Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Mad in America Radio. My name is Brooks Seem, and I am the author of May Cause Side Effects. Today, I'm with

Jules Hots, a solutions-focused journalist based in New York City, who is also the author of

the forthcoming book, The Connection Cure. Her stories have appeared in the New York Times,

Wired, Scientific American, the Boston Globe, Time, and more.

After studying sociology at the University of Cambridge, she joined the Solutions Journalism Network,

where she helps other journalists rigorously report on what's working to solve today's biggest problems.

Before becoming a journalist, Julia worked as a teacher, bartender,

pizza server, and summer camp forest ranger. She enjoys hiking up mountains, riling up dance floors,

running around parks, biking around New York, and budget traveling around the world,

as well as building the longest road around Catan. Julia, welcome to the Mad in America podcast. Thank you so much,

Brooke. I'm such a fan of you. It's such an honor to be here. Oh, good. So I'm going to start with maybe

an unconventional question. How old are you? That is a great question, not unconventional. We should

normalize asking this. I am 31 years old.

Great. And you have a book, The Connection Cure, that is coming out soon in June. And the reason why I asked

you how old you were is because I'm 38. And before I had gone and done some research on you, I had read your book, and I had this idea of you being someone a good 20 years older than you are, in part because of your excellent writing and your journalism.

And also just because the book, The Connection Cure, the subtitle is the prescripted power of movement, nature, art, service, and

belonging. And in reading the book, there was a part of me that kind of said, I can't believe that

we have to have a book about this because it seems so obvious. And then when I started doing

the research on you, I realized that you're quite young. And you were kind of coming of age right at that time

when social media and the more technologically connected world has really blown up. And so I started

to think to myself, there is a whole generation of people who don't remember what it was like before the internet

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