Welcome to Beyond Your Why podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you’re already a fan of the show, then you know that every week, we talk about one of the nine whys, and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why is played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you’ve already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. It’ll only take you about five minutes. Now, let’s meet today’s guest.

This week, we’re gonna be talking about the why of contribute. To contribute to a greater cause, add value, and have an impact on the lives of others. So if this is your why, then you want to be part of a greater cause, something that’s bigger than yourself. You don’t necessarily have to be the face of the cause, but you wanna contribute in a meaningful way. You love to support others, and you relish successes that contribute to the greater good of the team. You see group victories as personal victories. You’re often behind the scenes, looking for ways to make the world better. You make a reliable and committed teammate, and you often act as the glue that holds everyone else together. 

You use your time, money, energy, resources, and connections to add value to other people and organizations. And so today I have a great guest for you. His name is Stephan Spencer. He is an SEO expert and founder of interactive agency Netconcepts.

He’s a bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, life hacker, podcaster and contributor to Harvard Business Review and AdWeekly. He has three books published by O’Reilly, The Art of SEO and in his fourth edition, Social Ecommerce and Google Power Search. He’s helped optimize websites from some of the biggest brands in the world, including Chanel, Volvo, Sony, and Zappos. Stephan hosts two podcast shows, Marketing Speak and Get Yourself Optimized. Stephan, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Gary. It’s great to be here.

Well, this is going to be fun. Now, tell everybody where you are right now. 

I’m in Tel Aviv, Israel. Been here for about a month.

And just as a quick aside, what’s it like over there compared to what we hear here in the US? Is what we hear what you’re experiencing? 

No, it’s CNN (Crisis News Network), is all about selling fear for eyeballs and advertising. And I don’t watch the news, I don’t watch TV, so this is not helpful; it doesn’t feed my soul. And what I experience on a daily basis, when I go to the park, when I go to the playground with my son, I go to the grocery store, whatever, is peace and regular life.

I can’t imagine it’s what we hear over here. So, thanks for the quick update. But let’s go back. Let our listeners get to know you, Stephan. Where were you born? What were you like growing up? 

Okay. Growing up was quite a challenge for me because I bounced around a lot as a kid. I ended up in foster care eventually. But before that, I was living with my grandparents. My mother was not capable of raising me. So, as a baby, my grandmother came over and said, “This is not good. I need to take him.” And yeah, I started living with my grandparents after that. And when she died when I was in fourth grade, it was a pretty tumultuous time for me. I ended up going to live with my aunt for a couple of years. We went to Connecticut and then Florida, and then I got bounced back to Toledo to live with my grandfather because my aunt got a divorce. It was really chaotic, and my grandfather was really abusive and violent. 

It was a very tough childhood, and it was a very bad neighborhood that my grandparents lived in, so it was very unsafe. I almost got abducted as a little kid just going around the block once. Yeah. So, that was quite a challenging childhood. Course is all perfect because it’s all by design. And so, looking back, you can connect the dots, but you can’t connect those dots as you’re going through it. It doesn’t make sense. I mean, sometimes you can get a little glimpse of insight from the creator, but other times it’s just like, how does this chaos really work, and how does this even make sense?

It was a gift in retrospect. I see it now, but my wife says, you know, sometimes the gift has the bow on the bottom. So, I didn’t see it as a gift at the time. I just saw it as completely chaotic. You know, in Hebrew, the word is Balagan. So it’s just a mess. It’s an absolute mess. And it certainly strengthened my resilience. I did really well in school, so that was a way for me to gain some reassurance that everything was going to be okay because I did really well in school. I got great scholarships when I went to college and everything. And it just helped to build my resiliency. I say that I’m not even just resilient. I’m anti-fragile because I grew and evolved from

the chaos, not just bounced back from it. That is a big difference, you know, so that’s how I see my child. 

Yeah. If we were to have seen you in high school, what would we have seen?

A really smart kid who didn’t just run with a particular pack. I kind of fit in wherever I was adaptive. I adapted to different environments, and I wasn’t a jock, but I did well in school in sports like track and cross-country. I actually helped set a school record. This is with thousands of kids. There were several thousand kids in the school, and I set a record in the 4×800 relay. So I ran two minutes and six seconds, 800 meters. That’s pretty good. Yeah, a couple of other of the team members actually ran faster than that. So, the collective time of the four of us beat the school record of decades.

Wow. Well, that’s awesome. So you had a couple of sports that you were into. What other kinds of things were you into?

Oh, I loved playing with the computer. It got so bad, though, in terms of me being overly into the computer that I taught myself not just basic, but assembly language. I could code in hexadecimal. An Uber geek. And I wrote my own bulletin board system, a BBS; back in the day, before people were on the internet, there were BBSs that you would dial into. And I did the, and I was a Sysop systems operator of a BBS that I wrote myself. I wrote the whole code in Basic and ran it on my home phone line. And so, at the time, I was living with my mom, and it was for a short period of time, maybe a year, but I’d tie up her home phone line most of the time, people calling in and using the BBS.

So that got to a point where I knew this was unhealthy because I was doing all-nighters during the summer coding as a 13-year-old. It just didn’t feel right, but I needed to do something because my mother actually worked the third shift, and I was home alone all night long as a 13-year-old. Not great, right? So, I had to do something to feel safe. So I stayed up all night, and I coded. And then it got to the point where this was not a good thing for me. I recognized that this was way over the top. So I sold my computer, gave away all my software and went cold turkey. No more computers, and then I joined the track team, cross-country team, and cycling club and went to that other extreme.

So whatever you get into, you really get into it. 

Yeah.

Okay. All right. So now you graduate high school, off to college. Where did you go to college? 

University of Michigan.

Okay. It’s unfortunate since I went to USC.

But I actually went to USC as well, but I hated it. So, I dropped out after one semester and went back to the University of Michigan. Yeah. 

Oh my gosh. Yeah. Small world.

One semester at the University of Michigan, I’m like, oh, I want to do the California dream thing. Then I moved out to California and went to USC, and I thought, wow, these instructors, the TAs, and the professors weren’t nearly as good as the ones at the University of Michigan. I really need to go back. And I did. 

Okay. So you go back to Michigan. And then you, what did you major in? 

Cellular and molecular biology. And by the way, this probably will throw people off, too. I met the lady who became my wife in California while I did that short stint at USC. And it was the summer before I started at USC. And then I decided, as I said, to go back to the University of Michigan. I convince my wife. She became my wife actually that same year. So I got married at 19. So we’re married, and we move back, or we move to Ann Arbor. She’d never spent any time there. So, that was a big leap of faith for her to do that. But we did that. And yeah, I was married for 18 years. So, that didn’t end up lasting.

Yeah, it came to a close, that relationship, but I have three daughters and a stepdaughter from that relationship. So I was very busy being a father to really young kids while going to school, two of them in diapers, and I’m going to the University of Michigan and my wife at the time is studying for a master’s at Eastern Michigan University. So it was, and we had a four or five-year-old stepdaughter for me. It was a lot. It was heavy duty.

Yeah, with a little bit of work you could maybe overcomplicate that a bit, huh?

Yeah. If I could figure out a way, I would have. 

That is amazing. So, okay, you’re in the University of Michigan cellular, molecular biology. Why cellular and molecular biology?

I wanted to cure cancer. I wanted to do something that changed the world. 

And then, how did that go for you?

Well, everything’s perfect in retrospect, but I found that when I went to my master’s program, I actually entered a PhD program. So, this was after the University of Michigan. I went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In the biochemistry department studying for a PhD. I had a run-in with my advisor, who wanted me at the bench much more. Because “Hey, the other graduate students, they’re here almost 24 seven. You go home at six o’clock. Like, who do you think you are?” And it’s like, I’ve got young kids at home. I have to be home. I can’t just be here all evening long. And he’s like, at some point, he basically said, “Get out.” Like you’re done here. This is not how we play ball. And I said okay because I didn’t want to start over again. And I didn’t want to even pursue that career path anymore, be a postdoc after that, professorship, fighting for tenure. That’s just for what? A maybe six-figure income?

It seemed like a joke to me. So it, yeah, I was very disillusioned by all that. And at the same time, this beautiful, amazing synchronicity happened where I ended up getting into a conference. This was 1994, so these were the very early days of the web. Very early, right? So the World Wide Web has just been invented in the last couple of years. Mosaic, the browser from NCSA at the University of Indiana. That just recently came out within the last year or so. Yeah, I just created a website for my department or for the Institute of Molecular Virology while I was at the university. That gave me an opportunity to do some cutting-edge stuff in the very early days of the web when there weren’t that many websites out there. And I put these visualizations of 3D, like 3D spinning virus structures and stuff.

And I ended up getting into a conference to present a paper about this. It was called the Second International World Wide Web Conference. And Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was the keynote speaker. And in the breakout, or what was it? It was like the speaker lounge, I think. I just had a conversation with this guy named Rob McCool. And you probably don’t know who Rob McCool is. Pretty. Badass sounding name, though, right?

Yeah, it’s a great name.

You probably have heard of the software he created, though. Apache.

Oh yeah.

Runs most websites on the internet. That and NGINX. So he created Apache, but before he created Apache, he created the NCSA HTTP server. So the web server that was the server component to the Mosaic browser. He wrote the server, so he was working with Mark Andreessen. Building Netscape together. And he was just there as one of the speakers, and I had never heard of him, and I never, like, I was a little bit starstruck, him telling me the story of, like, he actually wrote the HTTPD app or server software that ran the web servers that NCSA had created the server and the browser. Everyone knew about the browser.

Not many people realized that the server was just as important, and he wrote the server, and then he got poached by Mark to go found this company together, Netscape. So he wrote the Netscape server, and Mark wrote the browser. So, I was just enamored by all of this, having this conversation with this guy. And I’m like, why am I taking this track to be a postdoc and then a professor and all this nonsense? At the same time, I was having this run-in with my advisor, you know, the one who was in charge of my education and had the say whether I got to finish or not. So I’m like, yeah, this is not for me. 

I need to be doing this stuff and not the thing that I thought I was destined for. So that took me on a completely different trajectory, the one that I was meant to be on actually, now that I see it in retrospect because I’ve been in this online marketing world and SEO in particular, but just all of the web stuff happened because I just by circumstances, divinely orchestrated ones, end up at that particular conference and then got this amazing conversation that inspired me to really go full into the website. 

Did you then go back to the University of Michigan and decide to stop that path right then and then switch directions? 

No, no. I stopped with the advisor. I was working in his lab. He let me finish another few months to get a master’s degree. So, I have a master’s in biochemistry, which I do absolutely nothing with and have done nothing with. But at least I finished that and had some closure to it, and then I started my company, my web agency in Madison, Wisconsin, and then ran that for quite a number of years until eventually I had a successful exit. So the company was acquired in 2010, and I started another company in 2010 after my earn out. So, as soon as the check cleared, I’m like, I’m out of here. And then, yeah, I’ve been running that company for 14 years.

So the first company was called what?

So the first company actually was called Internetconcepts. And then, we changed the brand to Netconcepts. And then the company got acquired, the assets, the customers, all that sort of stuff, but they didn’t care about the brand. So the brand sat dormant, they canceled the trademark, and they had no interest in using Netconcepts. They gave me the Netconcepts.com domain, and then 10 years later, I realized, like, wait a second, why am I not using that brand again? So, in 2020, I decided to revitalize and reestablish the Netconcepts brand. 

Prior to that I was just operating under my own personal brand, Stephan Spencer. But that really limits me in terms of my ability to service the companies as an agency. I look like a small, independent expert, kind of a solo printer, but I’m not. I’ve got a team and we do pretty big projects. I’ve got a dozen and a half folks who are working on content creation, link building, technical SEO and auditing and all that. Yeah, that’s not me. That’s my team. That’s why I started using Netconcepts again. I just dusted off the Netconcepts.com domain that was gathering dust and sitting in mothballs and then a new website. 

What was the path from Netconcepts to what you’re currently doing? How are they different? 

Yeah, so, boy, that’s a big question because there’s this whole thing that happened in the process that totally awakened me to my bigger why, my mission, my soul’s mission. And two big events occurred after I sold my company, the first exit in 2010. What happened was I was at a Tony Robbins event. I joined their platinum partnership, and this was October 2012. We’re in India. The Platinum Partners pay like an insane amount of money to be in kind of this inner circle group of people going to exclusive events of Tony Robbins. So we’re in India. Tony has arranged for these monks to come in. They’re called Oneness monks. And one of them zapped me on the head with a blessing. And it sounds weird, but it was like a psychedelic experience. I was agnostic my whole life. Remember, I was raised partially by my grandparents, and they were at war all the time with each other.

One was a Jehovah’s Witness, and the other was a converted Catholic. And they just didn’t see eye to eye on anything. So I thought this is all bunk. None of this is real. It’s all made up. So I was agnostic. Up until age 42, I’m in India. One of the monks gives me a blessing, uses his hands, touches my head. And I have this psychedelic trip. I have no other way to describe it. Like it was as if I had taken LSD or something. I’ve never even smoked a cigarette. So this was very unusual, like foreign to me, but everything was in Technicolor like a cartoon. It was incredible. And I felt this deep sense of peace and connection, oneness. I felt like everything was perfect, and it was all like the architect did. It was all for us. 

It was beautiful, it was amazing. It’s like I could go outside and see the energy of the plants and the trees and everything. So that was my first big experience. And then, two months later, I was at a Tony Robbins’ Date with Destiny event, and I met my now wife after I prayed for her that morning to show up in my life. I wrote up a relationship vision and everything, part of the exercises for that event. To write a relationship vision, I wasn’t in a relationship. I had gone two and a half years without a single date, and then I started dating, and just, yeah. I felt the void there for sure. 

So I’m praying really hard, knowing that God’s hearing my prayer because of my experience in India two months earlier, and 12 hours later, we meet, we’re introduced by a mutual friend, and I knew within 10 minutes that she was my soulmate. 10, maybe five minutes. And the reason why is because I did that oneness blessing on her because everyone in the event on the last day gets a blessing, but it’s kind of chaotic and unstructured. Some people get blessed twice, and some people don’t get blessed at all, and she didn’t get touched. Like, oh, I learned how to do that in India. Like, you want me to do it for you? And wow, when I blessed her, I was praying for her like she was my soulmate and I knew, I knew she was my soulmate.

Wow.

Nine days later, I proposed to her on a hot air balloon. And she says no. She says, not yet, because it’s been nine days. I mean, that just sounds crazy, right? Nine days. And I had the ring and everything. I was, yeah, because I knew. But nine months later, when I reproposed, she said yes. Obviously, it worked out because we’re married, and we have an almost five-year-old. 

Wow. And if you’re not in the space, if you weren’t at the event, and you haven’t been to the different things that you’ve been on. You may not make a lot of sense, but being in the space that you were, I’m sure it would just seem like, well, of course, this is the way it’s gonna go. And it did. And so that’s exciting. And so the psychedelic trip that you were talking about made you think differently about God. 

Yes. It established and reestablished my personal connection. I felt like I mattered. I’m cared for. There’s a bigger picture. This isn’t all chaos for no reason. We don’t live in a malevolent, malevolent universe. We live in a benevolent one. Because I had seen so much of the negative news, so much tragedy and chaos through growing up and just the news and just life. And I started to buy into the lie, the fear-based narrative. And I thought, yeah, this is not a friendly universe. I didn’t think, but I’ve been deceived. I mean, we’re all being deceived if we don’t believe that this is all for the best good and that this is by design meant for our soul’s refinement. 

Yeah. So you meet your future wife at a Date with Destiny event. You propose nine days later and end up, you know, reproposing nine years later. Now, how the heck? 

Nine months later. 

Nine months. Sorry, nine months. 

Yeah, nine months later. And so what she could tolerate. I mean, she was starting to get nervous after about six months because she looked up the reproposal rate is incredibly low. Incredibly low. If you look at the stats, it’s not encouraging. So she was starting to get a little nervous there about six months into it. Oh my gosh. But I got a whole new ring and everything where I had met her actually. 

So, I met her on that date with Destiny of that and Desert Spring or Palm Desert and, you know, the Palm Springs area. Yep. I arranged for us to be at that same hotel from the JW Marriott, uh, staying there for a weekend and also I arranged to. I had a tripod and everything, and I videoed it myself. And she had no idea. There are three rules to a great proposal. One, she has no idea that you’re going to be proposing. Two, her nails are done. That’s important. And third is you capture it. You capture it on film, at least photos, if not video. And I got all three. She had, like, on the way there, I’m like, I got a surprise for you, and I pull into a spa. And she’s like, what? Like a spa day or something? Not exactly. I got you a mani-pedi. And she’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s cool.” She wanted the spa day when she saw where we were going, but then I got her, like, she didn’t connect the dots. Like, why am I getting a manicure?

Yeah, that’s great. Great story. Okay, so then how the heck do you end up going from there to Israel? 

Yeah, so God asked me, and you might ask like how. How does that work? So, first, I have to tell you another wild story that happened, this was on January 22nd of 2021. We’re in Israel for nine months at that point. January, it was maybe five months into the nine months. So we’re there in Israel, actually in the same place that we’re in right now when we’re recording. And I just spontaneously start praying in the middle of the night for a job. And you might wonder what does, what? So you’re in Genius Network, I’m in Genius Network. One of our fellow Genius Network members is Sheila Gillette. Sheila and Marcus. Do you know them? 

Yep, very well. 

Yeah, they’re amazing. So Sheila was on my podcast on Get Yourself Optimized, which is a personal development, not an SEO podcast. So she’s talking about spirituality, psychic abilities, and so forth. And then, towards the end of the conversation, Theo, the 12 archangels that she channels, came in and started sharing some amazing stuff, too. Well, in preparation for that interview, I watched some videos of her, and one was her telling the story of her near-death experience in 1969. She prayed for a job. She was on her deathbed, pulmonary embolism as a complication from childbirth, and she’s praying for a job. Please, God, let me stay on the planet when we raise my kids. I’ll do anything. Just give me a job. Please give me a job three months later, in the middle of the night, out of nowhere.

I’m inspired, and I start praying for a job. I have no idea what I’m asking for. I start praying for a job. And then I’m shown the matrix, this whole illusion that we live in. And I can’t tell you or describe it to you because I couldn’t hold onto it. It’s like terabytes of data jammed into an eight-gigabyte thumb drive. I couldn’t hold it, but it changed me. It incredibly changed me and my perspective on everything. And then my psychic abilities came online. 

So now I’m this Uber geek, SEO guy with the ability to channel and clear audience, clairvoyance, visions, all that. Yeah. Maybe I’ve lost some people who are listening at this point, and they’re like, okay, this is the part where I hit stop, and they’re on the audio. But you know, it’s okay, I’m not for everybody, nobody is. Like if you’re not willing to put yourself out there and speak your truth, if you’re trying to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody, and you don’t make any difference in the world. And as you know from my why, I’m here to make a difference. I’m here to contribute to help people to connect to God, to reconnect to God, to return to God. 

And all this stuff about business and everything, these are all just, like playthings or little distractions in comparison to the real why for being here in an incarnation on this planet. It’s to cleave to God, to the creator, to the master of the universe, to find him in the darkness that he created. He created what seems like a void, and he’s in that void too. He’s everywhere. There’s not anything that is not of him or independent of him. So if you think about how we have an opportunity to choose, like this free will, and then we get to go off the rails and find our way back on and get help and ask God for help and forgiveness and whatever. And this is just this beautiful video game we’re playing. It’s a beautiful movie, and we’re the stars. Did you ever see the Truman Show?

No. Oh. I need to see it.

Great movie, Jim Carrey. Don’t read about it first. Just watch it.

Yeah.

Love it. And then afterward, that’ll make sense to you. You are Truman. When I say you, I mean you, Gary, cause I’m talking to you, but I’m also talking to the listener. You listener are Truman. And that means that this whole world was created for you. The entire world was created for you so that you can serve God, and that phrase is actually either in the Bible, in the Talmud, or in a sacred word. So, the whole world was created for you so that you can serve God. I know this is a lot to take in, but with that new perspective shift that I had on January 22nd of 2021. Everything’s different. I mean, everything. The stuff that I do on a daily basis, the clients that I take on, the side projects and the big projects I take on, the memoir I’m working on, the guests that I have on my podcast, everything has changed because I prayed for that job and I was given it. 

What was the job you were given?

An ambassador of spirituality.

So I can tell you for sure, Stephan, this is definitely not the direction that I thought our podcast was going to go as I was reading your bio and looking at all the different things that you’ve done, but I’m glad it did because this is where you’re at right now and the journey that you’ve been on and it’s quite an amazing journey. 

If you recall in the bio, I’m name-dropping in the bio that was written years ago. That bio includes a lot of social proof and name brands and things like that. That was my ego. And so I haven’t been focused on bringing on more of those kinds of clients. I’m focused now on bringing on clients who want to change the world, who want to reveal the light in the world, and who are a light in the world. And if they’re not that kind of a company or person, then I don’t work with them.

Are you finding a lot of people in that space that are, you know, because there’s a lot of people in Genius Network with us that are, and there’s plenty that aren’t, but what are you finding as your, would you call it a rebranding or redirection or what would you call it for your business?

It’s more of a, I guess. It’s just a honing in on my ideal client and my ideal kinds of projects. So, if you look at the big hero image message on the Netconcepts homepage, it amplifies your mission and message. It’s not about taking your company to the next level or whatever result that you’re after; if this message amplifies your mission and message doesn’t relate or doesn’t resonate, we’re not a fit. And that’s okay because I’m not here for everybody. 

Yeah. So, how do you help companies amplify their mission and message?

By thinking differently. By coming up with- 

Hold on. Hold on one second on that for just a second. For all of you. 

I think that’s a pretty crazy praise for you. 

Yes, it is because of Stephan’s YOS. Okay, so his Y is to contribute to a greater cause, right? Add value has an impact on other people’s lives. How he does that by thinking differently, challenging the status quo, doing it unlike anybody else, not following a typical recipe. Ultimately, what he brings is a trusting relationship where others can count on him. And so I have a feeling that’s what we’re just about to hear.

So, let’s talk about challenging the status quo. To be public about receiving messages from God. Most people, many people, I won’t say most, but many people will say that’s in the crazy bucket there. Like I’m out, I’m out. And that’s okay.

This is not gay.

In fact. Because we’re all, like I said, we’re all here to cleave to God. And I’m sure there are some atheists listening, and that’s okay. It’s just that when I was disconnected, I felt so alone. I was agnostic, not atheistic, but I was kinda close. And I didn’t feel that purpose. I didn’t feel cared for and carried and looked after. I felt chaos. And now I know that was just a process, a chapter in my book that I had to go through. That’s okay. In fact, it was perfect because it helped make me who I am now. It helped bring me to a lot of important realizations. 

When you have that contrast, then you can appreciate what you have. Without the rain and the snow and the inclement weather, how do you appreciate the sunshine? You need the contrast. So, those challenges have been a beautiful gift. But that thinking differently outside the box and being willing to face and challenge that status quo, whatever the narrative is and stand up against it and to help galvanize people, create a movement so that we change the world in a meaningful way and not fall into these traps of getting manipulated. This is part of why I’m here. 

So if somebody’s listening and they have a message or mission that they want to bring to the world that will change it in a positive way, how do you go about helping them?

So in two ways, one is more on the kind of physical, nuts and bolts, internet marketing, SEO, all that sort of stuff. I know my stuff; I mean, clearly, this is a 770-page book here that I co-authored. I know a lot about how to get to the top of Google. I know a lot about other aspects of internet marketing too, from email marketing and analytics and conversion and just general web marketing, et cetera. But then there’s this more metaphysical aspect that I bring into a business context or into a client context. So I’m working with a client. 

I help that person connect with their intuition and discern what is intuition and what is not when they’re potentially gonna get misled because not every intuitive hit that you get is legit, but if you listen to your intuition and you follow it, you get more intuition, and you get more synchronicities, and it keeps building, it’s like a virtuous cycle. So on the metaphysical, if I teach a business owner how to use intuition in a business context, and it’s like, I don’t know, there’s something, so there’s something iffy or doesn’t feel right about taking on this client. Ah, but we need the money. And I tell that person, don’t take the client. 

Cause your intuition told you no. I hear you, Stephan and I want to do that, but I’m in a place of fear and lack. I mean, they’re not gonna say that exactly, but that’s basically what they’re saying. You know, prettier, more obfuscated wording. And then they take the client, and it becomes the show. I won’t use the first word. But it’s a terrible, colossal mess. Maybe they go to court. Who knows? Maybe they stiff to my client a lot of money or whatever. But it’s like, I wish I would have listened to that intuition. Always trust your intuition as, well, I guess, with discernment because sometimes you can get fooled. So that’s that thing of the metaphysical. 

Before we move on, how do you define intuition?

Okay, so I forgot where I learned this. So, I’m gonna differentiate intuition from receiving. So intuition, also maybe known as the still small voice. It comes in unexpected. It’s emotionally charged neutral, and it just stays there. Or, if you have other thoughts, it just keeps popping right back in. It doesn’t let go. 

A thought that doesn’t let go.

Yeah. So imagine, for example, that you have thought about, oh, I should ask stuff in this question. And then next thing, we’re talking about something else, and that just disappears, and it didn’t come back.

Okay.

That wasn’t your intuition telling you. You have to ask stuff in this question. If it just keeps coming and coming and coming, or it just stays there, and nothing else can go in there like there are no other questions bubbling up. It’s just that one. That one just keeps hammering on you. Ask stuff in that question. That’s intuition. And especially if you feel no sense of excitement or anxiety or anything, it’s just, this is it. You know, one of my team. He was driving his family, and out of the blue, his wife in the passenger seat said, get in the left, or no. Get in the right lane. She says, get in the right lane. Out of nowhere, she just says this, and he’s not reacting.

She’s staying in the left lane. And so she says it again: get in the right lane. This time, it was louder. Took three times. Get in the right lane. As soon as he gets in the right lane, boom, there’s an accident in the left lane right a second later, right in front of them. That’s intuition. 

Okay. 

Yeah, that happened last year.

Wow. And you said to contrast that with?

Okay. When you’re asking, and you just want answers, it’s not out of the blue. It’s not get in the right lane or don’t take this client. It’s you trying to discern what the most benevolent outcome would be for a particular situation, a particular person or a particular event. It’s like, I need some answers, please God help me out here. Well, that’s a different kind of receiving, and you’re in conversation with God. So, some people say that praying is talking and meditating is listening. So, conversation with God, like there’s actually a book called Conversations with God. And so if you’re in conversation with God, you’re also listening. 

How do you listen? Well, there are many ways of listening. One example of this is to simply put a question out there to God and say like, is this gonna lead to the most benevolent outcome to hire this particular person? And you just feel into whether it’s a yes or a no. Like, this is a superpower where you can basically look around corners. You get this weird feeling of a no, and it’s like, this person is perfect on paper. I paid so much money to the recruiter to find this person. Ah, it’s not good. I just really need this person. And then you hire them, and then they embezzle from you. Right? So whatever happens, right? 

It just is that seeing around corners, but you, it didn’t pop in out of nowhere, you asked. So that’s an example of just a simple yes or no. You could try this right now. You could ask God, are you there? God, are you there? Like you could, you listener, you, Gary, could do it too. Right now, you could ask in your head without even speaking it aloud, God, are you there? There’s no other answer but yes. So if you aren’t hearing a yes, then you’re just not tuned in.

You know, you haven’t used that muscle enough. You might hear it in your own voice, in your inner hearing. And you might second guess that, that’s just me, that’s my subconscious, or that’s my own inner voice, that’s not God. Everything is God. There’s nothing that’s not God. So, if you got a yes, you just cracked open the door to your own psychic abilities, because we are all psychic. All of us, by design, that’s a birthright. So, if you want to play with this, then you can start asking more questions and then see how they show up. Do you get a visual? Do you hear it in your own voice, in your head? 

Do you get a feeling, a knowing? How does it show up? And then you start journaling. Every day, I journal, and I ask God, what do I need to know or do today? And I just quiet my mind. And I mean, you ask God basically to quiet your mind because trying to control your own monkey mind is very hard on your own. So, God, please just pop into my head what I need to work on. And you might just, something comes into your head and it doesn’t feel like it came from anywhere. 

It’s just like, oh, yeah that I promised my neighbor I would mow his lawn for him a week ago, and they haven’t gotten around to it. It’s funny, I just thought about, this is hypothetical, but I thought of that. When I ask God what, do I need to know or do today, and boom, that comes into my consciousness and I hadn’t thought about it for a few days because I’ve been busy with stuff. Not a priority. He probably forgot about it. No, no, no, no. These are the things that really do matter. Being true to your word, being of service, cleaning up the messes that you made, somebody you told off 10 years ago, and there’s this animosity and your pride is getting in this is the good stuff. This is why we’re here. 

And then you help people do both parts of it. Get clear on what your intuition is telling you, and then let’s use the tactics and the strategies and all the stuff that you’ve spent 25, 30 years learning to help them amplify their message or their mission. 

Yeah, that’s right. 

Excellent.Excellent. And you’re doing all that from Israel. Did you ever think you would be living in Israel?

In 2020, yes, because we did have the intention of moving here back then, but it was really crazy. Back in 2020, with the pandemic and the lockdowns and like, it was pretty draconian, the measures. And so we eventually said, this is too much. We went to Florida, which didn’t have all the draconian measures. So, didn’t think at the time that we decided to leave and then go to Florida that it would just be temporary that we would be coming back to Israel. So yeah, as I said, it was God asking me, and we have free will, so of course we can say no, but I’m not going to say no to God. And I got multiple confirmations that this was His will and His desire for me, and so many amazing miracles have happened since we’ve been here for a month. It’s just beautiful. 

Okay, so take us through this. You asked a question, God says move to Israel. You show up in Israel. Do you know anybody there? Are you just like, how do you just show up in Israel? 

Hardly anybody. I know my mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and a couple of business people who have weak ties, but I haven’t even let them know that I’m in Israel yet. But, yeah, no close friends or anything, but miraculously within a week. I meet somebody who feels like he’s soul family. So he is actually training me in martial arts. And so I just had a lesson this morning. He’s amazing. And he told me, when I saw you, we met at a synagogue, and he said, when I saw you, I felt like I needed to help you like I was supposed to help you. Like I’m here to help you. Because he’s intuitive. You know, he doesn’t have like the Claire audience, Claire Voyance and all that sort of stuff that somebody like Sheila Gillette has, but he just, he knew, he just knew that we were supposed to, like he’s supposed to help me. And he’s been incredible, an incredible help. Yeah. 

Wow. So last question, we’ll actually second to the last question. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given or maybe the best piece of advice you’ve ever given? 

Yeah. So one thing I learned from a Kabbalah teacher some years ago was ask the question, why, why is this in my movie? So why do you ask the question, why is this in my movie? Well, you’ll get a better understanding and appreciation of this question after you see the Truman Show, but if you’re the star of the movie, you’re the observer in quantum physics, right? So, the observer effect, you actually change the outcome of things by observing it. 

Just seeing the thing changes the light from a wave to only a particle. It’s both. It’s a potentiality wave before you observe it, and it becomes a particle after and during it. So, how does that work in a spiritual context? Well, me as the observer, I’m going through life, and I’m hearing, and I’m witnessing, and I’m interacting, and all these things serve with my daily life, and they’re all for a purpose. Nothing is without purpose. You hear in an apartment building nearby a family, like a mother, screaming and yelling and, you know, what is this?

I don’t know where it’s coming from exactly. I can’t help, very angry, yelling and so forth, why? Why is this in my movie? And if you ask that question and you start to just ponder that and ask God to help you with ascertaining why that’s in your movie, there could be all sorts of amazing insights that you get from that. Just having a run-in with somebody, that you know, your landlord or whatever, and you’re like, why is this in my movie? 

Oh, because blah, blah, blah, and that just is that reason you hadn’t thought of, but it popped in your head when you had that question, when you posed that question. You know, I’m not saying everything that pops in your head is true and to take it as absolute truth, but at least take it seriously. Journal this stuff. Like I have 1,300 pages on my remarkable tablet and in my God journal. This is, I’m writing, Gratitudes to God.

I’m writing all the messages I receive. I’m writing all the challenges that I’m getting and I’m seeing them as as blessings, and I’m thanking God for them, and that opens up new insights. I journal those too while I’m being thankful for those challenges and, that’s amazing. It just changes everything. Why is this in my movie is probably the most important question you can ask, I think. You know, it’s akin to why am I here? And how can I serve? These are so important.

I mean, when you went through and discovered your YOS, and it came up as Contribute Challenge Trust, how did that feel to you?

Felt true. It felt right. And I don’t feel like I need to do anything with that. It just feels innate. So, yeah, I’m just grateful for that mission that I’ve been given to be a help, you know, and to be in service. 

So, now, the last question. If there are people that are listening to this that just resonate with your message, resonate with what you’re doing, wanna connect with you, wanna work with you, wanna hire you. What’s the best way for them to get in touch with you? 

Yeah. So, my personal website is StephanSpencer.com, and the agency’s website is Netconcepts.com. They can also get to know me a bit better from my podcasts. I’m particularly passionate about Get Yourself Optimized. That’s my personal development, spirituality, and biohacking podcast. So they could listen to a few episodes there. Marketing still passionate about that, and that is my other show, Marketing Speak. So that’s MarketingSpeak.com, or just put those keywords into whatever podcast app that you like to use. 

Awesome. Stephan, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I know it’s evening time when you’re at home, and your son’s running around in the background, but thank you so much for being here. It’s all good. Okay. Well, I really appreciate this. Learned a ton and I look forward to staying in touch. 

Yeah, likewise. Thank you.

I really hope you enjoyed today’s episode and that through today’s guest. You heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you’ll know about others. I’m Dr. Gary Sanchez, and I’ll see you on the next episode.