Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.

I'm Anne Strange Champs.

And I'm Steve Paulson.

There's a saying that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

After all, it's the only economic order you and I have ever known.

And we all know how destructive capitalism can be,

exploiting workers, clear-cutting forests, polluting entire ecosystems all for

profit. And how much inequality is baked in, especially today, when the top 1% of U.S. households

owns more than 30% of America's wealth, and the bottom 50% owns just 2.5%.

But does it have to be this way?

I remember when I was talking to the CEO of one of the biggest banks in the world,

and this must have been back in about 1990, and he looked to me and said, Rebecca, you know,

I became a banker because I wanted to serve customers.

I thought it was about getting money to the people

who needed it. I did not realize it was about accumulating personal wealth on a global scale.

This is relatively new, and we don't have to run capitalism this way. We really do not. So what

else could it look like? This is Rebecca Henderson, a star professor at the Harvard Business School,

and she's consulted for some of the world's biggest corporations.

She served on the boards of major companies.

She's also a climate activist, so she knows exactly how devastating global warming is going to be,

and she's got a pretty realistic view of why business as usual has been so hard to

change. Which led her to write a book called Reimagining capitalism in a world on fire. And I have

...