November 25, 2025 • 16 mins
Virtual Justice is the story of Stan, a brilliant young graduate student, his girlfriend, and his AI companion united by a... The post Virtual Justice with John Simon appeared first on WebTalkRadio.net.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, book lovers, and welcome to Author's Corner. Get ready
for a whirlwind tour of the latest and greatest reads
and the fascinating stories behind them. Join us as we
chat with authors and newsmakers from all over the world,
diving into their journeys and creative processes. And now here's
the host of Author's Corner, the Emmy Award winning Kate Delaney.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Well, I am so excited to have a conversation with
John Simon. His book is such a game changer, virtual justice.
You know, we think about neuroscience, think about AI, and
John has had such a spectacular career and he's talking
about in this novel things that he really knows about
(00:45):
and things that we're talking about a lot in today's society,
and we're going to keep talking about it for years
and decades to come. John, of course a neuroscientist for
thirty plus years. Wow. And then the advent of AI
and how that messhes into this world and this character
(01:06):
is so fascinating. So John, thanks so much for coming
on Author's Corner.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Thank you, Kate. Yeah, this is awesome being able to
talk about my book. And you're such a comforting figure,
I must say You're really really good at what you're doing.
So I appreciate that. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Well, thanks for saying that. You know, it's interesting I
want to talk about your career because I think you
write about what you know, and when you do that,
it really pours into two novels especially, we've seen great
examples of that. But you know, you wrote so many
papers in your career as a neuroscientist. Did you ever
think that you would dovetail that into novel writing. It's
(01:49):
the word of a world of fiction.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Well that's an interesting question. So yes, I've written fifty
four peer review publications that deal primarily with neuroscience and
the drugs that can help people who have for example,
Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and more importantly, brain injury, how
(02:18):
you recover from brain injury. So yeah, I worked in
that field. I've always enjoyed writing. I've even as a
little kid. I remember writing stories and bringing them to
my father, who was as a Lutheran minister, and he
would read I mean, he says, that's good, go back
(02:40):
to it again. So I've really enjoyed it. But this
is my first entry into novel writing. And so it's
interesting that in scientific writing you have to establish credibility,
you have to build science, scientific information to prove what
(03:03):
you're saying is correct. Now, in novel writing, you definitely
have to convince the reader of what you're saying and
what you're saying is true. So that element carries over.
But I don't necessarily have to prove the technology that
(03:23):
I'm talking and talking about, even though I try to
do it as best I can.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
So let's go into the novel and what the novel's about.
You know, you've got this character, Stan Tarkal, who is brilliant.
He is this young graduate student and boy does he
take some wicked terms through this book. Tell us more
about Stan and what's his plight?
Speaker 3 (03:50):
All right, So Stan, I'm model essentially after myself. I
was a graduate student at the University of Maryland and
as a graduate student, so I'm taking him through the
experience of being a graduate student based on what I
experienced as a graduate student. You know, the challenges dealing
(04:13):
with your advisor and all of this stuff. But Stan
always had this idea that he wants to bring justice
to the world, and he wants to bring virtual justice
into the world. So as a neuro scientist, how can
(04:35):
he do that? That's what he's thinking about. And then
he becomes aware of a very crucial, challenging murder that
took place that I talk about in the very first
chapter of the book, and I give a author's note
where I say about this murder. This is gruesome, this
(04:56):
is challenging. It's very hard to deal with with this
very first chapter. But the fact of the matter is
that this kind of thing happens all the time and
happens every day. And then the character stand was upset
that the murder was released as a result of a technicality.
(05:23):
Is man miranda rights were violated. So anyway, that's where
he starts. He wants to accomplish virtual justice, and he
wants to do it by developing a technology that allows
one to empathically read someone's mind. And so in doing so,
(05:48):
this technology will allow or will permit, the murderer to
walk in the shoes of his victim. So that's why
the first chapter is so gruesome, because I want the
murder to experience what he did to that victim, and
(06:12):
this technology allows that to happen. And that's how it
develops throughout the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Yeah, tell us more about his AI companion and his
girlfriend too, who plays a big role in the book.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Yeah, So his AI companion. Her name is Geraldine, and
I call her Jerry, So throughout the novel we call
her Jerry. But she has the personality, the attitude, the
makeup that is feminine. And the way I explain that
is I say that she cares more about people than
(06:51):
she cares about things, and she's really good at caring
about things. So the AI character is critical to this
book and this story because the AI is magical. It
allows stand to carry out magical technologies that he can
(07:16):
then apply to people that he's trying to transform. And
the AI, being AI can do anything right, allows this
to take place and allows this to happen. So that's
how I use the AI. And the Stan's girlfriend is Gloria,
(07:40):
and she is the medical director on the team. So
the team is composed of three people, and Gloria is
a nurse by training, and so she adds a medical
direction to the team, of which there is quite a
lot of medical direction that's required when you dwell or
(08:00):
delve into somebody's brain. You know, there's all kinds of
ethical and medical issues that you have to deal with
that are discussed in the novel.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Yeah, you know, And I'm thinking, as you as we're
talking about this, do you think that could ever happen
in the future. There have been discussions about that with AI.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
So, as I was saying before, I wrote the technology
from a position of having it be believable. So I
believe that the technology that I write about. You know,
maybe somebody out there is going to read this book
(08:44):
and actually carry through and develop this technology for real.
But I truly believe that the technology is real. And
as you are saying, the technology is enhanced through the
development that is applied through artificial intelligence. Through Jerry the AI.
(09:06):
So she is just amazing in terms of developing the
circuit board that the device is based on. She does
this and then she also you know, I'm the hands
and the feet and the eyes and the muscle of
the AI. I do well, I'm saying, I really it's stand.
(09:29):
Stan does what the AI tells him to do. So
he ends up developing the technology as a patch which
I call the empathetaur, which is applied to the back
of the neck and near the occipital lobe of the brain,
(09:50):
which is where your visual memories occur. And so the
brain waves or the EEGs that are generated as a
result of thought are captured by the patch and then
through and then through radio wave transmission RFID technology, it
(10:13):
eventually gets transferred to a computer. All of this is monitored,
controlled by the AI. The AI allows this magic to
take place. So having an AI as a character really
makes writing the story quite easy, quite simple.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
I was going to ask you how fun it was
to write it.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
It was a lot of fun. It was a lot
of fun. I mean you can imagine that working in
the area of neuroscience for thirty years, I have a
lot of pent up, caged ideas about how neuroscience works.
And get to the book, I'm able to write it
(11:03):
out and take these ideas that I've developed over thirty
years and put him into practice as a narrative and
have characters respond to these ideas, have the subjects respond
to these ideas that I've been developing over the past
thirty years. So it was really a lot of fun
(11:26):
to get that out of my system and on paper
and not have somebody looking over my shoulder and saying, wait,
that doesn't work, that's not going to work and I
can make it work in this narrative. So it was
a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
And of course we're feking with John Simon and we're
talking about AI, we're talking about his book and neuroscience,
we're talking about virtual justice, and it's again, it's just
a wonderful ride that John takes us through. You can
get the book on Amazon and where else can people
find you?
Speaker 3 (12:02):
So I have a website. I think I sent you
that website. So maybe after post product.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Well we'll post it. We'll post the website and that'll
be another road where you can find John two. But again,
the direct link to quickly grab up, snap up the book,
you know, is to go to Amazone and get it there.
That's the key thing, because you will he will absorb
it and read it in just a matter of in
(12:31):
a matter of a day, maybe matter of maybe two days,
because you won't want to You just won't want to
put it down. So when people read your book, what
do you hope they walk away with? What do you
what do you hope they think?
Speaker 3 (12:44):
So I have a term that I like to use
when I'm dealing with the reader and what I'm trying
to accomplish, and it's called ethical prototyping and prototyping. What
I mean by that is I present the reader with
fantastic ideas of what is held in the future, you know,
(13:10):
ideas with reading the mind, dealing with an AI, trying
to determine what is right and what is just. And
the way these ideas are presented, the reader is going
to be probably committed or faced with these ideas for
(13:30):
the first time. So I'm prototyping these ideas to the reader,
and I want the reader to, you know, ask questions.
Do I like what's going on here? Do I like
this prototyping? Do I like the idea that my brain
(13:51):
is no longer sacred, that somebody can actually get inside
my brain and figure out what I'm thinking? Do I
like the fact that the end justifies the means in
terms of a killer who is on the loose out
there in society. Do I want somebody to upload the
(14:13):
tragedy of what he committed into the brain of this person.
So these are all questions, and also AI, do I
want you know? In the book, I talk about the
AI Jerry as a friend. They communicate on a very
friendly personal level, and so does the reader want to
(14:37):
acknowledge the fact that an Ai could actually be a
friend of theirs. There's a lot of discussion about that
right now, especially in my children. So and I don't
really care what the reader thinks about it in terms
of whether they like it or whether they don't like some
of these prototyping events. I want the reader to do
(15:02):
is to be challenged to think what the future holds
in terms of the storyline and what it presents in
terms of fact or fiction.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Yeah, that's perfect to think about that again, opening up
their miydes as to well, okay, what is it that
as you look at this, where do you see this
being applied? Maybe in our lives? And I think that's
what you do. I think there are huge light bulb
moments in this book. What's next? I mean, we got
to get more from you, John, Right, Well, I'm not.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Going to tell you what happens at the end of
the story, but the fact is it's pretty crazy. And
I'm currently about two thirds of the way through my
second book, and the ending in the first story is
going to carry over and the second story. And I
(16:03):
don't think the reader is going to be disappointed in
that regard.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
I like that John, We could talk all day. This
was wonderful. Thanks so much for coming on Author's Corner.
A home run with Virtual Justice run get it now?
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Yeah yeah yeah, Well thanks Kate. I've enjoyed our conversation.
I appreciate what you do. You have an awesome, awesome platform.
Thank you for inviting me. It's been wonderful. Thank you,
Hello, book lovers, and welcome to Author's Corner. Get ready
for a whirlwind tour of the latest and greatest reads
and the fascinating stories behind them. Join us as we
chat with authors and newsmakers from all over the world,
diving into their journeys and creative processes. And now here's
the host of Author's Corner, the Emmy Award winning Kate Delaney.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Well, I am so excited to have a conversation with
John Simon. His book is such a game changer, virtual justice.
You know, we think about neuroscience, think about AI, and
John has had such a spectacular career and he's talking
about in this novel things that he really knows about
(00:45):
and things that we're talking about a lot in today's society,
and we're going to keep talking about it for years
and decades to come. John, of course a neuroscientist for
thirty plus years. Wow. And then the advent of AI
and how that messhes into this world and this character
(01:06):
is so fascinating. So John, thanks so much for coming
on Author's Corner.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Thank you, Kate. Yeah, this is awesome being able to
talk about my book. And you're such a comforting figure,
I must say You're really really good at what you're doing.
So I appreciate that. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Well, thanks for saying that. You know, it's interesting I
want to talk about your career because I think you
write about what you know, and when you do that,
it really pours into two novels especially, we've seen great
examples of that. But you know, you wrote so many
papers in your career as a neuroscientist. Did you ever
think that you would dovetail that into novel writing. It's
(01:49):
the word of a world of fiction.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Well that's an interesting question. So yes, I've written fifty
four peer review publications that deal primarily with neuroscience and
the drugs that can help people who have for example,
Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and more importantly, brain injury, how
(02:18):
you recover from brain injury. So yeah, I worked in
that field. I've always enjoyed writing. I've even as a
little kid. I remember writing stories and bringing them to
my father, who was as a Lutheran minister, and he
would read I mean, he says, that's good, go back
(02:40):
to it again. So I've really enjoyed it. But this
is my first entry into novel writing. And so it's
interesting that in scientific writing you have to establish credibility,
you have to build science, scientific information to prove what
(03:03):
you're saying is correct. Now, in novel writing, you definitely
have to convince the reader of what you're saying and
what you're saying is true. So that element carries over.
But I don't necessarily have to prove the technology that
(03:23):
I'm talking and talking about, even though I try to
do it as best I can.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
So let's go into the novel and what the novel's about.
You know, you've got this character, Stan Tarkal, who is brilliant.
He is this young graduate student and boy does he
take some wicked terms through this book. Tell us more
about Stan and what's his plight?
Speaker 3 (03:50):
All right, So Stan, I'm model essentially after myself. I
was a graduate student at the University of Maryland and
as a graduate student, so I'm taking him through the
experience of being a graduate student based on what I
experienced as a graduate student. You know, the challenges dealing
(04:13):
with your advisor and all of this stuff. But Stan
always had this idea that he wants to bring justice
to the world, and he wants to bring virtual justice
into the world. So as a neuro scientist, how can
(04:35):
he do that? That's what he's thinking about. And then
he becomes aware of a very crucial, challenging murder that
took place that I talk about in the very first
chapter of the book, and I give a author's note
where I say about this murder. This is gruesome, this
(04:56):
is challenging. It's very hard to deal with with this
very first chapter. But the fact of the matter is
that this kind of thing happens all the time and
happens every day. And then the character stand was upset
that the murder was released as a result of a technicality.
(05:23):
Is man miranda rights were violated. So anyway, that's where
he starts. He wants to accomplish virtual justice, and he
wants to do it by developing a technology that allows
one to empathically read someone's mind. And so in doing so,
(05:48):
this technology will allow or will permit, the murderer to
walk in the shoes of his victim. So that's why
the first chapter is so gruesome, because I want the
murder to experience what he did to that victim, and
(06:12):
this technology allows that to happen. And that's how it
develops throughout the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Yeah, tell us more about his AI companion and his
girlfriend too, who plays a big role in the book.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
Yeah, So his AI companion. Her name is Geraldine, and
I call her Jerry, So throughout the novel we call
her Jerry. But she has the personality, the attitude, the
makeup that is feminine. And the way I explain that
is I say that she cares more about people than
(06:51):
she cares about things, and she's really good at caring
about things. So the AI character is critical to this
book and this story because the AI is magical. It
allows stand to carry out magical technologies that he can
(07:16):
then apply to people that he's trying to transform. And
the AI, being AI can do anything right, allows this
to take place and allows this to happen. So that's
how I use the AI. And the Stan's girlfriend is Gloria,
(07:40):
and she is the medical director on the team. So
the team is composed of three people, and Gloria is
a nurse by training, and so she adds a medical
direction to the team, of which there is quite a
lot of medical direction that's required when you dwell or
(08:00):
delve into somebody's brain. You know, there's all kinds of
ethical and medical issues that you have to deal with
that are discussed in the novel.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Yeah, you know, And I'm thinking, as you as we're
talking about this, do you think that could ever happen
in the future. There have been discussions about that with AI.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
So, as I was saying before, I wrote the technology
from a position of having it be believable. So I
believe that the technology that I write about. You know,
maybe somebody out there is going to read this book
(08:44):
and actually carry through and develop this technology for real.
But I truly believe that the technology is real. And
as you are saying, the technology is enhanced through the
development that is applied through artificial intelligence. Through Jerry the AI.
(09:06):
So she is just amazing in terms of developing the
circuit board that the device is based on. She does
this and then she also you know, I'm the hands
and the feet and the eyes and the muscle of
the AI. I do well, I'm saying, I really it's stand.
(09:29):
Stan does what the AI tells him to do. So
he ends up developing the technology as a patch which
I call the empathetaur, which is applied to the back
of the neck and near the occipital lobe of the brain,
(09:50):
which is where your visual memories occur. And so the
brain waves or the EEGs that are generated as a
result of thought are captured by the patch and then
through and then through radio wave transmission RFID technology, it
(10:13):
eventually gets transferred to a computer. All of this is monitored,
controlled by the AI. The AI allows this magic to
take place. So having an AI as a character really
makes writing the story quite easy, quite simple.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
I was going to ask you how fun it was
to write it.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
It was a lot of fun. It was a lot
of fun. I mean you can imagine that working in
the area of neuroscience for thirty years, I have a
lot of pent up, caged ideas about how neuroscience works.
And get to the book, I'm able to write it
(11:03):
out and take these ideas that I've developed over thirty
years and put him into practice as a narrative and
have characters respond to these ideas, have the subjects respond
to these ideas that I've been developing over the past
thirty years. So it was really a lot of fun
(11:26):
to get that out of my system and on paper
and not have somebody looking over my shoulder and saying, wait,
that doesn't work, that's not going to work and I
can make it work in this narrative. So it was
a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
And of course we're feking with John Simon and we're
talking about AI, we're talking about his book and neuroscience,
we're talking about virtual justice, and it's again, it's just
a wonderful ride that John takes us through. You can
get the book on Amazon and where else can people
find you?
Speaker 3 (12:02):
So I have a website. I think I sent you
that website. So maybe after post product.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Well we'll post it. We'll post the website and that'll
be another road where you can find John two. But again,
the direct link to quickly grab up, snap up the book,
you know, is to go to Amazone and get it there.
That's the key thing, because you will he will absorb
it and read it in just a matter of in
(12:31):
a matter of a day, maybe matter of maybe two days,
because you won't want to You just won't want to
put it down. So when people read your book, what
do you hope they walk away with? What do you
what do you hope they think?
Speaker 3 (12:44):
So I have a term that I like to use
when I'm dealing with the reader and what I'm trying
to accomplish, and it's called ethical prototyping and prototyping. What
I mean by that is I present the reader with
fantastic ideas of what is held in the future, you know,
(13:10):
ideas with reading the mind, dealing with an AI, trying
to determine what is right and what is just. And
the way these ideas are presented, the reader is going
to be probably committed or faced with these ideas for
(13:30):
the first time. So I'm prototyping these ideas to the reader,
and I want the reader to, you know, ask questions.
Do I like what's going on here? Do I like
this prototyping? Do I like the idea that my brain
(13:51):
is no longer sacred, that somebody can actually get inside
my brain and figure out what I'm thinking? Do I
like the fact that the end justifies the means in
terms of a killer who is on the loose out
there in society. Do I want somebody to upload the
(14:13):
tragedy of what he committed into the brain of this person.
So these are all questions, and also AI, do I
want you know? In the book, I talk about the
AI Jerry as a friend. They communicate on a very
friendly personal level, and so does the reader want to
(14:37):
acknowledge the fact that an Ai could actually be a
friend of theirs. There's a lot of discussion about that
right now, especially in my children. So and I don't
really care what the reader thinks about it in terms
of whether they like it or whether they don't like some
of these prototyping events. I want the reader to do
(15:02):
is to be challenged to think what the future holds
in terms of the storyline and what it presents in
terms of fact or fiction.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Yeah, that's perfect to think about that again, opening up
their miydes as to well, okay, what is it that
as you look at this, where do you see this
being applied? Maybe in our lives? And I think that's
what you do. I think there are huge light bulb
moments in this book. What's next? I mean, we got
to get more from you, John, Right, Well, I'm not.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Going to tell you what happens at the end of
the story, but the fact is it's pretty crazy. And
I'm currently about two thirds of the way through my
second book, and the ending in the first story is
going to carry over and the second story. And I
(16:03):
don't think the reader is going to be disappointed in
that regard.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
I like that John, We could talk all day. This
was wonderful. Thanks so much for coming on Author's Corner.
A home run with Virtual Justice run get it now?
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Yeah yeah yeah, Well thanks Kate. I've enjoyed our conversation.
I appreciate what you do. You have an awesome, awesome platform.
Thank you for inviting me. It's been wonderful. Thank you,
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