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

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.

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. The path there started with loss.

Greg lost his father to cancer at 17 and went off to college carrying it, then spent years numbing the grief instead of facing it. In his twenties he chased the film business in New York, got his start at Miramax, produced independent films, and made a movie dedicated to his dad. He built a sports children's video company out of the trunk of his car, landed licensing deals with the NFL, NBA, NHL, and NASCAR, brought in an investment from former Disney chief Michael Eisner, and sold it. Then he did the opposite of everything he had done and went into insurance, building a million dollar book of business, becoming a partner, and helping sell the firm in 2020. It was his biggest financial success and his least satisfying professional experience.

At 47, with resentment building and his wife telling him not to blow what they had built, he got his first coach and started writing what he now calls his Midlife Action Plan. It took thirty days to write and three years to follow, and from 47 to 50 his life changed in every category. The conversation moves through grief, entrepreneurship, fatherhood without a template, and what it actually takes to rebuild a life once you stop running from it, all of it grounded in the idea behind Midlife Male: most men plan the first half of their lives and have no plan at all for the second.

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 the work had built. He was also the kind of man who made everything an experience worth having. Nate remembers that time more clearly than he remembers most of high school.

The day before Nate decided to walk onto the Ohio State football team, he had the best conversation of his life with his dad. The next day, Jeff was murdered at the junkyard. Nate was 19. He dropped out of school and spent weeks in the dark, sitting near the weights they had built together, close to something he couldn't have come back from. Then his mom walked upstairs and said a few sentences that changed the entire direction of his life.

What followed is one of the more remarkable athletic careers of the last two decades. A walk-on at Ohio State under Jim Tressel. A sixth-round draft pick of Bill Belichick's New England Patriots. Three Super Bowl championships. The 2016 Olympics in Rio with the US rugby team. An All-Pro season. Now an author and part of the team at Goodwin, Nate tells the full story here: the junkyard, the grief, the grind, and what it looks like to carry someone with you all the way to the Super Bowl.

Connect with Nate:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ebs43/

Book: Finish Strong: A Father's Code and a Son's Path:

https://www.amazon.com/Finish-Strong-Fathers-Code-Sons/dp/0525560858

Goodwin: https://www.teamgoodwin.com/

Goodwin on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goteamgoodwin/

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 Alabaster, Alabama, about the smallest town you could get, with no art scene and no one around to show her that a life in art was even possible. Teachers told her to have a realistic career. Her own feelings rarely landed at home, where attention came when she created and words or tears got waved off with "you're fine." Art became the one place she was actually heard.

This conversation explores the relationship between childhood pain and creativity, what it does to a kid to grow up unheard, and how a family can change when someone finally speaks up. Emma talks about the depression that still shows up today and still fuels her work, the parents who later apologized and learned to listen, and the long road from selling her first painting at twelve to building a real business around her art.

Now she travels the country painting large-scale murals, works with a team of ten contractors, and is building toward the day she gets to be just the talent. This one is about turning what nearly broke you into the thing that defines you, and why the voice that saves you can become the work of your life.

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 deal that would have kept him out of prison, he turned it down rather than confess in open court to something he says wasn’t true. He went to trial, he lost, and, despite appeals that took him all the way to the United States Supreme Court, he ended up serving twenty-seven months in federal prison.

In this raw, unfiltered conversation - his first since coming home - Matt opens up about the daily emails he wrote to his wife Kate, that became a lifeline for both of them, and what he learned about what actually matters when the comforts of life are taken away. This isn't a story about politics. It's about a human being tested in the crucible, and facing the question “who are you?” then being brave enough to find that answer – and trust it.

Matt's story is one of the most powerful examples of reckoning, resilience, and human connection we've ever shared on Innerspace. A reminder that sometimes losing “everything” is the surest way to find what's real.

Learn more: joininnerspace.com

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. His work has grown to include a book, an app, and a team of coaches he calls builders.

In this conversation, Chet shares his philosophy of "oneness within, then oneness with others," and why most people stay stuck blaming external circumstances instead of doing the harder inner work. He and Brett get into his mantra "live hard, love harder," why the work is "for the few," what happens when clients plateau and stop growing, and why learning to run toward hard conversations instead of away from them is what separates chronic pain from acute healing. Chet also talks about the power of curiosity, the seven good minutes exercise that has transformed relationships, and why the people you invest in most are sometimes "built to leave."

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 Formula One racing to the mentor who pushed him to take the leap.

Prior to his current venture, Anthony was a two-time edtech entrepreneur with two successful exits: Tech Elevator (acquired by Stride) and The Software Guild (acquired by Wiley). Before that, he partnered with MIT at JumpStart to found a mentoring program that helped over 100 early-stage companies raise $45M in capital.

Today, Anthony is the Co-founder and CEO of VITALS. VITALS is a personality-powered self-awareness platform that helps you make better decisions, build stronger relationships, and find work that actually fits. It starts with a deep assessment across six dimensions (Values, Interests, Temperament, Action Style, Learning Style, and Social Style) and translates what you learn into highly actionable guidance.

Sign up for free at: www.vitals.me

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 husband, father, and a entrepreneur. He is the acting CEO of Two Men & A Vacuum, a commercial cleaning company he started from the ground up in 2012 that now employs over 200 people. He is also the founder of Peak + Restore, a performance and recovery company dedicated to helping others push their physical and mental limits.

From the prison yard to completing some of the world's toughest ultramarathons, including the Moab 240 and Cocodona 250, Cody’s story is a masterclass in redemption. In this raw conversation, we explore trauma, growth, and the mindset required to rebuild yourself. Cody’s mission is simple: help others find their "why," because when you find your why, you find your purpose.

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 custom guitar. When he took it to Bryant "Pablo" Russell at the iconic Charley's Guitar Shop, the restoration expert was completely blown away. That validation sparked a career that eventually led Leo to track down and work directly with the legendary Doug Irwin.

Whether you are interested in guitar building, the Grateful Dead legacy, or incredible human resilience, this episode shows that sometimes the longest detours lead you exactly where you are supposed to be.