Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The time has come to be talking about contrary stuff to Darwin. And if it damages Darwin, well, so be it. It had to be. If it turns out that Darwin really was right, well, so be it. But get it out in the front. We're talking about it. Don't hide the conflict, Idaho the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Jonathan Witt, a senior fellow at Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture. I'm also the executive editor of Discovery Institute Press. And the Press has a wonderful new book out now. It's a. It's a novel, actually. It's our first adult novel, a disaster thriller by our very own Jeffrey Simmons, who in addition to being a medical doctor, a disaster preparedness expert, and the. The author of a couple of fantastic ID evolution books, what Darwin Didn't Know and Billions of Missing Links. He's also been a very successful novelist and his the Z Papers sold more than 350,000 copies. He's gotten lots of praise for that and other books like Pandemic. But he has a new novel, Oppenheimer's Demon. Welcome to the show, Jeff.
We're continuing our conversation.
Do you have a copy there? Have you received a copy? I think you have it. To us in our last episode, there it is in all its glory, Oppenheimer's Demon. And that title, by the way, is, is a reference to the Manhattan Project, which was led by Robert Oppenheimer.
They had a. Another nuclear core besides the test one, besides the one that they used to drop on Hiroshima and the other one to drop on Nagaside. They had another one that they, they could have prepared if they needed to.
And it ended up killing two, a couple of different scientists in these kind of random accidents, two separate accidents. And so they, they retitled the Demon Core.
And that's kind of the. The idea behind the novel title that that physical core is not there, but this idea of nuclear war being unleashed on the world with the, with the invention of the atomic bomb. That's Openheim's Demon.
And sometimes that demon threatens to get out, certainly threatens to get out in this novel when and where. That's. You'll have to read the novel to find out what his plans are. And the good guys, of course, are when they get wind of this, they're, they're desperate to, you know, find and foil the attempt.
It's a disaster thriller and there's more than one disaster. And this is something we didn't talk about in our previous episode.
There's the attempt to foil the terrorist plot, there's the panic that sets in in Chicago and elsewhere. That's a kind of unfolding disaster.
But there's another disaster that we, we get a look at in this novel and it's the disaster that a boy, about 10 year old boy experiences when he just barely survives the nuclear bomb, the atomic bomb that's detonated over Hiroshima back in August of 1945.
And, and yes, the novel does have character articulate the logic of, of the US doing that. The lives that very well may have saved and bring the war to a shorter end.
But Jeff, you do not spare any details in try conveying careers what it might have been like for a kid survive that and to, to just barely survive it and the, the tragedy that was to his family.
And of course not to give too much away, this becomes a major character in the novel. You'll just have to, to read on to find out which character that is what becomes that person. But extremely vivid, wrenching, it's not the sort of thing you typically get in a thriller novel. I don't think such a, a sympathetic, moving portrait of, you know, what the other side in this case the, you know, Japan and the U.S. japanese war, World War II experienced. What was your thinking there, Jeff, in painting that so vividly, so powerfully that that experience.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Good question.
Can I just. I'll come right back to it on the book. I'm just going to point out to people who don't know about Chicago, this is called the bean. It's a reflective item that if you think of a pinto bean or something or a lima bean bent in half, it reflects in a variety of funny ways people walk under it, around it. And Chicago is known for this in Grants Park.
And in the middle of this reflection is a nuclear mushroom bomb, you know, blast. And so I just, I had nothing to do with designing this. I thought it was a spectacular idea. And it literally says what I'm kind of saying anyway.
[00:05:09] Speaker B: Yeah, that shape, by the way. So it's, it's very trippy. But, but yeah. So in that you have the reflection of a mushroom cloud. You were asking.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Yeah, you're asking about the antagonist person. You know, I, it occurs to me, not uncommonly that we folks are victims of wars that we may not be for and we pay the price. Not uncommonly.
There's nothing we could do for instance, if our country declared war on another country, which is going on right now, which I'm not against in a sense, but only going political on this. But I'm just talking about I think about all the innocent people and what happens to them. And I've read a lot about what's happened in Germany to some of the Germans and the Jews and I paid attention to some of the stuff that's happened to Japanese people.
I've read on it. I've been interested in that. So it didn't make sense to make him anything but a character such as he is. And I don't want to go into depth on him, but I was aware of the background and. And also it's a bit of a portrait of what will happen here too in the face of a nuclear war or could happen.
And so here's what it looks like. There are some post apocalyptic movies and books that talk about this kind of stuff. And this is my view on it, or how I wanted to say it.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: You probably developed some knowledge of what the experience would be like from your developing expertise in your disaster preparedness and nuclear response.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: Well, we do a lot of pretend stuff in training.
We can't really have dead people and dying people and so that's part of it. But I. My experience in the emergency room, of course, was with that every.
Jeez. In la it was multiple gunshots and multiple stabbings and a few rapes and you go on and on and so it was like that all night long. I mean, you almost get PTSD just being in this place and seeing a lot of tragedies and so I'm accustomed to a lot of tragedies, especially emergency. When I got out into practice, I'm an internist and so I was doing more outpatient work and yeah, I lost a lot of older people, rarely a young person, but you know, I have to deal with death and bad things and funny characters. There's a lot of mental illness and strange folks out there. When I was at LA county and when I was at Cook County, I dealt with a lot of homeless people. In those days we would call them quite homeless. You know, there was more derogatory terms, but they were similar to some of our homeless. Except for the drug problem wasn't like it is alcohol. It wasn't. You might call that a drug, but usually when we talk about drugs we talk about something separate.
So alcohol was a very common problem and it still is.
And I dealt with the end stage of it. So there just come in barfing blood and pooping blood and screaming and DTS and not cooperating and insects jumping off of them and. And tying them down, trying to get them to cooperate and settle them down. You treat them and then you settle, you just send them out and they go to the first seven, 11, get some booze and they're back in two days.
And so I have a lot of stories from those days, but.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: Right. And that feeds into then. That probably helped inform two tutoring partial. One is where the boy ends up in the hospital back in 1945, which is more of a nuclear radiation kind of thing. But there's lots of death and dying and whatnot. And, and then, but then also in, in the present of the novel, several scenes end up in the hospital because there's this hospital subplot. There's a character that's been injured that may have information that will help them.
And this is where the, the hero of the novel, uh, Jeff Winders, ends up interacting with an old medical colleague.
Emily Latimer is a neurosurgeon. And they've got to try to get this guy where they can get this vital information out of him. But those scenes in the hospital, they're clearly informed in the emergency room. Clearly informed by your, your background, your knowledge, like I said in our previous episode, all that. Not myself a doctor, my father in law is a doctor, my brother in law is a doctor.
But I'm, I'm eager to get this in the hands of my brother in law because I think he'll very much appreciate the authenticity of that side of it.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: I met your brother in law. Right. Was that the brother I met?
[00:09:49] Speaker B: Yeah. You met, you met him the entire.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I, you know, there may be some, some things in there, I say that date me a little bit, but probably not by much.
People are people and the diseases are what they get and the equipment may change a little bit, but I try to stay current, you know, and so I don't think there's anything like that. But maybe there's something in there that dates me, but that's really not the point.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Yeah, there's no etches, sketches or anything like that. It's. I think we've updated things pretty well. The villain of the novel is. He's brilliant. He's very old. He's very much permanently injured. He's very much seeking revenge on an epic scale.
Then we have the novel's protagonist. Is it. He's not the novel's only heroic figure. There's several of those, but the central one, Glenn Winders.
Tell us about him a little bit, Jeff.
I'm thinking in particular of his medical school experience. He's the D.A. but this character was, he was a medical doctor before he changed careers. Is there anything of.
Of Jeff Simmons in this Glenn Winters character?
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Of course there is.
He's good looking like I am.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: He's very, he's very sociable, very athletic, very capable. All the very capable. Movie star caliber. Yeah. Model just after me.
Yeah. I. Well, the things that he thinks and the way he reacts to stuff and the medical stuff for sure is me, one of my kids stepson is an attorney, prosecutor. And so I take some information, some style from him as well and put it in this character.
And so I use some things for my patients. Not exactly because I'm not supposed to, but you wouldn't know what I'd use and what I don't use. But there's certain personal traits and stuff that make a character more interesting and.
Yeah, and so, yeah, the homeless person and. And some of the other characters. Yeah, they come from me and my experiences, but modified and that's that kind of stuff.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: Yeah, it was, it was fun at first. I was like, wait, he's a da but then he was a doctor. Is this going to work? But you made it work beautifully. It's a lot of fun. And we, and we even several who are.
Yeah. And we get the, and we get the character development reason why he ceased being a doctor.
So.
And it gives, it gives some opportunities to kind of paint that whole world in a way that's organic to the plot. Okay, so we have that. That's the primary hero.
We. We have a subplot hero that we're not going to talk about that. That's his daughter who's stuck in the city and trying to get to safety.
But the, the kind of. The adult heroine of the novel is the beautiful Emily Latimer, who's a neurosurgeon. We talked briefly about her in the last episode. She's Winder's contemporary. She's a friend from medical school days.
She's the hero's budding love interest. But no, there are no steamy love scenes. You'll be happy to know most of our viewers may be. I guess there'll be a few that may be disappointed, but in our previous conversation we talked about the evolution Intelligent Design subplot. Just very briefly. We're trying not to give away a lot of spoilers, but she's of course, as you may have guessed, she's pro Intelligent design. Her dean is very much anti Intelligent Design and would love to shut her down.
We won't cover that same ground again. But Jeff, tell us about her.
And just very briefly, kind of just to kind of tease readers with. I think it's a really fun concept. Tell us about her pioneering memorial memory retrieval technology and how that comes into the story.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Actually, I'm not going to. Not going to do it. Maybe that's all that you tell that.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: But I'll back up in a couple of days.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll bet. I'm not. Yeah, I'm not telling them that one. Yeah. You'll have to read the book to find that out.
No lob scenes.
I'm an MD and I'm retired, of course.
But I just. All my books, and I have several novels I couldn't put love scenes in because I. I couldn't look at my patients if I did, you know, I mean, or have the. You know, him. They were looking at me that maybe that's how he thinks or something like that.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: And so I. I just. It didn't feel right. And it also didn't feel right with my wife and me.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:20] Speaker A: And so I. It wasn't. I didn't. Some love scenes and stuff. And books and movies are gratuity anyway. Gratuitous.
And I don't think the book needs it.
And so I've passed on that in all my books. And in fact, even my second book, the Adam Experiment, was the first child born in outer space does not go into graphic sex and outer space. So it's just not me. So I do that with the characters. You know, she's black and the protagonist is white.
He's Jewish, she's Christian. Those are minor issues, but differences. Their backgrounds are different. They feel differently about things, and yet they get together and they have stuff that are in common. And I thought that was an interesting matchup as well.
And so.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: Right. And it's not where all the good people are pro ID and, you know, have memorized all the best ID books. You know, the. The main character, the main hero character, he's somewhat ambivalent about this stuff.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: If. If not a little bit against it or negative or not believe. Not believing.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: Not believing.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: Ugliness in the world. He's like, really? Yeah. You think there's. There's a good God out there that I know this?
[00:15:40] Speaker A: It's not a book to convert somebody to religion or ID per se. It's just an argument between characters and a problem in society where you can't get your ideas out. I mean, we have free speech in this country, yet we sometimes don't. And this is one area where we haven't allowed it. So I think the time has come I mentioned I used to have coffee with Phil Skel and this is one of the conversations. The time has come to be talking about contrary stuff to Darwin. And if it damages Darwin, well, so be it. It had to be. If it turns out that Darwin really was right, well, so be it. But get it out in the front. We're talking about it. Don't hide the conflict. Disaster preparedness has been a thing that I've been involved for a long time. I've taught in Chicago, I've taught many trainers from Guam.
And there's some very. This I can go back into something. This is a very important point of the book is that we don't know as a community what to really do if there's a nuclear bomb, except maybe panic.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. I was going to ask are we well prepared? It sounds like you're saying no, we are not well prepared. Most of our community, I mean none
[00:17:00] Speaker A: of our communities, I think the cities, a lot of them are done tremendous work and teaching individuals what to do and getting it out there. Ready.gov is a spot that everybody should go. Remember ready.gov look up tornadoes or hurricanes or nuclear war, anything. You get a lot of information.
But what you don't find, or at least I haven't been able to find, is what to do when there's panic. And that's what the major gridlock. This is in my book, the huge gridlock. You'll get stuck. And I talk about Hurricane Rita, not the book. Hurricane Rita was one of the worst gridlock situations with a hurricane, 100 deaths related to the evacuation. Evacuation dash deaths because people fled, they didn't have anything. Their car ran out of gas and some of them got stuck in floods. And so panicking and running is not a good idea or at least know when to get out and how to get out. And so in forested areas where we have fires and on coasts where we have tsunamis, the there's highways that are marked evacuation zones. So if it were Chicago, for instance, and I'm not an expert on this, but if you live on the north side, you know, go north on such a highway on the south side, go south if you know if that's. But don't do that. But if you have to have a half a tank of gas, at least a quarter gas isn't going to get you. And know that you might not be able to get gas. Gas stations may be shut down from power. They may be shut down because they've run out of gas.
So that's the reason to read my Book and to read the common sense and disaster preparedness, there's a lot more people need to learn.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: Yeah. One thing I was really impressed about me is you don't need to be a crazy prepper who builds a fancy bomb shelter to take, you know, a few practical steps to be. To be ready. And it's not just, oh, you're just thinking about yourself. Well, if my whole neighborhood. If half the people in my neighborhood are ready instead of free, the whole neighborhood's going to end up doing better.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: If there's gridlock and thousands and thousands and thousands of people injured needing help, you may only have your neighbor to help you. And if they had some first aid training, if you have some supplies, if you even have antibiotics around and directions on when to use them and not use them, which people are advertising now, have a kit home with your own antibiotics.
I've wanted to do that for a long time as a business adventure, but I didn't have the capital or the time. But now they're doing it. And so if people use the antibiotics appropriately. So you have them there, things like that.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: Yeah. And so. Yeah. So I hope this novel raise more awareness about that.
Now, one thing impression that I want to would be a false impression from just all the different threads of the novel that we've been talking about. That would be misleading, would be the impression. The novel is just always deadly serious.
In fact, Jeff has a sharp, sometimes wicked sense of humor.
And it comes through in the novel very organically. And some of the characters, it's. It's not.
It's not the predominant emotional mode, but. But it's there as Leaven, and it's just very pleased with that. It's. It very much enriches the novel.
One character in particular is certainly not exclusive to this character in terms of humor. One character in particular is a homeless man.
Mei Lee, did that character just come into you a dream? Did you. Did you know individuals working in the emergency room that were like that?
[00:20:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I knew a female version of that.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: A female version.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: A female version of that. So she can't. If she reads my book, she won't. She may recognize herself, but she can't recognize.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: So that's another teaser. What is Jeff talking about? Who's this. This Melee character? Well, you know, you'll have to read to see. He ends up. He's a central minor character, a sporting character in the novel.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: My humor books, I. It was like divine inspiration. I hate to say that because it's not really a religious book in any sort, but I. They hit me like, be funny. And I wrote two books in 30 days. No, three months, and laughed all the way. So that's my sense of humor. So if you. If you're all interested, you might backtrack into that. But yeah, humor is a funny thing. It's.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: It's so different between people.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And you see so much of human nature as a medical doctor working in the emergency rooms and, and just of course, living life. But yeah, a lot of that comes through that, that sharp observational eye for human nature in the novel.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: There's a lot of sick humor in the. In the medical field that only the doctors would understand.
[00:21:55] Speaker B: Right. And we've tried to keep things PG in the novel, but. But there is some gritty stuff.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: Because he's trying to be real about what, what nuclear disaster is like, what. What. What the emergency rooms are like. So. But just a big, sprawling, wonderful novel.
I'm honored to have been able to.
To work with you on it, Jeff.
All the best luck.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Let me say you've been a great editor to work with too. I mean it's been absolutely absolute fun and within reason. And allowing me. Some editors will just say thank you, we're buying the book and you'll see it when we're done kind of thing. But John, it was a pleasure. You were, you were. It was great fun. You would ed me, I would edit it back. And I do need to stick in one other thing, really. And I said it in the book as well. I had a very terrible tragedy in my family. My daughter passing away at age 37 from a complication of mono. A very rare, bizarre complication of mono. And she was suffering terrible.
And I just had the worst time in life and still do is very current. And we're just at the end of the book basically.
And John was just really, really helpful at the time and.
And I can't help say thank you any. You know, I can't say more than that, but thank you. Thank you, Rome.
[00:23:21] Speaker B: Like I said, it was an honor working with you on the novel.
So pleased the way it came out. So please.
Certain people have already started to read it because we got some review copies in front of people and are getting really strong positive reactions. I'm very excited to have this out there in the world now for people to get. So listeners, viewers, you can go on Amazon.com just type in Oppenheimer's Demon. You can also go to discovery.press/openheimer and you can find the novel at our Discovery Institute Press website.
And, and the other, the other book, Common Sense and Disaster Preparedness. You find that at Amazon. Jeffrey Simmons, thank you, Jeff, for joining us for this second time. And all the best luck in with this new novel.
I suspect you're gonna be radio shows. You go connections with some really big radio shows coast to coast and some others. So we're hoping to get you on that and really get this novel boosted and in front of a lot of people.
It's a fun read for Idea the Future. This is your guest host, Jonathan Witt. Thank you for joining us.
