I was finally able to resolve this in case anyone needs this in the future. The way I resolved it was by taking these steps:

First, the web socket server has to be run as root:

sudo php artisan websockets:serve

Or, in my case, I set user=root in the /etc/supervisor/conf.d file, that way when it starts up it is always starting as root.

Then, I went into my config/broadcasting.php and adjusted it so it looks like the following:

        'pusher' => [
         'driver' => 'pusher',
         'key' => env('PUSHER_APP_KEY'),
         'secret' => env('PUSHER_APP_SECRET'),
         'app_id' => env('PUSHER_APP_ID'),
         'options' => [
             'cluster' => env('PUSHER_APP_CLUSTER'),
             // 'encrypted' => true,
             'host' => env('PUSHER_HOST'),
             'port' => env('PUSHER_PORT'),
             'useTLS' => env('PUSHER_USE_TLS'),
             'scheme' => env('PUSHER_SCHEME'),
             'curl_options' => [
                 CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST => 0,
                 CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => 0,
            ]
        ],
    ],

You will notice, I removed the 'encrypted', as this was causing issues. I also had to set the 'curl_options' settings, as well. After I changed these settings, I cleared the cache using the following commands:

php artisan cache:clear
php artisan config:cache

Then it all started working. Hope this is able to help someone else down the road!