About the Podcast

Welcome to the Hot Takes podcast by the UCLA Heat Lab. As global warming worsens, heat increasingly impacts people’s daily lives – influencing health, behavior, and more. But, we often aren’t very conscious about heat, and knowledge of it doesn’t get shared beyond academia and specialized fields. In every episode, our hosts engage different researchers, activists, or community members to share their work and how it can be applied in the real world. 

Thank you so much to TGIF who made the production of this podcast possible.

Ep 1: (re)Defining heat with Dr. Bharat Venkat

Heat continues to increase in frequency duration, and intensity. Yet it remains an overlooked (and under researched) part of our lives. Bharat Venkat is the founder and director of the UCLA Heat Lab, an interdisciplinary effort to study the experience of thermal inequality. His upcoming book project involves a synthetic story of what heat is today and how we’ve come to understand it. He joins us to discuss the work of the Heat Lab, different methods of studying heat, and why we’re studying the phenomena in the first place. Find our shownotes here

Ep 2: Throwing Shade at Shade Inequality with Sam Bloch

If you live in Los Angeles, or another super-hot city, you know how important shade is. Whether it’s a dog-owner trying to hop from one patch of shade to another to prevent burned paws, or an exhausted commuter hoping to grab a seat under a shaded bus shelter on the way home from work, everyone needs shade. In this episode with journalist Sam Bloch, we learn that not everyone has access to shade – and that this is often by design. Find our shownotes here