docs to Notepad to Excel to CSV, reverse-ordering 4,800 lines, then using Publer to spray them across Twitter. All so his novel can live (backward!) on X, like Borges on methamphetamine.

More than that, his pod is a sermon on the sheer joy of making something just because. No market strategy. No guarantees. Just the luxurious bloviation of a writer entertaining himself — and inviting you to watch, laugh, and maybe catch some of that reckless creative fever.

Follow Jonnie Fazoolie on X

https://x.com/JonnieFazoolie

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In this expansive solo episode, Mookie Spitz takes listeners on a hallucinatory, high-concept journey through the philosophical backbone of his new novel, Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine. The focal point? A chapter titled “Hating Mondays," featuring an object so conceptually loaded it makes Borges’ Library of Babel look like a cozy bookshelf.

Mookie starts with literary ground zero: Jorge Luis Borges and the mind-warping thought experiment of a library containing every book that could ever be written. From there, he threads this concept through the lens of 21st-century tech — digital photography, quantum computing, and the limits of human creativity — to build his own speculative monstrosity: The Spider’s Jar. a 10-meter-high cylinder containing every possible 3D instantiation of reality— past, present, and future —down to the Planck pixels.

Now imagine it’s been hacked...

But this isn’t just a mere philosophical exercise. It's also the heart of the novel’s plot. The Spider’s Jar becomes a battleground of power and emotion when it’s hijacked by Alice — a cryptic, childlike avatar who claims to possess the “Builder Numbers,” mathematical keys to all of Reality. Mookie reads from his novel and breaks the fourth wall to annotate his own fiction with literary analysis, physics, philosophy, and a touch of twisted humor.

This episode brings it on: Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, Tegmark’s multiverse, quantum determinism, synesthetic memory, and digital reality. It’s one part lecture, one part novel reading, and one part bong-hit dorm-room revelation.

Whether you’re a Borges junkie, a speculative fiction nerd, or just someone tired of formulaic alien-invasion plots, this is the episode that dares to ask: what happens when a simulation becomes self-aware — and falls in love?

The Novel: Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine

https://a.co/d/ay0uTjD

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