Welcome to another episode beyond perception, where we delve into the unseen aspects of our world. Our exact exciting guest for today is none other than Stephan Spencer, the driving force behind Get Yourself Optimized. Stephan, to introduce you briefly. You are a distinguished figure in the digital landscape, renowned for your expertise in SEO, e-commerce, and internet entrepreneurship.

Today, you’re here to hopefully share some of your unique insights on biohacking, entrepreneurship, and the journey toward self-optimization. And how do all those aspects possibly connect and so I’m really excited to have you here. Welcome, Stephan. 

Yeah. Thank you for being, thank you for having me on the show, and it’s just a real honor to be here. We met in 2019. We were just commiserating about that. It was at the LA summit, which was a really cool event. So, yeah, it’s great to be here and reconnect with you.

Yeah, we just had a little chat before we started the recording. What would make this conversation stand out? What I shared with you is that this podcast mainly focused on topics such as philosophy, psychology, and spirituality until now, and we had not really had an entrepreneurial perspective until now.

So, I’m really excited to have you here because the little I know about you covers quite a universe of different themes and topics. And you, yeah, but as I just said in the introduction, you had this really successful career as an entrepreneur, but then you also really went through a real self-transformation, not only physically but also mentally and spiritually.

And what I’m really curious to hear, first of all, is about your personal journey and you now being here looking back; what do you see different today than possibly a few decades ago when you started your exploration and entrepreneurial journey? 

Yeah. So what a difference. What I see now is how intricate and orchestrated everything is; precision is the word that comes to mind. When I look back at how everything fell into place perfectly, even the memories that we recall from our childhood, from books that we’ve read, movies that we’ve seen, et cetera, the quotes that we recall, all of that is.

Is it precisely orchestrated? And so then you can connect the dots looking backward, but you can’t do it the other way around going forward and saying, well, this makes sense. And this really dark period in my life was really awful. You can’t say that it led to something great when you’re in the middle of it; you can only connect those dots looking backward.

So, when I look back at my childhood, which was very difficult, and I was bounced around from place to place, part of my childhood I spent in a foster home, part of it I spent with my abusive grandfather, and then I spent a couple of years with my aunt, and my uncle would tell me like, I can’t even believe that you made it out alive and didn’t end up in jail or something with the kind of childhood that you had.

I think he was trying to compliment me, but I don’t know if it really came out the way that he intended it. So, anyway, it was a very dark, difficult time going through my childhood for the most part. But of course, they were wonderful moments as well. So it’s just that when you haven’t had the spiritual awakening and you haven’t had the bigger kind of view or perspective on things, you know, just zoom out and from a place of big picture kind of clairvoyance, it just doesn’t.

Looks like it was done for you. It looks like it was done to you. But you know, Tony Robbins would always say, “Life happens for you, not to you.” And yeah, it’s true. It’s absolutely true. But I didn’t really get it until I started going to the Tony Robbins events in 2009. I was going through a divorce, and I was in a dark place.

I didn’t really have any social skills for dating, so I went two and a half years without a single date. It was a very tough time, but then I did the spirit. The physical transformation came first, and then the spiritual transformation came a couple of years after that. So, it all unfolded the way it was meant to.

But it was quite, quite a journey. The second spiritual awakening happened just two years ago, in January 2021. So, I can unpack some of the stuff, but let me just kind of say that it, from my perspective now, I can see that this is all for my highest and best good. I don’t have any resentment or anger or unresolved feelings about how different people treated me, or circumstances that seemed unfair at all were divinely guided.

Thank you for sharing this. What did Charlie do, and what do you think I’m particularly interested in? You mentioned those as spiritual awakenings. And I mean, this podcast is called Beyond Perception for a reason, because I mean, that’s my experience. One’s perception sometimes seems without any alternative.

And then, as you just mentioned behind, just mentioned before, later, you start seeing it from different perspectives, you start having the ability or possibility to see things also from another perspective. I read this quote, which basically describes or refers to what you were saying. Life can only be understood by looking backward, but it must be left looking forward.

No, there’s a certain uncertainty about how life unfolds. But backward, when I ask about the possibility of seeing things in a different frame of reference and, long story short, I would really be interested to hear more about how your perception changed or what those spiritual awakenings led you to discover.

Well, for one thing, nothing is random, absolutely nothing. So, if I’m, let’s say, looking out the window right now, and I see a butterfly in the background, it’s put there for a purpose, for a reason. Think of it like you’re in a movie, and everything that’s on that set has been placed there by the director or somebody who works for the studio.

Nothing is there randomly, right? Let’s say there’s a bedroom with a nightstand, a lamp, a clock, a phone charging by the clock, and so forth. Everything is put there. So look out the window, and you see a butterfly or, you know, a goose or whatever. Yeah.

It’s there for a purpose. It was put there. So, what is the message? What’s the meaning behind it? What am I supposed to do about it? That’s where you have to listen and tune into your intuition. Intuition is the whispers of the Creator and your unseen support team, angels, guides, ascended masters, ancestors, and all that.

So they’re whispering into your consciousness. Telling you, “To pick up that phone. I know you don’t usually answer the phone, but pick up the phone this time or turn left. I know you always turn right, but turn left, and you feel like I don’t know why I’m doing this. But okay, I’m turning left today.” So when you’re tapped into that higher knowing, life happens not just for you, but it’s like you are carried down a river and no longer have to fight the current. You don’t even have to swim.

What you’re describing does not make rationally necessarily sense. And you’re referring to it also by recognizing or opening up to our intuitive capacity, which is, as you’re describing, our connection to something larger than us.  

Right, right. And you know, truth be told, I was agnostic up until age 42. So, 2012 was when I had my first spiritual awakening. Prior to that, I didn’t really believe in much of anything supernatural or spiritual or divine. I just was undecided, didn’t really, non-committal really, just didn’t really buy into religion or anything. My grandfather was a Christian, he was a converted Catholic, and my grandmother was a Jehovah’s Witness.

And when I lived with both of them, they were feeding me conflicting information. So, as a young child, I was like, this is all bunk. And I just shut out all of it. I was not interested in anything having to do with religion or God.

So, yeah, it was in 2012 when I had my first awakening. I was on a Platinum Partner Trip, the Tony Robbins Platinum Partner Trip. We were in India, and he had arranged for Oneness monks to come in and give Deekshas and lectures and things like that, too. So, one of the powerful things that I learned from the lectures from those Oneness monks was that God is an experience, not a belief.

You could try to force a belief system on somebody, but if they don’t have the experience of God, it’s not going to stick. So I had an experience. I got touched by one of the monks on the head; it was a Diksha, an Oneness blessing, and everything turned technicolor. It was like an LSD trip. I’ve never done any drugs. I can’t really tell you how this compares to psychedelics, but everything was in technicolor, like a cartoon, like someone who would describe a psychedelic trip.

I felt this deep sense of peace and Oneness that I’d never experienced. It was incredible. And that changed everything. It’s like I got plugged into the fabric of creation, and now I was able to manifest miracles and, really, just have miracles and connections happen for me without having to do all of it myself.

That was the first awakening. The second one happened on January 22nd, 2021. I’ve been studying Kabbalah for a number of years, starting in about 2013, 2000, yeah, 13, 14. I went to other kinds of seminars and things as well, but primarily, Kabbalah was what I was, where I was growing spiritually.

And on that night, I prayed to God for a job in the middle of the night, and God answered my request, my prayer, and showed me the illusory. world that we live in. The matrix showed me the matrix. It was like one big download and most of it I don’t remember but it changed me. It forever changed me.

And the reason I prayed for a job—which sounds kind of weird for an entrepreneur to do —is that I was inspired by a guest I had on Get Yourself Optimized. Her name is Sheila Gillette. She’s a pretty famous psychic, and she channels 12 archangels. Well, in 1969, she was on her deathbed. She had a pulmonary embolism.

It was a complication from childbirth, and she was not going to make it. And she prayed to God, “Please let me stay on the planet. Let me raise my kids. I’ll do anything. Give me a job. I’ll do anything.” And that just stuck with me because, of course, she got healed miraculously and spontaneously; it was to the astonishment of all the doctors; it was just that it didn’t make any sense that she would spontaneously heal like that overnight, and she did.

And then she started developing psychic abilities. And as I said, she’s been doing this channeling of archangels for the last 50 years. So, when I prayed for a job, I didn’t know what I was praying for. I did get psychic abilities that woke up from that request. And I got a mission, and I got lots of synchronicities, and I get lots of guidance. It’s constant, like daily. And so that’s what I’m up to these days. It’s following through on that mission, but I’m still running an SEO agency.

What is the mission?

An ambassador of spirituality, an ambassador of the light. Now, people like who I was connect to the Creator. Because all those years that I was disconnected, I didn’t really have any relationship that I thought of, that I could recognize with the Creator.

Of course, He’s with us every second of every day. If we turn our back or close our perception of Him, then we don’t feel Him because it’s really a still, small voice. It’s very subtle. It’s meant to be that way. That’s by design. It’s If it was, you know, hit you over the head, like with obvious kind of signs, burning bush sort of stuff, bellowing godly voice, telling you not to do that, is going to wreak a lot of havoc, well, you wouldn’t feel like you had free will.

So it’s got to be super subtle, and it is, and that’s how it’s designed to be, so you really have to tune in. To receive those whispers and that guidance and act on it.  

First of all, thank you very much for sharing your experience. And the question I have is, then, how, well, how or what have you been? Could you maybe also give us advice to others who might come up with the question? I’m coming now to learn how to differentiate intuition from thoughts, feelings, or the noise of our own conditioning.  

Yeah. So, I got three things from some sort of documentary or docu-series I was listening to. I forget what it was, but it was a medical intuitive or just an intuitive who taps into messages and so forth.

And he defined it as this three things. First is, it comes in unexpected. Second, it’s neutral in terms of emotional charge. And third, it doesn’t jump to the next thought and the next thought and the next thought and the next thought. It kind of just stays there. Or if your mind is very busy and you keep thinking about other stuff, it’ll keep coming back, popping, for you over and over again.

Those are three hallmarks of intuition. You’re getting guidance, and you’re not sure if it’s of the light or of the dark; you can get a kind of read from simply going into your heart and how it feels in your mind. In your heart, in your body, how does that feel that thing you’re being guided to do?

I go up to this person, and I apologize. That’s what I’m being guided to do. That’s what I’m feeling like I’m getting nudged to do from intuition or from, you know, my unseen support team. Does that feel good in my body? Does that feel true in my heart that’s the right thing to do? If it does, you’re receiving correctly if you’re feeling uncomfortable with it, not because you don’t want to apologize, but because it just doesn’t feel like the right time or the right circumstances or doesn’t feel like I don’t know, just doesn’t feel genuine. You got to listen to that too.

You’re constantly going within for that, that spiritual GPS. Does that feel right? Does it feel correct? Does it feel like, you know, it’s coming from the light?  

This is then also how you approach your enterprises, your companies, and your entrepreneurship.

Absolutely. First, I’ll give you an example from a pretty well-known entrepreneur in the spiritual space. Then, I’ll give you some of my specific applications for this. This is from Vishen Lakhiani. He shared the story of how, before he founded Mindvalley, he was a sales rep, a commission-only sales rep for a software company for law firms. And he was not very successful at it, so he was just eking out a living and having a really hard time paying his bills.

He goes to a Silva Method seminar and comes back with all this new knowledge and insight. And then he starts, instead of calling A through Z in the phone books, like all these different law firms in different cities, he connects and feels which ones are the right ones to contact.

He uses his sensing abilities, his intuitive sensing abilities, to pick exactly which law firms he’s going to call and not call any of the other ones. It works. He doubles his sales, and it keeps working. He doubles his sales again and again. Fast-forward just a few months, and he’s a VP of sales and, you know, he’s been promoted to an executive-level position at that company.

Well, he ended up quitting, of course, to start Mindvalley.

That was, you know,  pretty strong evidence that what he was tapping into was something extrasensory paranormal, maybe you might call it that, but it was certainly energetic and not based on logic and, you know, hard data or anything like that.

And it was highly effective. So, in my life, in my business, what am I doing? Well, I will get an intuitive feeling to contact somebody that I haven’t been in contact with for years. I’ll reach out to them via email, text, or whatever. And then a lot of times, what’ll happen is, “Oh, how funny, Stephan. I was just thinking about you.”

Or even better, “You know, it’s funny; I was just thinking about you. I know it’s funny. but we actually have an SEO need right now that, maybe you could help us with.” I used to travel several times a month to speak at conferences and attend events, masterminds and seminars and all that sort of thing.

And that was the primary way I garnered business. I no longer do that. I don’t speak at many conferences anymore and don’t travel multiple times a month. I have a young son who’s three and, you know, it’s just not something I’m interested in doing anymore. So, now leads show up out of nowhere, or I get the intuitive hit, like contact this person, who you haven’t been in touch with for years, or I’ll get some sort of synchronicity happening where it’s just.

What are the odds of this happening? And then it just leads to a new client coming on board. So I don’t have to get on lots of airplanes. Like I used to, I travel maybe 10% as much as I used to a 10th of the time. And that’s one, you know, specific implementation of intuition and of this connection with the Creator, but at a higher level.

One thing that really probably made the biggest difference in my business was asking God to be my business partner and Him saying yes. And so then, everything shifted. Everything’s gotten a lot easier because, in reality, we’re not just supposed to tithe 10% of our income. In reality, it’s all God’s. None of this stuff, you know, the assets we have or the money in the bank, the businesses that we own, none of it’s ours. It’s 100% His. So, you’re the steward of his assets and stuff. I mean, you’re not even, like, this body isn’t even my own. it’s on rental.

I’m borrowing it. So, if that’s your understanding, then you can manifest a lot more miracles because you’re getting out of the way. You’re not trying to make everything happen on your own. Everything is co-creation and collaboration. When you take God out of it, and you’re just trying to hustle and grind, stuff becomes hard because that’s the way it’s designed to be.

You’re not supposed to get stuff easy when you don’t bring God into the picture. Everything becomes ease and grace, when you are doing this in collaboration with the Creator. 

That’s a wonderful thing. Thank you for sharing that example with us. You are also helping people optimize their lives and your podcast, which you mentioned before, so get yourself optimized.

It’s quite successful. I think you have more than 400 episodes by now. I would be curious to hear about what you’re describing now. What does an optimized life look like if we really surrender to this intuitive capacity or the greater reality we are part of? How would you describe an optimized life, or how do you help others optimize their lives?

Yeah, well, a great analogy. I learned this from a Kabbalah teacher, David Ghiyam, that if you imagine a prism, the white light flows into the prism, and then all the colors on the other side come out. People erroneously chase after individual colors, their career or business, their health, fitness, the relationship of their dreams, money, wealth, you know, this sort of stuff.

What ends up happening is that they can’t handle everything. So, other things fall through the cracks.

They kind of fall apart. You know, maybe the relationship fails because they’ve been working so hard on their business. Maybe their business fails because they’ve fallen in love and they’ve just lost track of everything but their soulmate. Right? When you chase after the colors, you end up losing some of them, and you know, it just kind of falls apart. Whereas if you chase after the white light of the Creator, it comes with all the colors. So, everything is a lot easier and a lot more optimized and interrelated, correlated, and working in concert with each other.

See, you don’t have conflicting priorities. Your priority is your relationship with the Creator. And because that’s your priority, everything else becomes easier. Your business becomes easier. Your relationship with your significant other becomes easier. And with your kids, your family members, your peer group, everything.

And when you start working with someone, what are the principles you work with them through, or what is the invitation to your coaches? How do you actually guide someone to create that or experience that connectedness and co-creative? 

Yeah, well, so I listen to my intuition and get messages and guidance on what things to share with the person. Also, of course, we’ll listen to what’s going on in their world and what they’re struggling with. And, provide, you know, my experience and lessons learned and, you know, the hard knocks I went through. It’s just it depends on what their priority is. If you know, there’s this expression: sell them what they want and then give them what they need.

It’s not often that somebody is going to a coach because they want to work on their relationship with God. That doesn’t get most people over the finish line to sign up with a coach, but that’s what they need. They just aren’t motivated until after this, you know, the kind of illusion of this reality is glimpsed by them.

So, you maybe start with something that’s more specific to a problem they’re facing. Let’s say that, and they want to. Improve their health and the quality of their sleep, and they need some biohacks for sleep hygiene, more deep sleep and so forth. They need more, you know, measurement.

What gets measured gets managed. The old adage goes again: Get them signed up with the aura ring, know what things to track with the ring, start making improvements and see what works and what doesn’t. Yeah. So that’s just one example, but it could be relationship—or business-related. A lot of times, it starts with the business. It could be SEO consulting that we start with or just marketing consulting, but it’s all interconnected.  

So it doesn’t really matter.

It doesn’t matter where you start. I mean, yeah, because everything is all leading to the same place. It’s like all roads lead to Rome; all roads lead to the Creator because this is all an illusion for us to experience the Creator, experience our divinity, and experience our earning.

The experience and the blessings, because when you don’t earn stuff, it doesn’t feel very good. It comes with side effects. You know, if you win the lottery, chances are good that you’ll lose that money, get swindled, or end up on drugs or whatever. Right. So it’s not going to be a panacea that you won the lottery.

On the other hand, if you’ve earned that money from, let’s say, building a business or buying and selling businesses or creating roll-ups or whatever, you earned it, and you don’t feel so entitled. So that’s another thing, too. It’s like this idea of earning, it’s a contrast with what’s in Hebrew, translated to the phrase bread of shame.

It’s a concept I learned in Kabbalah that when you have not earned it, it comes with side effects. So don’t give your 16-year-old kid a brand new convertible, crash it, heaven forbid, or they’ll treat it poorly, or they’ll, you know, run it into the ground sort of thing, or you know, who knows. But it’s not treated with the level of respect that it should be because they didn’t earn it. 

And is optimization in that sense, is it a continuous process or is there an end to optimization once you realize the truth of your being or is it, what would you say about that?  

Yeah, that’s an interesting insight because when you recognize your eternal nature, it’s not so motivating to try and live to 180 years old like some of the biohackers. What’s the point of living to 180? Because, you know, let’s say that you might have been reincarnated hundreds of times. I’m being hypothetical here because I don’t actually know how many times anybody’s been reincarnated or what, but this isn’t your first go-round.

And this isn’t most likely your last, you know, you’re given. Not more than you can handle. Imagine if every single lesson was piled on to you in one single lifetime. Everything that you needed to learn about justice, love, kindness, generosity, equality, prosperity, everything all at once in one lifetime.

It’s untenable. It’s unrealistic. It’s not workable. So it’s doled out piece by piece and enough, lifetimes. This is my understanding. If it doesn’t resonate, you know, that’s fine. You don’t have to take on board everything I say. I’m not purporting to be the source of all truth or anything.

This has just been my experience and my understanding of things. So when you take on the lessons with gratitude and, I don’t know, balance, non-reactivity and proactivity, the lessons come easier, and you don’t have to get hit over the head so hard by the universe with some of these lessons.

I forget who it was who said this at an event a few years back, or maybe it was a decade ago. Said that the,  the universe sends you feathers that kind of lightly drop on your shoulder and you can ignore those. That’s easy to ignore a feather landing lightly on your shoulder. But if you do ignore the feathers, then they eventually turn into bricks.

When the bricks fall on you, that hurts. Of course, you can ignore the bricks as well, as many of us do. But then, of course, it doesn’t go endlessly without some sort of escalation. So eventually, the Mack truck comes. What I want to do is preempt the feathers, even. I certainly pay attention to the feathers, and I take action. But I also want to be so proactive that before even a feather arrives, I want to start working on it.

Yeah, when I look back, my take on optimization from a few years ago was very obsessive. I didn’t know that at the time, but there was this unconscious. Like imagining that when I optimize myself, I finally will be okay, whole, able to live, to be loved.

And so I jumped into all kinds of modalities, such as biohacking, very obsessively.

My whole life became about optimization until one point, as this bubble burst, and it became obvious that who I am was already here. And what I did was kind of like running after an ideal I project projected onto other things or into the future, and I was through that not experiencing what already was and that revelation, recognition or realization that was, quite in one aspect, wonderful.

It was also a bit shocking. It basically turned my whole self-understanding 180 degrees. And it also took me some time to kind of be functional again. But then there was a phase of resenting optimization improvement because there was this: no, I just had experienced everything is already perfect. Where I am now is kind of finding a balance between, yes, everything is, in essence, perfect. But then there’s also there’s. There are things I actually make in my conditioning, my personality, and how I experience life and see others. There are things to improve and to optimize.

We’re constantly improving. It’s not that we’re not here to optimize and improve. It’s that we’re here for experiences. We’re here at ultimately the end of the day and all this is to get closer and closer to God. Amen. Amen. And, while we’re doing that, we’re learning and growing and evolving and, we’re making choices.

You know, we have this incredible gift called free will, and we can make choices about whether we go to the gym or sit and binge on Netflix series. Or if we lose ourselves in a business or a job or focus on our family and our kids. You know, we get to make choices. So, I rely on my intuition as to which biohacks are the ones that are meant for me and the other ones I leave behind.

I used to take so many different supplements. I take a third of the supplements now, maybe a fourth. I used to be gung-ho about things like stem cell therapy. I did a stem cell procedure with Dr. Harry Adelson, who’s the stem cell doctor to Dave Asprey.

You know, the godfather of biohacking. So, my wife, Orion and I both went in for procedures with Dr. Harry. We’ve done 40 years of Zen, which is Dave Asprey’s week-long neurofeedback program. We’ve done, well, let’s see, a health nucleus I’ve done and my wife has signed up to do. That’s the full body MRI scan and all the different kinds of blood tests. Like it’s a full battery of tests. And full genetic sequencing and everything.

It’s very in-depth. It’s like concierge medicine to the nth degree. So, you know, I still do that. I do that on an annual basis now. As a preventative, just to know that everything is copacetic, and I also get my own guidance in that regard if I need to get something checked or if something doesn’t feel quite right.

But yeah, it takes a lot of the pressure off when you realize, like, I don’t have to do all this on my own. I’m guided that everything’s happening perfectly, as it should, as it’s meant to be. If I meant to learn a lesson about something, then I will learn that lesson, and I’ll do it with gratitude. You know, so I had a lot of pain in my left index finger from Morton’s neuroma for years.

I didn’t even know what it was, what, you know, finally got the name for it, Morton’s neuroma, but it’s nerve pain. And it’s like, if I bump my finger in the wrong spot, it will feel like someone took a hammer at it. It’s not quite as bad as it used to be, but this started maybe a decade ago, but I got, really powerful insights and gifts from this experience of having this pain.

But if you don’t, you know, there’s this thing that if you don’t learn the lesson from, like, in school, you’re going to have to repeat the class, right? So, I needed to go within and find out why this was showing up. There’s a book called The Body Keeps the Score. The body does keep the score.

Everything has a spiritual or emotional root to it. And so you got to be curious about what’s the point of this? Why is this in my reality? Why is this in my movie? This particular ailment or chronic pain or disease. So yeah, I’ve got, you know, some beautiful, powerful experiences of emotional and spiritual healing because I went within to ask those questions.

This also implies that the journey of optimization is an individual one. So, or would you say that there are general things that you can recommend to, for example, someone who is listening now and interested in improving or optimizing their life? Is it purely individual, or are there things that you still can recommend or which will benefit most people?

Well, of course, there are things that will benefit most people, but the question is, what is? One of my Kabbalah teachers taught me this question to ask: why is this in my movie? So, let’s say you have problems with sleep, asthma, high blood sugar, or high blood pressure.

You know, so whatever the issue is that you’re facing, there are things that could make that issue better. But if you don’t go within and ask the deeper questions, why is this in my movie? What am I meant to learn from it? You’re missing the point. You’re just putting a bandaid on it. So, okay, well, about four years ago, I started getting a lot of insomnia, or I started getting sleep paralysis, or I started whatever.

And now, you’re, let’s say, four years later, and you have no insight into why this occurred from a metaphysical standpoint. No idea. Like, how is this benefiting me? I have no idea. I never thought to ask. Well, you need to ask. Otherwise, you’re not getting the lesson, and you have to repeat the class. So yes, I can recommend sleep hygiene things, like wearing true dark glasses after, you know, sunset, or I don’t know, keep your room much cooler than you’d like, if, you’re, you know, keeping the temperature, pretty toasty warm, you got to dial that down.

Or, if you want to try some more unusual sleep hacks, put your bed at an angle where your head is about six inches. The bed is six inches higher at the top of the bed than at the B base of the bed at the bottom of the bed. And so you’re sleeping at a slight slope that will improve your sleep.

I did that. All sorts of things. I did that, but it had a negative effect on my relationship because my wife was down over the night. She woke up at the lower end of the bed, and she’d get very look at that and take that away.

Yeah, that’s hilarious. Well, she’s got to be on board with these sleep hacks. If you implement them without her support, you’re, yeah, that’s a whole other can of worms there.

What you are suggesting is biohacking. No, I, we’re like, those are the things you have to do to improve your sleep, nutrition, exercise. And then,  you’re starting to check everything on the list and optimize your life. Or that’s at least that’s how I got introduced and what I then also did into the theme of biohacking.

And that’s what I still receive. Many of the people in the field of biohacking are doing this. They’re saying, this is the thing you have to do. For example, if you want to become healthier and more productive, and there’s not so much of an emphasis or perspective on it, it might be very individual, and you too. Be aware of from which perspective you are doing all the optimization.

Yeah. The intention is everything. So if, you know, you’ve probably seen videos of Brian Johnson, the guy who’s trying to age backward, doing every biohack under the sun. Do you know about this guy?

This one actually, no, I missed that one, no.

Yeah, so he’s a multi-millionaire, and he’s spending millions of dollars on biohacking to improve his longevity and performance and all that. He’s open-sourcing all of the processes and things that he’s coming up with. And it’s overwhelming to someone who isn’t biohacking or in that world, even somebody who is in that world, like, whoa, that’s 10 times more things than I can possibly handle.

This guy is just extreme. And what, to what end? Is it helping him cleave to the Creator? Or is it just, like, allowing him to spend more years in this illusory world, which in Hinduism is referred to as Maya, and in Buddhism, samsara. It’s all an illusion. The only thing real here is love. The Creator—that’s it.

Everything else is part of the video game, part of the movie. So if you are really set on spending as many years in this illusion as possible, go for it. Follow all of Brian Johnson’s protocols. To me, that would just stress me out. And that would be like chasing one of those colors and letting everything else slip through the cracks.

You know, relationships will suffer because you’re overcompensating for your fear of death. You know, even if it’s not fear of death, it’s just fear of missing out. You know, this, FOMO (Fear of missing out) is not, it’s touted as something that’s, you know, a good thing. Like, “Oh yeah, FOMO, like I have FOMO.” It’s not. It’s fear.

Who’s going to wear that as a badge to show them that they’re in FOMO? No, you’re in fear. Fear of missing out is fear. Fear is inverse faith. I learned that from Florence Scovel Shinn from the book, The Game of Life and How to Play It from a hundred years ago. That’s a great book.

Fear is inverse faith. So FOMO is inverse faith. And in fact, if you’re experiencing FOMO, “Oh, I should buy this course, or I should do this protocol, this biohack, or this, you know, buy this technology or device, or I should, do this program, whatever it is.” Turn and run from it. Like, go the other direction. Because FOMO is not connecting with the Creator and your trust, faith, and certainty, you’re making decisions based on uncertainty.

That’s a good one. Fear is inverse faith. I know that FOMO very well.

I do, too. I mean, I’ve spent so much money on personal development courses, seminars, masterminds, and everything. It all worked out perfectly the way it was supposed to.

It got me to where I am now, and where I’m going to be in the future is going to be even better, but it’s not about regret or looking backward. It’s about appreciating everything that came before to get you to where you’re at now.

You know, I keep a gratitude journal. I call it a God journal, and I write down the things I’m grateful for that are challenges, too. Because the challenge is actually just a disguised blessing. If I were to have the opp to undo some of the challenges that I went through, the divorce that I went through in 2008, 2009, if I were to be able to undo the physical challenges I went through, let’s say baldness and so forth, I ended up getting a hair transplant in 2009. But would I change any of it? No. I don’t know. Because it got me to who I am now and it was all planned out. It wasn’t random. It was done with precision and intention.

Thank you for this wonderful conversation. In the back of my mind, there’s another I would be really interested in exploring with you, possibly because we are a bit short of time already. It’s the interplay of SEO and perception, and it would be a really interesting one, too. Maybe there’s a chance for a second conversation. I’m just leaving that open. I don’t know.

But it has been really interesting to listen to your experience and your perspectives. I’m very grateful that you’re here to share them with us. Is there a last thing you want to share with our listeners? Something close to your heart that you feel is still important but has not been expressed yet.  

Yeah. Yeah. One little tidbit that, again, I got from the monks at Oneness on my India trip. This was actually a follow-up trip, where I went to Oneness University a few months after the awakening event, where the monk touched me on the head.

So, this is what the monks explained to me. And it’s about fear. Let the tiger devour you. In other words, don’t run away from the fear; just let it devour you, and you’re going to be okay. It’s just a temporary discomfort, but just let it happen and then be at peace with it, and it loses all its power over you.

Thank you, Stephan, for the interview, for your time, for your inspiration, and for sharing. Yeah. Some of your wisdom with us. And, for those of you listening and watching this, if you agree, I will link your webpage, your podcast and whatever you also think might be interesting below in the show notes so that everybody can contact you or follow you to learn more about what you, do and share and all, I mean, the amazing conversations you already have published. No, there’s a huge. Database available.  

Yeah, there have been eight years of episodes on Get Yourself Optimized. And then there’s my other show, Marketing Speak, which also has eight years of content on marketing-related topics. So yeah, there’s a lot of stuff.  

Yeah, I know there’s so much more to explore with you, but thank you so much at this time for the time at the time. And, yeah, to everyone who’s listening to this or watching right now, thank you very much for your time, focus, and attention. Take care and see you soon.

Thank you