Hi there, welcome to the show. I’m your host, Anna David. I’m so glad that you’re listening. If you’re new to the show, this is where I talk to people about their struggles, their success, how they have found, how they’ve hustled their light out of the dark. And I want you to know that I arranged this particular interview with somebody who does not know anything about his personal life at all. So, the fact that we got into some heavy-duty struggles from minute one was a great revelation to me.

So I’m hearing it at the same time you are. Let me tell you about this guy. He’s somebody I’ve long admired. I’m one of those people who fangirls over big marketing people, and he’s considered one of the leading, if not the leading, SEO expert. He’s published three books about SEO, the ones that were studied in school and the classics. He founded the SEO agency, Netconcepts, which is now part of a multi-billion dollar ad agency. He hosts two podcasts himself, which is how I discovered him.

One is called Get Yourself Optimized, and one is called Marketing Speak. You will hear about how you can come from really nothing and build this empire and how you can find that coming from nothing is actually your greatest strength. So, without further ado, I am giving you Stephan Spencer. 

Okay, so we are chatting away. As you know, when I met you, I was not just a fan, but I had implemented something on my website specifically because I heard you talk about doing it, and that is the timeline.

And it’s funny to kind of get a little. I get a little starstruck by these, like my marketing heroes. It’s a bit embarrassing. I live in Hollywood. As you know, I don’t care about meeting Brad Pitt. I care a little bit about that, but anyway, it was so great to realize you’re a part of the Genius Network community. 

So, let’s talk. I was reviewing your own timeline. And when we talk about a timeline, anybody who has not seen one. It’s images. It’s rather than one of those long bios. It really walks you through the journey of the person. So, let’s talk about your journey. You allude to being a nerdy kid in this timeline. So let’s talk about that. Where did you grow up?

I grew up in a ghetto, and I’m not being hyperbolic about that. It was an actual ghetto. As a little kid, I made the mistake of going around the block once, and I was almost abducted. I ran away. So the guy tried to get me in his car, but I ran. I was raised by my grandparents, my grandmother and grandfather until my grandmother died. And I ended up in a foster home by the end of my childhood. But this was all a huge gift in retrospect. It was challenging. I bounced around from place to place when I was a kid, went to live with my grandparents and went to live with my aunt.

Back then she moved to another city with her, then back to Toledo to live with my grandfather, and then to my mother’s, and then back to my grandfather, back and forth, then to foster care. It was an interesting ride. But the idea here is that when you are given adversity, you can either turn that into something amazing or you can let it just crush you and be a victim of it. So, I chose to do something with it. When I lived with my mother, she was mentally ill, and she worked the third shift, so I’d be spending all my nights by myself as a kid. 

It’s not great to be in a house by yourself all night long every night. But what I would do is in the summers that I lived with her, which is just maybe two years, I would code all night as a kid. I taught myself how to program not just in basic but also in assembly language. I was coding in hexadecimal. A super geeky old kid. I wrote my own bulletin board system, a BBS, back in the day before there was the Internet. World Wide Web and everything, there was CompuServe, and there was, you know, BBSes that you would have to dial into, and so I ran a BBS from my home phone line, which really ticked my mother off, she’d pick up the phone, and then she’d hear a modem sound, and she’d scream up the stairs to get the modem off of the phone so she could make a phone call. 

So, I saw this as an opportunity. I had so much freedom when I lived with her; I could just go. In retrospect, it’s crazy to think about all these things that I would never allow my kids to have done at that age. But I would hang out with guys that were 10 years older than me. As a 12-year-old, I would go hang out with 23, 24 year olds who were trading software and stuff on Commodore 64 software and everything.

I could have gotten abducted, kidnapped, or whatever. I could have gotten molested. All sorts of really bad stuff could have happened. Thankfully, it didn’t. But that experience of having so much freedom and the ability to create my own destiny and build stuff started a whole trajectory for me. For example, as a 17-year-old, I’ve managed to scrounge. I bought a car for $65 that ran for, and I figured out how to go to a junkyard and get an alternator from another car of the same make and model and replace it myself. So, I replaced my own alternator with a junkyard alternator, and it worked, and the car was a $65 car. That’s how I got around in the world; I just hacked the system.

And so I got married at 19 years old. I started building websites in 1994. I dropped out of a PhD program, biochemistry, to start an agency without ever having any business experience or any kind of business classes or marketing classes or anything. I just kind of winged it. I’m like, I’m gonna figure this stuff out. And I can thank my grandparents, and my upbringing was pretty difficult in setting me up for that kind of success. So, that struggle was a huge gift. My wife, Orion, likes to say that sometimes you get a gift, and the bow’s on the bottom.

Oh, I love that.

Yeah.

And to be clear, I didn’t know any of this. Like this was just, I was like, had no idea what your struggles were. So, was this all in Ohio, or were you moving all around that entire time?

A lot of it was in Ohio, but I spent a year with my aunt in Florida and a year in Connecticut. I would spend summers and some years with family friends in Chicago and friends of my aunt. I was bounced around so much. Yeah. It’s hard, really hard. It’s like when you’re familiar with ACE, you know the eight.

Yeah, Adverse Childhood experiences.

Adverse Childhood experiences, yes. You get a score, and every time you have major turmoil in your life, let’s say you have to move cities or whatever, I’m sure my ACE score is off the chart. I don’t have any, and I don’t see any benefit in adding all those numbers up. But I just know that it was tough, but I got through it, and I am super resilient now. In fact, this was a huge epiphany moment of clarity for me when I realized I’m not only resilient but also anti-fragile because there’s this book called Anti-Fragile by Nicholas Taleb, and he talks about economies, immune systems and mother nature being anti-fragile, meaning that they actually get stronger because of the stressors in the system, right?

It’s not like if your immune system was only resilient, you’d be dead. If the economy was merely resilient, we would be like our economies would be in shambles. But they’re anti-fragile; they actually get stronger, and they need those stressors in order to really blossom. And that’s how I see myself now as anti-fragile, not merely resilient. And I think that’s a game-changer for a lot of folks.

Now, what do you think it is in you that caused you to be like that? It was other people, you know, as we’re talking about, would have had those experiences and would have, you know, gotten addicted, killed themselves, God knows what. So, do you think you were just born with that resilience or that anti-fragility?

You know, I don’t know. It’s a hard question to answer, but what I can say is there were some moments of clarity that I was given as a young child that gave me a perspective. You know, there’s this expression that goes something like, I don’t know who discovered water, but it certainly wasn’t a fish. You’re immersed in a dysfunctional environment, and you don’t see it. You don’t see the mental illness. You don’t see the abuse. It’s just the new normal or the old normal that you were never accustomed to. I got this gift very early on. I was a young child, and I remember opening a drawer upstairs in my grandparents’ house and seeing a huge pile, like the whole drawer was full of soap slivers.

Soap slivers are like little bits of soap that are left over from when you use the bar up, and there’s hardly anything left. They kept those. And that was a pivotal moment for me. I looked at that drawer full of soap slivers as a little kid, and I said, “Wow.” To myself, “Wow, they’re crazy. They’re crazy.” So that gave me this new perspective, like, okay, I’m not the fish in the water, I’m looking outside of it, seeing the insanity, and this doesn’t compute, and that freed me from getting sucked in. Like, my grandmother was trying to convert me to Jehovah’s Witness. She’d read me Watchtowers and Awakes instead of reading children’s books and stuff. Like, all of it, it was like, I was in the Matrix, and suddenly I had the red pill.

Right, wow, yeah, those moments in childhood that we look back on now where really we just go, “Wait a minute, this actually isn’t right. I’m not the crazy one.” I may be six years old or whatever, but I’m, yeah, I have those too. Did you have siblings?

No, only child.

Only child. And when you so escaped this environment, is it something, are you in touch with anybody from your past? Is that something? Did you make a conscious decision not to be? Where are you with that?

Yeah, so I took to heart one thing. There are plenty of things I learned from Tony Robbins. I had some really life-changing epiphanies from going through a lot of his programs. But one thing that he taught that I think is relevant here is you don’t want to necessarily write off your family, but you wanna spend time with the people that you wanna become more like, right? So, that time and attention are very valuable, and you’re the average of the five people that you hang out with the most. 

So, if you wanna become a better person, hang out with higher-quality people, and love your family, choose your peer group. So that’s the bottom line of this lesson from Tony Robbins, “To love your family. Don’t necessarily write them off or whatever. Sometimes you do, but if you love them and you don’t spend, that doesn’t mean you have to spend lots and lots of time with them, but love them and then choose your peer group.” Because they are not your peer group. They’re not the people that you want to become more like.

I mean, this is no offense to anybody with wonderful parents and childhoods, but I will say the longer I’m alive, the more I observe that the truly successful and striving people I know did not come from those loving and perfect supportive families. Just my casual observation, not a scientist. So, in terms of financial success or success in the eyes of the world, was that happening right away?

It came pretty early. I was struggling for quite a while in college because I had young children. I was married very young, 19, with my first child at 20 and another child at 17 months after that. And I had a stepdaughter as well. So, it has a college student, and my wife at the time was also going through graduate school. It was pretty challenging in terms of financially. We were on food stamps and WIC and stuff at the time, and I was up to my eyeballs in student loan debt just to pay the bills while we were both in school and I was going to the University of Michigan as an out-of-state student. 

So that’s like, You might as well be paying for Ivy League tuition because it’s crazy expensive compared to a very good school. But I was just over the border in Toledo. So that made all the difference, an extra what, over $15,000 a year for four years because of that, you know, five-mile difference. But I really enjoyed going to college and getting the degree, which I don’t use for anything. Cellular and molecular biology. Yeah, okay. Cellular and molecular biology. Then, I went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin Madison for biochemistry after that. But for undergrad, I was dirt poor, like broke, living off of student loans and all that. Then, two years into my graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

I had built some websites for fun on the side and so forth. I decided to quit school. Now, it wasn’t. I was kind of pushed to the precipice. It wasn’t just like, you know what? I see this great opportunity. I’m gonna just go for it. And that’s usually the positioning that you’ll hear, like, you know, success upon success upon success. Well, you know, I’m pretty transparent with this sort of stuff, and it’s not all, you know, easy peasy. I had a run-in with my advisor where he said, “Look, you’ve got to show up longer at the lab. I see you leaving at five, six o’clock at night. And your colleagues are staying till seven, eight, nine o’clock at night. You know, you don’t have your priorities straight. Like this is not important enough to you. You’re either going to start showing up like everybody else, or you’re going to find yourself another lab,” which means starting all over again, new research, new advisor, and being kicked out of a lab.

 It’ll be really hard. I’d lose the year easily. Gee, I could choose to do that, or I could choose to wrap things up, take three months to finish, get a master’s and do something different. At that same time, I had the opportunity to that I saw to start a business and to get into internet marketing. It was 1994, and I had just been to the second international World Wide Web conference. Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was the keynote speaker. I got to talk to him for a minute or two after his talk. I met Rob McCool, who probably none of your listeners will know who the heck that is. I didn’t know who it was either. So Marc Andreessen was the guy who started Netscape with Jim Clark. Well, Rob McCool was the guy that they hired to create the Netscape server. He was the creator of NCSA, HTTP server. He’s also the creator of Apache, Apache web server software, which runs most of the web servers on the Internet. He created that. 

And I met him, and we talked, and I had never heard of Netscape. It was 1994. Everybody was still using the Mosaic browser, and I was starstruck. I’m like, “Oh my goodness,” there’s Netscape. There’s this guy who just was plucked out of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and now is part of this massive startup that’s going to change the world. And I’m like, I was starstruck. So, within four or five months, I dropped out of the PhD. I did the master’s thing. I finished that up.

Then, I started a business, and a funny thing about it is how I was able to start the business and get my first clients. It was really tough at the beginning. I was charging next to nothing to get really terrible clients, building websites and stuff for them. And I couldn’t even afford to run that business. So, I had to have a part-time job. So I took a part-time job at the university, and then I had my big break, but it wasn’t an easy break. It was a very embarrassing one. I’m just going on and on and on.

To tell. No, embarrassing break. Don’t you dare stop. Go on.

Okay. So I talked my way into a conference called the How to Market on the Internet Conference that was put on by IQPC, which is a big conference organization. It’s a $2,000 conference back in 1995, and it was impossible for me to even dream of going there and attending spending $2,000 to attend. I didn’t have it, so I talked my way in as a volunteer. So I volunteered, and they gave me the job of mic runner. Well, I’m a really cheeky 23, 24-year-old. So, I’m running around with the mic, and I’m listening to these panelists and speakers who are not that smart or skilled, at least from my young perspective. I decided to jump in and add my two cents because I have the mic, right? I’m the mic runner. And so I’m upstaging some really pretty famous people like GM O’Connell, the founder of Modem Media, a big agency back in the day. And by the end of that first day of the event, I had a big stack of business cards.

People would come up to me afterward and say, you know more than the panelists and stuff. I’m really impressed with you. I wanna hire you. Because I had, like, no clients, I had so little revenue. It was just like I could buy a candy bar with it sort of thing. By the end of it, that first day, out of that stack of business cards, I had two companies that became my kind of foundational clients, adding up to a million dollars of customer lifetime value.

I was also de-invited from attending and participating on the second day by the conference organizer. Apparently, it was not cool that I was upstaging the big-name speakers. So that was kinda devastating. I was not expecting to be de-invited from day two, but I’m so glad that I took that liberty and just put myself out there in that kind of way, even though it wasn’t socially appropriate. I didn’t have to get funding. I didn’t have to take on angel investors. I didn’t have to struggle at a part-time job until I finally had my big break. That was my big break. It was incredible.

And, the irony of all ironies, that same conference organization contacted me three months later and invited me to speak. How to market educational programs on the Internet. I was the chairperson, I was a speaker, I had a general session during the main conference, and I had a post-conference workshop. And that started my speaking career, and I was terrible. I was the worst speaker, terrible. I was even worse at chairing a conference than I was at speaking; I had never been trained in speaking. I didn’t know how to keep people on time and keep things light and moving.

And it was a train wreck as far as my speaking ability and sharing ability, but I was just focused on getting that mastered. “Repetition is the mother of skill,” as Tony Robbins likes to say. So I just keep plowing at it until I master it. And I did that. I’ve spoken, I don’t know, a thousand times in the last 20-some years. And I’ve gotten really good, but I’ve also gone through training as well. But just that repetition and keeping at it. 

And the funny thing about when you get a speaking gig, even if you’re terrible at it and you’re like on the speaking roster, you’re in the brochure, all the different conference organizations poach each other’s speakers. I would start getting calls from conference organizations I’d never heard of, and I just said yes to everything. So, I had my calendar full of speaking engagements, even though I was a terrible speaker. It was pretty funny.

But these two stories are just such a testament to the fact that breaks don’t happen. I think a lot of people have this delusion that a break is gonna happen to them. Like you bestowed your break upon yourself. And then, despite the fact that you knew you weren’t good at something, you learned on the job. And I think a lot of people are not willing, maybe not willing, and don’t understand that’s an opportunity.

Yeah. And what I didn’t understand in those days, I mean, I had that hustle and the drive and all that, you know, I got Gary Vaynerchuk talks about, or Gary Vee, you know, he’s all into the hustle. I had like copious amounts of hustle. What I didn’t have was that kind of spiritual perspective. I was agnostic until I was like 42 years old. Then, I had a spiritual awakening in India on a Tony Robbins’ Platinum Partner trip, which changed everything for me. Now, I’m coming to things with a lot more wisdom, surrender, trust, and belief, and I know that life happens for you, not to you. 

And it’s not all about the hustle now. It’s about allowing and that we live in a friendly universe and to trust in that. I didn’t believe in any of that. I just thought, Oh, there’s so much darkness, and you know, there’s so much evil and like, that’s a lonely, sad existence to believe that everybody’s out to get you or that you have to be on guard 24-7 or that there’s really nothing. It’s just emptiness out there. So now I’ve got this new perspective that I didn’t have, and that makes life a lot more joyful and alleviates some of that need to hustle.

The podcast is called Light Hustle because it’s all about combining hard work with the spiritual and the light, you know, in terms of lightheartedness, humor, and all of those things. The truth is, with the hustle and the success, if you don’t have joy, who the hell cares? Sure, you can pay your bills, but who cares? So, how long ago was that?

So, the spiritual awakening happened in 2012, and all the miracles started happening after that. That was incredible, like crazy stuff. First of all, you know it’s a spiritual awakening when it’s like an LSD trip. I don’t have any experience with LSD or any other drugs, but it was an out-of-this-world, kind of out-of-body experience. I went, and I was touched by this Oneness monk. Afterward, I felt so blissful and connected to the creator, and I remember I was agnostic and practically atheist for my whole life. I felt connected to the Creator like I was suddenly plugged into the universal Google or something. It was just incredible. And then I walk outside after that, and I see the trees, the grass, and everything.

I’m just thinking to myself, wow, this is so beautiful. And the color of the green was just bizarre. It was technicolor, like in a cartoon. I’d never seen stuff glow like that. And I’m just like, wow, I’m like, this is a pivotal moment in my life. I’ve suddenly discovered my higher power. And afterward, the monk explained to me that the divine is an experience, not a belief. 

So, we believe in God. We believe in a higher power, or the Creator, or whatever we want to call it in the Universe. Whatever our belief is, it’s a belief. But when you experience God, that’s a whole other ball game. Right? So, I got to experience God, and then it changed everything. Then miracle upon miracle, like crazy stuff you’d never like that doesn’t even compute, that stuff doesn’t even happen, started happening to me.

Okay, so this was in India. You arranged to be touched by this monk.

Tony had brought these monks from Oneness University outside of Chennai to this palace and Udayapur. It’s beautiful. They have these little islands in Udaipur and there are palaces on each one of the islands. So we were at one of these palaces, which is a hotel, a very fancy one, and he had arranged for all these monks to come in. And the whole topic or theme for that intensive was oneness. 

Oneness is like the sugar that you can add to your coffee, your tea, or whatever your favorite drink is. Whatever your favorite religion is, it doesn’t matter. It’s compatible with oneness. Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, doesn’t matter. Judaism is compatible with oneness. And we got to experience oneness through these Dikshas, these oneness blessings. And that one in particular was from a particular monk who has a super high vibration. Like, wow, I got zapped, and that opened a portal or something. It was pretty wild.

And how long did that feeling last?

Well, the feeling was kind of fleeting, and that hour later, I was kind of back to my new normal. But having had that experience, I was a different person. I was completely transformed, permanently. It’s like they explain that awakening is a permanent shift in your brain, in your biology. You can’t go back to the previous version of your brain anatomy after an awakening.

So, what were these miracles? What have these miracles been that followed?

Well, meeting my wife. So, I wrote my relationship vision two months later on a poster board at Date with Destiny, another Tony event, and I prayed for my soulmate to show up as I was writing it or right after I finished writing it. I prayed for her to show up. I connected to the divine, my divine, and asked for her to show up right away. You get what you ask for. If you say, well, I would really love to have a partner in the next couple of years. Well, okay, you just asked for it to happen in a couple of years. I know I specifically asked for it right away. 12 hours later, we were mutually introduced.

Eighteen hours after that, we said I love you to each other. Nine days after that, I proposed to her in a hot air balloon. She did say no. She said, well, she said, “Not yet.” So, it was all perfect. We were inseparable together that whole time, and then nine months later, I proposed to her, and she said yes, but we were inseparable that whole time. So it’s not like it destroyed the relationship that she said “No.” I mean, it was a little impetuous or impulsive, I guess, to propose and have the ring and everything nine days after meeting her, but I knew, I knew. And the way I knew was because I had learned in India to give these oneness blessings, the Diksha‘s myself, so I could put my hands on people’s heads and zap them too.

And at Date with Destiny, there’s this evening, the last evening where everybody gets touched, or if you’re a blessing giver, then you can be the one who’s blessing people. So I was doing the Diksha’s to people while the lights were turned down, the music was playing, and so forth. And she hadn’t gotten touched.

A lot of people don’t get touched because it’s kind of chaotic, and you’re not directed. Okay, this role has not been addressed yet. Go deal with them. So there are a lot of people who get touched more than once. She didn’t get touched at all. So I met her like I said, she mutually introduced me, and she mentioned that she wasn’t touched. And within the first 10 minutes of meeting her, I’m like, would you like me to give you a Diksha? Yeah, I’d love that. That’d be wonderful. Cause I knew how to do it. When you do this, you are connecting to your higher power, and you are asking for divine grace to pass through you. You are a conduit. And the more you want it for the person that you’re praying for, that you’re touching, the more divine grace that passes. So I’m praying for her like she’s my soulmate, and it was 10 minutes into meeting her. And I knew she was the one.

And how long ago, how long have you been married or how long have you been together?

Well, we’ve been together since December 2012. So that’s six and a half years and a half. We’ve been married for two and a half years. And yeah, it was a long engagement.

Yeah. Just in the math.

Yeah. And we have a baby on the way.

Oh, congratulations.

Thank you, thank you. And. Three more weeks.

How long?

Three weeks.

By the time you guys hear this, he will be a father yet again. Yeah. And we should mention that what her work is in the relationship realm, and doesn’t she teach how to find your soulmate?

Yeah. She’s a love coach. Before that, she was a life coach, and before that, she was a personal trainer. So she’s gotten a lot of training and learnings from Tony Robbins. She’s been a great coach. That’s how we met. I was at a Tony Robbins event, but she had done Unleash the Power Within, she had crewed Unleash the Power Within, and we’ve done a lot of events together after, but we do a lot of personal development stuff.

We don’t do Tony Robbins events anymore, but we’re doing other things. So we’re seminar junkies, we’re mastermind junkies, we’re in Genius Network together, for example. So, yeah. She’s not going to any meetings right now because she’s so pregnant, but she went to several Genius Network meetings earlier this year. So yeah, it’s fun.

What we haven’t even talked about is that you are the leading SEO expert. Can I say that?

I’m not gonna correct you, but I wouldn’t say that myself because that kind of sounds pretty arrogant. But I do have kind of the Bible on SEO that I co-authored with several other folks. It’s called The Art of SEO, and it’s a thousand pages, and it’s used as a textbook at universities and published by O’Reilly. It is the go-to book on search engine optimization. If you have a website and you need to get it to the top of Google, that’s your book.

And you also have two podcasts.

I have two podcasts. I also have two other books. I’m kind of an overachiever. I’m prolific with content creation. So the podcast that’s all marketing related is called Marketing Speak, but then I have a personal development podcast that was inspired by my journey and all the development stuff that I’ve done, all the self-help stuff. And it’s all biohacking, productivity, spirituality, relationships, all that. It’s called Get Yourself Optimized.

And are they both released every week?

Yeah.

Okay, this has been fantastic. We are gonna get right now to the lightning round, which just means say the first thing that comes to mind; don’t think about it too much. What is your morning routine?

I connect, do a prayer, a Kabbalah prayer. I’m big into Kabbalah. It’s called the Anabekoach prayer and helps me connect to the Creator and to my certainty and to the bigger picture, and to the 99%, the 1% is what’s like, what we experience, this table is hardwood, but it’s not, it’s actually mostly space, and you gotta connect to what’s outside of the normal realm of our senses, and I do that every morning. And that’s the most important thing that I do. I also do three absolutes that I write down in my online journal, or, like, not an online journal, but on the computer. I use the Day One app, and I put my three absolutes down. And yeah, I’m probably way over time with that lightning.

It’s okay, there’s no time. There’s no time. Are three absolutes just three things you’re gonna do that day?

Yes. It’s taking a massive to-do list and winnowing you down to, like, what are the three attainable things that I’m going to do and not like trying to do everything, not trying to overwhelm myself. I’ll look at the to-do list, but the three absolutes are the three must-dos.

What is a book that has changed your life?

Wow, there’s so many. One of the books that has changed how I see my purpose in life is The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. Before I had the spiritual awakening epiphany, I read it. The point of the book that I got out of it is that the purpose of life is just to be happy. It’s not to create whatever, it’s not to save the world, it’s not to atone for your sins of past lifetimes—it’s just to be happy. So I got a lot out of that.

And what is one of your favorite quotes?

From The Art of War by Sun Tzu. “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

Love it, I love it.

I’m all about strategy and if you’re very tactical, you can be a great tactician, you will lose because you’re not seeing the bigger picture. You will be slaughtered on the battlefield.

Have you had a mentor? Is it Tony Robbins?

You know. Not really. He was more of a coach and a seminar leader. And you don’t get much time with Tony directly like you don’t get any time. I had very small, limited conversations with him one-on-one, which was almost impossible even to get a minute to talk to him. So, I wouldn’t consider him a mentor. I’ve had plenty of mentors. And many of them were also coaches. So, if I see somebody that I want to learn from and kind of emulate how they are in the world in a particular area, then I will seek them out. And some mentors have been just helpful and not charging me. Some have been very serious investments.

It just depends on the situation, but I’ll give you one example of somebody who has been a great mentor and coach to me, and that’s Ephraim Olschewski. He is a guest on both of my two podcasts. I’ve gotten some incredible insights from him, and you can catch some of those about things like intentionality and responsibility and so forth from the episodes.

It’s Ephraim. Okay. We’ve touched on this a lot already, but what if you could break it down? What is your spiritual practice?

Yeah, so I’m really big into Kabbalah. I really get a lot out of oneness as well, but I’m kind of more shifted to Kabbalah. I take a lot of classes at the Kabbalah Center. I’ve taken Kabbalah one, two, and three, and then one and two over again, and then with my wife, we go through these classes together, and then we stopped at three and got married, and then we ended up doing three a second time. So these are 10-week courses, amazing. By the way, I’ve interviewed three of my Kabbalah instructors on the Get Yourself Optimized podcast.

So, if you’re wondering what the heck this Kabbalah thing is, why is Madonna so into it? It’s awesome. It’s like the most ancient self-help movement. And again, you don’t have to be Jewish or anything. It’s like the mystical branch of Judaism, but it’s like an ancient self-help movement. It’s like the sugar you can add to your coffee or tea or whatever. 

So it doesn’t matter what your religious bent is, or if you’re not even religious at all, just go for it. At least listen to those episodes; Kabbalah has so much wisdom and insight. So, I love Kabbalah. Taking Practical Kabbalah is another class from the Kabbalah Center. And I just love it. It’s awesome.

What is your best quality?

My best quality? Honesty, I guess. Honesty and transparency and just being real. There’s no pretense. Sometimes there is. I mean, we all have egos, but I work really hard to keep my ego in check. So, if somebody wants to hear the real story of how I got from A to B, I will tell them. I’m not going to sugarcoat it.

How do you define dark?

Absence of light. And when I say light, I mean like, or capital L, like the light of the creator. And suppose you are revealing light, which is something I do and try to do all the time. In that case, I’m thinking about how am I gonna reveal light in this podcast interview, for example, or when I’m interviewing a guest for my shows, like how am I revealing light in this, or if I’m doing a speech at a conference, how am I revealing light? It’s how I gauge my success and what I’m focused on. So if you are focused on the negative, like oh my God, Trump did this again, and like what the heck, or you’re like, oh the environment, it’s all just on fire and like all these species and are just being wiped out, and you focus on the dark, and you get more dark. 

You attract more darkness. You like to focus on the darkness in your relationship, and you bring in darkness like a magnet to your professional life and to other relationships and so forth. You have to focus on the light, and when you focus on the light, you are a beacon of light to others. People have hope, and they get inspired, and they change the world; you don’t have to change others. You just have to change yourself. Like Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

And so then, how do you define light? Is it the creator?

Yeah. So, I use the definitions for that. I learned from Kabbalah. There’s the light of the creator called the light of wisdom. And then there’s the light that we reveal as humans or as souls. And that’s not the light of wisdom. That’s the light of mercy. So when we’re merciful to others, like somebody really deserves to get cut off cause they just cut me off, but no, I’m going to let that go. That’s the light of mercy

Well, Stephan, this has been fantastic. You have brought so much light. What is the best way for people to find you?

Yeah, StephanSpencer.com is my main website. My two podcasts are Marketing Speak and Get Yourself Optimized. Each has a website, so you can go to them if you’re interested in the spiritual and personal development aspects of what I’m up to.

The MarketingSpeak website is MarketingSpeak.com. And that’s not just SEO; it’s Facebook advertising, e-commerce, analytics, paid search, and all the stuff that relates to marketing, online and even offline.

Well, thank you so much. Thank you guys so much for listening, and I will see you next time.

Thank you.