Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 109: Competence & Control

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

“Mediocrity is never a desirable destination. … At least, not when practice might transform mediocrity to competence, or even skill.” - Napoleon Bonapart https://elitebusinessconversations.com/

Greetings friends, welcome back to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today we have our friend, entrepreneur, consultant, and keynote speaker, Joe Rocky. We're going to get back to him in just two seconds. If you would kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers, got some video game streams. I've got Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com where you can find audio versions of the podcast, a complete list of all 15 currently available works of historical dream literature, the most recent book 15, The World of Dreams by Have a Luck Ellis.

T-shirt like so, coffee mug. That's enough shilling out of me. Back to our guest. Joe, thank you for joining us today. I appreciate your time. Yes, thank you for having me, yeah. Good deal. So we were speaking a little bit off, off air.

I always talk to folks before I start recording, never record without permission, never release without permission. So if you're skeptical or hesitant to join me, that one's ever going to see it unless you feel it represents you well. But that being the case, we talked off air for a moment about your keynote speaking. You said that's kind of the favorite thing you do lately? Oh yeah, absolutely. So in my life, I've created a lot of businesses. But my favorite is actually being able to share and impress it on to people. So obviously that comes across in the business consulting arena. You know, you're helping people build business systems for there. But in the element of the keynote speaking, I get to be exposed to just so many more groups and companies about what is specific to theirs. Because obviously I have built systems that work for me, work very well. But for someone's individual. individual challenges to be able to make it for them has always been my favorite thing in terms of customizing it.

And again, whether this be a sales victory speech or we need to launch a new sales division or nothing in our company is working and someone motivated us to make things work and give us ideas. That's the arena that I really play in. And it's primarily going to be around sales or making management decisions better. And that's that's where I live. Very cool. Is it okay to say and not to put you on the spot? But who you may have spoken to recently, any recent experiences that stand out for you or big names? Just have a chaos.

I don't advertise the former clients because everything is customized to them. And there's just as you said about not wanting to share things that you're not allowed to share. I know what I've talked to them about, but I'm not sure if they want it all public. You know what I mean? Gotcha. But I can't say that I've talked to groups as small as three people and I've done presentations over 500. So there's a lot of in between in there, obviously, but I can comfortably say that without having to worry about offending anyone. Very cool.

Yeah. And I don't want to put anyone's business out there. Certainly, if you've been contractor hired to come and give a speech for a company, that didn't include, by the way, I'm going to tell everybody that that's a separate thing. Sometimes they're cool with it, but rather than going through my entire memory bank of were they cool with her or not, just. Yeah, for sure. So you say you've, you know, started up to 15 businesses. A lot of them you've sold or on autopilot. I don't know if you want to get into that, some of your experience with those things or what they were,

the type of business, how you kind of progress through learning how to do that. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the wrong way, I guess is how I progressed to do it. I saw when I was 23. And I mean, you know, like how my 23-year-olds didn't really know how to do anything. But that was when I launched my first business. It was a real estate investing business. We bought properties that were broken, renovated them, and then resold them for profit. It was a huge learning curve.

Prior to that, I was doing what most people do. I had a normal job working for someone else. I was selling life insurances and annuities. And I was very good at it. I mean, the first year, I was rookie of the year, the second year I was on a classman of the year and the third year I left. I left for a lot of reasons, but one of which was I wanted to work for myself and create residual income. So the goal with that at that time, I only really saw three true ways you can make residual income. You can own a utility company because everyone pays a monthly phone bill, gas bill or whatever.

You can be a taxing entity or you can be in charge of someone's mortgage or rent. Of those options, the only one I really could do at the time was become a landlord. And that was what I ultimately strove for. but I was starting in the recession that every bank hated landlords, they blamed them for the last recession for the credit crisis. So it was very hard to have enough capital to truly build an entity that would be worthwhile. And that's why I had to start by doing the flips. And that's what I did, is I started by doing the flips, obviously got my name out there that I knew what I was doing. And then as time went on, started building more and more partnerships with other people.

wanted to do the parts of the process that I didn't want to do and vice versa. So there's a lot of people out there that are very capable for various different reasons of being a partner in an entity, but either don't have the experience, expertise, or desire to be involved in it in the day-to-day basis. And that's really where I came in. We made some really good partnerships throughout the law of the ways. A lot of real estate companies I created were born in that very vein in different capacities. And then in the realm of real estate, once I got it about two or three years in, I found out how many different realms there was to make revenue in it. And with the exception of anything that requires me to be a real estate licensed agent, I pretty much have made revenue every single way you can being the owner of a property.

Very cool. Very cool. Well, you can see, or maybe you don't know, but this is me trying to start my own home business, my first experience. So you got into when you were 23. I waited until I was like 43. and, you know, took a, I wonder folks, you know, look at my, look at my situation saying, you know, I spent 20 years in inpatient psychiatric care, you know, emergency psych. And I wonder folks think I'm having a midlife crisis type of thing, which is a funny, it's a funny thing because, you know, it has that memetic quality to it. All, someone's going to flip out and buy a sports car because they're trying to recapture their youth. But I look at it a little differently. It's like you get to halfway through, well, this is half as long as I'm going to live for my entire life if I'm lucky.

Do I want to keep doing what I was doing before? So it's a definitely there's more of a midlife evaluation you take on. Is this the path I want to stay on or what I'd like to try? So I'm new. All that, all that to say, I've had a very steep learning curve in the past couple years technologically. And then, but also in terms of say, branding and and advertising and and trying to, you know, learning to build a website and do video editing and all of this stuff. It's been huge. It was probably a question in there somewhere, but I lost it. I don't know if you have any comments.

That's fair. I mean, to that point, a lot of things out of what you just said there. First off, most of us need to do more evaluation than we do. Obviously, once every 40-some years, it's a little bit on the infrequent side. But, you know, so, I mean, that's what all the great businesses do. And really, if you want to take yourself better, you got to figure out how to have an honest conversation about what's going on. And this is true as a business owner, as an employee, you know, what is really going on,

but doing it in a way that removes yourself from the equation. And kind of the example that most people can see since Marvel made a common was if you think of Dr. Strange, where he gets blown out of his own body, he can still see what's going on. You need to get that ability with yourself and say, if this is just person A and person B, not myself, but just person A and person B, is this the type of interaction that is responsible and acceptable. And if you find yourself in situations where it's really not, the boss has asked me to do things that was not what was supposed to be, and this is just inappropriate, well, then there's nothing wrong with at that point of addressing it to make it better. and there's many different contexts you can take that. Was this person who said no to me in the sales situation really a viable candidate to buy for me in the first place? That's a very common one that you got to address.

And that process of stepping out of the situation and seeing what's really going on is a very important human need that most people will never do. I'm sure it's psychologically based about doing that process. but it is necessary and most people will never put into work. And quite frankly, that's why most people stay in bad situations for way too long. It's my opinion. No, for sure, for sure. Well, there's two layers of that.

And one of them jumped out of me and I lost the other one. We'll see if I can get back around to it. But it's been put out there recently by another public figure in psychology that if you want to get your life together or you want to do something better, if you want to do better than you are right now, he says you want to treat yourself like you're someone that you are responsible. responsible for helping so that there's that layer there of taking yourself out of yourself and looking at yourself kind of objectively and saying if this was if if me was a person that I cared about that

I wanted to do well what advice would I give them what what honest critique and what encouragement and you know how how would I evaluate their their process and give them the best advice possible on making it better um so I treat yourself like you're someone you are a responsible for helping. And if you kind of, you know, a lot of, a lot of things are just mindset. Like, how are you approaching this? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's 100% true. And, and so you need to live in a realm of realistic. You know, you can't just be so optimistic that that it's not real life. Yeah. But nor can you be pessimistic where you think you're the worst person ever and you're insignificant, because neither one of those is really actually going to be reality. And the way that

I approach this and teach people is there's, There's two angles people kind of go to. They either say, we're going to work on our weaknesses or we're going to work on our strengths. And I absolutely say, you need to maximize your strengths. And then for your errors or your weaknesses, outsource them or find a partnership or some type of arrangement where they can be taken care of. And the best businesses in the world complement that. You very rarely have partnerships that stand the test of time when both of the partners have the same. personality and the same skill set. The best ones are ones where this guy goes and does all of the

stuff that the other one doesn't do. So for me, all of the things that you said about building a website never have done one of those. Like I said, how many business I've had, I've never actually built a website. I've never been in charge of social media of any of my companies. Because that's not what I do. In fact, actually, if you go to my Facebook, you either see a property that we have for sale or it's recognition of something I did in another profession, whether it be we did a keynote address here or something like that. I mean, there is no, hey, I'm at Starbucks right now, none of that, because that's not me.

I don't like that whole element of social media and, you know, that's what it is. But the point is finding someone who wants to do that in is, but furthermore, the activity itself needs to be practical and profitable or else you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. And that goes back to how you evaluate a business to find out what is practical and profitable and necessary. And fine-tuning what isn't profitable or necessary out of your life. You know, that's all important stuff. For sure.

Yeah, that's a lot of the stuff that, you know, in this being a new endeavor to me, like I really don't know how to evaluate. I'm always, you know, there's an old phrase, I'm sure you've heard it before. And it's a bit of a cliche in the business world that continuous quality improvement, CQI. I'm always looking to do stuff better. And so that's just natural to me, like my, my, you know, recording quality, editing skills, graphic thumbnails. All that has kind of progressed as I go along. And my process of the show I'm doing here, whatever it is, has also evolved and improved a little bit over time. But I'm kind of like, am I better than I was yesterday, definitely.

better than a year ago. But like hitting benchmarks, part of me is like, I'm not sure, am I on track with the right kind of growth and taking the most, you know,

best advantage of opportunities I can to get my name out there and acquire a viewership or whatnot? Or am I way underperforming? Because I just don't know what I'm doing. So there's a lot of that going on in my head too. Like I have no idea. Those are very real questions and conversations. And as a guy who hosts two different podcasts,

podcast and having gone through all that, that is very real situations. I literally have done keynote addresses about exactly everything you just said. So to try to rate it in here to do a smaller microcosm that's going to be applicable everyone, not just the podcast hosts out there, is that you need to realize you're in sales. It doesn't really matter as a business owner or what your business is. Sales are first and foremost the most important thing you are doing. So in your case as a pod host, you need to make sure that people, A, know you exist and B, want to care enough to check you out. And then the second funnel of that is if you were a brick and mortar store, people would need to walk in and be in your bakery to buy things.

So in your situation, it's does the sound quality actually click? Is it something I want to hear? Is there a lot of background noise that makes me want to get out of here? Because no one really stays in a store for a long time that they don't feel comfortable in. And for our world as being podcasters, it is, is the sound quality good? Is there too much moving parts? Or we got a pretty dialed in and succinct. And then the third part, which is where most people fail their business because they spend

way too much time in there, is the product itself. So while it's important to make a very good podcast, learn how to interview better, learn how to present your data well, if you're a bakery, have good bread. but at the end of the day, if the first two elements aren't satisfied, the third one doesn't matter. I mean, you can have literally the best product on the planet. If no one wants to be there forward or if no one knows about it, it does not matter. And there's a lot of different things you can do to make essentially Google or Apple, depending upon if you're talking about a video podcast or an audio podcast to like you.

And there's a lot of things that I can do. And I'll be able to refer to you to some of that. stuff after. I don't know if I'm allowed to give shameless plugs for for where this is coming out. If I can, I will. But if not, it's, I mean, I'm, I'm comfortable with you sharing anything you feel comfortable. You got a new book about how to advertise yourself. For me to be their keynote address and they want people to show up to it. I don't think they'll be upset if I advertise this one. In April, I, that's where this keynote address is coming out. It's for pod pros quarterly. It's literally designed for podcasters,

to sit down and attack problems like this. How do I get better ratings? How do I make a better product? How do I know what is a good rating? Like, how do I know if I'm being successful? So there's a number of different speakers that are called in to do it. I just happen to be in the April one,

as in the second quarter of the quarterly event. And like I said, it's something that I encourage all podcasters to check out because there's obviously very technical information about, you know, this is, is how you should answer it, which comes across a little dry to a non-podcaster, like, how do I write a description and all that stuff? But it's very, very beneficial once you go through all of it. Like I said, each of us speakers attack it from a little bit different angle based upon where

our level of expertise came in. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. And that's a toss up too for this type of format where we're doing an interview. We want it to be interesting. But we also want it to be informative, but not yet, not so technical that, like, I'm getting all kinds of great advice, but the audience is bored, or not enough where it's like there's, there's no meat to this. What are they even talking about? So that's, that's its own interesting juggling act with, with the, the actual creation of the product, so to be, the bacon of the bread. Yeah.

In terms of that, I would recommend you want to, don't flow for fluff, don't do fluff. You want to keep meat there as much as possible and the more consistent. then it is the better. And then basically an audience will find you. You know, if you, if you're one of the best talking about your topic and you're consistently there and you're bringing it and it's always being brought, the audience will find you as long as you learn how to do the first marketing element of it, it will take care of itself.

I'm hoping that is what I'm doing. You know, when I started looking into this, I did actually start with market research. I'm like, I got an idea. And I got a million ideas. I got a million dollar ideas as far as I'm concerned. I've never made anything of them because I don't know how to do half the crap. I think I've had ideas for a dozen different books. Here are most of the people who cash in on those either.

They learn as they go. It would true. Right. Right. Well, but I'm like, okay, if I'm going to change direction and I'm going to get in. So I've always had this kind of a talent, kind of an innate talent. You know, it's like, like anybody else, like some people are, what is it, Michael Phelps, built for swimming.

Well, if he never practiced, if he never swam, he wouldn't never have, I think that was his name, the kid with like the amazing, Also never would have looked like a streamlined bullet either. You get there with the practice. For sure. Yeah. So I started with, I think I have this innate talent. At least people told me so.

And I enjoy it. So I'm like, okay, I got a skill. I enjoy. Can I make some money? So I did all the way, you know, full circle market research for it. I'm like, it seems like no one was really doing what I'm doing. There's people out there that are, you know, brother Joseph who gets messages from God. And there's the people who are on the more.

supernatural side of, you know, receiving messages from spirits or astrology style stuff, but no one seemed to be doing this specifically, what I'm doing. The idea of this is a real conversation. I just keep it strictly to the psychological. I bring the innate talent of

the associative connections and the interview style. So, as far as I could tell, no one was doing this. So hopefully I've got something unique enough that it's unique enough no one else is doing it, but it's not so niche that nobody cares. I don't know.

I'm still. I think you have a very interesting starting point or else I wouldn't have joined in the first place. And as someone who has rode the podcasting circuit, if you will, for a while now, I just how many I've been on. You're the first one who's doing this specifically. I mean, I can't tell you how many business ones I've been on. Like, there's a gazillion there. So you certainly have yourself a unique spot.

And I'm really interested to see, you know, how you're going to dive into my own here. I never know. It just kind of happens. I don't know how I'm going to do it either. Well, we'll find out, I guess. So how do you want to start into it? Oh, yeah, it's great. We can just, let me put a little timestamp here.

This is the technical aspect of stuff where I'm like, I'm finally getting better at making notes when I should. Benjamin the Dream Wizard wants to help you pierce the veil of night and shine the light of understanding upon the mystery of dreams. Every episode of his dreamscapes program features real dreamers, gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions. New DreamScape's episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms,

as well as free audiobooks, highlighting the psychological principles which inform our dream experience and much, much more. To join The Wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media platforms, and through the contact page at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, where you will also find the wizard's growing catalog of historical dream literature available on amazon featuring the wisdom and wonder of exploration into the world of dreams over the past two thousand years that's benjamin the dream wizard on youtube and at benjamin the dream wizard.com um so basically i shut up and listen um i write it down you know you tell the story beginning to end however you experienced it and then we're going to

go back through it again in a little more detail and then somewhere between you know the deep dive and getting an answer. We start collaboratively putting things together that make sense. I can only have ideas about connections that seem to make sense to me. And I throw those out there and they're going to resonate like strings on a on a guitar next to each other or they're not. And where that resonation is, you'll feel it and you go. And you know what? Not only that, but more ideas will come to you. More connections based on those suggestions will just appear. You know, that's part of the reason I got the whole wizard thing is like what I do feels like magic. to me. I can't explain it. And I'm not saying I got magic powers, but in a metaphorical way,

I can't, I can't reproduce this. I can't tell someone else how to do it. I just kind of do it. So, anyway, I understand that. The difficulty of teaching someone how to ride a bike, certainly. Yeah, just flat listening. Most people don't know how to do. So let's start with that. No, for sure. I think that's a great analogy too, because you tell someone, well, you just balance. And you're like, well, what's balance? It's like, well, shit, I know what it feels like, but I can't. How do we describe to someone what it feels like the balance? That's a great. That's a great analogy.

Okay. So I keep saying, and I'm going to shut up and listen and I'm not doing that. So let's, I'm ready when you are. Well, to your starting criteria there, I hope I'm able to match it up. Because the one thing that I tend to not have is super involved details. Like whatever, I guess recurrence isn't really a big thing for me either because what I tend to have and to give you, I guess you want a very specific one here, whenever I'm trying to figure out a problem, whatever it be,

it's almost always business related actually at the end of the day, but whenever I'm trying to figure out a solution, whether it be whenever I'm designing a kitchen, which happens a lot, as you can tell, you're renovating properties. Kitchens are kind of important. But I will see essentially myself standing in the room, but like through my own eyes.

Like it's not like a third person view in a video game. This is like me actually there, walking around it and just kind of figuring out the layout of how I wanted to be, obviously knowing how many I've done in the past, but what would fit for this house? And, you know, obviously, I guess I'm also drawn to this outside of my life

of games that have building aspects to it. And one of the ones that Possible ahead is the way that fallout, at least the most recent one in Boston, you built your own structures and they would kind of be green. And then when it was ready, it would turn to the letter of a color it was supposed to be. And that's kind of how it is for me. Like I'm designing and I'm figuring out what it is that I want.

And then, like I said, sometimes it's there and I walk in and I pull out the tape and it will work the way I thought. And then there's also times where the proportions of the dream and the reality of the space ain't the same. And it's not even really close. So to give you one, I mean, I definitely remember that process, that specific house and how it turned out after the fact. So to give you a kind of a specific starting point there, that was that. Okay.

Well, a lot of times people come to me with a narrative. they're like I was in a place and I did a thing and there's other people were there and then I was in another place. That kind of basic idea. But every now and again, I get thrown a curveball, which is the seems- Me by myself working. Well, this seems like an interesting, I was trying to think of how to describe as you, almost have a kind of semi-lucid experience where- I believe so, yeah. Yeah, where you're kind of aware.

So there's a lot of things going on there, which is fascinating. No matter what, I'll talk about dreams. all day. So it seems like what you've got is a dream programming situation, which kind of falls under the lucid dreaming experience in general, which is, again, a little outside my wheelhouse in terms of like, I don't understand that. I couldn't tell you how to make it happen or how to, how to make the best use of it. Other people are better than that, but I want to get better at that. So I love talking about it. So a lot of people have dream experiences where they're involuntary. That's most people, I would say. Most people, they're, they're, oh, I have.

had a dream, I experienced a dream, a dream, a dream came to me and showed me something. But you're, you're having a little more success with the idea of carrying a specific problem, a specific space into the, into the dream thinking, problem solving process and having yourself appear there and looking at the problem again in your sleep. and that process having a very practical physical application for when you wake up again. That seems like a pretty common. I mean, so we just continue. Well, I definitely do a process to answer to a lot.

I guess it starts with me honestly. And this is something I definitely taught myself. And I started this very young, actually, in doing this. and it would be I just didn't remember this I was in Little League at the time and I was pitching the next day and my dad basically told me

fall asleep visualizing how you see the game going so I would literally fall asleep the same way that people are when they're reading or listening to an audiobook of building it in their head and I remember starting that way and then it just kind of became other problems the same way

ironically i never did one for a test like anything like that but they were all physical life things that that had an analog component to them like like we're going to build something or we're going to fix something something of that nature and i just think you remember that i obviously don't remember as in detail as i do about little league as as i do about rebuilding that kitchen over there on franklin but that's like said that's just stuff that that how i started and i have a sleep process that I guess it just do. And that's, I can't fall asleep unless I'm thinking about fixing something or building something. Regardless of what it is. And I guess that's why normally it's a work thing, because in my own life, I've kind of systematized everything. That's all I make

things successful. So I applied it at home as well. Well, this is a great example of the, what am I trying to say? The, uh, the diversity of physical and mental operations, you know, like a biology and psychology that fit together to give people different experiences. So for me, I'm, you know, relating this to myself, well, how do I fall asleep? I put on, I got to have people talking. I don't care if it's, you know, a talk show or it's a comedy radio station or something. I got to have something that gets me out of my head. Because if I'm thinking about something, anything, if I'm not distracted, I cannot sleep. So I'm like exactly the opposite. You're saying you.

No, mine's very specific. because I have to be thinking about something in a physical manifestation. If I'm thinking about conversations, I'll never fall asleep. Gotcha. Yeah. That's probably why all my stuff ends up me by myself. Be honest with you. No, for sure.

Well, and then that's also a very different thing. So perhaps my speculation would be what makes me not a lucid dreamer is probably something to do with what, you know, by, by the opposite makes you more likely to experience that is your your process of fading into sleep actually is is getting into visualization of physical spaces that then carry over into sleep and it's it's not a um well in some of the books i've been reading of you know by my historical dream literature um they have stories that come from both sides of that equation as well where people say if i want to dream about something i think about it as i fall asleep. And then there's an entirely different class of people that says, if I want to make sure I

don't dream about something, I focus on it as I'm falling asleep. And that prevents those dreams. So we get this contrary, what I'm trying to say. I mean, you get the opposite result from the same thing based on the person that it's experiencing it. And that makes sense. I mean, if you think about how many different personalities they are. I mean, I mean, you're a psychologist. So you probably have a different number than I do, but I've been told that there's either four or 16 or eight, depending upon how detailed you want to get. But basically, it's all the same concept.

There's a circle. And the dead center is the perfect blend of all personalities. And then just how far out in one extreme to a thing do you go to? And I look at it, goes, that would make sense that there's multiple ways. Because we're all part of the human race and all that. So just because I'm over in this. quadrant of the circle and you're over there, it would make sense that there are differences we're literally across the circle from each other. You know, that makes sense to me.

For sure. Yeah. Well, that makes it so whatever else makes it almost impossible for me to remember my dreams. My theory is I'm, I'm sleeping too deeply and not thinking near the, near the liminal space where I'm almost awake. That seems to be where most people remember their dreams. So I very often I'll wake up knowing I had a dream. And there's, a flash of an image, a sound, a feeling, and no story to it whatsoever. So I'm never harsh or critical with people when they're, when they have a hard time giving a story to someone. Talk to a gal a few episodes back where the entire dream was the experience of falling in a

void. That was, that was it. And we talked about that as long as we could and drew as much meaning as we could out of it. It, it does make it difficult to say, and this is why I don't generally ask people, hey, if you're a lucid dreamer, come telling me about your experience, because I'm not going to be able to offer maybe myself as much insight or, or associative, because it's all, you know, symbolical.

And this is a, this is a fantastic thing, too, with lucid dreamers, is that there, or at least people who are on the lucid dreaming side of things, is that you don't need that as much because what you see is what you get. It's a lot more literal, and there's not a lot of hidden messages there. There's no need to put things in symbolic terms. because you're really physically trying to solve a problem that has three dimensions in the real world. Yeah, yeah. It has to be one of those.

But to me, it was when I learned what a thought experiment was. I think what I'm really doing at the end of the day is just thought experiment or thought experiment in terms of will this work or will it work. And I think that's why it needs to be a mechanical thing for me because it needs to have a yes or no answer. answer. You know, with personalities and discussions, there is no way to conduct the conversation. There's ways to do it wrong, certainly, but there is no one right way, this is how you do it. Um, you know, it's not like this is how you build an engine for a Chevy. You know, like, this is how you do it. No, it's conversation. It's can go any direction and there's all kinds of acceptable outcomes. And I like having answers. I think that that's, that's pretty well in my personality ballpark there. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And that's, well, that's a great thing with the, with the idea of personalities in general was that, I mean, it's like as you, the, the analogy to engines was, was great there. And what made me think is that an engine is supposed to do a specific thing.

It's supposed to provide, you know, compression to to torque and then move wheels. And the goal is it, it drives the car. It makes, it makes the vehicle move. And then there's, you know, there's, so there's a variety of moving parts. parts that can be larger, smaller, moved over here. You know, they went from carburetors to with a fuel injection. So there's been advancements. It's kind of been the same with psychology.

Like there's the basic, basic pattern of, this too, you mentioned the idea of thought experiments. And a lot of people think of that as something that's naval gazing, you know, waste of time, what if philosophical stuff. And it can be that. I mean, you propose a thought experiment to challenge some. one's concept of a specific idea to say, well, are you sure you really believe this? Because now imagine, you know, the trolley experiment.

You got these people, you got that guy. You could save lives, but you got to kill one. What do you do? That's meant to make us really consider how we see the world. But the philosophical thought experiment is one kind of thing. We do also thought experiments of physical spatial problem solving. If you're manipulating a Rubik's cube in your head to try and turn. the colors. Some people can do that. I can't. That's a bit complicated for me. Um,

but that is also a thought experiment. You are experimenting with different applications of this thought process or pattern to get an answer. And we, we do that all the time. We do that more often than most people realize. They, you know, I would say most people don't realize they're doing it all the time. Um, it's, it's very rare. We just shut off and we have no thoughts. Uh, there's kind of a popular a meme out there, the idea of the NPC as like people actually being non-player characters in the world. They don't have a lot of thoughts, but I don't know if that's actually things. People who think less or don't think is deeply

or, you know, or more immediately connected to sense experience in the world. And that's not necessarily a bad way to go about engaging. It's different. It's the way their phones want us to go, though. Just immediate click button response, go back. That's true. It's the greatest child's toy ever made. Yeah, no, there's a lot of, I've gotten into some discussions about that kind of stuff too in online communities and whatnot of people who are

trying to figure out what's going wrong with the world. I mean, and then there's people who say, well, the world was always wrong. And that's one perspective as well, but also is our technology getting ahead of us to the point where we don't know, we haven't, we haven't evolved biologically enough to understand how this technology is reciprocally influencing us. Yeah, I mean, on that note, just from a, it's a little bit, obviously, a little bit outside of my run. own. But my take on it is that biologically speaking, we take what, six generations to actually

really truly change in a meaningful way. That actually impacts your innards and your ability that your muscular development and skeletal development and stuff like that. But mentally, we can change in 20 minutes. You know, and that's just a fact. But you ask someone who remembers what life was before the day before 9-11 and the day after it. Did our bodies physiologically change? No, but a lot of our attitudes and mindset shifted. And that's something that's obviously nationwide. For those of those that are NFL fans, that's obviously my second podcast,

that watched the Monday night game of Cincinnati and Buffalo, where DeMar basically almost died on the field. I thought it was. I'm surprised he lived. They thought he was too. I mean, that was a big part of the reaction of it. But my point is, is when you see something that's real and it pulls you out of your phone, it's like actually, this is meaningful, your brain can shift like that and your body can't. And these little devices, well, incredibly useful in the way they are, are designed to constantly change your mind. I mean, that's really what they are, whether it be a game that they're trying to get you to become addicted to or a texting program or whatever.

I mean, think about it. The more time you spend on YouTube or TikTok, the more money they make. They want you to stay there. They are trying to turn you from someone who never watched them to becoming addicted to them. Inherently, that's a mental transition they're trying to do. Your liver didn't change. Your lungs didn't change. It's a mental process.

and you can make the argument were we mentally stableer back in the day or were we just untested. I tend to fall in the second category because biologically speaking, our minds never needed to be able to fight off that. You know, I mean, you just look at, not to go totally down to different route here, but if you look at the things your body is biologically designed to protect you from versus what then human beings created after the fact, the easiest way to look at is morning sickness for pregnant women. There's an entire laundry list of things that would hurt the baby that gives them morning sickness, but alcohol's not on the list because alcohol wasn't there whenever these biological systems were evolving. And it's obviously here now.

It's a problem. Say with smoking tobacco is also one that you can put on that list that as your body just wasn't around for. Now, when there were cave people, they weren't smoking, they weren't smoking cigarettes. They weren't doing shots. No, for sure. I hadn't really considered. America. So I'm not going to

address, but I fall into that discussion as well. For sure. Yeah. No, that's a great perspective, too. That adds, not just nuance, but depth and breadth to the, to the conversation, too. It's like, I've said this before to people. It's like, human

beings really haven't basically changed in like 10,000 years. Like physically, biologically, we're the same. But our tools, we've invented. We've got this, that's what's talking about the feedback loop in a way of we have a brain that can conceive of a technology. And then the technology has an effect on our psychology because it changes how we interact with the world. And you were saying, you know, you can change your mind in 20 minutes.

You change your mind instantly. I mean, that moment, that moment when it's not to say, oh, you're wrong. It's faster than that. But like, you're right. Yeah, I just use the wrong language. No, no, but it's true. Sometimes it takes 20 minutes to get you to the point where the instant change happens. That's absolutely true.

But there's always that moment where you see the world one way and now you see it a different way. And again, another internet meme. What has been seen cannot be unseen, you know, unless you really can't unhear it. Yeah, yeah, unless you get dementia or you get a head injury or something, some physical damage. You know, there's these changes in perspective that we call it a paradigm shift. You know, the idea that you suddenly, Neil waking up in the Matrix. I mean, that's why these ideas are so powerful, these metaphorical ideas. is, you know, because they really explain the human condition to us.

And that's really where you see someone who's going to make a difference, whether it be politically, socially, or whatever. It's normally the people who are trying to do that transition in a way that actually will be beneficial. You know, in the last, it says at least 2007, there has been a legitimate portion of the media of this country trying to divide people further into two camps. And I know this because I do a podcast about it that we started in 07. It's called Father and Joe. And for those that don't remember, basically the transition from Obama to Trump was not awesome in America. The majority of CNN said

that you were either a Fox person or you're a CNN person and you're not allowed to talk to the other side. The reality is, is most people didn't care, but that wasn't selling enough, that wasn't selling enough ratings. So for four years plus, that's all that the media did from the CNN and MSNBC side as well as all the countless other websites. And as a result, you were getting the vision, people not wanting to talk to each other. And this so-called divide has just grown. And you look at the actual stances that people believed in in the mid-2000s, early 2000s, compared to the mid-teens or whatever we're calling this right now. they're basically unchanged.

But the perception has come across. And if you don't engage with other people that might disagree with you, it's going to just continue to divide. So what I say, the people who are trying to make the difference, it has to be for something positive. You know, they know that's going into a negative direction, but they don't care because the more the divide is, their half becomes bigger because there's less people not caring in the middle. So the bigger, the rift that CNN and Fox can create between the two sides of the country,

the more money they make. And money is ultimately what's fueling that. But it's something that once you know it, to recognize and go, oh, well, maybe I shouldn't just play in this game at all and just I'll research whoever I want to research about voting for. And that'll be the end of my day and not rely on either one of those two parties to influence me. For sure. Yeah, no, and I think you're right. I think it was 2007 when Apple released that at the iPhone generation one. That was like the big turn because before that I remember I had a Motorola razor. It will flip phone. Slim in my pocket. It had a little LCD screen. I just played a stupid game of snake on it or whatever. I can text, but I remember those. But then bam, 2007 smartphones really hit the market. Apple pushed that out and it's been the last 15 years of this in a way.

That's what I really definitely gripped on. I'm not sure if that was the origination because I want to say I remember. remember them. I remember a couple of people. I have like the first one. But I remember the one that had podcast was definitely out around 07 because I was a college for that. Yeah, there's the iPod. Yeah, and used to be had to download, download things and, and store them. When Napster was still a thing. Yeah, right? I remember that too. And some of those other, one of they, the peer to peer sharing, well, that was Napster was one of them. Yeah, the Pirate, stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And that all went away. It's very much, uh, very much. different world in the last 15 years. I mean, really.

Well, the little company that could now is suing people not to let what created them exist. Yeah. Yeah, that's a big problem to. Yeah. Well, it didn't know, speak in like in broader terms about this division. I think that so that's where I was getting to with that last 15 years. The division seems like it's growing. So hopefully another thing that I'm doing with this is not only am I having a unique niche type of interesting subject matter that a lot really allows us to talk about anything. but also focuses on the commonality. Everybody needs to sleep.

Almost everybody dreams. I think everyone does dream, but not everyone remembers them. Most people do remember something. And hopefully this is more along, and I think I'm just ahead of the curve. I'm crossing my fingers that there's going to be a lot more content like mine where the purpose is not,

it's fascinating for its own reasons, and it doesn't rely on shock value. It doesn't rely on division. and, you know, no one's getting destroyed here. No one's getting shut down. You're doing basically no judgment. You're just saying this is what it is. And from a clinical standpoint, this is what it would say.

So, you know, on that point, there are, I don't want to make it seem like this happens to me every night because there are plenty of nights where I'm like you, where I just, I don't know what happens. Yeah. You know, it just is what it is. Well, do you have any kind of memory of even an extremely brief dream that was non-related to a physical real world? board project, something we could maybe try and throw some, you know, associative interpretation on.

You do or you don't. But if you did, that's, it would be interesting to just do a quick one of those. Yeah, I mean, I certainly have had one where, now, granted, I know the car I was in in my dream. It was when I was in college, I had basically no money. And I had literally the cheapest Saturn that you could have that was still a, an SUV because I needed to be able to haul stuff. And it was a stick shift. I distinctly remember in real life

the tires being bought all the time. And where I live, it's Pittsburgh, which gets snow. And most people know us for our three rivers, but the reality is, is rivers make a lot of big hills. Allegheny County, the county we're in, has the second most bridges in the world, only behind Venice. So, fun little factor.

So that's the environment I live in. and lived in my whole life. I remember having semi-recurring dreams. I don't know what the technical thing is, but it had more than ones, where I would dream that the breaks just didn't work. And then we were just basically sliding uncontrollably. Now, that did happen to me a couple of times in real life,

but I remember that being as a dream as well more than a couple times. And that would have been around, as you're saying this, that that 2007-ish window because that would have been the time we had that car. Interesting. Yeah. Well, it's so there's a lot of crossover too between the idea of dreaming only about specifically real world things in terms of like I'm in a kitchen. That is the exact same kitchen.

I need to decide where to put the sink. But it's also very common to just have and almost universally happens that people bring in real world experiences and objects, people, situations they've been in before. It's almost impossible that we dream of something that we don't have never seen before or don't. It's almost like trying to think of a new color. You just can't do it. You can think of all the colors you've ever seen, but you can't think of a color you've

never seen. It's one of those things. So in our dreams, we take things from our real life experience and bring them in there. So what I would do with broad strokes on this type of a thing is to say, say, you know, there's two ways to look at it. One way is you had a very real life concern. Your bald tires were going to get you into a wreck because that was a legitimate concern. Very well could happen.

So that worry translates into your dreams. And that's a one-to-one correlation. I had a nightmare about exactly what I thought could go wrong if I don't attend to something. That could be its own useful kind of motivation. Like you wake up from that going, I got to fix those tires. I got to do something. I can't get away from this in my sleep. And sometimes that's the brain's way.

saying you're not anxious enough about this thing. You're not really attending to this problem that needs to be solved. So pay attention. I can see that being part of my life, especially, you know, anxious enough. One of the things that I got taught in my world of sales has had this abundance mentality that you always will find as someone who wants to buy from you. And the reality is that that can create a little bit of arrogance, hubris, whatever the right word is, is that I don't need to worry about what the bank account is right now.

There's a new buyer for me right around the corner. Right. It could lead you to not try a hard enough. And what was younger, which this time period was that are certainly a crossover to that. Well, that's fascinating. You said that because that's exactly where I was going to is that the one-to-one real-life to dreams absolutely could be and may even be most likely because of your later experience in life of bringing these physical spaces in to evaluate them while you're ostensibly unconscious. The alternative explanation is the. dream of a car malfunction that is realistic may actually be a stand-in for some other problem

that you didn't, didn't want to look at because it was difficult. That's one, that's the Freudian side of things. We were repressing things and disguising it to give us, give us a plausible deniability. We don't have to admit it, but we can still think about it. That's one side of it. The other side is that it's, that it's a symbol. Wallach stand in for some other struggle you're going through. And what you're doing is not disguising it, but you're saying it's an analogy.

You're making yourself an analogy out of the problem of like this other thing I'm dealing with is like the problem I'm having with my car and the brakes. I've got it. So you're giving yourself an idea. If you think about it like this kind of a problem, maybe that gives you the ability to get some distance from it, like we were saying earlier. But also find the similarities. and say, well, okay, if I could solve this problem this way, would that same solution apply to this other problem?

So if now that I've kind of thrown that out there, and we haven't gotten into any specific details on, you know, any discrete instance of that kind of a dream happening. But when I just kind of phrase it like that as possibly a comparison analogous to another situation, does anything come to mind? I mean, probably. I'm looking through it. It's hard to hit the exact timeline of when this was, but I know that whenever, A, this abundance mentality has existed forever and I've been doing commissioned jobs since I was 18. So that's things. So really, especially at that point, it was unique in the sense that we did, I did probably

six big sales a year. I made more than all my contemporaries around me, but there was also periods where it was like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to pay for anything tomorrow. There was certainly periods of my life when I knew what every single Keller, the gas bill meant, whether it meant shut off in 30 days, two days or today. I knew that based upon the envelope.

So I'm not going to decide to say everything was always awesome, especially at that point. So I can certainly see that being the stand in for that. It's like, if you want to have sales, you better go do the cold calling, that you're supposed to do to get there instead of riding this out and just hoping someone's going to call you. And that was a real thing in my sales life early.

I mean, there's just no way around that is everyone wants to avoid the parts you don't like. At that point, I wasn't able to hire a partner to do stuff like that for me. Can now, obviously. But then I couldn't. And that would have possibly also explained. why that dream stopped at some point in my life. Yeah, that's where I was going next. That could make a lot to it because now the parts I don't like doing,

I don't do. And they're great. For sure. Yeah. So one thing we could do is kind of nailed down a little bit of a time frame, like when it started is, and when it stopped. And that's a great thing about recurring dreams is that they generally relate to some specific

kind of problem that's been crystallized as that imagery. And so I start looking at, And this is more, I'm kind of getting meta on my process talking, talking through it as much as we're actually engaged in it at the same time. I love at the same time. I start looking at, well, what is the experience of having a car with bald tires? I mean, what, what is the purpose of a car is to get to, like we're talking earlier, an engine to drive the car, cars to get you from point A to point B. It's a, it's a conveyance. It's a means of traveling.

It's a method of goal accomplishment in a way. And what are tires for is tires are exist to basically give you traction, give you control over the direction. So when you start looking at this, this imagery of like, uh, a vehicle out of control is, it starts to speak to say,

am I in control as much as I would like to be? Are there things that are beyond my control or, or, you know, maybe that's a funny way to say too because yes, you could technically get new tires. Do you have the money for that? If you don't,

that's kind of. to be on your control. It's a different situation to say, I could do it if I wanted to, but I'm not paying attention. I'm not attending to problems I could fix. That's a different, different type of situation.

I threw a lot at you there, but does that kind of feel like it resonates? Oh, yeah. I mean, certainly. I mean, this is, so to put the, the start to point was you asked for the timeline.

Sure. This would have been early 20s, like who hell's in control in their 20s. So, I mean, you name it in terms of, of ways you could be out of control. With the exception of the drug route, I was probably there. I mean, that's when I

discovered gambling and loved it too much. That was whatever, obviously, being in many sports bars. And the joy of where I went to college, it literally was across the street from where the pens play. So there was, what, 41 nights a year where it would be sold out and there would be everyone in there. So that made it nice. So like I said, all those kinds of things. Really we're going on at that point. And then as well as, like I said, starting that, where I ultimately chose to work coming out of college, I did not enjoy it all for a lot of business practical reasons.

But that car was during that period of that as well. And that's in part why I want to go start my own business because I decided I'm never working for someone this bad again. I'm going to start seeing if I can do it myself, because if I can do it myself, I don't need to work for anyone. If not, then I tried, and then we're just going to go be better selective about who the boss is going to be. But that was just my part of the journey. Did it feel like the dream, that recurrent type of dream stopped once you felt like you got your legs under you in another, in a self-started enterprise?

It's kind of hard to say, when does something recurring? Stop, you know? Yeah, yeah. But I would assume so. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, it did. It faded away into nothing, but it was like one of those things. Like, like, when you're doing your fade out on your videos, technically it's one second. But to say the moment where it actually started and not when you're not in front of your editing software, you'll never get it right.

And I kind of think of it like that. The long story short is the answer is yes, because I certainly do not remember having this once things were up and running correctly. but when exactly like pinpointed the day. Yeah, that could be real tough. Because you can have a recurring dream that happens once a week and then once a month and then once a year and then never again. It's like when did it really stop? I mean, did it stop after it was gone for the second year or was it at the end of the month

of the first year that it disappeared? So the exact timeline isn't as important as perhaps as the broad strokes of like, I'd say that's a fantastic analogy as well, you know, the idea of skidding around on bald tires in icy weather working for someone else. You're not really steering this vehicle. I mean, you're driving. You're technically in the seat. You're doing the work, but I'm not really doing the work where you're going.

And the road can shift underneath you and someone can throw you a curve and it's, it's nothing you can do about it. It's just going to happen. It's more of a passive thing. So, yeah, that's, that seems like a very strong, um, as I was saying before, physical manifestation from the real world that you say, this is, this is a very, iconic type of experience that when I think about something else or another situation that I'm in, it's very analogous.

It's like, this is what it feels like. It feels like driving around on bald tires, not being in control. And it would make, I think, a tremendous amount of sense for you to say, you know, that was no longer necessary imagery once you established the ability to exert some control and choose your own path, that really being back in. you've got your own traction. You've got you, you put new tires on it.

The other side I was going to get to was, you know, you may have also sold that car or gotten new tires during that time frame. And relieving that realistic worry might have said, okay, the dream is not necessary. You fixed your tires.

Moving on. Actually, I was coming out of the, so parts of having really big hills, sometimes we build tunnels through them. I was coming out of one of our tunnel structures here. we have three of them. I was coming out of the Liberty tubes.

And what makes these things unique is that they have a light at the end of them. So I've driven through those things millions of times in my life, like all the time. And the one thing I knew is that especially late at night when there's no one in them, if you gun it as hard as you can when the light turns green on the other side of the tunnel, you will catch it green on the other side. It's a mile and a half long tunnel. It's all straight line. So boom, so you can see it the whole time.

And when I say gunning, I mean, you're coming out of it, pushing your car as hard as again. Again, I was driving a stick ship and accelerating a lot. So I knew that about my car and where I was at. And I just so happened, it's very, it's like a million signs that you cannot turn in front of the tunnels. That's why there's lights there so you can. This guy did, and I spun his little car like a top. And it actually ended up stopping perfectly below the no left turn sign. Very easy case for me to win regardless of how fast I was going because if he wasn't, if he didn't turn, nothing would happen.

But that was the end of that car. Very fast hitting something very abruptly kills the front of most cheap cars. But did the experience of the recurring dream persist a little bit beyond that or did they stop at the same time? I'm not sure it was still going on when that car actually died. The situation had changed before, which leads me to believe that you were correct there. Um, but yeah, um, for sure. Yeah. Well, that's, that's, uh, so hopefully this has been for a lot of folks watching, you know, a little different than the normal process. We've done a lot more talking around the idea at the same time. We're trying to pick the Gordia nod apart a little bit and say, what does it look like? We got the shape of it, what, what is on the inside of it. So the one of the key factors is this collaborative process of, hey, I got an idea. Tell me what you think. And then asking these questions of what the time. frame does it fit here more in the context uh you know and so the actually my um what i would say is you know my magic talent whatever it is actually kind of a small part of it kind of gets us

looking at the thing from some of the right angles but then you got to do the work for the rest of it i hope folks can can look at this kind of meta analysis of the process in process and look at this is what you can do for yourself as well you can sit down and think about okay that's a car for my real life. What is the time frame that's happening here? What does it feel like to be in a vehicle where the steering wheel is not responsive? What does that mean to me? And then we get these really great, really great understandings that, you know, I would anticipate you haven't thought about it to this depth before. And so you at least got a new understanding of a new way of looking at it. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Very cool. Well, hopefully the dream never comes back. But if it did,

it would probably be number one because we talked about it now and brought it back to mind, but also because that iconic image of, wait a minute, am I sliding into something out of control again or the feels out of control, might come back to warn you, which is a great thing. I was doing some editing today too of another, working on the next audio book. And there's a, you know, some folks out there maybe, you know, and I'm not, I'm an agnostic atheist, but some folks are not very religious. But in the Bible, there's a tremendous amount of stories of dreams coming as warnings and premonitions and prophecy to people. And I think that still happens today. And you can take the

religious side out of it and just say, we have the ability to perceive more than we are aware of. And so a lot of what's happening in these dream circumstances is we are giving ourselves warnings like, hey, you didn't notice, but this thing's happening. Pay attention to that or bad stuff's coming. And a lot of times there's so dreams, dreams come to us to, to, to, to, to, be a warning and to be a premonition in a way of like bad things if you don't pay attention. Yeah. From a biologist standpoint, your subconscious never gets turned off or else you would stop breathing. Yeah. Fact of life. Yeah, that's what I say too. The the heart beats, the lungs breathe, the brain thinks. And even when you're unconscious, it's still warring away

there. And maybe someday I'll get better at tapping into my own ability to pay attention to what's happening while I'm unconscious. But we'll see. But when, when, I never know how to end these things. I mean, I think it feels like we've gotten through an interview and we touched on the dream thing. And usually that's about when we're done. Fair enough. Do you have more questions or you want to look at another dream? I mean, I'm always willing to keep going.

But if you're satisfied. Well, I think that this is a natural conclusion. And I appreciate you having me on here. Yeah, I definitely wouldn't sell yourself short. I mean, part of your 20 years of your 20 years professionally learning this is you know the questions to ask. And even if you don't know the exact spot we're going to drop at the end, you kind of know how to get people moving and then let them take it where it is. So from a professional standpoint, I think that was absolutely great.

So thank you again for having me, absolutely. I'm not always comfortable with praise, but I'm more like, you know, don't applaud, just throw money. Well, that works too. Click his little donation link that's, I'm sure, in the description and go from there. Exactly. Links in the description below. Also for our friend, let's do this, Joe Rocky, and I didn't mention,

mentioned it at the beginning, Elite Businessconversations.com. He's an entrepreneur consultant keynote speaker. And for my part, I'll just say, like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers. It's easy.

We'll just, we talk about everything and nothing, and I laugh and look like a fool and you look good. That's the best, the best part. Also, 15 works of historical dream literature, the most recent book 15,

The World of Dreams by Have a Luck. Ellis is up there. And you can find all this and more at, Benjamin the dream wizard.com. That'll be bloop popping up down here. And I'll just say once again, Joe, thanks for being here.

I appreciate your time. Thank you for having me, yes. All right, and everybody out there, thanks for listening.