I thought climate change was overblown.

Not a casual opinion. A considered one. I had spent decades inside corporate structures, watching how data gets weaponised for agendas on every side of every argument. I was skeptical of the volume. I thought the urgency was exaggerated and that business, if it got serious, could course-correct. That we just needed better leadership and smarter incentives.

I was wrong. But not in the way you might expect.

The first three seasons of this podcast lived at the surface level of climate change. What it is. Who can I blame. What’s causing it. What business could do differently about it. Useful ground to cover. Necessary, even. But surface level.

Season Four changed everything for me.

I went looking for deeper thinkers. People who had spent their careers not just studying climate, but studying the systems underneath it. And what they kept pointing me toward was not a new climate model or a better carbon accounting framework.

They pointed me toward the economic system itself.

Here’s what I’ve learned from those conversations. Climate change is neither the problem nor the disease. It’s a by-product and a symptom. So is social injustice. So is inequality. So is the rise of monopolies and oligarchs and the slow hollowing out of the middle class. So is patriarchy, in the structural sense of the word. These are not separate problems requiring separate solutions. They are all the logical output of the same system, running exactly as it was designed to run.

Industrial capitalism is not broken. It is working perfectly. It is doing precisely what a system does when it is built to pursue endless growth on a finite planet. The cancer doesn’t malfunction. It just consumes.

And we, as consumers, are not innocent bystanders. We bought the story that our worth lives in what we own and what we acquire. We funded the machine. We cheered for it. We are inside the loop.

That realisation sat heavily with me for a while. Because if the entire system is the problem, what exactly CAN we do?

A conversation with Simon Mont shifted something in me. We talked about power. About what we actually stand for when we strip away the strategy and the positioning and the careful language. (You can find our chat here in the back catalogue.) And what I came back to is what I have always come back to.

Stewardship. The highest good for all.

That hasn’t changed. But what I needed to go find had.

Season Five isn’t about big, scalable solutions. It is not about the celebrated case studies or the companies with beautifully designed impact reports and pledges they may or may not keep.

It’s about the people doing things that actually work, in places most of us have never heard of, at a scale that conventional business thinking would call too small to matter.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe.

The thinking that brought us to this point will not get us past it. We need different logic, not more of the same logic applied harder. And the people living that different logic right now aren’t the ones making headlines.

They’re the ones quietly building something that doesn’t have a case study yet. Something that can’t be franchised or taken to Series B. Something that works because it is rooted in a fundamentally different understanding of what we are here to do.

I need those people. We need those people. Because we also need hope. Real hope, not the motivational poster kind. The kind that’s earned by watching something small and true actually work.

So that’s where Season Five is going. Into the edges. Into the experiments. Into the thinking that most of us haven’t encountered yet. Not because it isn’t serious. Because it doesn’t speak the language of quarterly returns and net equity.

None of us gets out of this alone. And frankly, we’ve all got to do better. For the highest good. For all.

I’m not asking you to abandon the world we live in. I live in it too. I’m asking whether we’re willing to question what it’s actually for.

What would have to be true for you to believe the whole system needs new logic, not just better management?