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

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 geometry compass. The first mural that stayed on a community wall for five years instead of one month. The moment she learned her great-grandfather was the Grand Master Freemason of England. And the fires of August 8th, 2023, that she evacuated from and is still living with.

Gemma now lives upcountry in Kula, Maui, gathers red clay from the volcano, processes it into pigment, and paints large mandalas by hand with no grid and no spray cans, thousands of straight lines, each one a silent prayer.

She calls it painting with the blood of the earth. While she works, she asks the people around her what they need her to pray for, and she paints their names into the lines.

This episode is about what it costs to make your life match your calling, and what it looks like when someone finally stops judging the line and lets it become something.