The difference between having standards and settling.

Trina spent nearly two decades as a foster care social worker, then an attorney, watching families get "finalized" by the court system and then abandoned to figure out co-parenting alone. So she built BEH2O: an operating system for divorced families, borrowed straight from entrepreneurship frameworks like EOS. Then she went further, training an AI on her own decision-making process to build BeAligned Pro.

This conversation is about more than a startup. It's about funding a nonprofit through years of legal-practice debt, getting turned down by the same accelerator three times before getting in, and the moment a dying father and a grieving mother finally saw each other in her office because the system gave them no other way to.

There's a chemical in nearly every building, car, and grocery store in America and the world just agreed to phase it out. On this episode of The Disruption Lab, host Kevin McGinnis sits down with Tony and Casey from EARTH, an NSF Engineering Research Center led by the University of Kansas, to unpack the massive, mostly invisible transition happening in refrigerants and cooling technology.

They dig into why 90% of refrigerants leak into the atmosphere, why the industry is racing toward a 2029 supply cliff, and why captured refrigerant has become one of the most smuggled substances in the country. Along the way, Tony and Casey explain how a consortium of universities and industry giants like Chemours, Carrier, and Trane are working to close the gap between lab discovery and market impact, and what it will actually cost consumers when their AC breaks down.

It's a conversation about climate policy, supply chains, and innovation infrastructure hiding in plain sight.

Courtney hears 200 domestic violence cases a day. She has six months to work with, structurally, the maximum sentence her municipal court can impose, and she's spent over a decade building intervention programs, wellness courts, and a first-of-its-kind Fathers for Change program inside that constraint.

Then she co-founded a startup with a data scientist.

Thaddeus built data systems at Amazon, Cerner, and CVS Health before joining Courtney to build MAGIS: a platform combining speech recognition, AI analysis, outcome tracking, and grant management for courts. In this episode of The Disruption Lab, part of the Social Venture Studio Founder Series, Kevin McGinnis talks with Courtney and Thaddeus about what it takes to build technology inside one of the most cautious, high-stakes systems in the country: the courts. They dig into racial bias in AI risk-assessment tools, what it actually means to sell software to a judge, and what changes for the person standing in front of the bench when the system finally has the data to see them.

This is a conversation about power, trust, and what happens when the people inside a system decide to rebuild it from within.

Brandon has survived 12 strokes. Lindsay has been his care partner for 15 years. Together, they're the founders of Beyond This — a company that didn't exist 90 days ago and is already reshaping how the healthcare system handles disability, intimacy, and relationships.

In this episode of the Social Venture Studio Founder series, Kevin McGinnis talks with Brandon and Lindsay about losing and rebuilding identity, the five years it took Brandon to hug his wife again, and a staggering gap in care: 85% of people leaving therapy want help with relationships or sexual health, but only 5% ever get it from a therapist. Between 60 and 80% of relationships don't survive a disability.

Beyond This is built to change that math — using a workbook, a certification model, and a metaphor framework called "Levels of Spice" to help couples rebuild connection after a life-altering injury. This is a conversation about grief, love, co-founding with your spouse, and building something that found you before you found it.

After building some of advertising's most iconic campaigns — Sonic's "two guys," Southwest's "Now Free to Move" — Brian walked away from agency life to become the client. Eleven years later, he's still there, having built Garmin's 110-person in-house creative team from the ground up inside a famously engineering-led company.

This conversation goes past the campaign highlight reel into the real tension of in-housing: how to stay creatively hungry without an agency's survival pressure, how to earn trust from an organization that didn't believe in emotional storytelling, and why "thank you, Ecuador" became his go-to line for managing feedback from 20 people on a call. Brian also gets candid about AI's place in creative work, why authenticity is non-negotiable at Garmin, and the simple magazine flip-through that led to one of his favorite campaigns.

A rare inside look at what it actually takes to build — and defend — a creative culture inside a product company.

Nadia trained in haute couture at the Paris American Academy, the kind of centuries-old, precision-driven craftsmanship the fashion world has run on for generations. Then she came home and started growing textiles out of algae and kombucha.

On this episode of The Disruption Lab, host Kevin McGinnis talks with the founder of Biospoke about the unlikely path from traditional tailoring to biomaterial innovation, and what it actually takes to build a company at the intersection of science, sustainability, and craft. Nadia opens up about teaching herself through YouTube and late nights of trial and error, the greenwashing she sees plaguing the sustainable fashion industry, and why she believes changing consumer mindset matters more than shaming fast fashion. She also shares the reality of running three ventures as a solo founder: Biospoke, community workshops, and Lumo, a mapping app for textile waste, while relocating her business to a brand-new city.

A conversation about material, mission, and what it means to build something the industry hasn't figured out how to scale yet.

Why do the most promising innovation programs inside big companies keep getting killed — even when they're working? Host Kevin McGinnis shares the story of Hack Friday, a hackathon program he helped build inside Sprint that grew in popularity month after month, only to be shut down for not producing a "shippable" solution fast enough.

In this solo episode, Kevin argues that story isn't unique — it's a symptom of how corporations structure innovation itself. He draws on research from sociologist Ronald Burt, author Frans Johansson, and the economic concept of absorptive capacity to explain why proximity to new ideas, not a defined ROI, is what actually drives breakthroughs. He closes with four practical shifts leaders can make to protect innovation from getting measured to death before it has a chance to compound.

A candid, research-backed look at why innovation keeps getting killed for the wrong reasons — and what to do instead.

Most people hear "Kansas City" and think warehouses and highways. That's about 10% of the real story.

In this episode, Kevin sits down with Chris Gutierrez, President of KC SmartPort, who has spent 23 years building the case for why Kansas City is one of the most strategically positioned regions in North America — five Class I railroads, all four modes of freight transportation, and the only single-line railroad connecting Canada to Mexico, running straight through downtown.

They dig into how the CPKC merger reshaped the region overnight, why foreign trade zones are quietly driving billions in trade, and how nearshoring is pulling manufacturing back from overseas. But the conversation goes deeper than logistics — into automation, robotics, and the AI-driven data center boom creating an entirely new category of jobs nobody's training for yet.

This is a story about infrastructure, yes. But it's really a story about what gets built when a region stops waiting to be noticed.

Everyone keeps saying nuclear is "having a moment." But Kevin McGinnis has heard that before — and this time, the pressure isn't coming from where you'd expect.

In this live taping of The Disruption Lab, Kevin sits down with Jason Pottorff of Deep Fission, the company drilling reactors a mile underground outside Parsons, Kansas, and Dr. Amir Bahadori, who rebuilt Kansas State's nuclear engineering program from a handful of students into one of the fastest-growing programs in the country.

Together they unpack what's actually different this time: the staggering electricity demand created by AI and data centers, a workforce gap that requires tripling the entire sector by 2050, and a public-trust problem that decades of safety still haven't solved. Jason explains why putting a small reactor under a mile of water makes a meltdown nearly impossible — and why "innovation, not invention" is the real strategy. Amir makes the case that the hardest engineering problem in nuclear isn't technical at all. It's communication.

This is a conversation about systems change: how a 70-year-old technology gets a second chance, what an emerging "nuclear corridor" across Kansas and Missouri could mean, and the one thing both guests admit could send the whole industry backward overnight.