In January 2026, Mark Carney stood at Davos and said what most people in power have spent years carefully not saying: the old model isn't coming back, and nostalgia isn't a plan.

We had a lot of thoughts. Many of them. Some unprintable.

Episode 02 of Doing Good, Badly starts there. Because that speech didn't come out of nowhere. It came after decades of something building, cresting, and then quietly collapsing. The Net Zero Banking Alliance. ESG as a framework. The brief, shining moment when Larry Fink mentioned it 26 times in one letter. And then once. And then zero.

This is the story of how we got here, what capitalist realism has to do with it, and why two sustainability consultants who have seen this from the inside are still, against all available evidence, stubbornly optimistic

Capitalism is a vibe. Not a law of physics, not a natural force, not an inevitability handed down from somewhere above the clouds. A vibe. A constructed system that won by convincing almost everyone participating in it that there was never any other option, and that imagining one was either naive or dangerous or both. And once you actually see that you cannot unsee it.

So when Mark Carney walked into Davos in January 2026 and said nostalgia is not a strategy, we needed to understand what that speech was actually standing on. Because behind it is a story that moves fast and ends badly. Forty-three banks. Forty trillion dollars. And that is just one piece of the story. But this episode goes a lot deeper than one alliance and its very public collapse.

We go back to the actual roots of the debate. The Friedman doctrine. The Berle-Dodd argument about who a corporation actually exists to serve. The ninety-nineties and the slow, scrappy rise of the triple bottom line, B Corps, and the idea that business might owe something to someone beyond its shareholders.

We talk about what the third path might actually look like, structurally and culturally, not just as a concept but as a real thing that real organizations are already building. And we ask what it means to stay optimistic in this specific moment when the urgency has quietly left the conversation and the people being baddies are, as Kristy puts it, very good at being baddies.¹

And what we wanted to understand is whether a speech, even a genuinely good one, can tear a hole in a curtain that thick².

Spoiler: we're still optimistic³. We're also aware that's a little embarrassing at this point. We're choosing to call it stubborn. It sounds better.

The long answer is the episode.

¹ It is what it is.
² Spoiler within the spoiler: curtains are surprisingly resilient.
³ "Stubbornly optimistic" is not a clinical diagnosis. Probably.

The work isn't done. Neither are we. See you next episode.

Joanna & Kristy