Innerspace: Deep, Meaningful Conversations with Brett Kaufman

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...

Eric Zimmer's story reveals the complex path from rock bottom to redemption. Growing up as a gifted but troubled kid in Ohio, Eric's restless energy led him from childhood kleptomania to a devastating heroin addiction that left him homeless and facing multiple felonies. After getting sober and thriving for eight years, a devastating betrayal in his AA community led to a relapse that looked...

Recognized as one of the "100 Most Influential Women in Advertising History," Nancy Kramer built a marketing empire while trapped in the wrong life. After religious guilt and trauma led to a forced marriage, she escaped into a parallel existence as an entrepreneur. In this episode, Nancy shares her incredible journey of launching her agency in 1981 with seed funding from Apple. She opens u...

Laura Cooke had everything that should have made her happy — successful career, beautiful family, dream job as assistant head of school at Wellington School in Columbus. But her body was keeping score. Stress-related illnesses forced her to confront a hard truth: she was walking around pretending to be happy while making choices that led to misery. In this conversation, Laura shares her journey fr...

Jim McCarthy lived every high school athlete's dream until it became a nightmare. State championship winners, local celebrities, his teammate awarded the illustrious “Mr. Ohio". Then one phone call changed everything: their 15-year-old teammate Lorenzo Hunter was found shot dead, and two teammates were arrested for murder. Jim carried this story for twenty years, knowing the truth wasn&#39...

Brad Kaplan had never baked a cookie from scratch when he Googled "pumpkin desserts" for Thanksgiving 2018. Six years later, he owns two Lion Cubs Cookies locations in Columbus with a third on the way. This is the story of how an impulsive kid from Cleveland who became a reluctant civil engineer discovered his true calling through controlled experiments in his kitchen. Brad shares the thre...

Geoff Javer is a lifelong friend of Brett's, and in this episode, they sit down to unpack a journey that spans five decades. From growing up navigating childhood trauma to finding an identity as the "party kid" in high school, Geoff shares how he struggled to fit into the traditional academic box due to dyslexia. A major wake up call in college led to an 18 year career climbing the ran...

Gabby Goldach is a chiropractor, but she does not approach the body as a broken machine that needs fixing. She views the nervous system as a transmitter of life force, and her practice is designed to help your body remember how to heal itself. In this conversation, Brett and Gabby trace the full arc. They explore her childhood in Columbus, navigating her parents' divorce at twelve, and the pro...

Tricia Eastman — author, facilitator, and founder of Ancestral Heart — has spent her career bridging cultures, honoring initiation traditions, and supporting Indigenous-led land stewardship. Right now, she’s part of a grassroots campaign to preserve iboga, the most sacred plant of Gabon — and arguably one of the most significant on earth. Through Ancestral Heart, donations are flowing directly to...

Scott Levin is a tenured college professor, a lifelong friend of Brett’s, and someone who has learned to find profound comfort in life's unavoidable chaos. In this conversation, Brett and Scott trace the full arc: growing up in Ohio, the sudden loss of his father at 13, discovering Dostoevsky to escape the trap of 1980s materialism, moving to New York City just two weeks before 9/11, and the d...

Chantell Preston sold her healthcare company at 41 and thought she'd finally made it. What followed were the two hardest years of her life. In this episode, Chantell traces the full arc: a childhood defined by divorce, abandonment, and a controlling home in Oklahoma. A teenage relationship that turned physically abusive and why she couldn't leave. The drive to prove herself that became the...

Michael Shapiro grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. His grandmother survived Auschwitz. His grandfather was a Nazi slave soldier. By the time Michael was 12, he was self-medicating with drugs. By 15, he was having mystical experiences in the forest. By 48, he had become a Buddhist monk, a clinical psychologist, a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand, and the author of Truth Medicine: Healing and...

Jenny Shuman didn't map any of this out. She became a mother at 16. She picked up her first loom at a summer powwow in 1992. She spent years selling beadwork from a booth while her daughter danced beside her in full regalia. She built a quiet, intentional life in Michigan and then left all of it behind for Oregon, her husband, and a new beginning she couldn't quite see yet. Today, her work...

Ben Katt spent a decade building something rare: a contemplative community center in Seattle rooted in belonging, service, and inner life. From the outside, it looked like purpose-driven work at its best. Beneath the surface, the same old patterns were quietly running the show — achievement, performance, the hunger for approval. It took a single moment on a morning run and the words if you don&#39...

Chris Voss is a former FBI hostage negotiator, bestselling author of Never Split the Difference , and one of the world’s leading experts on high-stakes communication. In this conversation, Brett and Chris explore what negotiation really is and why most of us misunderstand it entirely. Before he was teaching executives and founders how to navigate boardrooms, Chris was negotiating with terrorists,...

Vanessa Bennett is a depth psychologist, therapist, and author of The Motherhood Myth. In this conversation, Brett and Vanessa go all the way back. Vanessa grew up as a parentified child in a single-parent home — the overachiever who learned early that love was something you earned through achievement, not something freely given. At 25, a close friend told her she always seemed angry. That one hon...

For years, The Gravity Podcast created space for meaningful conversations around business, creativity, and personal growth. But over the past year, something shifted. In this episode, Brett shares why he realized he was playing the external game — building, scaling, optimizing — and why he now wants to play a bigger game: the game of consciousness. After attending Abundance 360 and hearing Elon Mu...