Innerspace: Deep, Meaningful Conversations with Brett Kaufman

Gagan Timsina is a Columbus, Ohio real estate team leader and the founder of The Columbus Report. It’s a local media source he launched at just 22 and grew to nearly 50,000 followers in less than a year. He uses the platform as an incubation model for his real estate team, serving the community with useful information and turning earned trust into lasting relationships. His mission is to operation...

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 healt...

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...

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 rai...

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 Al...

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,...

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...

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 t...

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 few...

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 Hopkin...

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 e...

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 wi...

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 sai...

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 Interna...

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 th...

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 pr...

Gemma Danielle grew up thirty minutes from Stonehenge in a 250-year-old converted barn and was uprooted to America at eleven without warning. She rebuilt her life as a single mother and self-employed fine artist on the most isolated land mass on the planet, and this conversation follows the full arc of how she got there. The $10 healing event in a Denver bookstore that sent her home to pick up a g...

Greg Scheinman is the founder and CEO of Midlife Male, the premiere digital publication and lifestyle brand for men over 40, with a newsletter that reaches more than 50,000 men every week. He's the author of the bestselling book The Midlife Male, a keynote speaker on transformation and redefining success, and a coach to midlife CEOs, executives, and founders, with two company exits behind him....

Nate Ebner grew up between two worlds. School weeks in Columbus, and weekends and summers in Springfield, Ohio, working the family junkyard with his father Jeff. Lifting off railroad-tie dumbbells they welded themselves. Chasing robbers through the yard on Sunday mornings. Jeff Ebner was the kind of man who kept a notebook of every workout his son ever did, so they could look back together at what...

Emma Gilbert was nine years old when she found herself under her bed, in the depths of a depression no kid should have to carry. That is when she heard a voice, loud and clear: "You're not done yet. You have so much more to do." It snapped her out of the spiral, and she carried it with her. Even at nine, ten, eleven, she kept telling herself she had to keep creating. She grew up in Ala...

Former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges lived a life most could only dream of. Traveling with presidential candidates, hosting the first Republican debate of 2016, standing next to history on Air Force One. Then one July morning in 2020, the FBI was at his door with handcuffs. What followed was a federal trial that would test everything Matt thought he knew about himself. Offered a plea...

Chet Scott is the founder of Built to Lead, a coaching practice he started in 2002 to help high performers discover who they are at their core. A former tech executive, Chet's path changed in 1993 after a leadership course forced him to confront how he was actually perceived, and he has spent the years since studying human nature and high performance with business teams and sports teams alike....

Anthony Hughes struggled with dyslexia from an early age, often living in the shadow of his twin brother, who seemed to excel at everything Anthony found difficult. Fast forward thirty years, and Anthony had built Tech Elevator, a company that placed 6,000 people in software development careers. This conversation explores his winding path to entrepreneurial success, from getting rejected by Formul...

Cody Warren was arrested just one month before his college graduation. What followed were four years in prison and a choice: let the mistake define him or use it as a turning point to reshape his entire life. While incarcerated, Cody discovered endurance running by completing his first marathon behind prison walls, finding a new sense of purpose through suffering and discipline. Today, Cody is a h...

Leo Elliott's transformation into a master guitar builder is a remarkable story of second chances. In this conversation, Leo shares his journey from a curious kid in Dallas who loved taking things apart, through years of severe personal struggle, to becoming the founder of Scarlet Fire Guitars. After a winding path that included mining gold in Ghana, Leo crafted his first Jerry Garcia inspired...