You’re listening to Unite and Heal America on KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host, and we have a couple of guests on the program today. First, Dr. Lon Chang, who is an engineer who worked with Exxon Mobil as an engineer, and then, after a number of years, became disillusioned and started out working in the environmental space, and would like to welcome him to the show. Welcome, Dar-Lon.

Thank you, Matt. Pleasure to be here.

Thanks for coming on the show. And why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and in the science and what led you to go to axon and and then what disillusion do after you got there?

Sure. I graduated with a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2000. Great. And I was recruited by ExxonMobil in 2002. At the time, I was very concerned about the dual issues of fossil fuels being a limited resource and climate change.

And being from a mechanical engineering background, I was very concerned about whether this transition away from fossil fuels is going to happen in time, and whether I was going to be able to be a part of that.

So when I was recruited by ExxonMobil, I was told by my peers and by my recruiters that ExxonMobil was an energy company. Looking back on it, I can see why they said that because there’s after the 80s and 90s, when oil prices had gotten too brutal loads, and none not enough petroleum engineers were graduating.

So they were at their most humble when they recruited me in 2002 for the 21st century, and at that time, I had the understanding that I was going to join gas facilities work on natural gas as a bridge fuel away from fossil fuels, and eventually, over the course of my career help to transition away from fossil fuels.

And what what actually happened after you were there for a while, what actually happened was I worked on liquefied natural gas for three and a half years, which is the cryogenic cooling of natural gas until its liquid form and then transported by ship around the world. And I worked on making natural gas processing plants and looks like natural gas processing plants that would be all electric.

So they wouldn’t require using gas themselves, but they could be driven electrically. And I worked out a research project looking at what were the energy options that ExxonMobil goes into back in 2006. And it ended up that even though we consider things as far flung as mining helium three from the moon to use a nuclear fusion reactors, the end conclusion was it’s not going to happen next decade or two. And I started feeling disillusioned at that point, I also started feeling disillusioned because of a project I worked on myself for liquefied natural gas storage tank.

And there was a flaw in it like what I perceived like a Challenger accident, or there was a flaw and if that could lead lead to structural integrity issues. And I wasn’t heard by my management manager ended up moving me off project punishing me in the performance rankings, and then shipping me off to another division. As luck would have it, my new division manager was receptive to my concerns, he allowed me to go talk to the Senior Vice President of Engineering at the upstream research company. And when I made my case, the vice president took it seriously.

And they were able to make sure there was a senior technical person making sure that that flaw was resolved. So I gave ExxonMobil another chance. And for the second half of my career, I worked on drilling, I realized that this drilling technology we’re using that could increase drilling rates by 25%. It can also be used for geothermal power and renewable energy. It can be used for carbon sequestration. But there was no interest among management to do this.

Same thing with the last project I worked on reservoir engineering and simulation, we were addressing the industry wide problem that reservoir simulations never actually predicted anything well. So we were working on how to make it actually predicted. And this can be used as well to study carbon sequestration and to make sure your reservoirs trap the carbon dioxide permanently.

But again, management had no interest. And I found that the only way I can make this transition away from fossil fuels happened is under personal level, to quit Exxon Mobil and to move my family to the netzero neighborhoods that didn’t use fossil fuel.

Well, tell us a little bit about the CO2, CO2 sequestration possibilities. I’ve read a little bit about that and that there are enormous potential places where we could sequester carbon, say like in North Dakota, and maybe in the old drilling fields where or in Texas and other places? What what work is being done on that front? And why? Why do you think Exxon is not interested in doing that work?

Well, the challenge is that the best geologic places to make sure that the CO2 doesn’t leak after you’ve stored it down there are not necessarily where you’re going to have your plants to capture the carbon dioxide from. Ideally, you would have it right next to your coal burning plant, or right next to your refinery. But in reality, many of the best geologic areas to do that are not next to where your plants are.

So the challenge is making do with what you’ve got, knowing the risks and geology in the local area of the plant, and be able to really engineer a trap that would ensure that the carbon dioxide doesn’t leak out. Of course, all these challenges require that you have a good reservoir model that you can predict very accurately where your faults and where your traps are to ensure that the CO2 doesn’t escape.

But ExxonMobil didn’t have any interest in applying the technology to carbon sequestration, rather, they just have an interest in using CO2 to extract more oil and gas by just subjecting it to help mobilize oil and gas.

So how would carbon get transferred from say, a coal fired plant to a area where it could be sequestered? Do we have any good technology for that?

Well, you’d be limited by your pipelines. So how expensive it is to have a pipeline go out to your your underground ground storage, that will be the limiting factor. So as the distance increases, the cost will increase. And you have to find some kind of optimum of having a very good geologic trap and be able to afford the pipelines that would go out there.

Could we use the existing pipeline technology that we have in place to, to kind of use it for carbon transferred to to an area where it can be sequestered?

If you mean by wells that have already been drilled, that have already extracted oil and gas, they may not necessarily be good CO2 traps. So that would have been evaluation based on the reservoir engineers and the geologists. They may have been good for trapping hydrocarbons. But it might not be the case for carbon dioxide.

What I was actually referring to, with the pipelines that are in place that currently are transferring gas and oil products, be good conduits for carbon sequestration from say, a coal fired plant or or a natural gas plant or something like that.

They might be, but in general, you’re not going to have oil and gas pipelines going to coal plants. Generally, coal being solid, you wouldn’t need pipelines to transfer the fuel there. So in a lucky situation where you do have those pipelines, that would be the call of the engineers to see whether there’s any corrosion issues that could happen with having CO2 go through those pipelines with a different chemistry, the stainless steel of the pipes might not be able to last the lifetime of the sequestration.

Okay. Well, it’s it’s fascinating, the work that needs to be done to solve these problems. And one of the questions that I would ask you is, given your study of these issues, what are the top five things that you would be looking at, that we should be focusing on to solve our climate change problems?

Well, I think the number one issue is whether we’re actually displacing fossil fuel use, because much of the renewable energy boom that’s happened over the last couple of decades, has not decreased the amount of emissions has not decreased the amount of fossil fuel use. fossil fuel use has actually increased along with renewable energy increases granted renewable energy starting from a very small base, as increased much more quickly.

But fossil fuels are still increasing at a rate that renewables are not displacing them. So I would say that any technology that we’re evaluating this decade should be seen as a do or die thing where it really has to be evaluated for whether it’s displacing fossil fuels making the demand for fossil fuel less, because over my over the course of my career, I’ve it’s been driven home to me that the fossil fuels are much more limited than most people realize.

And hydraulic fracturing is not a sign of strength. It’s a sign of weakness. It’s a sign that we’re truly scraping the bottom of the barrel, and it’s in the interest of the world. When gas companies to sell all the hydrocarbons that they have, but then that means when it’s really about to be gone, that we’re gonna fall off a cliff in terms of fossil fuel use.

Well, I guess, in terms of displacing, or when we’re getting new technologies that create energy, such as wind and solar, and we’re continuing to wrap up fossil fuel usage, it seems like conservation is really what you’re talking about there and what we can do to conserve energy because that that is seemingly the most efficient way to reduce energy in the short term. We’ve only got about a minute or two to our break, but maybe you could talk about that for a second.

So my criteria is, if a technology is really viable within this decade, which is maybe the last decade we have to truly turn this thing around, it should be something that a good intention person should be able to do personally. And so for me that was buying into an all electric neighborhood where the houses are so tightly built with such good insulation and such good efficiency, that they use about 25% of the energy that a typical house uses in the US.

Well, you’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, and we’re speaking to Dar-Lon Chang, an engineer who worked with Exxon Mobil for a number of years and we’ll be right back and talk with our lines more.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern. And back with Dar-Lon Chang, ExxonMobil former engineer talking to us about environmental issues. This, the first thing you talked about was the displacing of fossil fuel usage and making sure that whatever we do, we’re not yet using even more energy kind of that would cause us to use more fossil fuels in the process. It seems like in our ever increasing energy needs, what are some of the other top five changes that you think we need to make to reduce our emissions?

I think to reduce the our emissions, we have to consider carbon capture and sequestration, there are certain uses of fossil fuels where they can’t be readily replaced, we’re unfortunately at a point where we’re cramming for the final exam, we need to, according to climate science, reduce our emissions in half by 2030, just to have a two and three chance of not tipping into irreversible climate change where it’s out of human control. So it’s very important to consider how we can do carbon capture and sequestration.

But we need to do it with good oversight. Because it’s it’s more more than easy and profitable for the oil and gas industry to put out a bunch of pilot plants say, Oh, it didn’t work out and just, we ended up with no solution. At the end. There has to be good oversight to ensure that the best possibilities for carbon capture are actually done in good faith, which I found throughout my career. Many technologies were not they were just done for PR but not in good faith to actually transition away from fossil fuels.

The other thing that we need to explore that hasn’t been explored enough as geothermal for both heating and for geothermal power generation, the core of the Earth is as hot as the surface of the sun. The deeper we drill, the hotter the rock. Of course, geothermal has been primarily used in those places where they’re already events, they’re already hot springs, but we need to make it available to all of the world. Because if geothermal power was made widely applicable, it could replace coal and natural gas is baseload power.

For the electric grid, you need to have baseload power in order to be able to provide power on demand. And without nuclear being able to get online fast enough, the next best option seems to be geothermal power. geothermal heating can be done on a wider basis of heating people’s homes by having geothermal loops that provide a hot water and scheme to be able to keep people’s houses warm during the winter. So those applications are also something that should be rapidly scaled up this decade.

Do you see that happening? Do you see either the US government or private industry or governments around the world, really making significant efforts on the geothermal front?

I don’t. There was a burst of geothermal power research that was done in the 80s and 90s. But since the 2000s Geothermal power has said migrated. And there hasn’t been much progress in that area. In fact, I’ve been trying to get into geothermal power research myself. And I haven’t been able to get position because there are only 8000 positions in the entire US for geothermal and compare that with millions of fossil fuel jobs.

It’s very, very hard to get in, even if you have background to be able to contribute immediately in a geothermal position. So there has to be a rapid scale up. And this can’t happen by market alone. Because there’s too many advantages for the fossil fuel industry to be able to block any new entries. And the government has to step in to be able to take away the subsidies that benefit the oil and gas companies and provide a jumpstart to make these geothermal startups work out.

Do you see the Biden administration putting any energy or effort into the geothermal area?

I do. I’ve interviewed with the geothermal Technologies Office of the Department of Energy. They have great people. They’re very enthusiastic, but they’re very limited positions. And Jennifer Granholm has said many good things.

She’s a Department Energy Secretary, and she has been very supportive of geothermal. But without congressional approval for the kind of funding that would be needed to rapidly scale up geothermal. It doesn’t look very good right now.

What about in California? Are we doing anything in California too?

Yes, California is one of the hotspots, you have some great locations that are very close to hot rock, you don’t have to drill as deep. You have areas that are tectonically active. So those are ideal for, for doing geothermal work. And there are some startups and medium sized companies there.

I personally am not willing to move to California because I made the decision to come to Colorado, for this sustainable neighborhood. But I also think this should happen all throughout the US. It shouldn’t just be California, it needs to be scaled up and made affordable, impossible throughout the world.

Okay, so that was three. What are areas four and five?

I would say four is, is a popular one, solar and wind solar is great for people to have it on their homes and become their own power producers. And also makes it possible to have micro grids, which is neighborhood scale grids, where you have some sort of storage, energy storage, it could be anything, it could be batteries, it could be hydrogen, you could use a solar power to run electrolysis to make hydrogen and storage for use in fuel cells.

Ideally, your micro grid could even work for the summer and winter seasons so that during the summer, you generate much more solar power than you need. And you can generate hydrogen for storage during the winter. And that way, you don’t have to take power from the utility even during the winter.

Okay, and what would be item five?

And item five, I would say is wind offshore wind is really the most promising because you’re not displacing land use. But that’s only for coastal areas and you lose a lot of power, the farther that you have to transmit electricity.

You didn’t mention nuclear what what are your thoughts as to nuclear and what we could do? It seems as though a number of top thinkers in this area think that we should be doing more nuclear.

When I was back at the university, I was told by nuclear engineers that nuclear fusion was just around the corner within the next 1020 years. It’s been 20 years, and it’s not around the corner, it’s still another 10 to 20 years away. And we can’t keep hoping that if your Fusion is going to be our lottery ticket that gets us out of this energy crisis. It’s like your family being on the verge of bankruptcy and buying a lottery ticket every day. We can’t count on nuclear fusion, we should continue to research it.

Don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the cure all. The other thing that didn’t work out is affordable, safe nuclear fission reactors that were modular and can be rapidly deployed. That didn’t happen either. We’re still looking at nuclear plants ticking from five to 10 years in order to be commissioned. So that means we have to start from today to have any hope of making a dent in the global emissions goal that we need by 2030.

And do you see the Biden administration pushing on rolling out new nuclear plants?

No, I don’t part of it is a policy failure. And part of it is the technology did not pan out like us engineers hoped it would. Unfortunately, we don’t have another couple of decades to keep trying to make technology affordable.

I see a number of articles about smaller nuclear reactors that they’re hoping to roll out to kind of do it more quickly. How are those panning out?

Yeah, as far as I understand, they’re still pilot projects, they’re still prototypes. And just like nuclear fusion reactors, even if by the most optimistic estimate, they get a pilot plant in 2035, that generates more electricity than it uses, you still are looking at another decades to commercialize it.

Well, one of the things that I don’t think is talked about enough, which is kind of implied, and one of the first things that you said was that we should be doing more conservation, essentially, more energy efficient appliances and other sorts of energy efficiencies that we could get to reduce the amount of energy that we’re using, rather than just focusing on the creation of more energy.

Where do you think we’re at on that front? And, and what kind of leadership do we need to see from governments or institutions to to make this move more quickly?

Yes, the technology is already mature, the Asian market has really made heat pump technology, very mature, very affordable, and very efficient. For every kilowatt hour of electricity you put into heat pump, you get three to five kilowatt hours of heating from it, at insulating houses, the Passive House concept house built so well insulated and so tight that you virtually never have to heat or cool it throughout the entire year.

That technology has been developed in Europe, and it’s available in the US. The problem is developers, the problem is city councils and local governments. They want to build houses as cheaply as possible as always done for a long time. And they don’t want to adopt these new technologies that would massively reduce the amount of energy that people need to heat and cool their homes and to run their homes.

Well, that’s definitely food for thought. Oh, it’s great having you on the program, Darla Anna, and I appreciate, you know, your technological knowledge that is certainly, you know, very extensive and appreciate how having you share that with our listeners, because knowledge is certainly power and and we should be pushing on all these fronts to to address the problems of climate change.

And the more educated we are, the better decisions we can make. And the more we can talk to our legislators and it get changes that really are going to make a difference enacted as quickly as possible. So thank you again for being on the program.

Thank you for having me.

Well, you’re listening to KABC 790. This is Unite and Heal America, Matt Matern, and we’ll be back in just one minute we’ll be speaking to Jay Levin.

This is Matt Matern and KABC 790. Your host of Unite and Heal America. We’ve got another guest on the program, Jay Levin. Jay, welcome to the program.

Good to be here. Enjoy it, enjoy the conversation with Chang. It was very wonderful.

Well, I appreciate that.

Yeah, Dar-Lon is quite a knowledgeable guy. I wanted to ask you, Jay, you’ve been in the media business, and had had worked, had had an ownership interest in the LA Weekly. And we’re a big, big wheel there for a long period of time and eventually sold out your interest. And when I did a bunch of other things, but while you were there, my understanding is you.

You did a number of pieces about the South, the south coast, a qmD Air Quality Management District, which were were important pieces, helping in kind of energize the community to have the community take these, our coin air more seriously. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the work that the LA Weekly did on on that front?

Well, we did a lot of environmental work over the years. But the biggest thing we did was we took on the fact the massive amount of smog and La toxic smog, huge mathematical seamer among youth and communities closer to the manufacturing areas. And we didn’t trust the official announcements that it was cars, et cetera, are a joke in our office which was on Sunset Boulevard was a smile was so bad. We couldn’t see my hope is across the street.

So I had a background in New York before I came out here we’ve done a fair amount of risk In journalism, so I put together an investigative team. And we spent some months really diving into what was happening in pollution enforcement by the local qmD. Their state is divided into reasonable akin with the secrets and the state’s supplies then responsible for cleaning up the air and then districts. And then clearly we’re not doing in Los Angeles.

So, at the end of the day, we we ended up doing 40 different articles with two full issues 20 and 31. Issues 20 The following week. By the time the first issue hit the street, pay eliminate and that day, the head of enforcement for the Los Angeles region, AQ MD, was fired a few months later in the the legislative health committee meetings to look into the what we had found. And they ended up not only changing the law for, for in the rules for AMD in Los Angeles, but for the whole state.

So soon as the new board came in, under the new regulations, they fired the executive director and they really started getting down to work of cleaning up the air here, as happened around the state. Wherever there was also really industry oriented toxically minded a qmD districts. So that was that was a big achievement for us.

Yeah, that is it’s a remarkable achievement. And kudos to you and your team for for coming out with those articles. Because certainly all of us are breathing the air here in Southern California, that was way too dirty. And it’s still too dirty, but has improved dramatically since the early 90s. There’s there’s still room for improvement.

I, I have a bit of experience with the the A qmD in the case that we had against or have against Exxon Mobil and and their predecessor was running the Torrance refinery. And it’s a remarkable how many pollutants were allowed to be emitted from these refineries. And they’re, they’re violating the regs to all the time. Yeah. And yet they’re still allowed to operate. And you’re like, how is this? How is this happening? It’s not in,

it’s called money in politics. Right? You remember that all or all our elected officials except those who take themselves off their book, live and die by the money they can raise and most much of their money, Democrats and Republicans. So come come from industry. And one of the other causes I’ve been involved with is money out of politics. And the surveys show that send me between 79 81% of Americans wanted private money taken out of politics, and there’s no way you can get it to happen.

The the power of that money and the amount of even though they have to spend all that time, you know, 1/3 to half that time raising money is kind of atrocious. But it’s it’s got a real grip on the country. And you know, the thing that our line fights against and why they can get away with murder is because they own the bait on the politics of our country in a very substantial way.

Well, that’s that’s very clear. I made it once one studies the environmental situation on our country, you recognize that it didn’t make sense for our country to stay on oil and gas as our power source. It made sense for oil and gas companies to have that happen. And they made billions and billions of dollars doing it. But it wasn’t the right choice.

From a public policy standpoint, we should have been making these changes. 50 years ago, maybe even 100 years ago, there were other options out the first, some of the first cars were electric back in the early 1900s. But the oil and gas industry were more powerful than the electric electric industry. And they they quash that really quickly. Right?

Well, you know, the politicians are also supported by a public that like that cheap guess.

Right, right. You know, we’re all a part of this problem, but we certainly should be demanding more from our government because government regulation could The rain in this an industry that’s kind of out of control and give subsidies to the industries like Darwin was talking about the geo thermals, the solar, the wind, because that is the way of the future and states is like Kansas, I think it’s 40% of their power from wind right now. So clearly we have the potential to have an enormous

Yeah, right on that we definitely have the potential and then there’s politics, you know, Biden can’t, can’t get his new proposals to, like 40, but 35 plus 40% of the way, but that’s going to be another fight coming up. So it’s, it’s a difficult situation, for sure.

Well, what do you what do you think? Is the path forward? Given kind of the investigative work that you have done in the past? What are the areas that you think are most most ripe for kind of investigating and putting some sunlight on to to get people to wake up just like they did when you wrote those articles about the AQ MD?

Well, the I mean, just in the context of what we’ve been discussing, much more concentration about the money being spent and who’s buying who’s being influenced by the money that that’s the core and much more. You know, the Democrats have good policies and lousy communications on at least better way better policies on on this without getting too bipartisan here.

But they don’t have they don’t have their act together and how to move forward on this with this law with it. Make it a priority that communication skills are sorely lacking. So it’s, it’s it’s the context in which we’ve had a lot of other problems have been in the country.

Any any particular set of things that you would do kind of on the environmental front for the spot, say the top five things that you see as things we should be doing as a country?

Well, I like everything dialogue said, No, that was good. But for me, the it’s really the context of a really full on public education has to happen. I don’t know about fives, I’ve got five things, but the quality of what has to happen, the way it’s impacting life. I’ve one of the things we did we I found that a while after I left the week, we I found that a TV network, that didn’t make it because they didn’t roll out the digital. But we had part time as time. We couldn’t do everything we wanted.

But one of the things we did was, we had a situation in which we were going to show exactly the nature of developments in the Pirate Bay, about a third of that would be environmental, environmental self, the rainforest was going down, we thought that we show that every day. And then when we put it, we track it, you could see the changes every day.

So your changes in health commodities changes here where things were positive, and things were negative. And at the end of the day, we then we have here’s the updated news on this. So that was our idea was embroiled in the people’s visual sensibility, so they could see it every day and know what’s going on.

We’re going to do it in other areas, human rights progress here and their education, but environmental was that stuff. So we’re not set up to teach ourselves what we need to know. And that’s it. That’s a really unfortunate situation.

But that does sound like a fascinating way to report the news is actually show people what’s happening in real time and, and then reporting on it. And because sometimes we’ll see these snapshots of things happening, saying the Arctic glaciers melting and so on and so forth.

But it’s, it’s not, it sometimes doesn’t just people have said, just to show the species that died today and the cute little beings that may no longer with us. That could have been one of the things you could when I’m talking about is lack of really visible communications in America around them are most important issues. And it’s not it’s an environment and other things.

So let’s, we’re gonna take a break now. You’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America KABC 790. This Matt Matern, your host and we’re talking to Jay Levin, and we will be right back in just one minute.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host and we’re talking to Jay Levin. Jay, tell us a little bit about the work that you’re doing now with kids and what?

Why that so six years ago, I was running a campaign, I was publisher of a website, environmental website. And after a while, really didn’t need me. And I was kind of restless, because I’ve done that a lot. And I want it and I thought, What’s the most important thing in the world I can do to make a difference, that it hasn’t been that where we could get the next generation pumped up, I happen to be trained in psychology and the human development, and we covered it journalistically.

Basically, or what I learned from all that is that most human dysfunction, including everything we’re talking about today is a lack of skills and mindset that has, I have the Vantage myself over you, no matter what cause. So we come from a paradigm that needs to be changed. And that paradigm is locked into the child development process that we pass from generation to generation, thus, we pass wars long, and we get Vyas ecological.

So let’s go for the next generation, the young kids, let them come out. And there’s an education movement called social emotional learning, that really trains kids in how to deal with their emotions, their realities, and their relationships. resolve conflicts, be a clearer mind. And if the end of the day when these programs in schools are really, really concentrated, and rich and comprehensive, you get the most revolve, markable kids automatically thinking not how I’m going to manage myself or pay you, but what we can do creatively, and what are the issues, so they become very activeness and things. And that is it affect life.

And of course, the younger generation is very aware that it may not be there. But they’re not necessarily coherent enough to organize, collectively and CO creatively. So these programs, so we just, we looked at that movement, and the educators and they didn’t know how to talk to the public, nobody could talk no parent ever heard social emotional learning. So we did a bunch of I left my side this organization equip our kids.org.

And what we do is we support we provide, we do media and awareness for parent, mostly for parents. And now for companies we work with starting to talk to big companies about getting behind this movement. So we get a generation of kids who will deal with the problems facing us in a much healthier way than the past generations have, and much more coherent, evolve conscious way. And on our website, equip mark is that oh, you can see some of these kids.

And you can see a lot of videos about schools, turning turning bad schools around and getting these really remarkable kids learning caring will make them make the grading workplaces. So we just got to evolve the species. So I decided that that’s worth doing by helping by helping these educators get some public support for the work they’re doing. So are you working?

Sorry, are you working with the school district districts here in LA or California in general?

I saw this funny clip equip our kids. I started with the other the other thing that was needed was more grassroots organizing. So I looked for the best organizing out there and happened to be in Massachusetts with what educators and program providers community organizations to get to the grassroots talking to talking to school districts talking to State students, state education departments. And so I had that mentor me and we created the California Social Emotional Learning Alliance, which I no longer have to leave because we have a great executive director but they’re doing the work of with LAUSD.

When I was doing it, we weren’t very close again way Stevie and it was very slow to get them to roll it out. Funding was not there. It’s now because of grassroots work around the country over the last few years. There’s some money there’s real money coming in. And there’s a lot of things that have to happen by way of implementing the program schools learning how to implement And, but there’s progress being made. So with positive balance, still, we have a big job to do to get the public and corporations behind.

So we’re arguing to companies that got behind stem, big time spent 1,000,000,001, over the last 10 years should also get behind social emotional learning. Because one, they’ll get the great greatest workers in history and two will will, they really be making a positive change, and they’ll also get more stem people. And there’s a lot of kids that just not mentally present in school because of all the stuff happening. And just the other day, I mean, the games and the tensions and the ego stuff and the peer group stuff that goes on.

And just the other day, December 7, ProBlogger, day, the Surgeon General of the US declared that is a US mental health crisis among youth based on all the restrictions and changes from COVID. And it’s very serious, as every school was dealing with it. And so one of the things he arranged was advancement of social emotional learning.

So we think it’s something everybody in the public should know about. Think of it as emotional intelligence, it’s a better set of life skills, you get the boring name, it’s the set of life skills that every parent really wants to have for the job and ways that they not train themselves always train their kids. And it makes a huge difference.

Yeah, no, or no does the program train teachers or their outside people in some of the programs that can after being sold in the schools, also trained with teachers, but teacher development, staff development is one of the issues that has to be happened, got to change the school cultures. And on the website, you can see videos of schools that have changed school cultures, and how fantastic it is for men, and everybody involved.

The but there’s a lot there’s work to be done on it. And it’s a step by step processes not doesn’t happen overnight. But the soil changing programs training with teachers finding the money to do that, changing the curriculum, so being a time for this. And what happens is it changes the way if kids want the kids show up in a very present for learning. So project development, project driven learning becomes very, very popular and very easy to do, because the kids really want to work together. project driven learning is a really, really great way for kids to learn together about things.

So that that takes place. And piece by piece schools figure out it’s more present, they’re more aware, we can cut back on discipline stuff, we can teach them more sophisticated stuff, because they want to hear it. Kids get excited. And then they teach the schools have to find the best ways to teach. The kids want to learn.

I think that as somebody who who runs teams of people, myself, project driven learning seems important is that a lot of times people have a hard time working with teams. And it kind of reminds me of a book that I had read a while back super cooperators which a guest the theory the book or thesis of the book is that essentially, humans evolved.

And were more successful as we became super cooperators that that’s the the mark the hallmark of a, an effective society. And so obviously, we need to take it to the next level. And if this helps us do that, and of course, the environmental problem is just one of many problems that we have to deal with. I think it’s then the number one problem. This, this could help us.

Yeah, that well said, I mean, the hierarchical learning that we pass from generation to generation with all the family drama, and all the pains that people go through, really gets solidified as ujet generally learning the matrix we’re in which is a matrix of judging yourself and judging others. So you’re always thinking my one up one down, etc, etc, unless you evolve, and you carry it into relationships, and it’s a skill set to cut to break that pattern.

And the earlier we get into kids, the easier it is to before they’re programmed to be reactive and when you spend and negative and self absorbed. There’s a natural there’s a natural collaboration that happens and loving this that happens and caring This happens when outside that dynamic. And this there’s there’s a survey that there’s a study that was done of kids who were four years old, who had a couple of months in his training, and they had a control group very similar to them.

They followed them For 25 years, and so how they performed in life happiness and relationships, self self confidence, financial success, caring this, etc, all those good designs, and they will work for the control group, just from having the have learned these gotten a different way of relating to the early on, they became habitual for them.

So we all know our bad habits and reaction and stuff. And we got to move to species fast enough to get them out of it before we go side ourselves on Nuke ourselves and know when we’re not in a good in a good position right now.

So where do people go to learn more about this movement and how they can they support it in their communities?

Well, thanks. Our website is equip, equipourkids.org. And there’s a lot of information there about this and ways you can get behind it, especially if your payments and you want to learn more about this. And there’s also resources you can go from to other websites.

Okay, well, that sounds great. Jay, I appreciate you coming on the show and enlightening me and the listeners to this important development. And obviously, we want our kids to be trained and taught in the most effective way possible. So they will thrive in the future because they are, they are our future. So thank you for bringing that to the show. And thank you for all the work that you did.

Particularly with the LA Weekly and the environmental articles that you guys had published. I certainly read a number of them back back in the day. So thanks, everybody for listening.

You’ve been listening to KABC 790, Unite and Heal America, this is Matt Matern and we’ll be back next week. So have a great week everybody.

As you may know your host Matt Matern of Unite and Heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you or 84465449688446544968.