Advertise on podcast: Innerspace: Deep, Meaningful Conversations with Brett Kaufman

Jeremy Miller came out of architecture school at Ohio State full of theory and history and short on practical skills, so he learned the trade from the ground up at Compton Construction. A decade there and seven years running his own practice led to GeoAlchemy Studio and Codex Homes, where he now leads a team of building scientists, building biologists, and architectural consultants designing healthy homes that heal instead of harm. Jeremy and Brett trace the path that brought him here. He spent time living in Peru, in adobe homes surrounded by temples built to align with the sun, and there he saw how much the spaces we live in shape our energy and clarity. They also talk about the park they built together in Franklinton, where the main path is aligned with the sunset on the winter solstice and 108 stones painted by local artists line the edge. As Jeremy puts it, “if we have to place the path somewhere, why don’t we be intentional about where we place it?” Jeremy also shares what’s next at Hickory Run, a 162-acre agrivillage built around a working regenerative farm. He talks about the old belief that everyone else was smarter than him, and the daily affirmation that keeps proving him wrong. Follow Jeremy Instagram: @geoalchemystudio Web: geoalchemy.studio Hickory Run: regenfarmliving.com

Lindsay Hergott is the Founder and CEO of Alive + Awake, a TEDx speaker, writer, and leadership coach who has spent more than two decades working with founders and executives at the intersection of strategy, science, and spirituality. She began her career in management consulting at Kearney, left Bay Street for the world of human transformation, and trained in Compassionate Inquiry with Dr. Gabor Maté. Her debut novel, Playa Dorada, is a love letter to Costa Rica, where she has been rooted for over twenty years. Lindsay grew up in a small Northern Ontario town, the daughter of a physician who was rarely home, and learned early that attention came from performing and achieving. She married at nineteen, had four kids in six years, and built a global coaching practice while her husband built five tech startups. Then, standing on a red carpet while he was honored for selling his company, she was in the middle of a divorce. In her words, “We got the money. We got the kids. We got the exit, and it cost us everything.” Brett and Lindsay get into what she calls connected sovereignty, why she worked on herself before working on her marriage, the line between a healthy habit and a hidden addiction, and why the parts of herself she was once ashamed of turned out to be the parts she needed most. Playa Dorada launches next month. Learn more at @playadoradacr on Instagram Follow Lindsay Instagram: @lindsayalive Alive + Awake: @aliveandawake | aliveandawake.com Playa Dorada: @playadoradacr

Jane Grote is the founding family member, Chief Purpose Officer, and Executive Chairwoman of the Board of Donatos Pizza and Jane's Dough Premium Foods, a $275 million family-owned restaurant operator, franchisor, and manufacturing company. She is the author of The Missing Piece: Doing Business the Donatos Way, was featured on CBS's Undercover Boss, and co-founded The Reeb Center, which raised $14.5 million and now houses 14 nonprofits focused on education and workforce development on the South Side of Columbus. Jane grew up behind her dad's first pizza shop, where customers waited for their pizzas in the family living room, and she earned her first Donatos paycheck at 11. After her family sold the company to McDonald's, she stayed on through the transition and slowly felt herself lose the courage to speak up. When the chance came, she led the effort to buy Donatos back while it was losing $7.5 million, and she credits the turnaround to one thing. "Our people just really truly started caring about what they were doing again." Brett and Jane talk about what it costs to lead with love when the pressure is on, why she stepped into the chair role so she wouldn't miss her daughters' games, why she calls family business "really messy and really magical," and the question her dad asks whenever things get hard: did you love your way through it? Follow Jane Instagram: @janeabell LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/janeabell Facebook: facebook.com/janemabell Web: janegrote.com

Alec Shankman is the founder and CEO of HeartRock Partners, a talent and brand representation firm that helps high-profile talent with entrepreneurial spirits expand their platforms into commercial enterprises, and helps consumer brands scale through creators, celebrities, and media. Before HeartRock, he was a Senior Partner at The Gersh Agency.  Earlier in his career, he launched and built the Alternative Programming and Digital Media Division at Abrams Artists Agency, growing it into a bicoastal team of nearly 60 people. Variety named him one of Hollywood's New Leaders. Alec grew up in Solon, Ohio, the oldest of four boys, and got his first look at entertainment by tagging along with a childhood friend whose dad was a Cleveland TV personality. Before he ever left Ohio, he ran a cologne company in college and an invite-only nightclub in Columbus. Then he moved to Los Angeles with almost no money, mailed his resume in shipping tubes full of bouncy balls, and started in the mailroom. Within ten months he was a contracted agent with his own department, built on reality TV at a time when most of the industry thought it was a fad. Brett and Alec talk about the Midwestern work ethic that carried him through Hollywood, why he'd rather start a new line than wait in someone else's, riding every wave from reality TV to digital to shows like Gold Rush and Duck Dynasty, and why he came home to build HeartRock in Cleveland. Follow Alec Instagram: @alec_shankman Web: www.heartrockpartners.com

Five women. Five very different lives. One thread running through all of them. Each of them learned early to go quiet. To keep the peace, to be the good one, to do what was expected. Each built a life on that script, and each hit a point where it stopped working. Nicole DiTommaso, founder of Sauce Boss Gang, describes what it feels like to lose your inner voice inside someone else's business, and the year of solitude that brought it back. Nancy Kramer, founder of Resource and lead partner at IBM Consulting, walks through the wedding she knew was wrong the night it happened, the whole other life she built to survive it, and the point where her body refused to keep going along. Vanessa Benett, psychotherapist and author, talks about running from home at 18, the friend who told her she was always angry, and the moment she decided the cycle she inherited ends with her. Tricia Eastman, psychedelic medicine facilitator and author of Seeding Consciousness, on why no one is coming to save you, and the experience that told her she was not living her true life. Gabby Goldlach, chiropractor and founder of The Inside Space, on the question she kept getting asked until she broke, and what it took to reconnect with her dad when her family was worried for her. The common ground is simple to say and hard to live. The answers were inside the whole time. The work is learning to trust them. Follow Nicole Business Instagram: @saucebossgang Personal: @thefireqween Website: saucebossgang.com Connect with Nancy https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancyjkramer/ Learn More about Vanessa Website: https://www.vanessabennett.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vanessasbennett/ The Motherhood Myth: https://www.vanessabennett.com/the-motherhood-myth Donate to Tricia's initiative: https://donorbox.org/ancestralheart Follow Gabby https://www.instagram.com/gab_chiro/ https://scheduleinsidespacefamilychiro.as.me/schedule/49d440d7 Timestamps 00:00 Intro 04:13 Nicole DiTommaso 09:10 Nancy Kramer 20:43 Vanessa Benett 30:07 Tricia Eastman 34:00 Gabby Goldlach

You sent the questions. Brett answers them. Part two picks up with the one that comes in most often, in some version or another. Twelve years into a business, successful by every measure, and completely empty. Brett has felt that exact thing, and he starts where he thinks anyone in it has to start. From there, whether you actually need a coach or can sort it out yourself, and why the honest answer is that almost nobody does this alone. What to do in the months after you sell the company, when everyone tells you to enjoy it and you feel lost instead. Brett's read is that it is rarely about the money. It is about who you are when nobody needs you anymore. He also gets into plant medicine, carefully, and is direct about who it is not for. Then the hardest things he has said no to, and what he looks for in a first conversation with a founder that tells him whether they are actually willing to do the work. Keep sending questions. He is going to keep answering them.

You sent the questions. Brett answers them. This is the first Ask Me Anything episode of Innerspace. It covers the ground listeners keep asking about: what Brett is actually building toward now, the lessons that cost him the most, the moments that woke him up, and how to have the conversations most people spend their lives avoiding. The first hard lesson came the day he realized nobody was going to hand him the life he wanted, and that freedom of his time, his money, and his relationships was something he would have to go make himself. The second came later, after the achieving and the accolades, when he got to the top of that mountain and found out it was not the thing. The third landed hardest. Moving from one business into the next taught him who his friends really are and who his friends really aren't. From there, the wake up calls that redirected his life inside a single stretch of ninety days. The listening practice he still uses in difficult conversations. What to do with the voice in your head. And an honest accounting of Gravity, what worked, what didn't, and why community stopped needing a building. Part two is coming. Timestamps 0:00 Welcome 0:14 The goal and the motivation 3:43 The hardest lesson 5:13 When the things you chased stop mattering 7:13 Who your friends really are and who they aren't 10:21 The wake up calls with the biggest impact 11:56 Landmark Forum and authoring your own life 12:40 Summit Series and seeing it lived 15:34 Difficult conversations 16:45 Curiosity and seven good minutes 18:38 Bubbling up conflict 22:58 Negative self talk 25:48 Gravity, honestly 28:45 Why community stopped needing a building

This one works differently. It is three conversations instead of one, pulled from the Gravity archive and placed side by side because they belong side by side. Lewis Howes, Tucker Max, and Dan Sullivan, each arriving at the same question from a completely different direction. Most people can tell you when their adult life started. The job, the move, the decision that changed the direction. Far fewer can tell you when their inner life started, because it started long before anyone was paying attention. Lewis spent years chasing achievement and discovered that it never actually landed. "No matter how much I accomplished or achieved, I still didn't feel it." What changed was not another win. It was going back and building a relationship with the part of himself that had been carrying everything alone. He talks about the emotional triggers most people live with without ever questioning them, and where a decade of that work has taken him. Tucker brings the research. The ACE study is one of the most rigorous looks at childhood experience ever conducted, and its central finding surprised nearly everyone who saw it. The children with the worst life outcomes were not the ones anyone predicted. Tucker walks through what that means, why attention matters more than we think, and what the psychological field had to rebuild once the data came in. Dan offers the counterweight. He grew up on a farm in Northern Ohio, the fifth of seven, with no playmate his own age until first grade. So he talked to adults instead. He figured out early that if you ask people about their lives, they will tell you for hours. That habit turned into a career, and he says he is doing the same thing now at seventy seven that he was doing at seven. Three childhoods. One that had to be healed, one that had to be understood, and one that quietly handed a man his life's work before he knew what was happening. The question underneath all of it is not whether your childhood shaped you. It is whether you have gone back and looked at how. 00:00 Intro 02:44 Lewis Howes 11:00 Tucker Max 19:58 Dan Sullivan

Michael Clune was born in Dublin and raised outside Chicago. When his parents divorced at twelve, what gave way was not just the household. It was his sense of what was real. Alcohol and weed came at fourteen, ecstasy at nineteen, heroin at twenty one. He describes that first time plainly. "Every problem I've ever had has now been solved. That was the feeling." He got into Johns Hopkins, held it together for a while, and then did not. He was arrested for felony possession and locked up in a jail he had painted himself, working summers as a teenager. What he understood in recovery is the part most addiction stories leave out. Heroin was never simply pleasure. It was a counterfeit of something real, delivered once and then dangled for years. Saying no was never going to be enough. He needed another route to the same place, and found it in Zen meditation and in a discipline he learned from people in recovery, something he says most people learn at five. He and Brett go well past addiction. What everyone chases when they are not chasing a drug. Whether an ordinary life can hold a spiritual one. And what it takes to keep writing through the resistance. More than two decades sober, Michael is a professor at the Chase Center at Ohio State, the author of three scholarly books and three works of creative writing, most recently the novel Pan.

Chip Conley bought a broken-down pay-by-the-hour motel in the Tenderloin of San Francisco in his mid-twenties, on the strength of an offhand suggestion from concert promoter Bill Graham, and spent 24 years building Joie de Vivre Hospitality into the second largest operator of boutique hotels in the country. Then the thing he built stopped fitting. He launched fifteen new hotels into a collapsing economy and found himself running a company he no longer recognized as his. What came next was a break, a second act at Airbnb as Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, and co-founding MEA, the world's first midlife wisdom school, now on a regenerative horse ranch in Santa Fe. Chip calls the whole arc the crescendo effect. Nothing wasted. Every skill and every detour feeding the next one. You only see the shape of it looking back. As he puts it, he is all the ages he has ever been. His latest book, The Midlife Manifesto, is out now. Brett and Chip get into what it costs to hold on to an identity past its usefulness, what it means to be a mentor and an intern at the same time, the father who talked him out of writing and the books that came anyway, and the tension he is living inside now between what he calls holy urgency and the instruction he keeps receiving to slow down. Connect with Chip: Instagram: @chipconley MEA: meawisdom.com Podcast: The Midlife Chrysalis, meawisdom.com/podcast Book: The Midlife Manifesto, meawisdom.com/product/the-midlife-manifesto-book

Kylie Ryan grew up on thirty acres outside Sydney, in a house that looked abundant from the road and carried a different story inside it. Her father was defrauded by business partners. Her parents' marriage came apart slowly, in the same building. Kylie became the one who held things together, and she had nowhere to put any of it, so she put it in her body. At 23, in a session meant to help with audition nerves, she found a belief buried in her unconscious that did not start with her. It traced back through the women in her family, generations older than she was. She cleared it, and the year that followed changed nearly everything. Two decades on, Kylie is a mindset coach and emotional intelligence specialist who works with founders moving through the transition she calls the Dark Night of the Soul. She is the director of the Spiral Institute, where she certifies practitioners in The Spiral™, a nervous system based emotional clearing method, and her broader body of work, Heart Alchemy™, sits where psychology, neuroscience, trauma informed coaching, and spiritual intelligence meet. All of it comes back to one question. Why do people stay stuck even when they can name what is holding them back? Her answer runs through the Karpman drama triangle and lands somewhere uncomfortable. When you are triggered, the space between stimulus and response collapses. There is no room left for consciousness, and without consciousness there is no real choice. You are not deciding. You are reacting. Connect with Kylie: Heart Alchemy: hello.kylieryan.com/drama Instagram: @kylieryan.mmc Website: KylieRyan.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kylieryan

Alex Charfen is the founder of The Brotherhood, A Society for Men, and the creator of Masculine Containment, a discipline that trains men to regulate themselves in real time. The work came out of the most confronting moment of his life. After years of therapy, personal development, and real effort in his marriage, his wife sat down with him. Not in a fight. Not in a therapist's office. She said, "I don't feel seen. I don't feel heard. I don't feel safe. And if something doesn't change, I can't do this anymore." Not long after, he sat down with her on the floor of their bedroom and asked her to tell him what the relationship had actually been like. No explaining. No fixing. No defending. Just staying present while she talked. They have done it nearly every day since. Alex takes Brett through everything that led there. Born in Mexico City and in the US by five, watching his family lose everything. Working swap meet stands next to a father who communicated in rage, silence, and punitive teasing. Bankruptcy with a one year old at home, then a rebuild that ended with the twenty-first fastest growing company in the country. And a marriage that worked from the outside while quietly eroding underneath. The Brotherhood is currently accepting interviews. Register at thebrotherhoodsociety.com Connect with Alex: Instagram: instagram.com/alexcharfen Facebook: facebook.com/alexcharfen1 TikTok: tiktok.com/@thealexcharfen Website: charfen.com Podcast: Masculine Containment podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/masculine-containment/id1872558844

Tom Krouse joined Donatos in 2000, spent ten years in marketing and growth leadership, and was named the fourth CEO in the company's history in October 2010. Over his tenure he nearly doubled revenue, increased profitability six times, and grew the brand past 460 locations in 29 states. Columbus CEO named him CEO of the Year in 2019. Before Donatos, he spent twelve years at Wendy's International and left as Vice President of Marketing. Then he handed it over. "I used to have a machine that I was responsible for that I helped build and fixed and added features to. And then there's no machine." In this conversation, Tom and Brett trace the line back. Losing his father at 21, just as the two of them had started having real conversations as adults. Sitting in the parking lot of the ad agency with his own name on the building, unable to get out of the car. The career counselor who told him what he already suspected. And what he finally understood about all of it: "everything was about external validation." The year since leaving has been a different kind of work. He turned down a private equity role that was flattering and lucrative, because it wasn't the thing. He's a singer songwriter, front man for Grassinine and the Tom Krouse Band, an adjunct professor at Ohio State's Fisher College of Business, and a co-founder of the Columbus Music Commission. He went into the transition knowing that part would be the hard part. "I've got to figure out how to do this better than I've seen people do it." A year on, he's still working out whether it's okay to sit in a coffee shop on a Tuesday afternoon with a book. Connect with Tom: Instagram: @tomkrouse New single: "More To The Story," out now Springsteen Tribute Show: August 7 at Natalie's Grandview. Tickets at nataliesgrandview.com Live at Columbus Clippers: August 14, performing "Hot Dog Boy" on the field with Joey Chestnut on cowbell Grassinine 20th Anniversary Show: September 24 at Mickey's Bar, Grandview

Nicole DiTommaso is the founder of Sauce Boss Gang, a woman owned brand built on the belief that confidence is the most powerful ingredient. More than a hot sauce company, Sauce Boss Gang is a movement that uses flavor as a vehicle for transformation. Every bottle represents a chapter of Nicole's personal journey, created to remind people that they have the power to begin again, embrace who they are, and live boldly. Nicole grew up being passed between Columbus and Cleveland, shuttled between two sides of a family that never stopped pulling, raised by a mom who was barely 18. She learned early to survive alone and never ask for help. By the time she was running operations for a multistate beauty franchise and managing 50 people, she had achieved everything she was supposed to and felt completely empty. When the burnout finally broke her, she said she couldn't hear herself anymore. Her inner compass was gone. What followed was a year of solitude. She meditated. She journaled. She cooked. Standing in her kitchen making a spicy pepper marinara, the idea arrived: she would build a brand around the one thing she had fought her whole life to reclaim. Confidence. Each of the five hot sauce flavors now carries a chapter on the back, and each chapter is a piece of what she was overcoming when she created it. Brett and Nicole get into what it costs to keep starting over, what happens when you can't trust your own read on things anymore, and why she thinks confidence is something you build rather than something you're handed. Follow Nicole Business Instagram: @saucebossgang Personal: @thefireqween Website: saucebossgang.com

Tim Corcoran is the founder of Purpose Mountain, where he works as a certified Nature Based Purpose Guide for people who feel a call from wild nature to discover why they're here. His path to the work was anything but linear. Raised in South Bend, Indiana, drawn to the woods as the one place his nervous system found peace, he earned a computer science degree from Purdue and was set up for a programmer's life. Instead, within twenty-four hours of graduating, he packed his truck and drove forty hours to the Navajo Reservation in northeast Arizona, chasing a calling he couldn't yet name. What followed was decades of study in earth-based spirituality. A year on the reservation. Training at Tom Brown Jr.'s Tracker School. A five-year apprenticeship at the Vermont Wilderness School, learning vision quest, grief healing, and the Lakota understanding that we are all related. In 2005 he co-founded Twin Eagles Wilderness School in Sandpoint, Idaho, with his wife Jeannine Tidwell. In 2018 he founded Purpose Mountain. He leads men's groups and rites of passage, works through the Ecology of Self and Voice Dialogue, and is a father of two. In this conversation, Brett and Tim trace the arc from a sensitive Midwest kid who was told he was too much to a guide who has run dozens of vision quests. They get into the difference between insight and integration, why a container of mentoring changes what a single ceremony cannot, and the danger Tim sees most in the healing world: getting so lost in rehearsing our wounds that we never reach the purpose they were pointing toward. As he puts it, quoting Jeannine, you can't be the container and be in the container at the same time. Underneath it all sits one conviction. Each of us carries a unique purpose, and it is never too late to say yes to it. Check Out Purpose Mountain: https://www.purposemountain.com/ Twin Eagles Wilderness School www.twineagles.org