Unveiling the Invisible War: Greg Pai's Journey to Purpose and Passion

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Living the Dream Podcast with Curveball. If you believe, you can achieve. Welcome to the Live in the Dream with Curveball Podcast. A show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today's guest is Greg Pye. He is a multidisciplined author, a system thinker, and the founder of the Voice of the Heart franchise. After a decade-long career, Wall Street Media and Technology Cover. Uncover. From a famous photograph taken in Kenya from a multi-generational literary movement. Greg is real passionate about his work. And his journey is as compelling as the framework that he has built. So, Greg, thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Thank you, Curtis. Yeah, and thank you to your audience for taking their precious time to hear what I have to share and uh being a loyal listener to your amazing platform.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Absolutely. Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Yeah, uh so the the notion that it's a little bit that I could encapsulate it is is probably not practical, but I'm gonna try. Um, and and I say that not to boast, I say it because I really believe that um I was sort of built for this ultimate outcome, which is the voice of the heart, the book, the franchise, the movement. Uh, it started way back. Um, I'm I'm up in my years, let's just leave it at that. But it started way back. I was my life was like a imagine a puzzle. You ever see a puzzle box and one of those 5,000 piece boxes? And my life was that puzzle box with no picture on the cover. So you can imagine what that looks like and feels like. Um, and so the pieces didn't look like much as I was growing up, uh, but they did form into something that I think is very valuable to obviously myself, but also to your audience. I was born very humble roots. I was born in the projects, for those who don't know what those are, uh, in the South Bronx, the very low-income housing. I was uh born to a single parent living with my grandparents and my uncle who was uh suffered from uh Down syndrome. And oftentimes my aunt lived there with her two children as well in a two-bedroom apartment. So it was very humble beginnings. I didn't know much, it was a very kept life. I didn't, I just went to school and came home. Um, but I was uh, and it was a very complex life. I I'm a multi-racial, a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious. And then that got further complicated in both good and bad ways. When my mother and her job, that she she worked two or three of them, but she worked as a switchboard operator at a hospital and she met a young resident doctor there, and they got married when I was nine, and he adopted me the day they got married, which was really a blessing. But he himself was um also bringing another added diversity to my life, and that was he was from India and he was Hindu, and so that you know brought a lot of complexity. But we moved from the Bronx to New Jersey to the suburbs, and it was kind of a uh, you know, a complete uh uh you know upheaval of what I knew, but it provided a tremendous amount of fortunality and opportunity for me. Um, from that point, you know, all through my life I was very creative. You know, something about isolation. If we study the people who are sort of successful in their own right, we find that many of them kind of were straight or disconnected from the world in many ways. They were, you know, and not for good reasons necessarily, but they may have been ostracized or just put in a corner. But in that sort of identity, they were able to really grow in a certain way and invest in themselves in a certain way where the world wasn't creating the noise that most of us were going to talk about this, that most of us are um uh a victim of. So I had that kind of upbringing. Uh being a loner and being alone and being ostracized actually proved to be uh benefit me because I indulged in books, I read everything under the sun, I, you know, was very interested in everything. I started playing piano at a young age. We didn't have a piano, but my mother made a cardboard keyboard. And I studied that on I at and I ended up going to Berkeley College of Music for a summer session uh when I was 14. So I became an accomplished musician. I also studied photography. And then when I got into my professional life, I never graduated from college, I went to a bunch of them. At the education system, which I believe is a one-size-fits-all, I think many people wouldn't argue that. Uh, doesn't really um a lot of people can't fit into that square box. And I was one of them. So even though I had the intelligence, I couldn't uh thrive in that system. So, but I ended up making my way into a professional life. I started working at Price Waterhouse, I became successful in consulting and then in uh technology, litigation support, and law, eventually media and entertainment, global entrepreneurship, and later finance in Wall Street. And in all of these jobs, I went I went straight to the top. I mean, I had really, you know, leadership positions in each of these sectors, which it's like a cat with nine lives. Uh, any one of them would satisfy an individual's career path. But I indulged in all these things, did well in them, and guess what? The more success I met, the more failure I felt, the more depression and the more disconnection from life I experienced.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Well, let's talk about that moment in Kenya, the the tree of light, because that seemed like that that was the spark for everything. So tell us about that and what shifted inside of you during that moment.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, um I was starting at there was a point in time where uh around 2012, where I started doing voluntary work over in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, where I was working with local entrepreneurs, uh, helping them, bringing them resources and access to information and business uh consulting to help them build scalable businesses in their communities and that could provide you know employment and services, much needed services and products for that community. I loved it. Um it was it felt so organic and the connection with the people was enormous. It's kind of like think about, you know, we went in living in America, we are we sort of take this for granted because you know, we have you know, flushing toilets, we have two or three cars in every home, we have a certain level of lifestyle, but a lot of parts of the world, what we would call the developing parts of the world, they you know, even running water is something they have to uh strive to you know create a system for. Um, so but it is happening, and I was a part of that effort and uh really uh enjoyed it. But we were we were in Africa uh at one time, and we were in Kenya in the Maasai Mar, which is between Kenya and Tanzania. We were going to visit a schoolhouse, a one-room schoolhouse, and uh there was a sunset, and my wife said, Hey, you got to take a picture of that sunset. And I was like, Well, look, you know, I have so many sunsets. What's so special? But I looked at it and I noticed what she noticed. There's a there was an acacia tree far in the distance, and behind it, the sun was literally right over it and falling behind it. This happens to be the photograph that graces the cover of the book, Voice of the Heart. Um, I took the picture, but while I was getting ready to take the picture, my son, who was at the time was with us, was around nine, ten years old, and like a nine or ten-year-old, what he decided to do while Dad was taking the picture, he was going to jump across the camera. When he did that, I adjusted the camera upwards, kind of like a reflex. But in doing that, and anyone that knows about photography and lenses, the blades of the lens caught the light in a way that created this burst, this blast of sunlight. It's just an amazing photograph. And it became an iconic image that's been in galleries all around the world. And but it but the picture, the beauty of the picture was one aspect. But what really uh there was something else about that picture it that troubled me. And it troubled me from the moment I took it. I was looking at it on the plane back, on the back of the camera, and I'm looking at it, and it occurred to me that yeah, this is you know, this is sort of a supernatural experience. I it occurred to me that this tree and this sunset, the tree was out there by itself, thriving, and the sunset itself was separate from the tree, but together formed this amazing picture. In other words, there was this individual nature of the tree, but then there was this cohesive nature of the entirety of the image. And I started to think about humanity, and I said, well, everything in creation seems to have that cycle of purpose and fulfillment. If you look at everything around us, uh, even when we create something, when we build something, uh, a garage, an extra garage, we build it for a purpose. We don't just do things for no reason. Uh, and if we fail when we do them, we often try to get it right or do it again. But there was one thing in all of creation that did that fell out of that model or that formula, and that was humanity itself. I realized that humanity was in a constant cycle of destruction. Now, we have normalized a lot of things. So whenever I hear the word progress, I always say, uh, you know, that's that's like an ugly, that's like a bad four-letter word. Because we accept progress and we pursue progress, but we never actually look at the other side of the equation. We never say, well, what are we sacrificing for the progress? Like everyone's talking about our cell phones. Everyone walks around, crosses the street with a cell phone, we communicate with emojis, which is like going back to the Stone Age with hieroglyphics. And it's all a lot of it is good. I mean, a lot of it allows us to have greater contact, but guess what? There's more disconnection, and no one wants to really talk about that in a meaningful way. So I realized that humanity was breaking down. And I said to myself, why? Why is that? And the it was easy for me to pick the off-the-shell responses, off-the-shelf responses to that. I could say, oh, well, you know what, just my life. Maybe it's just the way I look at things, or, you know, um, well, maybe that's just specific to nature. Maybe it's not, you know, maybe progress really does, maybe, maybe mankind really isn't that bad off. But I couldn't come to that conclusion. The conclusion I came to was that there was an invisible war. I couldn't, I called it invisible because I couldn't see it, I couldn't see its manifestation at the time. So I called it an invisible war between what we are and how we live, and what we could be. What would an idealistic situation look like where we were thriving as individuals and as a community of mankind, which is the way I believe we were designed. I don't see why we would have been the exception to that rule. And at the center of that war, I had to ascribe an enemy because every war has an enemy. And I didn't want to go with the easy answer. I want to really try to understand an answer to that problem that would be universal, that everyone would agree. Hey, there is a war, and hey, there is an enemy.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

Well, I know you had a highly successful career, uh, according to what we uh what most will believe, but uh talk about what what that internal bankruptcy looked like for you, despite your external success.

SPEAKER_00 14:17

Yeah, so and and that's a great question because um when I saw the tree, I realized there were two kinds of people out there. This this was the real, you know, kind of bullseye for me. I realized that there are two types of people. There are people who are suffering, they're openly struggling, they're emotionally struggling, mentally, financially, physically, spiritually. We have the oppressed, we have the enslaved, we have the codependent and the dependent, we have people who are this collateral damage of war. There's people that are openly struggling, so that's one group of people, and then I realize that the other group of people are simply unaware that they are struggling too. And that's where that's the camp that I was in. I looked at my life and I said, I've got everything, and yet I have nothing because I'm chasing the wrong things, I'm struggling with the wrong problems, I'm naming the wrong enemies. You know, like I talk about this enemy thing, right? And uh, you know, a lot of us we all have enemies. We may not admit it openly, maybe that's a harsh word, but we do. We we may have in uh uh a boss who we don't like, and we would consider we work for him, so we're okay with that because it provides us a livelihood, but we would consider him maybe an enemy because of the way he treats us, oppresses us. But the truth of the matter is that's a real narrow definition of an enemy because there's other things going on in our life that is connected to the way we feel about who we are, who our boss is to us, what our job means to us. And so when we narrow the definition, when we and you know, this is so so clear and implicit in politics, politics has become such a great, I hate politics, and I'm very apolitical, but I like it as an example because it's a crystal clear example of this enemy identification problem. We have a two-party system in the United States, and so one party hates the other party, and what it does is it keeps us from and keeps us very distracted from actually focusing on the problem, which is the system itself. Now, there is some awakening going on to that, but it's very hard to dislocate from it. That's why I wrote this 500-page book because it helps, it describes, it maps out the entire, you know, all the systems of society, because you can't fix one thing uh and hope that it it's completely resolved without looking at the other things. And and that's that goes to this tree of light metaphor that I'm sure we're going to talk about, because there's a connect, there's a contagion and a connection between all the systems of society. And that is by design. You know, when we look at something like COVID, when COVID happened, regardless of how you fet feel about sort of the health uh approach and consequences of COVID, it doesn't matter. What we can all agree on is that the incident of COVID wasn't just a health crisis, it was an education crisis, it was a family crisis, it was a government crisis, it was a finance crisis. It it spread throughout our entire society. And there's a reason for that. The reason is because I believe the invisible war on humanity is designed to keep us from recognizing that there is a war. So when we again relegate these problems to very narrow, very nuanced, you know, uh identities, we are kept sort of in the blind, in the dark about the invisible war.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

I know you introduced the idea of moving from victim to soldier to warrior. So talk about that and how can a person recognize what what part of the spectrum they might be on.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

Yeah. And so that that's a great question because it dovetails into the balance of my response to your last question, which is, you know, so what what was my sort of testimony about this? So yeah, I've been in many industries, and I played in probably every one of those roles, I played a victim, soldier, and in some cases a warrior. So let me first describe what that progression looks like. So in the war, the war is on our purpose, peace, and passion. Purpose is our identity, peace is truth, and passion is what we live for, like what drives us every day, our motivation. And so, you know, when someone gets a job like the jobs that I've had, it can be very excited, the careers I've had and working with the people I've worked with. But I and but I started to realize in the very system, in the very systems of society I was working in, I was also a partner in that war with the enemy. Uh, so if when I was in entertainment, and I tried very hard not to be enslaved as a as a soldier, but you're gonna hear when I describe to you, you're gonna hear the difficulty. People be able to relate to this. So I was um in management, I've been in different roles in entertainment and media, but in my management role, I was working uh with very famous people and at very high levels and had relationships with all the agencies, the studios, you name it. And um, I once was with an agent, the well, it wasn't an he was actually the CEO of William Mars. We were out to lunch, and I said to him, I have a great idea. Let's come out with a publication that we can send to all the artists that comes out, say, every month. We can call it handlers, and what it will do is it will describe, it will help the artists understand the business. Like it will describe how deals are done, the distribution modeling. He said, Greg, that's a great idea. Guess what? If we do that, you will be in a dumpster within three weeks. In other words, putting sunlight on the very things, the very machine that enslaves talent to the industry was not a good idea. Like, don't do that. So even though my heart said, hey, Greg, you know, you want to do better for the artists, and I had a good relationship with the artists, um, you also are cutting your nose to spite your face because this is the industry that's actually paying you well to operate as a soldier. So, in other words, you're you're, you know, it's kind of like a doctor. There's so many good doctors, right? They love what they do. They they they they gotta be devoted. Most of them are very devoted to their career. But most people don't know that I think it's 70 or 80 percent of the financing of medical schools comes from pharmaceutical companies. So, what does that mean? That doesn't mean pharmaceuticals are bad. It just means that doctors are right off the from the get-go, they are in partnership with pharmaceuticals. So that that means that holistic medicine doesn't have a chance. And that is uh, you know, and a doctor himself or herself can be sick too. So they're they're a victim in the system, they're a soldier when they accept that model, that business model. But here's where the opportunity is to be a warrior. And warriors are, you know, warriors what we want to become. Because when we become a warrior, we don't defeat the enemy, but we change the potential to thrive individually and as a collective. And I know that because I became a warrior in many ways, including in my authorship, but in all parts of my life. And I gotta tell you, it with all the wonderful things I've done in my life, nothing beats being a warrior. Let me give you a couple, one one case study uh or two. Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks was relegated during the awful history of this country to sitting at the back of a bus. And when she would do it, along with many others, she was a victim of the system, but she was also a soldier because inaction is a passive way of soldiership. So when we are participating in the system and letting the system take advantage of us, we're just as bad as somebody who's supporting the system. But one day she woke up and she said, I am going to, I'm not gonna sit in the back of the bus. And when she did that, she changed the system. And that's a key attribute of warriorship is what we call in the book selfless help. So that ties into the concept of self-help or self-sacrifice. So there's every there's so many books, and I know a lot of your guests, and I would never knock anything that your guests are doing, but I want to I want to point out that self-help in a broken world doesn't work. And I'm going to demonstrate why. I use the illustration in my book of a Ferris wheel. And if you're stuck at the bottom of a broken Ferris wheel, you're lucky because you can walk off. But you can never ride that Ferris wheel again until the people at the top are brought safely down. So when we go and we in the multi-billion dollar industry we buy self-help books, the power of now or atomic habits and all these, you know, I there's valuable information in these books, but the collective, the emphasis and the weight of the industry of self-help is about you helping yourself. But when you help yourself, you're still helped in a broken system. So the opposite of that is self-sacrifice. And we know people like that. People who just give so much of themselves, they are, they neglect themselves. It might be a caretaker in a family, the one, the one child that takes care of the parent, and the rest of the children don't have anything to do with it, and it just exhausts that individual to no end. That that is not a solution either. That's the other extreme. So in the book, we talk about selfless help, which is where when we tackle a problem that is ours, but at the same time pursue the um the remedy for more than ourselves. Like, in other words, just like a Rosa Parks, or just like a Frank Serpico who worked in the police station that was went bad and he decided to blow the whistle uh on that corruption. But when we do those things, we create lasting consequence. We create something that has more persistence. And by the way, it's more fulfilling. It creates the kind of lasting passion and sense of fulfillment that brings us life. So, in other words, helping others while we help ourselves in this act of selfless help is really what I call the solution to the problem.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

Where you outline 12 weapons used against purpose, peace, and passion. Talk about the most dangerous weapon uh used today and why.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Yeah, so the 12 weapons is there's four weapons for each of the command centers. There's four four weapons for purpose or identity, four for peace or truth, and four for passion or energy motivation. The most destructive among them is the one is one of the four that serves peace, and that is division. Division is the most destructive because it is by virtue of the collective that we have supernatural capacity. Now, I'm not saying this because I, you know, this is my my idea, I'm gonna prove it empirically. What happens when there's a catastrophe of enormous proportions or something that is extraordinary in man, man's you know effort? We come together for a moment in time in a way that it's hard to even describe. Case in point, 9-11. For the first couple of weeks after 9-11, nobody saw race, nobody saw money, socioeconomic division, nobody saw political division, nobody saw it. It disappeared, it vanished, but only for a moment. But when that happened, people felt an energy, something you couldn't put your finger on. Now, some of people and most people manifest rather uh ends end up taking that energy and they channel it. So they channel it into uh, unfortunately, we channeled it into a weapon against the Middle East. We called out a group of people and we blame them for what happened when no one had the facts at the time, and they became the object of that hatred. So we took a moment that was peaceful and loving at a level what I call agape love. It's love that transcends understanding, and we then channeled it into destruction. And in fact, one of the longest wars this country's ever uh participated in. So division is if if when someone reads my book, they that my personal story is woven in it, but the book is not about me. And the book doesn't tell you how to think, it just reminds you that you can think it, you're capable of it. And so when you do go through that journey of the book, 500 pages, you start to feel you it becomes obvious that division is such a dangerous weapon. We have division in our families, we we have, and division comes in different shapes and sizes. Division isn't always me against you, sometimes it's one spouse is in one room and another spouse is in the other room. Division has many faces, and it's not the way we're designed. We're designed just like the tree and the sunset and all of the surrounding foliage. We're designed to live together and thrive together, and it's an amazing thing, as I just described, when we come together for moments in time, what it feels like and what it has the capacity to do for mankind.

SPEAKER_01 29:31

We'll talk about the identity map and the truth filter tools. Talk about how that shows up in someone's life.

SPEAKER_00 29:38

Yeah, so there's three tools, one for each of the command centers, that are very practical and very powerful. And I use them, and a lot of people are using them. Uh, the first is the identity map. So, what this does, it's really interesting when you do it. It it literally reverse engineers your identity. See, we all walk around, like maybe I'm a maybe I'm a lawyer, and that's my job. I've been doing it for 30 years, and so everyone thinks I love that I'm a lawyer. And even I may think I love being a lawyer. Maybe I really think I love being a lawyer because it pays a lot of bills, it gives me a certain status in the community, but I really wanted to be a farmer. So, what the identity map does is it associates all of the different people, influences, both people and things that influenced you, and then it maps them to how you really feel about those things and where did they come from? So, for example, a child who is born in a family that is, say, a professional family, is going to be pressured by their soil systems. We didn't talk much about the tree, but I hope your audience can get to the book and understand this connection. But in the soil systems of family, education, and religion, a lot happens to us and our identity before we can even speak, before we can even talk. Much of our life has already been decided. So if we come from a professional family, it is likely that our parents are going to want us to be a professional. And they may even want us to be in a specific career and go to a certain school or play a certain sport. So these things have already been decided for us. It isn't until we become 46 and a half, and we're approaching that 47th birthday, and we say, I never wanted to do that. I never wanted to be that. Or maybe I wanted to do it, but I wanted to do it differently. And so the identity map unravels that and it allows you to rebuild your character, rebuild your identity slowly in a way that is deliberate and in small little bites. Find out who you are, who you were really, who you're really designed to be. I never knew I was an author, but I'd like to write. I didn't think I could write. In fact, people told me, hey, stay away from writing. You're good at everything else, just don't write. I ended up writing 36 books in two years. Well, it took 13 years to write the framework, but I'm a writer, I'm an author. The second tool is the truth filter, and God only knows we need that today because truth has is basically under siege. There's there's a couple things working against this. First of all, technology and media is distorting the truth. So technology like artificial intelligence and media has been uh distorting the truth since it's someone asked me once, when do you think was the turning point for media? I said the invention of the printing press. So ever since we were able to communicate in that way, it's been manipulated to propagandize people. So the truth filter is a tool that gives it it's it's like a muscle builder that starts to build the muscles of discernment. It roots itself, it doesn't tell you this is how you'll know the truth. What it tells you is that in order to find the truth, you've got to be in search of the truth. So I have a quote in the book. It says, those who are faithful to the truth, I mean, I'm sorry, those who pursue the truth are more faithful to the truth than those who know the truth. Think of people who come to you and say, I know this is true. And so they have concluded something about something else, and they're telling you when in truth, they may have not even researched that. They may have just heard it from somebody. And once they know it, they believe they know everything about it, which is impossible. And that goes for everything under the sun. In other words, Socrates said the only knowledge worth having is none at all. Meaning that don't let somebody tell you something, pursue the journey for truth. Get on the journey for truth, look for truth. If someone says to you, I remember I used to tell people, oh, I'm going to um, I'm taking, I'm flying to Algeria or Egypt or Libya to do something. Oh, you're going there, you're going to get killed. Well, actually, quite the contrary, the people there are lovely, they're amazing. But these are folks who have never don't even have a passport. And they're telling me because they heard it on CNN or Fox, they're telling me that it's dangerous over there. So the truth filter changes the way you process truth, which is really the pursuit of truth. And then lastly, is the is my favorite, and that's the passion builder. The passion builder is a tool that reorganizes the things that you devote your energy to, both people and things, like hobbies or what have you. And what you'll find when you do this, I mean, I was shocked when I did it, and I created the tool, but what you'll find is that you are burning energy. Like there's things and people in your life that are literally extinguishing your flame, that are getting the abundance of your attention. And then there are people who and things that excite you and that deserve your attention that you're not giving enough to. I have uh again in the book, there's something called the stuck jar principle, Curtis. Have you ever had a stuck jar? You the lid on it, you can't get it off.

SPEAKER_01 35:28

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 35:29

Okay, so what do you do? You take it and you start banging it on the counter, you can't get it off, you're sitting there struggling, you ask another guy the same size as you to do it, then suddenly your 15-year-old comes over and just finesses it and takes it off, right? So, what does that tell us? Well, that told me that sometimes we're the wrong person for the right job. So, think about that for a second. A lot of us have codependent relationships. Some of us have relationships where we are we feel obligated to. Um, we and we love the person, perhaps. Um, but in loving them, we are not taking care of them, we are just crutching them. We're we're giving them a reason not to actually fix themselves. And so, and they and they may take up a good deal of our energy. We may not be the right person for the job, and you know, there's another there's another adage, there's so many of these in the book, but you know, you've heard the adage, don't give a man a fish, teach him the fish. Well, yeah, I say, don't give a man a fish, don't teach him the fish. First, ask him if he even wants fish, and that hits hard to me, even when I say it to you, it emotionally chokes me because I was always a giver. I could I would give the last dollar in my wallet, and I did always. And then I realized again at that point when I crashed and burned, because that was a contributor to the crash and burn for me. What I realized, uh my giving was a way of substantiating my own purpose, my own peace. It was giving me control over situations and people, and I was doing it to make myself feel good. A lot of people do this. And I wasn't really asking the people, what did you really want from me? What did you really need? Maybe it was my time, maybe I wasn't even the right person. Maybe I needed to lob it off, you know, to somebody else who would be more effective in that relationship or that particular problem. Uh, we we are, you know, this on one hand, when you step back, you'd say, Oh my God, Greg, you I understand what you're saying. It sounds like a mess. Why are you such a pessimist? So people say you're a pessimist, you see the glass half full. I say, No, I don't see the glass half full, I don't see it half empty. I just don't see the glass. And I don't see the glass because society, the way we're operating, and we're reaching a peak in this performance. We are operating at a level of underperformance that is basically borderline deceased. I mean, people in their microcosms, they might look like they have it together. Why, where do we get that from? Sometimes we'll go on a social media account, Instagram account. It looks like Kim Kardashian just bought a new jet. I know these people. They're all miserable. The ones with money, the ones without money. The ones with a spouse, the ones without a spouse. The ones that are lonely and the ones that have all the attention. There's something really broken. But what's good about it is the glass is there. It can be found. We have to take our own, take responsibility. You know, in my book, and maybe I'm leading into where you were going to go, there's three things we need to do. We need to look in the mirror. So there's the mirror. We need to map the battlefield, which the book does very clearly, and then we need to get out the megaphone, the mirror, the map, and the megaphone. The megaphone is sharing this with our own spirit, sharing it with our family, taking responsibility, understanding what how we were designed. Were we designed to live like this? Is this really what it is? Is this what life is? I mean, I don't think anybody, if they're really honest, can accept this as being optimal. We're so good as a species at creating amazing things. This shouldn't be as difficult as say sending somebody into space. Loving on people, seeing alternatives to media, like stop watching it, stop ingesting it, stop letting it get into your head. Politics, stop with the politics. In fact, government, we're, you know, government has become two-thirds of society, the GDP. So we are actually, and I always say to people, if we can't govern ourselves, what makes you think we can get someone else to govern for us? So many people are caught up in the battle in just politics. Think of the consumption of energy in that space alone, alone. So I call on people when they read this book, it doesn't matter what level you're at in terms of when I say level, I'm not talking about aptitude. I'm talking about some people love to read, some people hate to read. This book is designed. In fact, in the back, there's a how-to-read uh guide. So you could read this book and get the essence of it at 150 pages, or you can read all 500. There's different tracks, but it's important that people start to see the invisible war.

SPEAKER_01 41:07

Well, we only got a few minutes left, so uh, you know, uh go out your contact info so people can keep up with everything that you're up to. And also, uh, if there's anything I missed that you would like to cover in the next uh five, 10 minutes, uh, do so.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

Yeah, thank you, Curtis. So um I think at a minimum, so first of all, I'm happy to field direct emails from people. If maybe you're not in a position to buy the book, if I if you reach out to me, you request it, I'm happy to send you one. Okay. I want people to have it. Okay. For me, it's not about oh, I want to sell books. But if you want to reach me, you can reach me at infoinfo at voice of the heartbooks.com. That's plural, voiceoftheartbooks.com. Info at voice of the heartbooks.com. Um, you you can get more background on this by going to the Amazon listings for the books. So Voice of the Heart, the Battle for Your Purpose, Peace, and Passion. And you'll see there's a lot of information right there. And I will tell you that between Amazon and Goodreads, they run frequent promotions for free downloads and free books. In fact, it was just a free book promotion. There are a few thousand people that entered into the contest. 50 got the book and they were they were signed books. But these things run all the time. In fact, the new Growing in the Garden. So there's actually a 30-book children's series that parallels the main book. And the first book, the Backwards Berries, and this is for like the four to eight, four to ten uh year old range. Goodreads is running a starting Sunday. Uh, go in there, goodreads.com, put in the backwards berries, it will come up, and there's going to be a contest, and I think it's a hundred books that are going to be given away. Um, so I just want people to have it. And the the books are also available on Kindle Unlimited. So if you have Kindle, you can download it for free. But please reach out to me. If you're in a position where you can't buy it, uh, reach out to me. I want to get you a copy. Um, and if I'm in your area, I'm happy to grab a cup of coffee. I can't do this for everybody, but I try. And so I want people to really, I want this to resonate with people. I want people to know I'm very serious about this mission. I've been I've been doing this thing called life for a long time, and I've been blessed to be a blessing. So that's what I want to do. I want to be a blessing to others.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

Do you have a website?

SPEAKER_00 43:46

Yeah, the website is uh www.voice of the heartbooks.com. You can also reach me through there. There isn't a bunch of information there yet. Um, I've been very cautious about overcommercializing this. I've wanted it to be more of an organic because I see I don't view it as a book or franchise. I call it a franchise, I view it as a movement. I see this as a movement that I want people to take ownership of it and to take it into their communities, into their families, into their churches, synagogues, mosques, any place of worship. I want them to bring this thing to life on their own terms. Uh, there's a lot of tools in these books. Uh, there's many ways that, and I'm happy to support if someone calls me and says, hey, I have a com I have a group uh of a hundred men and women, or a hundred women, or a hundred men, and I'd like you to come speak, or I'd like some materials to share with that group. Can you do that? Can you would you do a web conference? Would you can you get us some copies? I would be happy to do that.

SPEAKER_01 44:54

All right, ladies and gentlemen, voiceoftheartbooks.com. Please reach out to Greg, you know, email him, uh, let him know what you need. He he's definitely glad to uh help. And uh like you said, he he didn't it's not just about writing a book for him. He's created a franchise and a children's book fiction. So he's reaching uh multiple generations. So please follow Rake Review, share this episode to as many people as possible. Also visit www.curveball337.com and share that website to everybody you know, and keep up with all things living the dream. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Greg, definitely thank you for all that you do, and thank you for joining me. Thank you, Chris. For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.curveball337.com. Until next time, keep living the dream.