Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: But nobody talks about the likely panic that's going to happen and it's it. And so that's where my thought went. One thought. The other thing is I've always been interested in intelligent Design also. And so I just kind of wondered if I could meld these two together.
And I think I found a way to do that.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your guest host, Jonathan Witt, and I'm very, very pleased today to have on the show one of Discovery Institute's Senior Fellows. He's a fellow. Senior Fellow. I'm a senior fellow. I run Discovery Institutes, Discovery Institute Press, and I've been with Discovery Institute for many years. For a while I was behind the scenes with ID of the Future before hanging handing it over to Andrew, who's doing a fantastic job. But today I want to have on the show Jeffrey Simmons.
He is a medical doctor, a novelist in a different lifetime, but now again in this lifetime.
And he's got many hats he wears. We'll be talking about those here in a minute, but the occasion is a new disaster thriller novel coming out from Discovery Institute Press by Jeff Simmons. And we're going to be here to have him here to talk about it. And there it is. There's Jeff. Welcome, Jeff.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Yes, the novel does for our ID the Future. Listeners, you may be wondering, it does have a intelligent design subplot. We'll be talking about that more here in a little bit. But first, thanks for joining us, Jeff, and very excited about this novel. As I said, you have done written novels in the past. Here's one from years ago called the Z Papers, this thing by Jeff. It sold something like 350,000 copies.
So we're not asking Jeff. Hey Jeff, you never written a novel. You're a doctor. Why don't you just pretend you're a novelist? No, that's not the case. He's successful novels had several good novels. Here's some things that were said about some of his earlier work. Fresh, original and wholly authentic. That was the New York Times best selling novelist Gerald Brown. The MD knows his stuff. Kirkish reviews, suspenseful and realistic. Nashville Banner. If you get the novel, you'll see many other bits of praise like that in the opening section, the advanced praise section, endorsement section section. But here's one from our very own Stephen Meyer about Oppenheimer's Demon.
Oppenheimer's Demon is a riveting disaster thriller in which both the origin and end of man hang in the Balance. Bravo.
And that's from again New York Times best selling author Stephen Meyer, more informally. I had a friend who's a big thriller fan. He reads, he's got this whole shelf full of, you know, top best selling thrillers. Very, very sharp guy. And I asked him if he would be interested in reading it just pro bono to see if he caught any last minute proofreading errors. He cocked four or five, but he said that he told me after he finished. He says, I don't know how good a job I was doing because the book, the novel is such a page turner. I sometimes would forget that I was. My job was to proofread it.
And we also David Klinghoffer, who runs our science and culture today, he praised the novel. He, he just finished it. So this is not just a, just a book that's good for you though. I think there are some very important insights in the novel that we will talk about. But it, it is a page turner. It is a thriller in that tradition.
Quick bit of additional background on Jeff before we dive in to talk about the novel.
Jeffrey Simmons, MD has authored seven novels, including the Z Papers, which sold 350,000 copies, and Pandemic, described by Publishers Weekly as a quote, hard, lean thriller too fast to disbelieve. He has been a community Emergency response team trainer, served on FEMA's Regional Advisory Council, Regent Tin, and is a former member of the Board of Governors of the American Academy of Disaster Medicine.
His non fiction titles include what Darwin Didn't Know, Billions of Missing Links and Common Sense and Disaster Preparedness. Simmons is a fellow of Discovery Institute.
Your audience. Audience is. Let me try that again. So our audience is no doubt wondering what kind of novel is Oppenheimer's Demon and what's up with the eerie title? I'm glad you asked. Allow me to read your the novel's back cover blurb and then we'll get into our conversation. Hoshima Nagasaki, Chicago.
Everyone knows about the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. But Robert Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project had on hand another nuclear core. After claiming the lives of two scientists in separate accidents, it was dubbed the Demon Core. Melted down.
Some demons, however, are not so easily destroyed. And now Chicago DA Glenn Winders finds himself in a race against the clock to stop a shadowy nuclear terrorist and prevent World War three.
His city is descending into panic, his teenage daughter is swept up in the chaos, and his only hope is a beautiful neurosurgeon whose controversial beliefs pose a challenge all their own.
Okay, there's the blurb and ID the future. Listeners may have already guessed those controversial beliefs have something to do with intelligent design.
So Jeff, you had success as a novelist, but you focused your writing energies on non fiction in recent years. Tell us the origin story for this novel. How did you get back into fiction writing and what role did Discovery institute in that process?
[00:06:14] Speaker A: Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, I write nonfiction and fiction and humor without really planning to do so. It's kind of what gets my attention and what I'm interested in at the time, you know. And so I've been interested as I've taught disaster preparedness and a problem that I see the country having.
I teach response to a radioactive or a nuclear event.
I've taught about 1500 people. I've taught about a trainer of trainers, trains cert trainers as well. So I've trained about 1500 citizens over a 20 year period on community emergency response stuff. And I can get back to that. And I trained about a hundred trainers. And so I keep wondering about this nuclear part of the lesson and I've since looked into it. But I have a quote here from President Obama April 2010, when he told the 47 country Nuclear Security Summit.
Two decades after this quote, two decades after the end of the Cold War, we face a cruel irony of history. The risk of nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of nuclear attack has gone up.
And so it's kind of lingered in my head. I'm aware of it. And then I've done some other comments over the years, but by a variety of people. But this, this comes from the UN just three months ago where they think the risk of a nuclear attack by terrorists has gone up. It's the highest ever and it's in the UN News May 2026.
And so yeah, we teach, you know, get in a basement or get in a bomb shelter if you can find one, or what to get behind, you know, wash off if you're take your clothes off, bag them, wash off. Sometimes you run into using soap and warm water. I've always taught cold water because you don't want to absorb anything and stay put for 24 or 40 hours.
But nobody talks about the likely panic that's going to happen and it's it. And so that's where my thought went. One thought. The other thing is I've always been interested in intelligent design also. And so I just kind of wondered if I could meld these two together.
And I think I found a way to do that. And so I, I was talking To Phil Skelch, who's a redeemed scientist chemist for years before he passed away, about this kind of thing. And then I presented to John west, who's the executive vice president, I think, for Discovery Institute. He liked the idea and so I went ahead and started writing it. And so we worked on the concept for a while. And then, as you know, I worked with John, who's my editor.
And the plan today is if I can't remember what was in the book, he can correct me. And so it probably will.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: We need each other.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm an old, you know what, So I may forget something in the whole book. Who knows? But anyway, so it seemed like a really good topic to combine. It caught my interest. And that's really the bottom answer to what you asked. Does it catch my interest? I can't write something that doesn't really interest me, try to force it out. I mean, the two comedy ones I wrote called the Glue Factory and Return of the Glue Factory. And it was changed to Fun Things to Do on Uranus and Fun and Good Things to Do on Uranus and something else. How Hitchhikers Guide to Uranus. And so those things just. I laughed all the way through. They got my attention. The Z Papers was another one where President Nixon was somebody I disliked at the time. I thought, well, how could you kill him in a book?
[00:10:01] Speaker B: Not life.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: And I came up with an idea and I wrote it out. And then I got an agent who became quite a big agent later years who said, you know, maybe we shouldn't do president. You know, why don't we do something else? So I changed him to vice president.
And so that sold well. It was bought for movies.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: It might have sold at three and a half million instead of just 350,000. If you'd made him the president and just saying, maybe, maybe, maybe.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: And it might have been locked up too.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Yeah, you might have been locked up. All that money you wouldn't have been able to spend in prison. But, but I think you melded the disaster and the, the ID and the, and just your.
Just beautifully. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a page, kind of another part of your biography that feeds into this novel because. And the, the disaster stuff just feel, it just rings true. I mean, you always know when you're reading something from somebody that knows what they're talking about when you keep hitting things like, oh, I didn't know that, or, you know, I wouldn't have thought to make that up. And then you go check it. Oh, well, he didn't make it up. That's how they do things.
So that, that worked great. Another part of it felt. Felt very authentic. And I've only visited Chicago, but most of the novel, not all, most of it is set in Chicago. And you have a background in Chicago. Tell us about that.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: Well, I went to school there, high school, and then I went to Navy Pier, which was up here into Lake Michigan, the University of Illinois, which is now a much modern unit and near downtown, but. And then I went down state to Champaign and for two years then I went to medical school back in the city University of Illinois. And so I, I've been around the area for 10 years.
And then I went off to LA County Hospital for further training.
And that's where some of the information comes from. And some comes from Illinois. Cook county, which really isn't called Cook county anymore. But it was a huge crazy place.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Yeah, that hospital. Yeah, the hospital scenes. Yeah, you can tell that, okay, this guy, it was a doctor. He's worked in crazy emergency rooms.
You get that. That comes through very strongly.
And some, some of the politics of. Some of the politics of being a.
A doctor or some of that's drawn, I assume, from being a medical doctor, but also something that's drawn from your watching some of the ID folks get. Get beat up by Darwinists and their academic freedoms attacked. So that's another. That's another subplot.
That's an important subplot novel.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: I had no idea about that till I joined Discovery years ago. I mean, it got to be very interesting.
The dilemma of trying to get an idea across that had some validity, has significant validity and problems people were having with their career choices and their jobs just because they felt different about Darwin. And so I. That's a very interesting controversy, a very important one. So I just put it in there. It's not the main purpose of the book. It's just in there for character development and for people to know the story of what's going on. There's so much more to say, but the driving force for the book is the timing. I think as a thriller writer you have to have just like an orchestra leader, you have to know the beat, you have to know the timing. And it's not something I can teach to somebody. I don't think or explain. You either feel it works or you don't. So it's like you say page turner. It's got to be something like a page turner for me also.
And I just have to feel, you know, I feel when a Beat's been dropped, it's been slowed down, you know, a monkey got in the way, whatever. But, you know, I. So as you know, we working together, I would say to you, you know, it doesn't feel right to me, and, and sometimes that's all it is.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: Just briefly, without any spoilers. What is this? The, the ID evolution subplot? Because you, you get the gist of it pretty early. So I don't think it's giving too much away to, to just kind of sit, set up what, what happens there without telling readers. How put out.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: Yeah, well, the heroine in the story has a, A strong position on intelligent design and her dean has a just contrary feeling about Darwin and he feels his job, some of the donations, all kinds of business things can be affected by her, in his mind, radical ideas about how we came about. And so she's trying to work on getting this problem solved, which I've tried to be vague about in the thriller. And he's kind of getting in the way because he's upset about what she's doing at other times and to what he, you know, it's just not important to him what she's doing to save Chicago or the country. It's gotta be.
You're just wrong about what you think. And so, yeah, I just hoped I got it across. There were so many issues to cover and yet I didn't want it to take over the book. It wasn't the purpose of the book. There's a lot of things in there. The purpose of the book, probably bottom line is I personally think we're not well prepared for a nuclear attack, be it terrorists, and much more needs to be done. And when I look at, I looked at LA and New York and Chicago's emergency planning, the stuff that I can see as an outsider and I see the same kind of stuff, you know, which I mentioned. Get in a house, you know, get in a basement, get in a bomb shelter, have some supplies available, wash off the same stuff I said before. It's all important.
But what they don't look at is what's going to happen is panic around the country. Imagine one nuclear bomb going, or missile going off in one sitting. Imagine too, then think about the 50 or 100 big cities in the country, especially ones that are near air force base or an army base or industrial park, and everybody's going to be in panic mode.
[00:15:53] Speaker B: And one of the, one of the.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: You see the word unfeasible when you read the government stuff about what to do about this. They don't know what to do about it.
I mean they have ideas about getting police out to patrol traffic but the traffic is going to be devastating. It's like one of these soccer events where the. Everyone just runs and smashes and runs over people and kills people.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And that, and then a good bit of the drama and tension is, is the panic unfolding and, and some of the near and dear to the reader's heart characters getting swept up in that and it creating problems as they try to track down the bad guys and that kind of thing. So it's, it's very much showing, showing that problem dramatically rather than just preaching it at the reader. But at the end we do after the novel is over there's a 3, 4, 5 page kind of very boiled down disaster preparedness do's and don'ts. It's very helpful. It also points readers to some other resources so we can just get more people, more people thinking about to know Aaron, you know it's going to be good.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: I had to know of a really good book on that. It's called Common Sense and Disaster Preparedness.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: Right. Yeah.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: And that happens to be mine. And fortunately just by luck it's on Amazon.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: And you made a good point about that. When I first saw it I was like yeah, but everything's online now so what do you really need a book like that? And then you made a good point. Well, if there's a disaster you may not be able to get online.
Exactly. And you probably. And you may not have remembered everything from when you leased through it three years ago.
And so I think it is, I think it is a valuable book to have on your shelf.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: It's. I, I think the only thing that I would tell people to watch out for if anybody's going to buy it is the tourniquet section is. It's just a paragraph. I think it's page 11 is ancient. So what you need to do is look up how to use tourniquets because now we keep them on for extended periods of time. The old fashioned thing was we don't want to jeopardize the arm. And so it was a fight between
[00:17:57] Speaker B: letting people bleed and not letting them bleed.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Which in retrospect is crazy.
Don't go with that and have to stick that as a caveat.
The interesting. I also want to stick in the Z papers was a race against time.
This vice presidential candidate was poisoned. His life is in jeopardy. He's going to die in 24 hours. We'll give you the antidote if you give us something for him. I won't say what that is in case somebody finds a book. So it's the same kind of thing where people are racing to get an answer what's going on, while the other bad guys are kind of building things up about. And getting closer and closer to what they're going to do.
And I. That's what I think makes it into a page turner.
Right.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Yeah. The, the original, the working title is something like T minus 38 hours or something.
And we still do have kind of a countdown component if you organize the novel.
But there's also some. Just really good characterization, so which I was pleased by. Very sharp.
And some of the, not just the major characters, some of the minor characters are very sharply drawn.
We'll talk more about some of those maybe later in a later episode.
Just, just. I don't think we've given a sense of the scope of the novel. I mean, you have the President of the United States as a character. You've got, you've got an FBI's special agent, you know, in charge of Chicago. You've got.
Of course, this becomes. When they're trying to stop nuclear terror, this becomes much bigger than just one Chicago D A and a neurosurgeon. And so there's a lot of other heroic individuals involved. There's a not so heroic political figure. I won't, I won't give too much away.
That's a sharply drawn character. There's a homeless man. Maybe we'll talk about another episode.
Just a, just a big, sprawling, energetic novel with some, some great insights.
I'm looking forward to getting lots of.
I, I'm just confident we're going to get lots of ra. Rave endorsements that we'll be able to add to the Amazon page.
We're running out of time, but I want to have you back. Do you have any kind of final comments in this episode before we close out?
[00:20:20] Speaker A: Only as I was also explaining what's going on behind the scenes. People don't really know what an emergency operations center is and how it's set up. I, I. And so I thought I would give
[00:20:30] Speaker B: them a good look at that.
[00:20:31] Speaker A: Know who's there and why they're there and a little bit of how that conversation goes.
And so that's, you know, probably you asked 9 out of 10 people on the street in Chicago. I have no idea what, what they do, and they don't know where it is. In fact, I don't know where it is either, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't change anything.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: Right. That, that was. I remember when I was first reading, oh, there's this thing called an eoc and cities have it. And there's a. Well, that makes sense, but, you know, it was all new to me. So there's a lot of fun details that, that are rooted in your. Your knowledge of these sorts of things. So that's. Anybody that likes to geek out on some of the kind of technical thrillers. The novel by no means bogs down that, but you just feel the authenticity of it as you're. As you're moving through the novel. Good stuff. Okay, we're running out of time, Jeff, but I want to have you back on the show to dive deeper. Want us to talk a little bit more about how well are cities prepared for something like a nuclear disaster of this sort? How well prepared are you, the individual listener, viewer, prepared?
We may also get into some of the other characters. This, like I said, this novel is just full of fun, interesting characters.
When I. I'm gonna ask Jeff, you know, we're coming up on the 25th anniversary of 9 11.
Are we better prepared than we were 25 years ago? Worse.
I assume some of the threats are different, you know, with things like drone technology.
So we'll speak to all those things and, and I'll ask. I'll ask him point blank. I'm going to ask Jeff point blank. Is this idea of somebody smuggling a tactical nuclear missile into the heart of America, is that just a fiction, fantasy, or is that. Is that a real threat?
So stay tuned for ID the Future Again. This is Jonathan Witty. Thank you for watching and listening.
Visit us at idthefuture. Com and intelligentdesign. Org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
