In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Joel Perez, CTO and co-founder of Mindful Software, to explore how a deeply personal experience with dream interpretation sparked the creation of My Dream — an AI-powered app designed to help people decode what their subconscious is trying to tell them. Joel shares how a year off traveling with his wife Amy, followed by a career pivot from IT infrastructure to software engineering, shaped the resourcefulness and curiosity that now drives his work. He explains how Amy's own life-changing dream — one that finally convinced her to leave an overwhelming government role — became the founding story behind the product, and how a full year of research with dream experts and real users shaped an app that goes far beyond matching symbols to generic definitions. MyDream captures personal context, emotional state, and life circumstances to deliver interpretations that are specific, not generic, because as Joel puts it, a fish means something very different to you than it does to a fisherman. He then addresses the bigger question of where AI belongs in emotional and personal spaces, drawing a clear line: AI should support reflection, not replace judgment. It should ask better questions, surface patterns, and offer perspective — never tell someone what to do. With dream experts on staff, a rigorously built golden data set, and a firm commitment to user privacy that extends to blinding themselves from individual dream data in their own analytics, Joel and Amy are building technology that treats the inner life with the care it deserves.If you liked what you heard today, please leave us a review - Apple or Spotify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices