Halloween stores known for being seasonal.

Fabous for Orange.

Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun.

Let's find out why Halloween stores are secretly incredibly fascinating. Fascinating.

Hey there, folks, welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone.

Jason Pargin is my guest today.

My former colleague, my old pal, one of my favorite authors, he's writing a couple new novels all at once, and I highly recommend his latest. It is entitled, Zoe punches the future in the dick. It's full of humor. It's full of big

ideas, and it makes some amazing predictions. For example, it predicts a city called Tabula Rasa,

and Tabula Rasa is a city that was built by American business executives

from scratch in the middle of the American desert so they could have a U.S. city with no regulations

yet, and also so they could set up life exactly how they wanted to set it up. Very interesting

fictional concept in two of Jason's books, actually, both the Zoe series of books.

And then I'm also going to link you to another story. This story is from CNN.

This CNN story is about a former Walmart executive who wants to build a city from scratch in the American desert.

And it would be called Talosa. This executive is named

Mark Lorre, but the idea is to reimagine how life works by building a whole new city from

scratch in the U.S. desert where there's, you know, no regulations yet. That's in CNN from less than a

month ago. So I think Jason's novels are very prescient, and I think his predictive powers are

very interesting to dig into. We're going to springboard into this episode by discussing

another prediction from those same novels by Jason, because it relates to Halloween. Also, I've

gathered all of our zip codes and have used internet resources like native-land.C.a

...