Adam Torres and Jay Levin discuss EQuip Our Kids!
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Show Notes:
What is the best way to create a generation that will transform human life for the better and take down nuclear weapons? In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Jay Levin, President of EQuip Our Kids! Explore EQuip Our Kids! and how to transform schools for the better.
About Jay Levin
Jay is Founder and President of the EQuip Our Kids! Campaign. Generally acknowledged as a media pioneer, he is founder and former CEO and Editor-in-Chief of multiple award-winning and greatly successful (broke advertising records in the industry) LA Weekly newspaper, which he sold some years ago.
Jay has led or started six media companies and launched six nonprofits – all primarily focused on providing positive change. He is best known as the founder of the LA Weekly which won many journalism awards and grew to be the largest urban weekly in the country.
Jay is also trained in human development matters and concluded that raising the emotional intelligence and life skills of children is the most positive and needed education reform of our time, a very real and serious game-changer for kids, schools, families, employers and communities when comprehensively applied.
About EQuip Our Kids!
The EQuip Our Kids! Campaign intends to be the first-ever mass advertising and marketing campaign whose sole and huge vision is to mobilize the American public to insist that every school include in its daily curriculum education for students and staff in emotional management and in relationship and co-creativity social skills – to the profound benefit of children, teens, adults, the schools themselves, and society and business (the economy) as a whole.
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Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I have Jay Levin on the line and he’s president of Equip Our Kids, which is a nonprofit.
Jay, welcome to the show. Thank you, Adam. I’m happy to be here. All right, Jay, so just to, just to kind of start unpacking this one where’d you get the idea for Equip Our Kids? So I, my background is as a journalist. I’m the founder of the LA Weekly newspaper, and I’ve run six media companies. And as a young reporter in New York, I was interested in things that made positive change in the world.
And one of the, and I wrote a series about modern therapy techniques being used in drug treatment. I spent six months in research and sitting in sessions with people who had addiction problems and I saw real change. And so what, what it meant to me was that and it became a confirmed conviction through life that really human beings are not well trained for life.
We’re not, we’re, we’re mal trained actually to how to be in life in a healthy way. So that we don’t go into reactive states, blame on ourselves, judge ourselves, judge others, etc. We just pass this eons to, from generation to generation, eons. I have a talk, a little bit of lecture on this to explain that everybody can identify with.
So we’re, we’re, we’re set up for a lot of pain and I saw, and what I got out of that was that a very simple idea and, but a very truthful one, which is most, almost all life pain we create inside ourselves and with others and The way, it’s a lack of skills and not a lack of character. It’s a big idea, but a really simple one to grasp.
So over the years, I became, it’s one of the themes of my journalism. In fact, when I started The Weekly, we we covered the human development movement as one of our themes. People who were doing this you know sometimes called the self help movement. But it’s really much deeper than that. It’s a way of re And energizing reorganizing your relationship to life Yeah requires a set of skills to manage your own feelings to be empathetic to be to come out of self blame blaming others and And learn really good skills to relate relate to other human beings Almost all divorces happen because people are just not skilled to how to be in relationship with each other Partnerships break up, fights happen around the world, and ultimately it escalates to where you get Gausses and Ukraines and people who think I gotta, I gotta be one up on you, one down on you, etc.
It’s historic and it’s not healthy and the idea that there’s nuclear weapons pointed at us is the ultimate Outcome of a way of being and thinking in the world. So Equip Our Kids comes out of the idea that a friend of mine told me about, because I’ve always followed developments, and you’ve told it about.
These same kind of practices brought to down for many years, but unknown to the public, brought down to teach kids in school. So I went to a school in Chatsworth and I was blown away by the kids quality of being able to be with each other, how they solved conflicts. I’ve done a lot of journalism. I’ve done a lot of, won a lot of awards.
Seen a lot of the dark side of life. I’ve seen some. Major crazy people in government, including in the White House, and I thought these kids, by the time they’re 12, if they’re 10 now, I put them in the White House. They handle information so incredibly well. Wow. And they solve their emotional problems in the ways that they do.
All human beings should be trained. So it’s much easier to train a kid who’s not like inoculated totally. And, and, you know, am I one up, one down? Am I a good guy, bad guy? Am I, you know, Who’s functioning from a higher part of their brain rather than that shattering part that says how am I doing right now?
What’s happening here? What’s yeah, right, which we all know so So I looked into the movement and it was very it was only an edge. It was only a Conversation moving slowly into schools, maybe 5 percent of schools for some years out of you know, academics and child psychologists and child development, but it was very effective.
So I, I started, I thought, I was bored running another media company, so I switched over and I started Equip Our Kids as a kind of non profit pro bono advertising marketing media company with a mission of providing this wonderful social, what’s called the social emotional learning movement, a public face so that they had support from parents.
So we, we’ve helped, we’ve had a significant role in driving parent awareness from 5 percent to 75 percent by the latest independent polls. And it’s moving across the country, but they, you know, there’s struggles with it, but we We we, you know, we’re, we’re basically salespeople for the idea with the human species would do better to raise its emotional intelligence and skills to deal with your inner life and your life.
And when you get it to these kids, they, they, you know, you create happy schools, grades, or yeah, this goes away, et cetera. I mean, I could tell you story after story about transformations of schools. So that’s what we do. And and you know, the hope is that we can get the entire public behind this.
We’re making progress and people, and that we’re not bad people. We’re just maltrained people. Yes. Very important concept in life. We are badly trained. We are not given the skills we need to manage the dramas we make in our lives, for ourselves and for each other. Hmm and so since you’ve been on this project, especially with the you know, the vantage point of having run media So you see what happens behind the scenes in media, obviously you’re in the business for a very long time So what are what are some and now on this project?
I mean, we’re always learning So, I mean i’m sure as you’ve gotten further and further in this project In particular like you’ve gone deeper in your level of learning on this. So what are some of the best ways that you found? We can start to, you know, move the needle in creating a generation that’s going to transform human life.
Like, what are some of the things that you found? Well, the first thing is people have, you know, people have to take ownership of the fact that they are living in a world. And if you’re a parent and you want to see your kids really thrive in life and not go into the mental health crisis that kids are experiencing, the digital addiction crisis.
The high suicide crisis, et cetera. There’s a reason, there’s a reason that the context of what they’re learning. So our, our push for parents is bring, you know, make sure you get this in your schools, go talk to your schools, organize your parent groups, get 20 parents together and go say, we want this and we want it done right.
And start out being open to doing it in your schools at home. Learn yourself. What works, what’s more effective ways, you know, parents are under incredible stress at any rate, so whatever they can learn to be at home. We’re launching a we’re launching a streaming service for parents at this point.
That’s our big. This year’s major goal, so getting out a lot of more, we’ve created a parenting, curated, not created, a parent health kit on our website equipourkids. org. When COVID happened and the attention switched, the child switched to the house for people to be able to learn some of the techniques.
But now we’re, we really want to up the game because the more it gets into schools, the more, the more the kids see a whole, I go to school, I’m treated this way, I talk to this way, I got this great way to learn how to do this, I go home and it’s different. And so most of the principals who have schools are very strong on having parents adopt the same kind of ways of practices at home.
And so a lot of this in our societies and others, but obviously we’re talking about this like some of this stuff’s generational like the knowledge is passed down whether it’s in, you know Some of our inner cities or otherwise suburbs too. I shouldn’t just say inner cities, but some of this stuff’s generational.
Is it? What have you found that it’s is it possible to get people out of this? Whether you want to call it a cycle a trap or you know Yeah, for adults, a good start is because you can find a good non violent communication training in, you know, in Los Angeles, there’s several but learn, learn the different way of relating to situations that come up rather than the habitual ways that don’t tend to not, not to work and to accelerate conflict rather than to accelerate sense of mutuality and mutual caring and understanding.
So so it’s worked, but, you know, I took a, a master’s degree program. It’s it’s called spiritual psychology, but, It really, it really delved into the nature, among the things it delved into is the nature of how generation to generation we pass on these attitudes, these memes, these ways of behaving.
You know, we come in with all these mirror neurons, So the parents are, Behaving a certain way, we tend to serve, or we go into rebellion against that, but either way it’s implanted in us, and if we’re not trained to deal with those situations, we go into coping mechanisms as kids. We fight, or we run away, or we avoid conflict, or we try to manipulate and start lying very early on, or we become little control freaks, and then become big control freaks.
You know, the human psychology and the ways of being in the world, past generation to generation, are extraordinarily powerful. And we, we absolutely, species are not going to survive if we don’t break the mold and we retrain ourselves with healthier ways to deal with the feelings we have inside ourselves, particularly the ones that get us to act out.
And the way we deal with each other. And there’s a lot of progress in the world. There’s a lot of progress in the country, but The major thing is, it’s much easier to do it with kids. There’s a survey, and because they’re, they’re, the neural nets have not been so pounded with, you know, watching bad guy, good guy, everything you know, there’s always good guys, bad guys, and all that.
Yeah. Right. So, when you get the kids, there’s a survey they do with kids who have had like three months of training in this. They do They were four year olds. They only had three months of training. They had the same groups of kids. They had an A, B group. And the A group got the training. The B group didn’t.
And they tracked them for 25 years. And their outcomes were, you know, just beautiful. Which is, the people who had the training had happy lives. Doing well financially felt good about themselves, had healthy relationships. The other group was as usual, a large percentage, like the 20% of Americans who were on meds.
High rates of drug alcohol or drug abuse, you know, um, poor eco, poor economic situations. We are, it’s really important to get the idea we can train ourselves better for this life and the training is out there and for us with Equip Our Kids, we’re starting with the kids because, you know, it’s a whole other world to deal with the generation.
And there’s not enough therapy or training for adults at this point. Now, with now as a media guy and being in that business in the past, like, where does and to get, you know, to have an idea, to have an idea, to permeate, you know, the masses in terms of common knowledge, to get to bite, to get people to To, to, to hold onto it and to affect change takes time.
I’m, I’m curious, what, what do you, how do you see, like con, you’ve mentioned a streaming service, like how do you see content creation? Like what, what’s that role of content creation in this movement? Well, I mean, there’s two levels of content creation. One is like, okay, here’s how to do this differently, right?
Yeah. Here’s how to talk to your kid differently. Here’s how to do deal with this. The other level of of it is more public entertainment media. It’s sneaking up on us. There’s some really good stuff out there, you know sometimes someone that came out at Disney shop, but but you know, about making media that I’m not in that business.
I’m not making business, making media that actually It implicates or enforces this way of, way of being in the world, showing people things being solved, rather than we’re addicted to the drama or violence and winners and losers. So that’s a creative challenge. It is, and it almost seems like there’s a gamification component to that too, right?
Like, because you’re engaging kids, so there has to be some type of gamification to it to keep their attention. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. The more clever you can be with the gamification, the better. You just want to open people to the possibilities and show them, you know there’s other ways that we can go in this world.
Yeah. You mentioned, you mentioned stories of transformation or like things as you’ve been, I mean, cause a lot of people have seen, have been part of this. I mean, you reach a lot of people like, like, I mean, talk to me a little bit, talk to me a little bit about the kids and what you’ve seen. Well, aside from the kids in the many schools I’ve seen, I mean, you know, like, there’s a school in South Central that got was chosen for, because it was one of the worst schools in the state.
Lots of drugs, lots of kids, lots of violence. They had I think it was 263 serious discipline engines sent to prompter kids had to go off to juvie, et cetera. One year, then they pump. Then they, oh, that was in one year. You said, yeah, one year. Wow. So that’s, you know, that’s cranking on a one a day minimum, like school days.
I mean, there’s a school right near me where it’s happening right now. Wow. Up in Hawthorne. So so there’s, there’s a lot of There’s a lot of issues around how do you heal this? So they decided they were going to, they were going to like overload the school with this as a state project. It was one of the students because they were testing SELs, goes back a few years.
So two and a half, three years into it, they were down to 19 incidents. They were performing at the, at the top level of school in the area academically. The gangs were gone, the drugs were gone, kids were loving each other up and supporting each other. It was, we have some of this, some of the video of this on our website.
So the transformation is possible, the question is, how do you get the it’s not an easy thing. You’ve got to, you’ve got to retrain a lot of people, including the teachers and the way of students. This is a serious business to retrain humanity out of what we passed along from generation to generation.
But it’s a, it’s a compelling case, and it’s growing, and you know, it fits and starts. Here in California, one of the things we did was, you always, in any movement, you also, you not only need, you know, public awareness, but you also need boots on the ground. Yeah. So we, we followed a model in Massachusetts, and we had them mentor us, and We created the California Social Emotional Learning Alliance.
I ran it for a couple of years, and then we got this brilliant woman, Amy Cranston, who’s an expert in AI, and and actually the sister, Brian Cranston, the actor. And she’s got, she’s got, we’re approaching 5, 000 members who are really making a difference in the state, raising the state budget significantly, getting this into more schools.
So there’s hope in California, but there’s, it’s work. You’ve got to retrain, retraining humanity to be healthy and do it with itself. Means that you gotta, you gotta pay real good attention to it and make sure you’re, you’re tracking what works and what doesn’t work. And you’re training everybody that’s got to be trained, but it’s happening a little bit piece by piece.
It’s happening. I feel like that’s going to be one of the one of the challenges just in general is that we know the existing when I say hierarchy, I just mean the adults, the people that are, if they, if they don’t buy into it, it’s kind of hard to, you have to retrain them. So I guess part of that also is getting the you know, the, the future teachers like earlier in the pipeline so that when they come out there you know what I mean, they’re, they’re a little bit more pliant.
And if that’s what they’re, if that’s what they know, that’s what they know. Right? Like that’d be the ultimate goal or part of the goal. Absolutely. Right. I mean, the movement is now a movement. I mean, it’s got a lot of good organizations in it. We’re in collaboration. One of the primary demands of the movement is every education college has to train, has to certify that the teacher’s not coming out of the schools.
That’s beautiful. Universities are trained in social emotional learning and responsive classroom and the, you know, the practices that I’m a pretty hopeful guy normally, Jay, but this just adds more hope. Like, it’s amazing. To me, I mean, I got into this, I thought, after years of being in social movement Yeah.
And I started five, four other non profits. I thought this is the best thing I’ve ever come across. The most hopeful thing because I understand you really, you know, I’ve also been done life coaching part time just for most of the gig. Just mostly for the fun of it. So I’ve helped people by teaching them different techniques to help people change.
I don’t do that anymore. I’m too busy with this. But yeah, I mean, it is the most hopeful thing. If you can retrain the human beings, you know, the world is in effect. The course of how we’re either well trained in it or mal trained. And obviously, we can see right now in the news, huge, huge, huge amounts of total mal training and negative mindsets.
And rather than, you know, when kids are in this mindset, they look at each other and say, quote, quote, quote. creative thing we can do together, not how I got to prove myself to you and show myself off. Ego is not quite as big yet, inherently. It hasn’t grown yet. It’s still small, right? Hopefully, hopefully.
The idealized, the false idealized self, which is what psychologists call it the other self, the ego self is not so controlling of our thoughts and, and, you know, You know, you know, our minds are quiet. We’re not thinking every moment that, you know, how did I mess up or that one? I can’t, this can’t stand this one, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, Jay, this has been great. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. And like I said, this brings me a lot of hope. I’m normally pretty helpful, but this is, this is great. If somebody’s listening to this, whether they’re, I mean, there’s, there’s different stories. Stakeholders in this deal, right? There’s the schools, there’s the kids, there’s parents, there’s people that wanna get involved.
Like, like how do people connect with with, with the team and learn more about Equip our kids? Okay. So our website is Quip, E-Q-U-I-P, our OUR kids.org. Mm-Hmm. , you know. And you can go there, there’s stuff for parents, there’s stuff for students, there’s stuff for businesses. We really want to, the business community got heavily behind STEM.
In over a ten year period, they spent a billion, too. Promoting you know, science, technology, engineering, math, education. This is much more important than STEM. In fact, as kids coming back from COVID can’t learn math and science because their brains are so messed up from being, from the restrictions, so they need, they need social emotional learning to get themselves back to learning again.
So calm down their brains and their actions. So We want the business community to get heavily behind us, wake up, get to, you know, you can start with your employee being in planning, planning your local community schools, and start promoting the 3D education. You’ll only get a tremendously better workforce out of it.
People are more conscientious. A big problem with workforces is, you know, the fights that go on, the climbing, the backbiting that goes on. Hmm. You want people who show up, who, who are operating from their highest intelligence and, and create cooperation and, and creativity rather than tension and, and, you know confusion.
You know, climbing, ladder climbing, et cetera. Yeah. So you want healthy communities. You want healthy communities. And what’s the benefit? You get healthier communities, your taxes will go down. Look how much of your taxes go to people on drugs, people on who are homeless people, you know, all of that is a outcome of not allowing, um, creating people who are damaged in life because they’re you know rejected, had bad childhoods, never, never grasped how to be in life, et cetera, and medicated themselves or et cetera, et cetera. So There you go. I mean, Charles. Yeah. Yeah. And I will for everybody listening, I’ll put, I’ll put the website on in the show notes, of course equip our kids.
That’s E Q U I P, our kids dot org. And I checked out the website. It’s very, very well done. They, there’s, I also saw there’s a, a parent’s newsletter there as well. So everybody definitely go check out the site. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters, this is a daily show each and every day, we’re putting out new content, we’re bringing on new leaders in the community, entrepreneurs, executives, and experts and having them share their mission their businesses, what they do, what we can all learn from that and how we can all, you know, grow and thrive.
Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already hit it. Again, this is a daily show each and every day. Don’t want you to miss any of the upcoming episodes. Hit that subscribe button. And Jay, thank you so much for making time for us. And man, I’m really excited about your project. So thanks again for coming on the show.
Thank you, man. I appreciate the opportunity.