Jolty Faith Popcorn and Adam Hanft

Adam and Faith are back for a new episode of Jolty. This week’s guest is Don Burton, and education technology & innovation thought leader. Don started off in the business world working for Goldman Sachs as well as McKinsey & Company, before coming to the realization that career path wasn’t fully utilizing his passions and potential.

This inspired Don to eventually branch out into the educational space, taking a look at how our public and private education systems are run, and how we could potentially evolve to become more efficient and achieve better results for future generations. The “drill and kill” method of education is from a bygone era, and it’s time to radically change how kids learn as they grow into healthy, educated, and productive adults.

What are the choices when it comes to K-12 education for kids? What is a microschool like Elon Musk’s Ad Astra? How much money do we spend on education per child each year? Should homework be outright abolished? This is a fun one, and definitely one of our more Jolty episodes for 2024 thus far. We hope you enjoy it and learn more about the possibilities of our education system in the future.

This week on Jolty, Adam is riding solo as co host Faith is out on business. But this still promises to be a very jolty episode with guest Michael Matias. Michael is the CEO of Clarity, which is a relatively new company that is working to fight deepfakes for enterprises. 

Deepfakes are a new threat in the digital realm which combines “deep learning” and artificial intelligence with personal identity. Whether it be a political deepfake, or a more personal scam call or banking identity theft, deepfakes are something society at large needs to contend with in an increasingly digital future. 

What exactly is a deepfake and how can companies like Clarity detect them? What are the three types of “deepfakers” according to Michael? How will deepfakes affect digital avatars? What about biometrics? Adam and Micahel drill down “deep” into these questions and more on this episode of Jolty!

Adam and Faith are back for the second Jolty of 2024, and this is a great one with guest “Momo” Vuyisich, the Co-Founder, Chief Science Officer, and Head of Clinical Research at Viome Life Sciences. Viome is focused on microbiomes in your gut, making sure you are eating the proper nutrients for your individual needs. 

It’s a fact that as advances in medical and pharmaceutical technology have expanded the human lifespan, we have also fallen short when it comes to nature immunity. The dirt and grime that we sterilize in our lives today used to be a huge factor in building our gut microbiome.

Adam and Faith drill into this whole topic with Momo, covering topics from Covid to Ozempic. Are almonds actually healthy for everyone? How do we prevent things like Alzheimers or ALS? What about the brain microbiome? There’s a lot to discuss in this week's episode and we hope you enjoy it!

This week on Jolty, Adam and Faith are joined by the Senior Director at Ripp Media, Joshua Spivak, to talk about everything recall elections. Joshua has been running a recall elections blog going on thirteen years, and is a Senior Fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Center for Government Reform. Needless to say, he’s very passionate about this subject.

In an age where people are frustrated with their political representatives, with a feeling of little to no progress, why aren’t there more recall elections? What does it take to actually recall an elected official? Why can’t recalls be done on the federal level? Faith and Adam ask these questions and more on the first Jolty of 2024!

Welcome to Jolty with Adam and Faith! In this episode, we dive into the world of mental health innovation with our guest, Alex Frenkel, who used his training in clinical psychology as the basis for Kai.ai. Kai is a conversational AI app that engages users in meaningful, therapeutically-validated chats where people reveal intimate emotions they might feel uncomfortable exploring in settings that aren’t anonymous.

Alex discusses how technology that is trained on clinical learning can serve as a support system for anyone - especially young individuals navigating many of the well-documented emotional challenges brought about by social media.   

Kai, developed three years ago, boasts over 100,000 users and addresses a myriad of issues, all while maintaining user anonymity. Its effectiveness has been validated in peer-reviewed papers. 

Frenkel responded to the situation in Israel with a dedicated version of Kai, specially trained for the stresses of wartime. This geolocation-based response can be applied to any area that is experiencing high-levels of trauma, such as mass shootings.  

Tune in to explore the future of mental health tech and the transformative potential of AI companionship with this week's Jolty!

Today, Faith and Adam are joined by Dr. Harold Koplewicz, one of the nation’s leading child and adolescent psychiatrists and President of the Child Mind Institute. In a timely conversation following the attacks on children and other civilians in Israel, Dr. Koplewicz shares his insights on how parents can communicate the reality of these brutal events with honesty and sensitivity. He explains how much is enough, how to be truthful without triggering anxiety, and some basic truths about anti-Semitism.

As the child of two Holocaust survivors, Dr. Kolpewicz combines deep emotional resonance and decades of experience helping children and adolescents adjust to difficult news and experiences, in this don't-miss episode.

And if you want to learn more about Dr. Harold’s work, check out his website at: http://www.childmind.org