What dystopian fiction can reveal about power, ideology, and the danger of turning people into abstractions

Dr. Kaplan: Hey, Peter, welcome to the show.

Dr. Weiss: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Kaplan: First off, congratulations on writing Progeny. It was such an engaging and entertaining and fascinating read and concept. And obviously, you put a lot of work and effort into it, and it’s a great, great story. So congratulations, first off, on that accomplishment.

Dr. Weiss: Thank you very much. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, and it’s been out for a short period of time, but already doing pretty well. When did it come out?

Dr. Weiss: Actually about the second month now that it’s been out. And it’s doing very well. I should say surprisingly, but it is surprisingly.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, absolutely. And I know how much work goes into writing a novel because I have one coming out in a month or so. And just great respect for the time and energy of any writer who writes a novel. It’s really such a huge accomplishment. And so you’re the wind beneath my wings here, Peter. I’m hoping I’ll follow in your footsteps.

Dr. Weiss: Well, I enjoyed your book very much as well. You have an incredible talent as well.

Dr. Kaplan: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Before we get into talking about Progeny, I want to ask you first a bit more about your background because I really like to get to know my guests a little bit more and have the listeners understand who we’re talking to and about what inspired you to write. And so to start with, tell me a bit more about your professional background and how that led to fiction writing. How did that become a picture for you and your profession?

Dr. Weiss: Well, that’s a very fair question. I grew up in Michigan. I went to University of Michigan for medical school. But in undergrad, I was an art and art history major. And I loved the arts, the creatives, but I had no real talent, so I decided I’d go into medicine. And I put everything else aside. And it wasn’t until really COVID hit when I started writing more and getting a lot of things published, more in general health. It was well received and I decided to go back to my creative beginnings and started painting and drawing again and writing. And that’s sort of what I remember my mother telling me when she died when I was 16. And she was very sick and she told me, first become a doctor, then a bum. So now I’m enjoying the bum years.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. And what kind of doctor were you?

Dr. Weiss: OBGYN. A board-certified OBGYN. I was an assistant clinical professor for 30 years at UCLA School of Medicine. I’m an emeritus physician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. And emeritus just means I’m old. It’s like one of those Academy Awards for lifetime achievement. You couldn’t get one for your acting, but you’ve been around long enough so they give you something.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, they can’t get rid of you, huh? That’s interesting about being the OBGYN and the book Progeny. And I was going to ask next, what was the spark for Progeny? What made you want to write this book with the themes?

Dr. Weiss: Well, it’s interesting that you say it. So I’ve been in practice for, well, I graduated medical school in 1981. So we’re going on 45 years, which is quite a long time. And medicine back then was different than it is now. I was always raised thinking that the most important thing you do in your life is based on your merit. Are you good? Are you the best at it? Not if you should be given it based on who you are by your skin color, your religion, your sex. So it’s basically merit-based. And then when COVID hit, it gave all of us a lot of time to reflect and think what’s important in life and what’s not. You’re a psychologist, so you, I think, can understand that better than most anyone. And sometimes it takes a major event to make us recalibrate and rethink what’s important in life and what’s not. One of the things that I teach medical students and residents, and what I teach my kids, I always tell them is that if you want to make an argument, you use the facts, make your argument, make your case. But the minute you exaggerate a point, you will lose the argument. And I think that’s what happened in our world, where everyone exaggerates a point to try and get their side, and no one’s willing to listen to the other side. And Progeny came from the extreme bending of what we think is right and what is equality. And equity is not equality. It’s a completely different thing. And so I think once I take it to an extreme, then we try and find the balance, and that was sort of my satirical way of saying, hey, everyone, wake up, we’re all in this together. Let’s see what we can do to make our world a better place.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, it makes sense. And it just seems like everything has gotten so much more polarized with the discussions about everything, politics and social issues. Do you find that that’s true?

Dr. Weiss: Oh, it’s 100 percent true. I think a lot of people, their views have become ideological. And when it becomes ideological, it’s not based on reason. It’s based on belief. My wife taught me something a long time ago. She was a teacher, that when somebody says, I believe something, while that’s fine and dandy, it’s usually not based on facts. It’s a belief. And so people now think their belief is their truth and their facts. So people are not willing to hear the other person out. If you don’t agree with what I think, then you must be wrong.

Dr. Kaplan: So what do you think, for listeners who are new to this book, what do you believe is the emotional heart of the story beneath this dystopian setup?

Dr. Weiss: Well, it’s interesting. It’s been called The Handmaid’s Tale on steroids. It’s compared to George Orwell’s 1984, which I had to go back and read again because I remember reading it in high school. It goes to the point where we as humans have to understand that we all come from different places and we have to value the quality of our work, not necessarily think that you’re entitled to one thing or another just because of who you are. So it comes to the point where even in medicine, the standards for admissions to medical schools have been lowered to try and include those who had been less fortunate in trying to get to that certain level of education. So instead of going to the root of the problem, you try to make it easier. It’s sort of like moving the goalposts to make it easier to kick the field goal for somebody who doesn’t have the athletic ability to do that. And that’s really where it came to a point. So where I said earlier that if you exaggerate a point, you lose an argument, I thought, let’s take it to the other extreme, that if you really want equity, which is not equality, equity just means everyone is given the same amount, no matter what. It’s like a basketball team should have an average child of five foot six as opposed to having who’s the best quality. And I took it to the extreme, but I also took the acknowledgement of what both sides are saying. So Progeny is a dystopic world where every child that is born is randomly assigned to another family that’s given birth. So equity should begin at birth, and it shouldn’t be that you are born into a family of wealth or fortune or even intellectual capabilities. But then you take to the extreme what human beings do and how we use power to control and corrupt. So it puts everything in there and mixes the pot and makes everyone think.

Dr. Kaplan: Let’s talk about the main character, Brooke. She’s one of the main characters obviously. She’s a central piece throughout the entire storyline. She begins inside the system rather than outside it. Why is she the right character to carry the story, do you think?

Dr. Weiss: I like that question. You must be a psychologist. So you, I think, know and understand so much better than others that we are taught a belief system and as we’re young, we don’t question it. So Brooke Yeled starts out as a prominent member of the Progeny Agency, which follows through and completes the task of having this equity from birth. She then gets a very harsh wake-up, and I don’t want to tell the whole story, but a harsh wake-up, and she begins to question those values that she was always taught was the gospel truth. And it’s an arc that starts from being one of those who enforce the law to one who recognizes and starts realizing what’s really important in life. And it goes through motherhood. And what stronger bond is there than a mother and her child? You and I are fathers, or men, and we understand that’s one answer. But a mother and the bond with the child is something that you can’t even question. But in my world that I created, I threw that into complete turmoil. So she is a young woman whose husband is a person of color and they don’t look at each other as black or white, but they are deeply in love. And I won’t go through the story of what happens to one or the other. But it’s sort of the evolution of her going from what she was taught, what she thought was right, and it becomes really topsy-turvy. And she goes through a full sort of conversion to the strength of motherhood.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. And by the way, just as a psychologist, I really loved that aspect of the story, just thinking about the concept of attachment, being a parent and attachment to a child. And this idea, it’s very sort of Brave New World or Orwellian, kind of as you were saying, this idea that people don’t belong to other people. They just can get distributed and be part of this bigger society or organization, and the attachments to individuals are not as important. So I kind of loved wrestling with that idea in my head.

Dr. Weiss: Well, thank you. And I agree. And again, politicians from both sides of the aisle, when they talk about they’re all our children, I’m like, well, no, my child. It doesn’t mean I want ill on somebody else. I want them the best. But we all look out for our children. We would fight for our children or our parents or the ones we love. And you’re the psychologist, so I would ask you too, in a deeper sense, how do people sort of rationalize their behavior when you talk about equality for all, but you still want what’s best for your child and you will give them even more than you would for someone else? It’s just, I think, in nature.

Dr. Kaplan: You know what, that comes up sometimes when I hear people debating the private versus public school type of debate. Like you’ll see people who say private school kids should all go to public school, so everybody should have access to the same education. But then if you have your kid in the school system and you can get your kid a better education in the private school, are you going to say, well, I’m putting my kid in the public school because of that? It becomes a real dilemma for somebody when they’re faced with it in a personal sense.

Dr. Weiss: Yeah, there’s an interesting, I wrote an article which was sent all over the country at one time where it’s how to find your personal physician, your champion, basically. As a physician, when I graduated medical school, you could take two oaths, either the Hippocratic Oath or the Oath of Maimonides. And the Oath of Maimonides, he was a 12th-century physician in Spain and then in Egypt, whatever. And he basically said that I am my patient’s champion. Back in around 2000, there was a physician adviser for the political elite. And he wanted to change the oath that a physician takes when they graduate medical school from an oath of allegiance to the patient, the individual patient, to an oath of allegiance to the state, for the health of the state. And his rationale was that if we take an oath of allegiance to the health of the state, then everyone benefits because if the state is healthy, then everyone is healthy. But if you take an oath of allegiance to the patient, that means you give preferential care to the patient and not to the general population. It’s a philosophical change and it’s still an argument that goes on today.

Dr. Kaplan: Well, it’s an argument that went on with the vaccines and COVID, right? Without weighing in on one side or the other about what was the right thing to do with the vaccines, people were arguing about that. The argument that everybody should get the vaccine so that everybody was immunized so that the virus couldn’t spread versus, hey, this is my individual decision whether or not this is right for me. And that was an argument that raged like crazy.

Dr. Weiss: I was a national healthcare adviser for John McCain when he ran for president in 2008. But I also was an adviser more on the side as a personal friend for the former governor of New York named David Paterson. I don’t know if you remember who he was or is, a wonderful, wonderful man, a Democrat, and we used to joke that we come from different political sides, but we listen to each other, and he was wonderful. This was during the H1N1 crisis in New York. He was getting a lot of pressure to mandate state employees to get the H1N1 vaccine. And my response to him at that time was, you know, Governor, if you cannot express and convince people to get a mandate on the merits, then how can you mandate it? So you need to explain why you think it should be, not force it. And he agreed with me. He got a lot of flak for it, but he ended up being correct. Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s an interesting argument, but that’s where Progeny came in, to try and show what happens when we take these ideas to an extreme and how do we as a world respond to it and how the individuals respond. How do we respond to power and corruption? And then the other thing I point out is we all talk about AI, and I have a lot of AI reference in Progeny, and everyone’s afraid of where AI is going. And I tell people there’s more benefits than harms, but there’s risk just like with a scalpel. When I hold a scalpel, it’s used to save a life, but it could easily take a life.

Dr. Kaplan: So we talked a bit about this chilling theme about how equity could take over in a society and this idea that children could be just distributed, taken away from their mothers. And we’ve talked a little bit about that. How much was this theme about the power of an authoritarian government or totalitarian regime, however you want to call it, something that you were paying attention to? That’s obviously a very Orwellian concept. Was that important to you?

Dr. Weiss: Yes, because when I put this idea together, and it took a couple years to put it together into a way to express it, I understand and acknowledge different points of view. I may not agree with someone, but I’m very open to hearing what someone has to say. Sort of like how Bill Maher might be a liberal, but he’s very open to hearing and deciding what he disagrees with and hearing what’s best. So there is a concern from authoritarian regime, whether from the left or the right, and how human nature is what really dictates it. So you could have someone like a benign dictator who might be a wonderful person while they’re ruling, but if the next one comes along and they’re an authoritarian dictator, power, I am afraid, corrupts. And power can bring out the worst in people who are susceptible to abusing that over others for their own personal well-being. And that’s what I showed in this case. What the idea of what they were trying to do on paper might be good, but when it comes to reality, it never pans out.

Dr. Kaplan: Peter, did you want the world of Progeny to feel sort of futuristic? Or did you want it to feel very close to our possible near future? What was the intention there for you?

Dr. Weiss: That’s brilliant. I love that question because it’s exactly what it is. It’s almost like when you hear those old movies, in the not too near future, not just future. I mean, this could be five years from now, ten years from now, 20 years from now. It could be tomorrow. So sort of timeless, really. Right? It is dystopic time. And I also put in reference to nostalgic figures like old sports figures frowned on in social media for differentiating one from the other. Everyone was sort of wearing monotone color grays because you don’t want to wear something showy and flashy, which might imply to somebody else that you’re better off. All cars are the same color. So what gives you the right to have a big, fancy car as opposed to somebody who drives a small, little car?

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, that was sort of interesting, Peter. So Brooke’s husband, his name was, remind me.

Dr. Weiss: Derek.

Dr. Kaplan: Derek, yes. And Derek was into old sports memorabilia and older stuff that the general societal population frowned upon, yet he kept it and he was into it. And it seemed like it wasn’t illegal. It was okay to be there, but it was frowned upon and it was considered bad. Was this an example of societal pressures to conform? How would you view that?

Dr. Weiss: Exactly. I think a lot of the troubles we’ve had over the last generation is really social media and the pressures that it puts on us and how it really dictates what is acceptable and what’s not. I look at social media, and to jump into a different area, as psychologists were sitting here talking, you could be thinking something in your mind, but you’re not going to express it out loud because it might be offensive, might not be whatever, but we all do that. I think social media is thought diarrhea, so to speak. That is what comes out and it just explodes. And we don’t know what the consequences are. And that’s what I think caused a lot of problems. There’s no lag time. There’s no delay. And I think what happens in Progeny, I show that while things aren’t illegal, social media is so strong it really dictates what people can and cannot say. And the reason that I have the sports memorabilia frowned upon is because those are when there were winners and losers. We still have it today. In every sports team, there’s a team that wins and loses. That’s not fair for the team that loses.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, good point. And that seems like another concept that’s crept into the way people think. Like everybody should win. There’s a line from Alice in Wonderland. It was the Dodo bird: everyone has won and all must have prizes. I love that line, but it’s sort of like the idea of competition and people winning and people having to deal with loss. That makes a lot of sense, that from the perspective of Progeny, that wasn’t what they were promoting, that idea, right?

Dr. Weiss: Right, exactly. So everything has to be equity. There were no winners and losers. And I have plays with the names of some of the characters, sort of play on words. But that’s really the whole world that we’re in. And as you go through the arc of Brooke going from one aspect to the other and all of the people involved, I leave the story sort of a cliffhanger to the point where I’m not telling the audience what I think. You’re the psychologist, and when you tell people, what’s your famous line in every movie? So what do you feel about that? You don’t know. You want it, right? So that’s the whole point of it. I want the person, when they read it, when they finish it, it’s a quick read, that they come back and they think. And I’ve talked to so many people now. It’s so many different answers of what they think I meant. And I don’t tell them what I think because I don’t want them to be biased by my ideas. I want people to think.

Dr. Kaplan: Well, Peter, I actually think with a novel like yours, you’ve succeeded if you get people saying that they think totally different things. The more different kinds of answers you get means you probably did something right with your story, in my opinion.

Dr. Weiss: I appreciate it. It’s kind of funny. I’ve had people think that this is a right-wing conservative view. And I have other people think that it’s a left-wing progressive view. And I’m thinking, wow, how did they read that? You’re the psychologist. So you tell me, when people read things, they read what they want to hear or see, right?

Dr. Kaplan: Well, they’re projecting themselves into the story and they’re reading it and seeing it, perceiving it from their lens, just like they do everything else in life. And so the story becomes a projection. And I know that that’s the case with my book, just real briefly, as people have been reading it and have been giving me some advanced commentary about it. People are reading it totally differently and what they’re projecting into the various different characters or different ideas and different perceptions. I’ve had one person say, oh, this one person in the novel, I would have bailed on her the first second I met her. And another person said I would have stayed with her for the rest of my life if I was the protagonist. So it’s so interesting the way people process things.

Dr. Weiss: Yeah, your characters that you created were fascinating. And I don’t want to give the story away, but I love how each of your characters has an unusual sort of view on life and they each have their own little psychological issue and take on the world and how this person has to deal with it. It’s absolutely brilliant. I got to tell you, it’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read for a long time.

Dr. Kaplan: Oh, thanks, Peter. No, I appreciate that. It was so much fun, but I’m really kind of relating to a lot of the things we’re talking about with Progeny, with just the projections of the characters and what you obviously put a lot of thought into, the psyche behind the people in the book and the way they progress throughout, especially Brooke, of course. Peter, what would you say to this? In your view, are dangerous systems usually sustained by more obvious cruelty or by ordinary people convincing themselves that they’re being fair and reasonable? Is it more overt or is it more just the subtlety of good intention, so to speak?

Dr. Weiss: It’s when it’s subtle, it’s the most dangerous. When it becomes acceptable norms, then it’s truly dangerous. I think human beings, we tend to accept things piece by piece. And then it becomes, oh, that’s common, that’s normal. That’s normal. When it’s an abrupt change, it becomes more obvious. And I think those are less successful. When it’s subtle, it could be a very slippery slope to things that really just don’t work out best for us.

Dr. Kaplan: So we don’t get a lot of the backstory for how Progeny came to be the society it was. But do you suspect that it was a subtle progression to that point?

Dr. Weiss: Yes. Oh, that’s a good question. Yeah, a lot of people ask because if your viewers are interested enough to go ahead and get Progeny to read it, see, it’s a quick read. It doesn’t go deep into what brought the society there. There’s an assumption: here we are. But yes, it is in my mind a subtle change that progressed all the way to that point where we’re trying to find equity. And we’re seeing that today being exhibited in so many different ways that people aren’t willing to work for what they earn. They want it given to them because of some equitable claim that life isn’t a number. Life is living and you have to earn the respect. I guess it’s simply like respect. You earn respect and you have to earn equality. And when it becomes a subtle break of this, that’s what I envisioned in Progeny. And at the end, I leave it up to your imagination as to what you think is going to be the next chapter in that life. And we’re in the process now of writing a screenplay adapting this to a feature film. And that’s interesting, you said that, because this is where the screenwriter, which I’m not, then goes in and takes each character and dives deeper to the foundation of what brought this on, how this came about, and then it becomes a much more full picture.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, well, it would make an amazing high-octane film. So good luck with that. I really hope that comes to fruition. I’m really thinking about when we’re talking about how changes happen in society, are they quick or are they slow and subtle? And you said, well, slow and subtle is where the most obvious pattern is going to take place, or something like this. I’m sort of reminded of Stanley Milgram and his experiments with the electric shocks. I don’t know how much of the psychiatry and psychology in your career. But he created those experiments after the Holocaust, of course, and trying to understand how ordinary people could do such awful things. And this kind of concept of the banality of evil, people just sort of falling in place and doing what’s expected of them and what society is dictating them to do. And before you know it, you have evilness or you have wrongdoing or horrible things happening. And it just sort of slipped into that pattern without anybody really noticing it.

Dr. Weiss: It’s brilliant. And not only that is you then learn not to give the excuse, you explain why it happened and you could understand it. Well, the person became evil because he had a horrible childhood. He was abused as a child, so I could understand why he raped three women, which makes no real sense when you think about it. But when you start to give excuses for patterns of evil behavior, then it becomes acceptable. And there lies the real danger to society. As a psychologist, you deal with those who are just confused, those who are delusional, schizophrenic tendency, psychopath. There’s a wide range, but it’s a very subtle shift going down that path.

Dr. Kaplan: Peter, was there a character or a scene or a plot turn that surprised you when you were writing it, like in your process of writing?

Dr. Weiss: I like that question. Interesting. So my youngest son is a screenwriter and he’s a brilliant writer. He helped me build up these characters. And I didn’t realize when I write, there are different ways. Certain people write outlines, and I don’t know how you write, or certain people have an idea from A to the whole arc. And then you start writing and you see where your mind takes you. Not that I am anywhere near that, but Stephen King actually writes that way. He doesn’t write with an outline. He starts writing and he knows where he wants to go and he just lets it go. So I sort of do that and I’ll write it and then I’ll come back and I’ll fill it in more. So it just depends on where my crazy mind goes. Some of the scenes that I came up with even surprised me when I started writing and I’m thinking, and a friend asked, how did you come up with that scene? And I said, you know, I’m afraid I have no idea. Sort of, what do you call it in psychology where you’re just like not loose associations, but you just let your mind think and wander. It’s almost like dreaming in daytime. You know, you just let your mind go and just write and flow.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, I mean, I like free association. That’s a good term.

Dr. Weiss: That’s really what it is. It’s free association and you just see how it sounds and you say, wow, that’s creepy. That’s good. I’ll keep it, or that didn’t make sense, and you change it around.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. Well, I think creative people have the ability to do that. Their mind is open in this way that they can let it wander without editing or suppressing. And so you must have one of those minds that allows you to do that. And that’s kind of how you were able to go through your writing process, I imagine.

Dr. Weiss: Well, that’s probably how you did that too, because your characters in your book were so well thought out and, with all due respect, were kind of weird. In such a good way.

Dr. Kaplan: No, I will own the word label. I didn’t think of that. Yeah, for sure. You must have dealt with that personality at some time in your career. Peter, what was the hardest part of writing Progeny conceptually, emotionally or technically? Where did you struggle the most with it?

Dr. Weiss: I think finding the time to write it, to be able to do the free association. I wrote it when, so I had a large practice for 40 years and then COVID hit. And I decided I didn’t want to be in private practice anymore. I started doing what’s called locum tenens, going to small little towns where they didn’t have a doctor and I would fill in. And I was going up to a town in northern California, Eureka, which is a fabulous little town in the Redwoods. But it’s in the middle of nowhere. They call it the Lost Coast and it’s got a little microclimate of cloudy, rainy, foggy most of the days. I would go into the hospital, but I had most of the days free and I would just sit in the hotel room and start writing and looking out at the Redwoods and the fog and it just got to it. And maybe the clouds of cannabis smoke blowing in. There’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of homeless. The funny thing is there is a large homeless population, but there are a lot of dogs that the homeless in the county, they give. So I would go to the store and I would buy dog food. I don’t give money to the homeless because they would just use it for drugs. You can donate to the local chapters that give food. But the dogs I would give, and these dogs were well taken care of by these guys. And I would give, and somehow I found that very relieving. These dogs were fabulous.

Dr. Kaplan: That’s interesting. You don’t really typically think of the dog populations in places you go, except when I lived in Nepal all the dogs were pretty mean, I got to say

Dr. Weiss: I would talk to some of the homeless guys and they would tell me they’re stuck on meth. There’s a lot of meth there. But they found that the dogs gave them a sense of purpose. And so I would give the dog food and they were very appreciative.

Dr. Kaplan: Peter, after reading Progeny, what do you hope that readers take with them?

Dr. Weiss: I’m tired of the divide. And I think we all are. And it sounds hokey when you say, listen, it’s okay if we disagree. That’s not a problem. But when you not belittle, but when you demonize somebody you disagree with to the point where you think they’re mentally ill or they don’t deserve, that becomes a problem. So with Progeny, I just want people to understand that if you have a, and I’ll call it a radical idea of what you think life should be, if you take it to an extreme, you’ll see how the answer isn’t 100 percent one way or the other, it’s somewhere in between where we can find: you want A, I want B, let’s find a solution with C, and we all move on from there. The problem is when one or the other takes full control, then half of us are disillusioned and become very upset.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, well, that’s what we were talking about earlier about the polarization. And I guess sort of like living in that gray area or the in-between. That’s tough for people now, and that’s where I think most of us are.

Dr. Weiss: And remember, you’re too young to remember, Richard Nixon used to talk about the silent majority. And I think the silent majority of us are in the middle and we’re being destroyed by the edges.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. In writing Progeny, did it clarify anything for you about your own fears, beliefs or moral preoccupations? What did you come out from this? You started with obviously some themes and we’ve talked about a bunch of them. Did you change in any way or did it just reinforce stuff?

Dr. Weiss: I think it did two things. One, the idea of Progeny, when I first told my wife and a couple of people, they thought, wow, what an interesting idea. And other people thought that’s so lunatic, that’s crazy, to such an extreme. And I thought, oh, boy, you know what, maybe I have a crazy idea. And it was frowned upon. But when I finally put pen to paper and started sending it out to all the friends who wrote back and said, this is really, really good, it reinforced that not to be afraid to just do what you believe you are capable of doing, putting the pen to paper and then getting the response that I got. So it reinforced that people are willing to read ideas that sort of hit you. It’s sort of like hitting your head against the wall to wake up. I think what we’ve gotten to the point where we need to realize is that the extreme of ideas can be dangerous, and Progeny is sort of a wake-up call to that. That if you go to certain extremes, you better be careful of what you wish for.

Dr. Kaplan: Well, I think it takes a lot of courage to write for a lot of reasons. One, you’re putting ideas out there that a lot of people come to you and say, this is a crazy idea. Why would you write about this? Two, just getting from start to finish. I mean, it is a huge, huge project. And it’s hard to convince oneself to undertake that. So that’s really amazing that you completed it so successfully. And I’m glad you had the courage to get all your words on paper and your ideas out there because they’re really important and they make people think.

Dr. Weiss: Thank you. I appreciate that. And I’ve already started the idea for the sequel.

Dr. Kaplan: Well, I was going to ask you that. What’s next?

Dr. Weiss: I actually have a trilogy planned. So a lot of people have asked, since I leave it as a cliffhanger, they said, what happened? They want more. So I’m going to do that continuation. And I have another wild extreme idea, which will continue the radical views of the crazy world I’ve created. And then the third one will be the one that brings it all together.

Dr. Kaplan: Nice. Well, good. I can’t wait to read those, Peter. Thank you. Peter, any final thoughts you have for us before we close out? I mean, it’s been a fascinating conversation and I love discussing your amazing book. What else should we know?

Dr. Weiss: Well, thank you. And I just want to thank you for the work that you do. We actually need more people like you that will be able to help cope with the extremes of today, and information comes to us so fast. I think that’s part of the problem. It used to take a week to get information passed on. Now it’s faster than thinking. It’s so quick. People need to understand that extremes are dangerous and need to be open to other people. Just because you disagree with someone doesn’t mean that they’re evil or bad. And I think this has gone too far from as simple as political disagreements to religious disagreements, what have you. We have to find a way to be able to work together. And as I said, find that middle ground.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. Well, those are very wise words. Thank you for that and an amazing message from the book. And I will definitely continue to try to help pass those words along to the people I come in contact with and obviously recommend Progeny as a book that tells this cautionary tale and sheds light on what we’re going through. Regarding you, I assume the book we can find on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all the places where you normally buy books. Where else can we get information about you?

Dr. Weiss: Oh, thank you. There is a website, Peter Weiss author at gmail.com, which will give you some of the background. That’s going to be the most effective way. And Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, these are all places that you can get the book. And hopefully people enjoy it. And I love getting the comments and the reviews. I take criticism. Hopefully I take it well. Hopefully everyone enjoys the book and will pass it on.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, thanks so much. Well, again, great work, Peter. Thanks again for the great read and for the conversation. And it was wonderful meeting you and talking with you.

Dr. Weiss: Thank you again. It’s a great pleasure and an honor to be with you.