The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – WITH LOVE, FROM PLANET B: A sapphic spiritual sci-fi fantasy novel by ZAAYIN SALAAM MD.

Episode Date: October 28, 2023

WITH LOVE, FROM PLANET B: A sapphic spiritual sci-fi fantasy novel by ZAAYIN SALAAM MD. https://amzn.to/478HjAd Our world is about to change very fast. Are you ready for a story that takes you deeper into your spirit? It’s 2085, and the 6th extinction event is unfolding. The climate crisis escalated after we ignored the deadlines. Super corporations created the Free One World Nation, which now rules the world. Zara is a Master Lucid Dreamer, waiting to Lucid Teleport to a suitable exo-planet once it’s found. She is spiritual, deconstructing the religious beliefs forced on her as a child. Lex, her girlfriend and team mathematician is an atheist. She discovers the existence of Planet B. Join Zara and Lex on their hero’s journey as they each earn their way into this utopia. Will they cure themselves of Three Spiritual Diseases that afflict all Earthlings? Will they survive on Planet B? Several predictions from this novel have already come true. Those who receive the messages embedded in this story will be better prepared for the massive shifts to come. Here are some summary notes from the podcast interview: Zaayin Salaam is the author of the new sci-fi spiritual novel "With Love From Planet B", releasing November 11, 2023. The book is set in the year 2085, where climate change has ravaged Earth. Corporations rule and two heroines try to save the world by teleporting to an alternate dimension. Zaayin Salaam has a medical background and was always interested in science, quantum physics, and spirituality. She wrote the book over several years, going through extensive edits and rewrites. The book touches on her experiences growing up in Pakistan and immigrating to the U.S. The characters reflect parts of her own spiritual journey and desire to make a difference. Key topics in the book include humanity's possible extinction, climate refugees, controlling corporations, teleportation technology, quantum physics, dreams, and spiritual awakening. Zaayin Salaam calls it a "spiritual sci-fi novel" that goes beyond dystopian tropes to focus on love, connection, and humanity's potential. She hints at important spiritual insights layered throughout. She wrote it to fill a void for more meaningful, intelligent sci-fi, especially lesbian sci-fi, that takes readers deeper spiritually. The book is meant to be transformative. Zaayin Salaam is excited to finally publish her debut novel and hopes it inspires readers to see humanity's positive potential during difficult times.

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Share it with your family and friends. Go to YouTube.com for it says Chris Voss. Go to Goodreads.com for it says Chris Voss and Chris Voss won on the tickety-tockety. Because we've got to pay her that $10. We owe it to her. She says that if we don't pay her, she's going to come back and get the opera. She's going to give us a C&D. Welcome to the show, my family and friends.

As always, for 15 years, we've been bringing you the most brilliant minds, the most creative minds, the people who tell their stories through life. And as I always say, stories are the great owner's manual to life because that's how we learn from each other. That's how we discover things. That's how we educate ourselves. That's how we get the Chris Voss glow that we always talk about on the Chris Voss show. We have an amazing new author that's coming on the show.

She has her new book that's coming out November 11th, 2023. I see what she did there, 11-11-2023. It is entitled With Love from Planet B, a sapphic sci-fi spiritual fantasy novel uh zion salam is on the show with us today she's gonna be talking about her amazing new book and she's new to uh writing books so uh welcome to our debut author and you always got to be nice to debut authors because they're just coming on the scene they're bringing all their cool stuff and usually they smack it out of the park they do pretty good with all the stuff that goes into being an author and uh and sharing all the stuff they put into it and she put a lot of years into it so we'll get into in a second uh she always knew something

was wrong with this world and if you've watched the news lately you know there is so on one hand she garnered the shield of science and in the other she summoned the secret of spirit and put it into her book she is a doctor of internal medicine and her name is her pseudonym her concern for the world led her to become a doctor and an energy healer she She's now called the matriarch, just one of many who are rising. She's a speaker for balance and a messenger for, is it Gaia? Yes. There you go. I knew you, I hadn't gotten the message from Gaia yet, so I wasn't sure.

And she says the earth is howling and the divine feminine is rising welcome the show uh how are you i'm good how are you i am excellent i'm excited to hear about all this great stuff we have going on because we need more positivity and upliftedness and good spiritual sense in this world so give us your dot com signed uh before wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs sure it is planetbthebook.com b as in boy so planetbthebook.com and you can get my pre-order and other stuff there there you go and you've got it on a kindle where people can pre-order you're gonna have an audiobook coming up and a paper book and all that good stuff yes the kindle comes out on 11 11 the paper book and audiobook soon after.

And I'm super excited for the audio book because the narrator is Gabriela Zachman. She's done a lot of books. Her voice is beautiful. Awesome. That's really what brings a novel alive. So give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside the book. 30,000 feet overview. This is a spiritual book about the future of mankind, where our world is headed. The year is 2085 and climate change is ravaging the planet. We are very close to a final famine where there's a huge food shortage. There's massive migrations going on all over the world.

People are getting their cities destroyed in a day, in half a day. And corporations have taken over. They make all the rules. Countries still exist, but they don't really have much power. And the sapphic part of the book, sapphic means lesbian, is basically our two heroines are part of a secret research facility on a ship in the middle of the oceans. They're trying to access a vortex and they're working on teleportation. And in the beginning of the book, they have just achieved it and it's possible. Oh, wow.

And so this, this happens in, what was it? 30, 85, 20, 85, 20,

85, 20, 85. So how far is that away from now? A bit of a ways away. Maybe 50 years. Yeah. So we might live long enough to see if it comes true or not. Yeah. Even though it is a novel.

It is a novel. So you've been writing this book for quite some time. Tell us what the lead up to this book is and what are some of the proponents what the lead up to this book is and what some of the proponents that made you want to write it. Well, in 2017, the United States left the Climate Paris Agreement. Thankfully, we rejoined it. And in that same year, we undid a lot of the good environmental protections we had. And I've been reading about climate change since I was 15.

I was that kid where people would be like, hey, don't worry about these kind of things. And I was like, how can I not? I'm reading everything. So I became even more concerned after 2017. And in 2018, I found myself one day just writing out the future that I was seeing in my mind all the time. And it quickly turned into a story. It was just flowing out of me. Like I couldn't stop. I would just nonstop get ideas and write them down. And I had never written a book before. I mean, here I am.

I'm a doctor. I'm working in hospitals. Yeah, you're in a hospital. Yeah, I'm in a hospital all day. And then I'm like, I want to write this book. So it was a very steep learning curve i had to learn so much i've had six or seven really good editors and i feel like i finally have a polished result and it's going to be out on 11 11 which is a spiritual number a lot of people have

been seeing so it just kind of fit the book yes what is the what is the spiritual realm of the 11 i've said i've had friends that they always like it's 11 11 o'clock or it's 11 11 a month and stuff they'll post on social media people have their own theories but they basically call these numbers angel numbers and if you go in if you speak to experts which i am not experts say each number has its own significant meaning so 11 11 222 444 11 11 to most people means positive goodness positive spirituality and that your angels if you believe in angels guardian angels or spirits are around you or your higher self my my uh my magic number is a 1, as long as it's in my bank account. That's a lot of zeros.

Yeah. It works for me. And that's when I feel like I've achieved my most happiness. So, I mean, you grow up and you're reading about all these things about climate change. What made you want to become a doctor? I'm always curious about that. To be honest, I was 16 years old when I sort of started watching the news on CNN. I'm sorry.

Wars and this and that. And I honestly got a little depressed from the world that I was living in. And I wanted, two things gave me energy. One, let's be a fighter pilot and fly really fast. And two, let's be a doctor and go in the middle of these war zones and fix both sides. And I think even back then we had an Israel-Palestine thing going on. Like, it's always happening.

Yeah, I think it's been going on for at least 3 trillion years, I think. Yeah. happening yeah i imagine it's released three three trillion years i think yeah um of course i'm not exactly like a war medic doctor right now but you know i ended up as internal medicine i really fell in love with the science of it and all the things you learn you're learning about life and death when you're studying to be a doctor you're learning the pathology and how things go wrong on the cellular level and on the DNA level and how there's a story at each level being told to you. If you study it. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. And that's, that's where science and what we can measure mixes into philosophy and your brain, your mind kind of wants to figure it out. Like what's the story here? Cause I know that there is. And sometimes it all makes sense.

And one of the things you studied when you were young was quantum physics. Clearly, I did. I flunked English in second grade. And everybody knows that callback joke on the show. So where did that lead you from there and uh and kind of intertwine itself and you know we do these things in life where we learn things and then we end up using them stuff so maybe some of that got incorporated into your novel yes i remember i really didn't like the physics they were teaching us in school about how to throw a ball and how it falls and calculate

that but when i would read like Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, I would underline so many things and I would read it again and the book was tearing apart. And I was just trying to understand and know it all. And you can't because it's so complex. And because you're not the mathematician and you're not the physicist, you're just like, you know, a 20-year-old something trying to understand. So maybe on some level something seeped in. But I do know that, yeah, everything is energy, right, at the end of the day. That's what they say.

Yeah. And it sounds like you were searching for something, you know, the juxtaposition of what you saw on TV, the news, the ugliness, the horror, and, you know and the depressing nature of it all. You were trying to find a way to find something positive, something to build into life? Is that a… Yeah.

I was trying to talk to God. I was trying to find God. I was trying to find reality and what is the truth because things are obviously not the way people say they are. No one's really in charge. So what's really going on? Yeah, he's got an account over on TikTok. You can go see him over there.

I think everyone's got a TikTok. I don't know if that's true or not. He seems a bit suspect. There's also a Santa over there that I suspect as well. So, you know, who knows? But you can try talking to him and see what he says. Maybe he'll just scream, the world, the end is coming. The end is near.

He's the problem because he's not a he. That's one of the lessons in my book. There you go. So you write about, you've got some characters in your book. Tell us about the characters in the book, the protagonist, kind of why you chose them and how you flushed them out. How I flushed them out. How you kind of bring them chose them and how you flush them out. How I flush them out? How you kind of bring them out in the book. Ah, okay.

Unless you did flush them out in the book. No. Flush them out, I think, is the word I should have used. Flush. Flush them out, yeah. Yeah, not flush. So one of my characters is named Zara, and that's the one i started writing with i think it helped to have my because my name starts with a z and hers did as well she is a future

climate refugee from pakistan where now i wrote this book in 2018 and there was a major flood in pakistan and a lot of millions of people became refugees and her family was one of them. And then she kind of ends up living in a refugee camp where all they're taught is religion. And there's a Taliban there as well. The Taliban were always going to come back in power. Oh, God, the Taliban still running things in 20? There's them or their version of them, the extremists are still there and they

I mean, who else would be in charge of a refugee camp, the extremists without a proper law and order situation. That's how I see things. So she actually manages to get

out of the refugee camp. She's one of the few people. When the corporations took over, they created the Free One World Nation, which is called Free Own, which is supposed to be an oxymoron and make you think like, okay, what's really going on? Because these corporations by now own most of the world's natural resources even. Not much different from how Nestle keeps trying to buy up our springs and natural spring water. So she gets out. She actually becomes a free-owned citizen, which is a very highly esteemed, wanted position. She climbs up the ladder.

She becomes a neuroscientist. And she's doing research in teleportation and what the mind goes through she becomes a master lucid dreamer so she basically sleeps a little longer but she tries to remember and document all of her dreams and they do this because if they want to teleport safely over long distances their theory suggests that you should be lucid when you do it. If you're not lucid during long teleportation, you might kind of lose some of your mind and maybe not even make it. That happens to me all the time.

When I sleep, yeah. I have weird-ass dreams and I wake up and go, what the hell? Yeah, and dreams are fascinating. You know, people have recurring dreams, the same thing over and over. And yeah. So that's her character. Her girlfriend's name is Lex.

She goes by Lex, but her real name is Alicia Keeling. Yeah. Keeling was a guy who made the carbon dioxide curve when studying climate change so i wanted to put him in there somewhere so that's a little bit of an homage yeah and um she is an american she kind of grew up i think in california i keep getting um and she's a mathematician um she's the more boyish one in the relationship. She used to be, you know, just always short hair, very athletic. That's just the way she is. Um, and she's an atheist.

Okay. Whereas Zara had a lot of religion forced into her and Zara's now identifying as spiritual, not religious. She's trying to deconstruct all that, but that's still in the back of her mind. So when they discover planet B, they both need to teleport there separately. And they realize that they need to earn their way in. And so the way I wrote the story, Zara sort of has a religious experience and she actually projects her,

the prophets that she believes in and they come and help her get through. And Lex, because she's an atheist, she's a mathematician, she has a more how we would scientifically describe teleportation is where she literally breaks down into her quantum self and then rises back up level by level, subcellular level, the cellular level, and then her own consciousness level, which is where a lot of the medical background comes in because we're talking about the stories at the cellular

and subcellular levels that are playing out. Oh, wow. This is detailed in how they go through what they go through. And then you talk about there's three spiritual diseases that afflict all the earthlings. Tell us a little bit of tease on that, if you would. Okay. Yeah.

I'm not sure if everyone's ready to share those three spiritual diseases yet, but. If you don't want to share it, we don't want to, you know, there's some things in a novel you can't tell the middle and the ending. That's one of the challenges of interviewing. Yeah. There's some secrets. So if you want to keep that secret um we can keep that secret

uh it's now i think you uh were raised as an immigrant to this country is that correct i am i grew up in pakistan i've lived half my life there and i always knew i had to get out of there like the minute i i was old enough to watch MTV or just American channels, I was like, well, that's the way life is supposed to be. We're supposed to be free. I want to go there. And, you know, people criticize America a lot these days, but it's a beautiful country. And the people here are beautiful inside and out. They are so much more better giving more evolved than people in so many other countries that I've visited to, not just one or two. And I think we need to give ourselves some credit for that.

Well, I'm glad you see that in the world because I've been in America for a long time. I think the game being played on your end and your vision of it is better. Because you have been in some places. I mean, Pakistan is probably not the most fun and interesting place to be compared to. You know, we like running water and toilets here. I'm sure they do in Pakistan and stuff. But, you know, I mean, we have, I don't know, freedom or something or whatever going on. Yes.

It's the freedom. It's for this week only. I don't know, freedom or something or whatever going on. Yes. It's the freedom. It's for this week only. I don't know about next week. But so the reason I asked that question is did that, I imagine that played into, you know, your setting for this book and you're writing it and some of the experiences that people go through as you told the story in the novel. Yes. Although that part kind of came in later when when i had to give the characters a backstory what poured out of me in the beginning i feel the

skeleton of the story was the analysis and and i'm not sure i'm not even sure how to describe it but yes later on i decided well yeah she should be a climate refugee of course she is and yeah and it sounds like you've been through quite a lot of rewrites if you've had would you say five to seven editors yes yes i because i i never knew and i never thought i would write fiction i was very happy being a complete scientist and an m. But when I started writing, I realized I was missing this entire creative outlet. So my learning curve was steep.

When I thought I was finished, I was just done with the first draft. Yeah. And the editors and the editors go, well, as a 50,000 words is great. Here's the, here's the one page that you can keep and the rest we tossed out.

Do it again. And when I gave it to, I think, my second editor or my first main editor, I thought I was done. I wasn't. I had moments when I would be sitting and I would just slap my forehead. And I was like, oh, that's why that happened. Because this is supposed to happen. Because I was, at some levels, going so deep into the story, like pulling in and out.

I had to connect my own dots. And I didn't know what I was writing when I started off. It kind of took me a while. I don't know if that means I'm dumb or smart or what. No. No. You're telling a story, and to tell a rich story, it takes time. It's like a fine wine, right?

Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. And you can't rush it, and you can't try and force it to be done. It has to come out of you. It has to find that flow,. It has to, you know, find that flow. And sometimes it's like a river. And, you know, sometimes you look at your thing and you're going, wait, that needs to go there.

And this piece needs to go there and over here. And, you know, you start, you know, sometimes you look at it and you're just like, that whole thing just needs to go this way and spin around. So, you know, it's just the telling a great story takes time and development i mean we've had people on the show that took i don't know 20 years to write their write a certain book or story um and sometimes they're really prolific novelists they you know they're writing all these other books but this one book that they had or when you know lane that they're gonna write this thing on took them 20 years, even though they were doing all this other stuff and they're prolific.

So, you know, sometimes it just takes a while to cook, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you go through the journey,

you write it, you've written it down and, uh, you've shipped it to the editors cause you're almost to your, uh, to your uh to your uh published date so it's a really exciting time um so what in the future and we can't ever you know talk too much about the middle or the end um what what what are some of the other things we haven't talked about that maybe you'd like to tease out in the book you mean things from the future uh well you know the book's set in the future but you know

2085 um what are some other aspects of the book uh that you that you found maybe you may put in characters maybe that you've uh from your life maybe that you incorporated or paid homage to or or maybe you know things that you put in the kind of a reflection of yourself oh sure i think the main characters boats i kind of drew on myself um i i can't say i've put a character from my real life in the book feel like just the spiritual aspect of the book which is why i call it a spiritual novel uh took me deeper than i thought it would i um it it started off as a hobby like oh i'm writing a future dystopian novel and it's for fun. And then somewhere along the line, things took a turn and the things that I was writing started happening.

And I was like, whoa, this is not supposed to happen yet. Like the Amazon isn't supposed to burn yet, but it was. And even weird, weird, like I'll give you a really weird example.

So I just decided to make up something called a floating island, which is an island that just pops up and a volcano under the ground erupts. And I had never read about it in geology or anything. And then I'm reading the news one morning in 2019. And what do I see? I see a headline saying, volcanic eruption creates temporary islands of

humus and i'm like oh so our minds are connected right so it's our brains in an antenna and i feel like we're picking things up uh and when we're writing we become really good at picking up certain things that we're tuned into yeah and some so some things really jolted me um like i wrote how abortion is going to be banned in the west in the future and that was again back in 2018 2019 and then in may of 20 what was it last 2022 last years i was like what what's happening uh things got really intense around that time. Yeah, they've been working on that really hard for 40 years. We've had a lot of authors on that have documented the intent of stacking the SCOTUS court by the billionaires on the right to take and make that happen.

They've been working on it a long time. There's a saying, the dog finally caught the car and now the dog doesn't know what to do with it. And so it's kind of, it might be backfiring a little but I don't know, we'll see. This country's kind of weird how we as Obama used to say it, we zig and we zag and we kind of muck about to find the way and just hopefully that baton of democracy makes it forward another day or another administration.

It's kind of interesting how we do things. But, you know, when you're a young democracy and you're pretty much the most vibrant democracy that's ever been created, I would think we can say, you know, there's no model for what we're doing. So we're just going to try and do the best we can with it and hope we survive another day. Which, you know, you watch the news, you're like, oh, wow. So any final tease-outs you want to tease out about the book

to get people to pick it up or thoughts you have on the book and why you think it's going to appeal to a lot of people? I think it'll going to appeal to a lot of people um i think it'll appeal to uh lesbians because a lot of the lesbian literature out there is sort of all romantic books and if someone out there is looking for one that is serious about like let's save the world level serious and with it's not going to abuse your intelligence. I can promise you that. You will learn at least a few things, especially with all the medical facts and some of the science fiction thrown in. It would appeal to them. But also if you're concerned about climate change and our extinction.

And here's the main spiritual message of the book is you know people don't talk about this enough because everyone's like oh we got 200 years we'll figure something out we're not going to go extinct a lot of animals and plants and insects are going extinct already um what if that is a possibility and what if the possibility is that a lot of us will die out or be left on an uninhabitable earth while just a very few rich survive. If that is a possibility, the good news that I discovered while I was writing this book, and it actually changed from a dystopian to a book that led me through a spiritual pathway of my own, it led me to love. So the thing that I want to tell people is we will rise. We are rising right now. There's a huge spiritual awakening going on.

I'll tell you what. So I'm writing this book and I'm a hermit while I'm writing it because I didn't want anything, right? I didn't want relationships. I didn't want distractions. I was just so in love with the process of writing and what was happening to me as i was writing and the the synchronicities that were happening to me when i was writing and the signs that okay so i'm thinking oh i'm like on level nine here wow i'm so awesome i've got all these knowings and my predictions are coming true and then i joined tiktok and i start watching other spiritual people and what are they talking about oh my god so many people are getting the same messages so many so many people are first of all they care so much about what's happening they're talking about the same

kind of uh things they're talking about the same sort of how we need to change how we need to elevate ourselves and so i feel like if uh for the spiritual community this book is sort of how we need to change, how we need to elevate ourselves. And so I feel like if for the spiritual community, this book is sort of like a must read, especially if you want a doctor's opinion on, on, on, for example, the chakra system,

you know, everyone's kind of obsessed with the chakra system and thank God to the yogis who protected it from the onslaught of Abrahamic religions, try to destroy it because now, now we have proof that the pineal gland is really something special. And we're starting to measure all these

experiences that people feel, like the Kundalini rising. Spirit comes from spiral. And there's a lot of spiral methodology and symbology in my novel as well. I didn't put it there. It put itself there. Ah.

Okay? A lot of things in the book put themselves there. I had moments when I was, like, even scared of what I had just discovered. Like, oh, my God. And had to try and put meaning in it and find the meaning. Anyway, I lost what I was saying.

You were saying that it's going to appeal to a lot of different people. Is there a lot of good novels or lesbian-targeted novels or books out there? Do you feel this is going to help the market in that way and maybe encourage some other writing? One of the reasons I started writing, to be honest, was because i was looking for stuff to read and i was disappointed i'm sorry just because i like sci-fi fantasy but i wanted to be something more real i wanted to teach me something i wanted to take me a little deeper and that's exactly what i wrote and you know this book is, it's written in layers. And when you keep getting these intuitions and these knowings, after a while, you start trusting yourself and like, I really am doing something important.

So I actually put in the book that it will take you deeper into yourself. It will show you how powerful love is at the end of the day and how we are so much more than what we right now think we are and the world is going to change really fast there's going to be a lot of bad things that are going to happen like you know look at what happened in maui and libya and morocco like one day yeah thousand people dead like you know one day and ten thousand people dead in libya there's going to be bad stuff, but we, especially if we tune into it and we choose it and we do a little bit of work for it,

we're going to rise. We're going to surprise ourselves. We're going to, for example, develop abilities where we'll know, hey, something's going to happen. Let's move. And if we develop that self-trust, no, we will. That's just one little example, one little baby example. There you go.

Well, spirituality, you know, what's the old saying? Hope springs eternal. That's kind of what has probably kept us on the planet this far, love and hope. And that seems to be, you know, the thing that rises us to be our better angels hopefully we can keep doing that if not the alternative doesn't sound very fun so uh zion it's been very uh cool to have you on the show and very fun i'm really excited for you to have your novel out you're gonna have a lot of fun when you get it out it's just such a great thing when when you finally feel it in your hands you hold it in your hands

and you go wow i wrote this so i'm really excited and happy for you give us your dot coms where do you want people to find you on the interwebs please right so planet be the book.com is the website it has some extras uh some teasers and the link to the audiobook will be there otherwise you can go on amazon and just type in with love from planet b the book and uh you'll find the book there you go with love from planet b folks order it up wherever fine books are sold and all that good stuff uh thank you for coming on the show we certainly appreciate it thanks to our audience for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortress chris fusschrisfuss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfuss,

youtube.com, 4chesschrisfuss, chrisfuss1 on the TikTok. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.