Adam Tanaka: Permission to Play, Building for the Kid You Used to Be & Launching StorySpace

This week Trent sits down in studio with Adam Tanaka — entrepreneur, inventor, speaker, TEDx alum, and one of those rare humans whose whole life and work is rooted in a single mission: reconcile with the kid you used to be. Adam's story doesn't start with the wins.

It starts in a small West Tennessee town with a mom battling addiction, a dad working nonstop to keep the lights on, and a little boy who slipped on a backpack and crawled into the rose bushes by the house to imagine far-off lands. That escape — that play — became his survival mechanism. It later became his TEDx talk ("Permission to Play"), his life philosophy, and the foundation of everything he builds.

We trace the whole arc: drumming for money as a teenager, dropping out of college a year shy of his biology degree to tour with a metal band, scrubbing floors and ink buckets for a Nashville print shop, founding Scoot Nashville in 2006 to help scooter commuters keep their bikes running, and then in 2008 — overdrawn $350 in his bank account in the middle of a recession — starting Life and Limb Printing. No equipment. Screens held down by his feet. Curing shirts in a kitchen oven on a baking sheet "like cookies." Seventeen years later, the company was acquired in March 2025.

Now Adam is all in on Cave House Supply — the kids brand he started in his garage in 2015, named the day his best friend Josh's little boy Jet walked up and asked, "Mr. Adam, why do you print in a cave house?" After 10+ years of trial and error and a pivotal moment tabling for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's Tennessee chapter, Adam finally cracked what Cave House was meant to be: an ecosystem of analog and digital tools for kids — especially neurodivergent and highly imaginative kids — and the families who love them.

And just hours before we recorded, Cave House launched StorySpace, the V1 beta of a storytelling app that is "kid-powered, not AI-powered." Kids write the stories. Parents get an actionable dashboard. 28 founding families are testing it now, on the road to 100.

We also dig into Mind Your Business Labs, his hub for founders and business owners, and his current six-city speaking tour with DAX Expo (Dayton ✓, Chicago, Tampa, Nashville, Minneapolis) — including the moment in Dayton when he shut his laptop mid-talk and turned the whole room into a live, real-time advisory session.

Plus: his move to Asheville, NC after 21 years in Nashville, why those mountains "give you a hug," his partner Kelsey and pup Otto, and the importance of drowning out the noise so you can build what actually matters. What's going right in the world? Adam quotes Mr. Rogers — "Look for the helpers" — and reminds us they're not on the big screen, they're in your zoomed-in community, stepping out of victim mode and into ownership.

What is he grateful for? People doing the damn thing, his community, Kelsey and Otto, and the courage to keep collecting experiences.

Find Adam: cavehousesupply.com · adamtanaka.com · LinkedIn (Adam Tanaka) · Instagram @adamtanaka Shoutouts: Dr. Stuart Brown & the National Institute for Play, Amanda Banks (TEDx), Boondock Van Company (Cousin Ryan), DAX Expo, and the whole STP studio team — Katie, Stephanie, Josh, Cairo, Jessica, and Trent's parents.

Come see us on the square in Murfreesboro and check out spreadthepositive.net — we're just getting started. Bringing light to what is going right.