🎙️ Episode: Get Off the Fence – Leadership Lessons for a Warming World

What happens when leadership replaces drama with disciplined choice?

This week, I sit down with Charles Sheppard — author, professor of leadership, and founder of World Bridge University — to explore how systems thinking can help us move from confusion to clarity in the face of climate change.

Charlie has spent decades helping people and organizations escape the Drama Triangle — the cycle of Victim, Rescuer, and Adversary — and replace it with The Leadership Triangle: Visionary, Catalyst, and Coach. Now he’s applying that same framework to the climate crisis.

We talk about why so many people still sit on the fence, how disinformation and social media shape our beliefs, and what it means to lead — in our families, workplaces, and communities — when the stakes couldn’t be higher.

💬 In this episode:

• Why leadership and systems thinking are key to tackling the climate crisis
• How to reach the “middle 60%” who still sit on the fence
• The role of language, storytelling, and education in climate communication
• What we can learn from his new venture, World Bridge University
• How AI (and even biotech!) fit into his vision for a better future

🌍 About Charles Sheppard

Charles Sheppard is a Professor of Leadership, author of Get Off the Fence and Save Your Drama for Your Mama, and founder of World Bridge University. He’s also the cofounder of Arjuna Therapeutics, a biotech company developing breakthrough cancer treatments — and a passionate advocate for systems thinking, education reform, and climate leadership.

🪴 Connect with Charles

• Website
• Book: Get Off the Fence – Amazon
• LinkedIn
• World Bridge University
• Arjuna Therapeutics

🌟 If you enjoyed this episode

Please share it with a friend or colleague who’s ready to get off the fence.

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Want to be a guest on Stories for the future: Beyond the Bubble? Send Veslemoy Klavenes-Berge a message on PodMatch.

You can always find more information about the podcast and my work on storiesforthefuture.com

Hello and welcome back to Stories for the Future, the podcast where we step outside our bubbles, connect with different perspectives, and explore meaningful work in our changing world.

Today's guest has spent decades helping leaders make better choices and avoid unnecessary conflict.

And now he's using these same ideas to tackle climate change.

Charles shepherd, or Charlie, as he prefers, teaches leadership.

He wrote the book get off the Fence, which is the main focus for this episode, and he started World Bridge University.

He's also helping build a biotech company that's working on a new way to treat cancer and possibly create clean energy in the future.

Nothing less.

In this conversation, we explore how good.

Leadership can cut through confusion, how the same thinking applies to both climate and cancer research, and why making a clear decision might be the most important thing leaders can do right now.

By the way, this recording was done early summer this year, so it's been a while.

But related to the state of the planet and climate change in particular, I.

Doubt that that much has change since then.

So the content is still highly relevant.

And because Charlie and I had so much to talk about, this episode got rather long and I had to do some cuts, unfortunately.

And that's why this conversation starts directly with what is the focus of the episode, namely climate change and to be more specific, the local climate in California where Charlie lives.

Let's get into it.

Los Angeles has had a pretty rough go, especially if you think back to the Palisades fires.

Part of what we have to deal with in the world is we have to think about where we're living.

We have to think about flood risk, we have to think about insurance risk, we have to think about tornadoes and the amount of weather that's coming at us.

And if anybody wants to think about whether climate change is actually happening or not, go talk to insurance agencies.

I have friends that own wineries that are having a hard time because they're in a higher risk fire zone, getting the insurance to cover their ability to do the farming, something that never even entered into their head.

They're thinking about selling their winery mainly because of the insurance on the land.

And as somebody that I have a property in the mountains, very difficult to get insurance for it because it's in a higher risk fire zone.

But where I personally am living, I'm on a lagoon that goes out to the San Francisco Bay.

For me personally, it's great, but I do think that we have to enter into the conversation for everybody across the world about what's going to be happening and can you survive a certain level of economic collapse Most of our infrastructure is built along waterways, and most of those waterways are actually oceans.

Because the city's built.

There's a combination of a river coming down for fresh water and an ocean for transportation and trade.

And so that's where the major centers in the world's infrastructure is in.

So if we have oceans rising or increases, fire zones, the economic impact is just extraordinary.

And insurance companies will always make money, so they are massively raising their rates because of the risk factor.

And the risk factors are only going to get more and more pronounced.

So I think choosing where you live, choosing to be in an environment where you're mitigating the risk of whatever the heat is or the more aggressive climate experiences are, it's going to be an important part of what we do to create our societies and also create the environment where you want to raise your children.

Yeah.

Yes.

So true.

To get a better picture of you and why you do what you do today, you have worked in leadership for many years, helping companies work better together and also solve problems and negotiations and things like that.

Now you, you're writing about climate change and you're also starting a company that works on cancer treatment.

So can you connect the dots for us and what's the thread in all the different parts of your work?

I actually think it goes back to systems thinking.

My background is in both two worlds.

My undergraduate degree was in agricultural economics, farming practices, talking about systems, and those systems of best practices in agriculture have to deal with living systems and farming and what it is, a very intricate system that interrelates with the weather.

My minor was in computer sciences, and if you look at systems, there was a whole thread through and I can actually still write in Cobol and Fortran, even though those are pretty dead languages.

I'm just dating myself now, but I got to work inside of the computer industry right when it was taking off and working at Wang Laboratories and Burroughs Corporation.

Before that, I was able to look at that systems architecture of bringing in a mainframe or a processor to be more efficient in how either schools were being run or banks were operating.

All of these things lead to an insight that everything is systems thinking.

And if you can become good at systems thinking, you can really unlock a lot of value in the world.

I got put into a manager's job pretty early and quickly found out I didn't know what I was doing.

And that got me down the love of leadership.

And I started studying a lot of different obscure behavioral sciences.

And that's where I found my love of developing people.

And that's where I decided to make a career.

So I'm a professor of leadership and I teach leadership inside of organizations and universities.

And just this year I decided to start my own university.

So I've got that.

I have the cancer startup which is again systems.

And I think that in my leadership work and the work that I do around leadership, I had an aha moment where I was doing a two week leadership development program with executives, where we surveyed the executives before they went into the training and after they went into the training, we discovered the people that needed the training the most embraced it the least.

And the people that needed it the least embraced it the most.

And so as an educator, I felt like I wasn't doing the best job that was out of Rockhurst University in Kansas.

We were doing it through the executive MBA program.

And so at the time, most of the theory was here's what a manager is, here's what a leader is.

And so that was the contrast.

A great way to learn something is to contrast it with something el so for me, the manager vs leader contrast wasn't that great because the behaviors of good managers and good leaders are usually the same behaviors.

And that's what led me down to the research of the drama triangle.

I had to change the language of it for business environments where I changed it to adversary, rescuer and victim as contrasted to somebody who's being a visionary, a coach and a catalyst.

And I had this moment when I was having a conversation with somebody about climate change.

And if you think about large scale systems thinking, nature is your best educator as far as large scale systems thinking.

And I went and I was having a conversation with them and I felt one, pretty powerless, two, I really didn't have a point of view.

And three, I found myself down into kind of the victim role.

Is it related to the environment?

I felt too small.

I felt like it couldn't make a difference.

I felt like I didn't have a point of view around it.

And I realized something.

I didn't really have a vision about what my thinking had arrived at, about one of the challenges and the problems of the world, which is climate.

Every other issue is from my perspective.

If you look at it from a system standpoint, you can solve a lot of other issues if you're working in an environment that's sustainable, right?

And it's very difficult.

Healthcare is going to be harder, safety is going to be harder, farming is going to be harder, education, everything gets harder and more difficult when we destroy the ecosystem.

So for me I went, huh, what are my superpowers.

I know story, I know metaphor.

I know how to work at influencing the unconscious parts of the brain.

So I decided to write a book.

There's a lot of people on the fence as it relates to climate change.

So the title of the book is get off the Fence.

And the impetus behind that is we've got to make a choice.

And part of it is inviting people to develop their own vision for what they want to do with climate change and how they can be one of the voices in helping us shift.

It will be a political solution.

There's no way to.

I don't think we're going to technologically solve our way out of this without the right type of government intervention.

Don't think that individuals are going to be able to get us out of this.

But 100%, we're going to have to have our government put policies in place that are supportive of doing the right behaviors.

And they already that's the purpose of government.

Now.

Governments don't do anything other than what we demand.

And we just had an election in the United States and whether you were a Republican or a Democrat, climate crisis or the climate change issue was I think 13 out of 13 if you were on the Republican side, but it was still fourth if you were a Democrat.

In my mind, it needs to be number one for both parties.

And challenge with it is it's not an immediate need.

Right.

It isn't not something that stares at us in the face every day unless you're trying to get an insurance policy on your house in high risk areas.

So what needs to happen is more people have to be inspired to make it the number one issue.

And my question is always, do you love your children and do you love your grandchildren?

If you're old enough, if you're lucky enough to have grandchildren, because the environment that they're going to inherit is going to be very, very different than the one that you.

So the title get off the fence.

Who do you see as these people on the fence?

Is that all of us?

I think there's probably about maybe 10%, maybe 10% to 20% of people who are actively climate change deniers.

Right.

They just deny that it's happening.

There's been a huge, massive amount of disinformation that has come down the pipeline and in some ways inefficiencies in the climate movement about messaging it.

There are people that actively climate change deny and there's some people that have gotten elected by being climate change deniers.

At least in the United States.

There's also people that really get it.

There's probably 20% of the people that get get it that go, oh my gosh, we actually have to make this an issue.

We actually have to look at renewable energy thinking about things or even nonrenewable.

Right now in nuclear energy in China, they're putting in about 8x what the United States is building.

And so nuclear is one option, even oil and gas.

So here's the thing.

I'm not against oil and gas.

I just wanted to price.

I want it to be priced that if I'm going to put carbon into the atmosphere, I should remove it.

Just like if I were to put.

There was a.

Somebody in Marin here had a huge fire in their warehouse and in it were all types of solvents and gases and other things that a hazmat unit had to come out after the fire to keep it from going into the water.

Right.

It was $100,000 bill.

He has to pay for that.

Right.

He was storing it.

It was potentially a risk of going into the water.

So we charge people for poisoning our rivers, streams, oceans.

Right.

There is a cost that goes to that and we just accept it.

You probably pay either through fees or your government to have your garbage removed.

It's not free.

At least here it's not free.

It's either going to be paid in fees or taxes or some form of services.

But there are people that get paid money to remove that.

And so they get paid whether it's by government or city, state, national.

So we pay to have our garbage removed from our environment.

We pay to have hazards removed from our drinking water.

If you go back to the River Thames, it was a huge.

Some of the massive destruction of life happened because they were using the Thames as a sewer.

You can't do that anymore.

So we're aware of this, but we don't apply it to the sky.

And right now I'm alive because I'm exchanging gases with the atmosphere.

Right.

That is a part of our environment and our ecosystem.

I think it was Al Gore that stated, and I love this line, the sky is not your free sewer.

Yeah, we treat it as such.

So it's important to get that middle 60% that's kind of on the fence.

Climate change deniers think that they're locked into an ideological point of view that is attached to their identity.

And there's people that argue for flat earth people that just aren't going to be changed as far as their point of view is concerned.

This is where I believe whether you're conservative or Liberal in any organization or government, if you think about their word conservative, it's to conserve.

And the first thing is, at least in the United States, it was Teddy Roosevelt that created the National Park System.

He conserved that land for future generations.

So I believe it's important for us to help inspire the middle 60% into going, oh, this is actually an important issue just economically.

Right.

If you look back to the United States, there was actually something that happened called the Great Depression and your retirement survive a Great Depression.

I haven't had it in my lifetime, but my father did.

I used to ask him, how come you didn't buy more land in California?

He goes, why aren't you buying land now?

And I go, well, it's so expensive.

He goes, one that's what I thought.

And I actually had to live through the Depression.

So it is a mindset where people don't realize that if we were to stop growth and if there were to be these disasters are expensive, it takes out our infrastructure.

And if the climate is going to be challenging enough around the world, as our world becomes more interlocked as a global economy, there are effects that will affect your pocketbook.

So I believe that there's an investment to be made and that we can make it in the domain of climate and everyone would benefit.

Thinking about those 60% sitting on the fence there, this is a question I ask myself all the time.

Not everyone has the same social media feed as I do or you do.

We're kind of in this algorithm, social bubbles, everything.

So just with this podcast, I always ask myself, how do I reach the people who are not in my choir with your book as well, how do you think?

And then tied to this question is actually your work with the Potential Energy Coalition, Because I was on their website, I hadn't heard about them before, and they spend a lot of money to help people understand climate change better.

And the communication and the way that we talk about it, the narrative.

So what's your plan to reach all these people on the fence?

Because they're the ones who should be reading the book.

I think John Marshall, who founded the Potential Energy Coalition, I love his story.

He was the head of strategy for a lot of large consulting firms and would design advertising campaigns for Coca Cola.

And he was an amazing marketer, did extraordinarily well.

Took his kids on a sailboat for a couple years and sailed the oceans and raised some amazing young men.

And they came to him one day and they basically said, dad, you're one of the best at advertising in the world.

We need you.

And when they say we need you, it was a little bit like planet Earth needs you.

We need your voice in this game.

And John's advertising genius and adept at linguistics and knows how to shift things philosophically.

And so he started an advertising agency but for Planet Earth, and that's the Potential Energy Coalition and has raised a lot of money and is shifting the voice.

And he does it in a very targeted way.

They shift policy, they shift mindsets, they're using the vehicle of advertising to actually shape public opinion.

He's done it extraordinarily well.

Now he does the research that lets you know how to actually talk to somebody who's denying the climate.

And he figured out ways of actually engaging with people.

And sometimes it's just a turn of phrase.

Instead of calling something a natural disaster, they're calling it unnatural disasters or unnatural disasters.

And so it's just a subtle shift, but it's an important shift.

It's just like global warming.

They actually took Al Gore's presentation Inconvenient Truth, global warming, and it got shifted to climate change.

And if you think about it, that's a very sophisticated concept, climate change.

The climate changes every day.

Well, no, actually the weather changes every day, the climate doesn't.

But that distinction was very hard for people to make.

And when climate is shifting the way that it does a lot of places where media is generated, hey, it's colder where we're at, right?

So what's this warming thing when we're personally colder?

And it was in some ways a very devious shift.

And so that same level of insight, precision is something that the Potential Energy Coalition brings to the conversation in a way to help create education.

And I think that education is critical.

If I think from my perspective as a professor of leadership, critical thinking and reasoning is important.

And you talked about how people get the same news over and over again based upon their feed.

Well, this is something that is new as far as our own ability to discern information.

I think back to people were upset about the choices that Nazi controlled Germany made during World War II.

And there was a lot of blowback.

But it was the first time that movies were used as propaganda.

Right?

Movies had never been used before as a propaganda device.

And so if you saw it on the screen, it was true.

We now know if I see a movie with Godzilla, that he doesn't exist.

Right.

We've been able to cognitively disassociate, but back then that didn't exist.

So now with social media and kind of the insidious aspect of social media.

If you look at the larger players of it.

YouTube will feed you the videos that you watch because they want your advertising dollars.

Meta will feed you advertising of the videos that you want.

And the videos that sell best reinforce your belief system and are negative, those two things.

So if you get reinforcing negative, you get eyeballs on the screen and they make money.

And so the science of it is insidious.

And what happens is we're influencing the world in a way that's not getting the best thought or the most accurate information out to the world.

You get only your point of view and that's all you're getting fed.

Or you'll get the opposite point of view, but it'll be fed to you in a negative way, which reinforces the belief system.

And nobody's ever had that before.

And if my friends and family members, my community is actually believing the exact same thing that I'm believing because I can see the likes.

Right.

So now you've got social proof.

Yeah.

Of the people that I know and trust and love that are actually believing the exact same thing.

So choices are being made that are not that elegant.

And this is where for me as an educator and one of the things that we teach is critical thinking and reasoning.

I wrote, I think I did a four part LinkedIn newsletter.

The 48 questions you have to ask yourself to actually think critically and get past your own biases.

My job is in the education and if I can create more leaders, whether it's around climate or whatever somebody's passionate about, how do they actually lead from a place of understanding that everything they're doing is inside of a system.

I've done my job and I'm going to support organizations like the Potential Energy Coalition any way that I can because I'm just, I'm such a fan and advocate of, of what they're creating and how they're creating it.

And even though my book is.

Brought everything together right.

So that it's a, you know, we talk about systems thinking.

The back of the book there is the interlocking nature of how we can create ecocide.

And putting carbon into the atmosphere affects fires.

Fires affect actually the amount of ice and the heat and, and it affects the oceans and there's an interlocking system that's accelerating.

Well, most people don't realize the world would be hotter right now.

The, one of the major carbon sinks of the world is actually the oceans right now.

So the oceans are absorbing carbon if your body dropped and we, we've got A drop in the PH of the oceans which is affecting things like phytoplankton.

Phytoplankton actually produce 50 to 70% of our oxygen.

Right.

But the ocean's PH has dropped.

If your body, right, which is mainly made up of water, dropped the same PH as the ocean, you would be dead.

So we run the collapse if in some ways we hit some tipping point of phytoplankton can survive in the more acidic Ocean.

We're talking 95% of terrestrial and aquatic life.

So I do mean to scare people, but it's true, it's not inaccurate and I don't see enough people talking about it.

I don't see it being on the forefront because it's not in front of me right now.

We understand the fires when they rip through our communities, we understand hurricanes, we understand floods because of the immediacy.

But we're not moving out into the future.

So it's really important that we do that.

Yeah.

Yes.

And speaking of which, you mentioned education and you also said in a short sentence there that you actually created the university.

That's a big thing.

So you have to tell us about World Bridge University and how does that come into the mix?

I got a cold email from somebody that was looking for a professor in the United States.

They had EU and UK accreditation and they wanted to find somebody to partner with for creating a university in the United States to establish the USA accreditation.

So it's a long journey, but it's what I'm passionate about.

I love.

After four decades of teaching mainly in corporations, I went, huh?

What could I do to take a modern executive MBA and make it accessible to people around the world?

So they're getting kind of cutting edge.

A lot of these leaders already have MBAs and we're still able to close the gap in the skill sets they need to get to the highest levels.

I decided, okay, I want to open up and start a university in the United States and give people an opportunity that can't afford.

Right.

You think about the cost of flying to the United States, you think about the cost of enrolling in a physical campus.

I could offer something virtual.

And this happened out of COVID for myself.

I would have never said that I could create the same type of educational experience virtually as I could in person.

And I got proved wrong.

I had clients that had actually had our in person program which is teaches amazing program called Leadership as a Choice.

It's been translated in 13 languages, is taught all around the world.

And we've gone around the world multiple times teaching it to individuals and ended up having to teach it virtually.

And the data came back that people appreciated the learning virtually more than even the in person program.

And partly because the cost of bringing everybody together for the in person program was a lot higher.

But also when we have that cost of bringing everybody together and this was a three day program.

When we divided that program into hour long lectures and spread it out into microlearning, the stickiness of the content went through the roof.

We were able to create through microlearning a better outcome because people were learning a particular behavior.

So my executive MBA is 240 micro lectures that people can do every morning.

There are eight to 12 minutes of lecture.

People practice the behavior during the day.

At the end of the day they write insights of actually doing the behavior.

And then we have a few weekend but again, virtual experiential learning that we can't get to any other way.

And I'll match that education against any in person curriculum anywhere.

It's proven now.

And so if you think back to even your own academic career, if you think back honestly, how much of your education was time wasted?

Oh yeah, I don't dare think about it.

I know we paid an extraordinary amount of money to have our time wasted.

The academic institutions waste.

They waste so much time in inefficient learning.

Everything.

Look at it.

It's a crime to waste your time.

I just need for, just could be reimagined almost all MBA programs and executive MBA programs because I've taught, taught at usf University of San Francisco and Holt International Business School.

They're based upon the same model, right?

There are always case studies from Stanford and Harvard.

It's a case model, right.

The lectures are PowerPoint slides.

You've got to take notes as the lecture's happening.

It's the same academic model that's been done forever.

And you go, oh my gosh, do I have a good professor or a bad professor?

It's so time inefficient.

It's broken.

I can teach things right now through we embrace AI.

If I want to teach somebody to do the calculation, you've got to know enough to do an internal rate of return.

But using AI to teach an internal rate of return is better than me teaching it.

There are things that we can make that are more efficient that will have a huge impact in people's education going forward.

So that's the premise behind World Bridge.

We don't waste your time, we don't waste your money.

We get you an accredited, depends on where you're at.

We can get you in eu, UK or USA through our.

Using a partner in the USA now takes a number of years.

I just launched it this year.

It is a time efficient, cost efficient program that actually gets the behaviors that are the differences that make a difference.

AI is coming whether you like it or not.

AI is already here.

Most students, whether they're using some AI rewriter or whatever, submitting papers with AI, we want people to learn how to use it well, stop them from using it.

And there's ways that you can use it as a thought partner and putting together ideas.

I used it as a thought partner to write get off the fence.

One of my powers is metaphors.

And there's 31 chapters in here.

I was using Systems Thinking's metaphor.

So I would put in all the research.

I wrote the facts and asked the question, come up with a metaphor.

They want to make it easy for somebody to understand the scientific information.

Some of the metaphors were mine because I understand the power of metaphoric structure.

But when I needed a thought partner, when I got stuck, it came up with unique novel.

I go, give me 10 different metaphors to convey this information.

And then I could choose one that's a thought partner.

And it made writing the book of what's a complex system that much easier.

I'm using it.

There's ways to use it well.

We're going to teach our students to use it well.

Yeah.

How do you use it in a way that unlocks value for yourself and for whatever it is you want to accomplish?

Because it's not.

It's only getting smarter.

If you look at.

In my career, I was with computers, then I was with microcomputers and then personal computers, and then there was the Internet and then there was mobile.

Right.

This thing is exploding faster than any explosion that ever happened in my past as far as adoption is concerned.

So we want to use it and we want to use it well.

We've incorporated it in part of our executive mba.

Interesting.

So people can actually enroll in this.

It's open and you already have students.

Yeah, we haven't started the first cohort.

It'll be this fall.

All right, so fall.

We'll do the first cohort.

And we're enrolling right now.

And it's awesome.

You ask anybody what the most valuable part of their MBA was, that would be the relationships that they formed with other smart, talented individuals.

So it's the Network.

So that's the problem with most asynchronous online virtual MBAs.

It's asynchronous.

And so you don't have the social learning which is such a powerful part.

We pioneered this inside of the corporations where we, when we teach a high potential program or we're rolling out, we roll out this program like we're doing with the executive MBA in micro lectures with a cohort of individuals.

So the corporations that hire us, their high potentials, no longer have the ability to go off and do a high potential training.

I mean it's too inefficient for time also.

So we do this exact same thing.

We'll put the high potentials into a program, we'll teach a lecture of a concept, we give them the behaviors to practice, they practice it, they come back, they share what they've learned.

But you get a cohort learning which accelerates the learning.

So that cohort builds relationships.

So everything that you want about the value of education in a remote environment, whether it's embracing artificial intelligence, whether it's social learning, the most important one is we've decoded the behaviors that are the differences that make a difference.

If you want to develop more presence, if you want to develop that kind of secret sauce that has people show up inside of a room where everybody turns and looks, we've actually engineered a behavioral sequence to make that happen.

Interesting.

Yeah, the differences that make a difference.

Yeah, that's good.

I have to ask you a little bit about this next topic because I think it's personal to most of us these days.

So this company you co founded, Arjuna Therapeutics.

Say it again?

Arjuna.

Arjuna.

Arjuna Therapeutics.

That's a hard word for a Norwegian to say.

So okay, but that's is about targeting aggressive cancers at the mitochondrial level.

But you also, when we talked last time, you spoke about the energy potential of that same molecule and I just thought that was so fascinating.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and what, what is it.

That you're doing at the University of Santiago?

One of our co founders, scientific co founders, developed a molecule, maybe 25 years of research, of covalently bonding heavy metal atoms and had a breakthrough in a process.

And interestingly, it was first developed for industrial applications.

And one of the industrial applications they're looking at is actually adding it into water, applying sunlight so that it's at an energy efficient level of separating hydrogen from oxygen molecules.

It's got the potential of creating clean energy at scale.

It's pretty cool.

That's cool.

Yeah.

They were starting to examine some of the aspects of the molecule because it's not something that's found in nature.

Right.

This is not something that nature produces.

It's got to be built from an artificial standpoint.

And it had a catalytic property that the medical department was looking at.

And it turns out an oncologist started playing with it and was looking at it and going, oh my gosh, this has got some amazing aspects.

And we formed out, licensed the technology with myself and my co founders.

We were able to license the technology to form a company that's actually in the oncology space.

We founded this a while ago.

We went through a lot of capital building the ability to manufacture it.

We're talking about a molecule that's five atoms.

And it is not easy.

The material science side of this is really complex and it's not easy to make.

But we've now made it in batches and it's stable.

And we're getting incredible results back with aggressive cancers.

Most aggressive cancers have what's called a high level of reactive oxygen species.

And with this high Ross element, it's the aggressive cancers that kill you.

Yeah.

When a cancer goes metastatic, the metastatic nature is they're high Ross cancers, we sever.

Right.

And the two redox systems.

So these are the ways that the cancer cell stays alive.

We use the metaphor of a Ferrari.

These cancer cells are like Ferraris.

They go really fast, but they have really good brake systems.

Right.

So it can go fast and brake to stay alive.

Well, we sever both brake lines, which creates apoptosis.

And we're seeing really good results in very difficult to treat cancers.

For only five atoms, we get across the blood brain barrier.

So when cancers metastasize and go show up in the brain, we're able to have that as a positive effect.

We've got another molecule that we haven't manufactured yet.

But in the lab, it's testing out where with chemotherapy, we could do 1/8th dose of, say, something like cisplatin and have the same therapeutic effect.

So we've got multiple molecules stacked up in this arena.

And what's happened is it's a known pathway.

If you could interrupt the metabolic engine of a cancer cell, you could actually make cancer a manageable disease.

The problem is if you're messing up the metabolic engine of a cancer cell, you're messing up the metabolic engine of a healthy cell.

It turns out our catalyst is only looking and targeting the high Ross, which are cancer cell, so it doesn't see the unhealthy cell.

So it doesn't have the same impact, we hope.

What will make cancer manageable disease?

The same thing that was hiv.

It wasn't any one drug that solved hiv.

It was a cocktail that allowed people to live with it.

Right.

It turned it into a manageable disease.

So we believe that because of our off target effects being so low, we don't create a lot of toxicity in the body.

Off target for what we want, which is the cancer cells.

If we combine it with maybe a lower dose of chemo, maybe with an immune boosting drug, we could potentially be the cocktail that turns cancer into manageable disease.

That you'll live, you'll outlive your cancer.

Like my father had a very slow moving prostate cancer and he outlived.

He died of old age.

Yeah, right.

He didn't die of prostate cancer.

So for him it was slow moving, it was a low reactive oxygen species.

But when you get in things like triple zero breast cancer, when you get into some of the more aggressive non small cell lung cancers, pancreatic cancer, you're getting into things that are very difficult to treat, but also they move quickly.

And the thing that kills people isn't the initial cancer, it's the metastatic.

These are the stage it goes through.

And we're basically affecting the metastatic nature of cancer.

So it's pretty exciting.

It's a system.

And here's the thing, the world's gotten so small, the science came out of Spain.

One of my other co founders is here in California.

Our CEO is in London, our chief scientific officer is in Germany.

And so this is the, the nature of work is no longer that you have to be in the same geographic area.

We work well as a team and so you get to bring a lot of different thinking together and a lot of different perspectives from around the world.

This links back to the reason why I called it world bridge.

Yes, exactly.

I actually think that education is one of the vehicles that allows us as a species to get more connected.

And if we get more connected, it's less likely for us to do war.

Who would go to war with somebody?

When I was at Holt International Business School, we had students from Ukraine and Russia.

They're appalled at what's happening.

Russia doesn't look at.

If you look at it from a systems thinking standpoint, what Russia hasn't looked at is there's a million young men, smart, kind of the economic engine, the it that don't have to live there to create value in the world they've left.

So you've basically cut off the economic engine underneath Russia by taking young men who, who are mobile that go, oh yeah, no thank you, I don't want to go into that.

And they've left.

And so from a systems thinking standpoint, it won't be immediate, but you can't lose a million men fighting, which is about what the estimates are.

Who knows how many injured.

And then you can't put a million men who have left to support the economic engine.

And as we're moving to more and more renewable energy, remember back at the beginning, China is putting in something like 8 terawatts of nuclear power.

They're not going to need the oil.

China is transferring oil and gas money to Russia, but it's rapidly building out the infrastructure.

The United States has 1 terawatt.

It's moving to 2 terawatts that they're building 8 terawatts power.

So, yeah, if you don't have a place for the oil and gas to go, yeah, at some point in time, as countries figure out whether it's renewables or nuclear, we can actually build the energy capacity.

And this is.

There are issues with nuclear, but I'm a huge fan of nuclear.

I think there's an opportunity to do it in a way now that the technology has moved forward.

And I think every country that needs power, we're going to need more power, not less, going forward.

This is a great way to actually help countries meet the power demands of the populace without actually harming the environment.

And we'll definitely have to engineer better strategies around how you take care of the nuclear waste.

But the nuclear waste issue in my mind is a far easier technological issue than actually removing carbon out of the atmosphere.

Right.

We just haven't cracked the code on that technology yet.

So I always go with what's known.

Right.

And if our parent company can sit there and separate hydrogen from oxygen in a way that's cost effective, then there are other ways of actually creating energy that's sustainable.

And maybe there will be a breakthrough in some form of technology coming forward in the sustainable environment.

And I really do think that having some of the bad actors around the world and some of the governmental actions that have happened that haven't been exactly elegant in their choices have actually come out of controlling or leveraging the energy resources that they have.

So we've getting ourselves into renewable in a green economy is such a powerful thing.

I talk about this in the book.

Carl Sagan stated there was a risk of nuclear war with Russia.

The United States had invested over $1 trillion at that point in time.

You could have bought everything in the United States for 1 trillion other than real estate, but you could have bought every car, made every house, built everything for $1 trillion.

That's how much money was spent on the military industrial complex, on the small risk that Russia was going to start a nuclear war to mutually assured destruction.

And we outspent them like you can't even believe.

But there was a small risk.

We made an investment and a few people in the military industrial complex made a massive amount of money.

Right.

If we would have taken that same investment, $1 trillion at that point in time, and would have invested it in the green economy, everyone would have benefited.

And something that has.

If you think about the small percentage of chance of nuclear warfare versus the high percentage of chance of ecocide and global ecocide, Global ecocide, I mean, we're going to have regional ecocide.

The coral, Coral is going to die.

My grandchildren are probably never going to see coral.

Lisa's adults, right?

We're, we're, we've killed off.

We.

This is the great extinction event.

We're in it right now.

Humans have actually destroyed it.

Only 4% of the mammal mass on the world is wild.

96% of it is human or animals.

To feed humans, it's 96%.

We only have 4% that's actually wild.

So we've dominated and controlled the Earth.

So it's important for us to recognize that it's also our responsibility to make the investment to what's actually going to not have 95% chance of terrestrial.

And even if there's a 10% chance that we could get ecocide in two generations going forward, we need to make this $1 trillion investment and shift over to sources of energy that don't put carbon in the atmosphere.

And the only way to do that, there's three things that I ask.

Get off the fence.

Demand a fair price on removing carbon out of the atmosphere.

I looked it up.

If I were to go back and write a check for all of the flights and everything that my family has done, if I were to use today's technology to remove carbon out in the atmosphere, I would need to write a check for a million dollars.

That would hurt.

Yeah.

I'm telling you, that would hurt.

Definitely.

Yes.

I need economies of scale to remove the carbon out of the atmosphere, which means governments have to do this.

But we need to demand that there needs to be some form of a price on carbon to remove it from our atmosphere, because we're Putting it in the sewer is not free.

And then you have to change your leaders, right?

So you have to vote in a way that they will do whatever we say en masse.

The political class, all it cares about is staying in power.

So if enough of us have our voice, if we can take the 20% and shift that 60, the political component will change immediately.

So that's why we need to get off the fence, actually demand some fair pricing on carbon.

We did it with the Montreal Accords.

The global community got together and removed CFCs from the atmosphere, remove the hole in the ozone.

So we know how to do it, but it's got to be political, right?

So these laws that we need to enact about some form of putting a price on carbon, which everybody reacts to.

No, we are putting it into our, the climate and the carbon doesn't care about borders, right?

And when people say we're not putting that much in, it's all China that's doing it.

If you look back over the infrastructure that got put into our country alone, in aggregate, we've been the largest polluter of the atmosphere over time.

And that carbon didn't just magically disappear.

So we're now getting close to not having done anything for what, 56 years, 36 years.

It's a long time.

It's over a generation of not taking real profound action.

So that's on us.

We've got a demand.

And again, if your affiliation is more conservative because you want to conserve things, then get conservatives, people that believe in what you believe in, that make conservatives their number one issue.

If you're more liberal, make, if, look, if you're leader is a dictator to me, and you know, I actually think that if somebody was a benevolent dictator, they might be able to make a choice.

All right, the thing that, the thing that's so frustrating for me from a systems point of view, I don't know what Russia's goal was.

I think it was, I thought they could go in and just acquire all of that.

But if you think about the environmental costs to what they've done, if you, if you'd taken that military, if Russia had taken its military industrial complex and put it into green energy, they would have ruled the world.

If the, if the leader had that much vision to say, we're going to unlock, They've got amazing scientists in Russia.

If they actually said we're going to lead in a sustainable, we're going to, we're going to win the green energy battle.

And they Took that whole infrastructure of the profits that they made with oil and gas and shifted.

That would have been extraordinary.

True.

Okay, I'm afraid we need to wrap.

Up, but I have one final question for you.

There are so many interesting topics here, so we could have talked for hours, but you have worked in so many different fields, from big companies to science labs, and now you're writing about climate change and also talking about education.

Education.

So what advice would you give to young people?

It could be young leaders, activists, or anyone trying to just figure it out these days.

What kind of mindset shift do you think would help to create a better future?

I felt like climate was too big for me to tackle.

Right.

I was in the victim role as it related to climate change.

And I went to creating a compelling vision about what I wanted to create.

I think you have to figure out what the vision is.

There's so many.

Every kid gets it.

There's something called eco anxiety right now.

Yes.

So they all get it.

They know what's coming down the pipeline.

They're going, hey, we're about ready to inherit a Earth that's worse than the one that our parents inherited and that our grandparents inherited from an environmental standpoint.

So find the thing that unlocks your passion.

Nothing can shift passion.

And I believe that there are people that are cleaning up the plastic that's in the ocean.

There are people that are looking at just nutrition.

If we lose the soil and the quality of the soil, what can we do to do more sustainable farming?

My children and grandchildren are showing up there now.

We always did cleanup.

One day we dedicated to cleaning up the environment.

And I think there's something that feeds your soul.

You can't may not be able to fix everything across the world if you actually focus on something.

You want to think global and act local.

And so for us, we're still going to go up and do it.

There's trash.

And this kind of gets back to system thinking.

We go in and people leave trash in a way that could affect the quality of the water in the lake.

Because people don't understand about proper sewage treatment.

They don't understand about water tables.

And there's a whole system there.

And once you understand how nature works and the interlocking aspect of nature locally, you can actually start to intervene locally in a way that improves your environment.

And I think that every act along those lines is teaching the next generation that the environment is a system.

It's an interlocking system.

We influence it.

And the choices that we make influence every aspect of it.

And I think that I teach that the function of leadership is to create more leaders.

So lead yourself first, then lead others and from that your voice can matter and it can expand to a much larger audience.

So thank you for exposing me to your audience.

Yes.

As I said, so many interesting topics and I think the headline for me after this is Everything is a System.

System thinking.

Important knowledge these days.

Yeah.

And the get off the Fence book, even if you don't like the environmental aspect of it, it teaches systems thinking.

Right.

So there's nothing better than the environment to learn about accelerating either positive or negative feedback systems.

And so I'm again an educator, so I'm teaching systems thinking and the aspect of making this book available to readers.

Amazon.com yeah easy to buy.

Five star reviews please.

It helps us message out definitely and I will put the link in the show notes.

Thank you so much.

I definitely going to follow your work both in cancer research, your writing and yeah, you write a lot of different things as well.

So that's another story.

But I think you need to come back another time.

Yeah, come at any moment in time.

Great.

Thank you so much.

What I really liked about this conversation with Charlie is how he connects taking care of ourselves with taking care of the planet.

And he does it in a way that feels hopeful and interesting, not heavy or driven by guilt.

If you want to know more about his work, check out the show notes for links to get off the fence.

World Bridge University and Arjuna Therapeutics.

I still struggle with that one.

And if this episode made you think or feel more hopeful, please consider sharing it with someone who might need a little bit more hope.

Hope in their day to day work.

I'm Wesley Maiklavnespargje, as always and this.

Is Stories for the Future.

Until next time, let's keep building bridges and bursting bubbles.

See you soon.