Innerspace: Deep, Meaningful Conversations with Brett Kaufman

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