The Feeling You Cannot Name

SPEAKER_00 0:04

What if the anxiety you have been carrying is not a personal feeling? What if the emptiness after achieving everything you were supposed to achieve is not weakness? What if there is a name for that feeling? That quiet, persistent sense that something is off, and it turns out the world has been designed to make you feel exactly this way. Welcome back to Healthy Mind Halli Rai. I'm your host Yusuf, and this is the show where we have the kind of honest conversation that actually matter. Honest, real and rooted in what it really takes to live well from the inside out. My guest today is Greg Pai, an entrepreneur, systems architect, and author of Voice of the Heart: The Battle for Your Purpose, Peace and Passion. A book that maps 12 interlocking societal systems quietly competing for our mental and emotional well-being. Greg spent over 30 years building success in finance, media, technology before experiencing what he calls a complete internal collapse. And what emerged from that breakdown became the framework we are going to explore today. If you have ever felt successful on paper but hollow inside, this conversation is for you. With that, I welcome my guest Greg to the show. Thank you, Yusuf.

Greg’s Puzzle Life And Collapse

SPEAKER_01 1:44

So, you folks, you recently had a show, I think it was just maybe last week, where your colleague said that we spend years trying to fix ourselves when we actually need to stop fighting who we really are. There was a famous author, Oscar Wilde. He said, Be yourself, everyone else is taken. And there's a lot of truth to that.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Um, if you may, um, if I may, could I take your audience on an amazing journey? Uh, a journey of discovering who we are, one they've never heard before, and not another self-help anecdote, but the potential to cause a volcanic shift in the human condition. So it starts with my life. Imagine a puzzle that comes in a box with no picture on the cover. One of those 10,000-piece puzzles. That was my life for a long time. In that box were pieces that spanned poverty, wealth, diversity across race, ethnicity, culture, faith. I was raised by a single parent, then folded into a complex blended family. And like one of those pieces, I just never fit quite fit in anywhere. So I was kind of like identity-less, if you will. And yet that very isolation turned out to be a gift for me. It gave me the ability to see the world differently, kind of distance myself since I was ostracized from it, kind of looking down on it versus being in it. And I began to notice patterns from a very early age that most people can't see. Now, I had experiences you had mentioned, I had many experiences. Um, I've lived like a hundred lives. I've had experiences. I've been an accomplished musician, a commercial photographer. I went on to build careers at the highest levels of business consulting at Price Waterhouse, technology, media and entertainment, global entrepreneurship, finance, and Wall Street. And I worked with leaders in all those areas, the people, the household names that you know. And success followed me, or so I thought, everywhere I went. But something was missing, or more accurately, something was really wrong. And I couldn't put a name on it until I finally could, in the most unusual and unsuspecting way, in place. So yeah. So so yeah, so people say, Well, what was that? Well, it was very unsuspecting. It was actually it was actually decades later.

The Tree Of Light Revelation

SPEAKER_01 4:28

I was with my family in Africa in 2012. We're in the Maasimara. I was on somewhat of a business trip where I was helping thriving entrepreneurs throughout Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia to create indigenous businesses that would basically create economies for the benefit of the community. And it was a very, very fulfilling experience. But this one moment in Ma Saimara, we were on our way to visit a school, and there was a tree in the distance. And I took a picture of that tree, and even that particular photograph and what how it was generated is quite a story, which is in the book. But that picture put the picture on my puzzle box. And finally, unmistakingly clear was my life. I saw everything connected in this vast, invisible war against humanity. Now, it's hard without reading a 500-page book about how I got there to imagine what I just said having the weight that it has. But trust me, I saw this tree thriving in the distance with a glorious sunset, which eventually became a pretty well-known photograph called the Tree of Light. And it spoke to me in a way that said, there's something wrong with humanity. Now, many would frame this as spiritual, and I would personally do that, but it isn't. It's universal because the concepts of good and evil, pain and pleasure, love and hate, they're universal concepts, and they're not debatable. So a single photograph revealed to me that we were in the midst of this invisible war because I saw a tree, and what it manifested was that everything in nature is created with a cycle of purpose and fulfillment, except mankind. Even when we create something, like we invent something, we create it, we design it, and we do that to fulfill a purpose or a market. And we do that quite well. But mankind seems to have this cycle of disruption and disconnection. So I came to the conclusion that there were two types of people on this earth: those who are openly struggling emotionally, mentally, financially, physically, spiritually, the oppressed, the enslaved, the dependent. And then there was everybody else who are simply unaware that they too are struggling. And part of that greater struggle extends way beyond self. My life put me in both those camps, sometimes at the same time, oftentimes just bouncing between them and never finding footing, like in a joyful life, regardless of how much I chased and gained. Now, stop the press. People I know, listeners are saying right now, hey, my struggle is unique to me. You don't know me. I'm the only one that has this problem. Or I'm a or I don't have a struggle. What is this guy talking about? Well, like I said, here's my caution. I've been both of those people. And my life didn't start to thrive. My purpose didn't get aligned, and my identity didn't get unwound from what the world told me what I needed to be and needed to chase until I recognized that the war was on my purpose, peace, and passion.

Voice Of The World Vs Heart

SPEAKER_00 8:00

And Greg, most people will hear the phrase like invisible war on your mental health. Probably assume we are talking about social media or maybe toxic relationships. But you are pointing at something much bigger and older than that. Can you explain in detail what is that?

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Yeah. Um, so again, I want to caution that many will box it in as a spiritual idea. And it can, for someone who is spiritual, someone who's religious, perhaps, it can be explained by that. Um, there's connections to most religions and spiritual ideas that connect to those foundational, you know, that that thin veil between good and bad, or good and evil, or joy and sadness. But I again, and I substantiate my book that it's a universal phenomenon. And the way I characterize it is these two voices. Now, before you call the psychiatrist and have me put away, we do hear voices. Guess what? When we're born into this world, before we can even speak, we're hearing voices of our parents and people around us. They're talking to us and they're speaking into us. As we get older, we have teachers, we have mentors, we have the media, we have bosses, we have colleagues, we have friends, we have people in social groups that we want to be a part of. So there are voices, and they do speak into our conscious and our subconscious. So I realized that there's a war between two sets of voices. There's all those voices I just described, which I call voice of the world. Why do I call it the voice of the world? Because it's not the voice that's within us. In other words, think about how miraculous we've been created. Think about, you know, everyone, you know, has a flushable toilet. Not everyone, but most in developed parts of the world. People have automobiles. These are phenomenal inventions, sometimes overlooked as at just how phenomenal they are. But they didn't start there. They started from man was in, you know, with a stick and not even a wheel. But something in him taught him or inspired him to create. So we're very powerful as unique, a unique creation. So I realized that there's got to be something in us that informs us, that that that inspires us. And again, if you're religious or you're spiritual, you can probably explain that. But even for the universal individual, I asked a person once, he was an atheist. He said, I don't believe in God. I said, Have you ever driven on the highway or on the on the road rather, and you come to an intersection and there's a red light, and you are hoping that the person that has, or rather, there's a green light, and you're hoping the person has the red light stops. You're putting faith in somebody you never even met before. That's a powerful intuition. It's something that's inside of you that makes you feel safe. There's something knowing that you would put your life at stake hundreds of times a day. So there's the reason I point that illustration out is because there's things that are just not simple, they're not simply explainable. It's just the way we're designed.

unknown 11:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

And so the voice in the heart is the voice that we don't listen to because all the other voices have already filled up our identity. They've already told us what truth is, they've already told us what we should thrive for. Oh, you need to go to the best school, you need to be rich, you need to have a big house. We're already told those things from the youngest of years, never leaving room. I have this thing in the book called identity stacking. There's horizontal, vertical, and then counter-stacking. I'm not going to get into the details of that, but suffice to say that it means that there are influences that stack up that take us so far away from who we are. For example, look at politics. In any country, there's a polarization. There's usually a two-party system. In many countries, there's a one-party system, but it's never really one party, it's always the government and the people. But people don't know that. They are fighting in a two-party system. And the one party hates the other party not because they understand the other party, but because they are the other party. So they have created an identity, they've adopted an identity without really understanding why. And this happens in almost every aspect of our life.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Yeah.

The 12 Systems That Shape Us

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Wow. And you know, there's this important distinction between something being normal and something being natural. We have been trying to accept so much as just the way it is when really it was built. It was not natural.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Exactly. That's why the 12 systems I talk about, which cover all of a society, actually relate back in a phenomenal way to the tree itself. There are the soil systems where our roots grow, and those are the systems of family dynamics, education, and religion. By the way, all systems are corrupted, even religion, even education. So by the time we're eight, nine, 10, 12 years old, our roots have already been poisoned. So what happens is the trunk systems are media and entertainment, news and information and technology and data. And guess what? By the time the nutrients are being are going up into the trunk, the poison roots are carrying the poison with it into the trunk. So all you're doing is perpetuating the same, you know, ideas that weren't healthy, weren't a part of your own identity from the beginning. The next set of systems are the branches. The branches are how we reach into the world and how we find ourselves in partnership with all of other humanity. It's also the place where we get divided up. Those are the systems of finance, government, and social structures. All the ways we divide ourselves instead of connecting. The branches are fighting each other. And all you end up doing is creating more shade. And you know, in a in a garden, the trees actually pollinate one another. They support one another. And then the last group of systems are the fruit systems. The fruit systems are the systems of health and wellness, law, order, and justice, and the military-industrial complex. And guess what? These systems are what determine the ability for humanity to populate and save itself from extinction. So it's an extraordinary book that just lays this out for anybody. I wrote this book. It took me 13 years. It's actually part of a group of books that are now 34 books, including children's series that mirror the masterwork. And it's really designed to awaken people. I do not tell people how to think, I only remind them to think. You know, they say to a lot of kids in college now, think outside the box. But the kids don't even know where the box is. So I help to put the box, I help to define the box. And the box is our humanity. What is our potential? What is our ability to thrive and to be better? Do we solve all the problems? No, the war will persist. But I give tools after you've looked in the mirror, after I you've read the map, and then you've taken on the megaphone to share with friends, family, and community. I've given you tools to persevere. This is not another self-help anecdote, as I mentioned. This is a change in trajectory. And you said something very interesting, Yusuf. You said we've normalized, I believe. We have normalized everything upside down. I always say to my kids when they were growing up, every day is opposite today. Because the world, that's how it confuses us. It does two things. It turns everything upside down and normalizes it. It also takes an element of truth and then twists it into a point of view. So we think a point of view is truth. And that chaos in and of itself is why we are where we are today.

Data Footprints And Owning Identity

SPEAKER_00 17:00

And I think a lot of our exactly what that feels like, even if they have never put those words to it.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

Yeah, you know, it's like trying to get off of a moving train. That's why most people, most people don't really want to change their life until they are hit a crisis. Because they don't see anything wrong with it. The train's moving, they're on it, they're seeing the scenery. I was there. You know, you it's a it's an interesting thing about, you know, when we look at our evolution, originally we were very simple creatures, and there were four ages that humanity went through. The first was the agricultural age, which is when community started to become important because we needed to gather around where food was being grown. So the idea of small towns and community. And then the next age was the age of industrialization, where we became labor and master enslaved. Um, so labor and but there's other attributes. We became a consumption world. Now, what's interesting is because I've traveled to 64 countries. So I've been to parts of the world that are developing, and they're in the earlier stages. So they had, they're just moving into an industrialization. And I caution them about that because when we go industrialize, what happens is we become urban. So it's about building big cities and becoming less about community and more about population, population growth, consumption, build consumers. And then the next age is the age of computerization. And we went into that age headfirst, with everyone owning a PC. And you might say there's nothing wrong with that, but what we did do is we started to change the brain. Our physiodynamics started to change. The simple things like adding numbers, we relegate to a computer. So we don't use that part of the brain anymore. So we've dumbed ourselves down. We made ourselves eligible for things like the media and news and information to take advantage of us. We become a little ignorant, if you will. The age we're in right now is the most dangerous, and people are thinking about it the wrong way. We're in the age of information. So people are all now the big topic is artificial intelligence. And everyone's scared of artificial intelligence. I'm not scared of artificial intelligence because of what it's called. It's called artificial intelligence, like artificial ice cream. It's not real intelligence, it never will be. It will always be artificial. And people have to recognize no matter how how generative it becomes, it will still originate with man's ideas and biases. But let me tell you what is dangerous about the age of information, and that is our data footprint. We have a new identity now, and people do not have control over it. They don't own it, they don't even know what's being done with it. And that is our digital footprint, who we are digitally. I think Brittany Kaiser, who was the whistleblower at Facebook and uh good friend, she said, I think there were 85,000 data elements that characteristics that were being captured on every individual interacting with Facebook. It's probably well over a million now. The way which which eye is lazier than the other one? How you talk, the nuance to your speech, everything is being captured. We don't own it, we don't even have it. It's being outsourced, it's being captured by others who are going to use it against us. And again, that's the influence of the world. Could it be used for good? Absolutely. In fact, I wrote a paper and we created a business plan for a thing called NOVA, know your value. I did it with a uh large group of investors. Um we just got it to the ideation point. But essentially the idea was to create a market, first of all, for us to own our identity. So harvest it back, own it, and then monetize it. Now, why is that valuable? So if we own our identity, guess what? Everybody in the world gets a standard of living immediately from day one because your identity is valuable. We know that because different people, different companies are trying to harvest identity around the world in developing countries. Like I think it was FedEx or DHL, DHL went into Africa and the middle and um India to upcountry parts where they didn't have addresses. And they started to put address locations so that people would have an address associated with where they lived. And so they're starting to tag people, even the ones in the jungle, even the ones up in the hills, they're starting to tag people. That's their part of their identity. Where you live is part of your identity. So why are they doing that? Because they are eventually going to become an economy. We should own our identity. So that's a big gulp. Like I said, Voice of the Heart, The Battle for Your Purpose, Peace, and Passion is a book. If I could give it away to everybody on the globe to 7 billion people, I would. If I could physically just get it to people, I would do that. But it's a necessary piece of work, I think, to change the trajectory that we're all on.

Where To Find Greg’s Work

SPEAKER_00 22:28

So Greg and even wants to connect with you or one video work or want to explore your papers. Where can they do that?

SPEAKER_01 22:38

Well, right now, a lot of my infrastructure is being built around my new, my new career as an author. I still have my day job too. But um voice of the heartbooks.com. But there isn't much there. The place to go right now is to just go to like Amazon. My books are sold, um, available, I think, in 13 countries, 11 or 13 countries. But I'm not telling you to go there to to buy the book. I mean, I hope you do, but go there and you can find out about me. You can find out about the books. There's a good deal of information. You can read a sample. If you reach out to me, if you send an email to info at voice of the heartbooks.com, I'm happy to get you an abstract from the book to read. I'm even engaging with some people when I have time. So if there's a particular question, issue, you want to take up a topic, you maybe you're working on a paper for school. I'm happy to give, you know, make a contribution to inspire you, hope to um uh lead you in a direction, not lead you, but inspire your lead in a direction that feels more of the of the heart than of the world.

SPEAKER_00 23:46

Do you have any last message that you want to leave us with?

Selfless Help And Becoming A Warrior

SPEAKER_01 23:51

Yeah, there's um two very important. So the the book is structured with 30 chapters, and they represent 30 what I call spine elements of the architecture of this, of this uh movement, if you will, voice of the heart. The first four chapters cover the invisible war, and then self-thing I call selfless help, the infiltration, and finally the victim soldier warrior progression. I'd like to just very quickly, if we've got maybe three or four minutes, touch on two of those, and that's selfless help and the role progression. You know, there's a deluge of self-help programming out there, books, practitioners, and I I don't fault them because it's like you know, if you're in a desert and there's a bucket of water, it doesn't matter if it's even clean, you're gonna drink it. But I think there's a problem with it. And I say that with all the love and care for the people who put and invest in that space, and that is well, let me bet let it's best articulated with a metaphor or an illustration. If you're stuck at the bottom of a Ferris wheel, you can get off safely, but you can never ride that Ferris wheel again until the people at the top are brought safely down. So, what do I mean by that? Well, think of the Ferris wheel as a system, system of education, a system of health care. If you have good education, that might feel good to you, but it's never gonna, it's not gonna endure. It's not going to be lasting because everyone needs to have access to real education. We don't, unfortunately, we don't have real education. We have rote education, we don't have critical thinking education. But that aside, same thing with healthcare. You know, people that have healthcare, they're they're fortunate. But then there's those that don't. The idea of selfless help is that you shouldn't be selfish or self-helped, and you shouldn't be self-sacrificing that there's actually something better. And that's the idea of selfless help, which is when we solve a problem of our own at the same time solving problems for others, we create lasting impact. You think about whistleblowers in an organization or just anybody like you might have a kid in school that's struggling, but then you see the opportunity for having parents, getting a group of parents together to have other struggling kids, and then solving the problem together. So selfless help is a very important concept because we were designed this way. We weren't designed just to self-help. Uh, self-help is not lasting. You could, you know, if you have anxiety, you can tell somebody, you know, don't, you know, here's ways to get rid of anxiety. But what about what's causing the anxiety? What about the systems of society that are perpetrating the anxiety? So that's number one. The idea of the victim war or soldier-warrior progression is also very important. We are all victims in this war. So there's no one safe. That doesn't mean we can't be a warrior, but we are victims. But most of us are also soldiers. What do I mean by that? When we are in a system that is oppressive, our silence or our unwitting participation in that system makes us a soldier for the enemy. So here's an example. If, like in America, there's it's no secret that there's a tremendous amount of discourse between the political parties, they're actually starting to come together because they view government as the opposition now, which is an interesting phenomenon. But the idea that when we are in a system and we say, oh, just vote, but we know the voting doesn't work, or the voting is hacked, or the voting doesn't uh isn't isn't um uh efficient and doesn't allow everybody to participate, or their vote doesn't really count. When you're in a system like that, you're voting, you're supporting that system. So you're a soldier for the system. But then the opportunity is to become a warrior. And a warrior says, you know what, this isn't working. I'm a part of it, so I have to find ways while being a part of it to either detach from it or while I'm in it to change it. And so many people have done that. I mean, I think I mentioned, or maybe I didn't mention Ed Snowden earlier, the whistleblower. And again, I'm not advocating what people have done. I'm just pointing out the case study. Ed Snowden worked for the NSA. He realized that people's privacy was being invaded, evaded. And so he raised that issue. He got out. Now he's a fugitive in many respects. But, and in fact, when he first did it, people were mad at him. They were like, Oh, you're an anti-patriot. But now people see that what he was, in fact, calling attention to was a systems taking advantage of which he was a part of, taking advantage of people. And he was a major force in revealing this to the world.

SPEAKER_00 29:15

Thank you so much, Greg. And you know, this was very richly and common.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

I hope so. I thank you so much, and you and your colleague, Avik, and I think you're doing great work. You guys are being warriors. You know, you you are make creating a platform for people to bring their ideas that are not necessarily in the mainstream. And it's important. What we all should recognize though is that we're all vulnerable. I always got I got excited. I'll close on this story. I got excited when I saw the independent media begin to thrive, the whole influencer marketplace. I said, wow, this is great. Mass media stinks. It's it takes advantage of us, it propagandizes us, it tries to leverage our spirit, get us to do things, it manipulates us. So I was happy to see independence begin to thrive and come up, and they're actually a major force in media today. However, now many of them are becoming soldiers of the enemy. Because they get so big, they bring on advertisers, they bring on investors who have their own ideas about what they should be doing, and the cycle starts again. So that's my caution to your audience. You're built for more, you're made for more, let's do more.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

Perfect. And to everyone listening, this is healthy mind, healthy life. Take care of yourselves, and we'll see you next one.