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.
Season 2 Ep 5 - Heat Without Borders: How to Beat the Heat
This long-awaited season finale is here! We’ll be continuing our conversation with Drs. Matthew Baldacchino and Noé Hernandez on rising heat across the globe, albeit from a different perspective. Tune in to hear about the upstream interventions and mitigating strategies to subvert the heat, including strategies for climate policy and planning. Recorded May 2026.
17 Jul 2026
Season 2 Ep 4 - Heat Without Borders: A Global Look at the Impacts of Heat
In this first part of our long-awaited season finale, join us as we take a step back to look at heat from a broader perspective. This episode, we discuss the downstream impacts of global warming with Drs. Matthew Baldacchino and Noé Hernandez, two medical doctors currently working in global health and policy. Rising heat presents as a continuously urgent issue to address in the global health sphere, though its negative impacts are largely predictable and preventable with proper management. Tu...
8 May 2026
Season 2 Ep 3 - Breaking Down Metropolitan Heat with Dr. Daniel Cumming
This episode, join us as we explore heat in the city with Dr. Daniel Cumming, a postdoctoral fellow at Queens College. As an urban and environmental historian of the 20th-century United States, Dr. Cumming examines the powerful intersection of housing and heat and the inequalities that emerged in post-World War II New York City. Through his research and his involvement in the international collaborative project Melting Metropolis, we’ll uncover how heat shapes urban environments, influences i...
17 Apr 2026
Season 2 Ep 2 - There's Nothing Chill About These Pills: Discussing Polypharmacy and Rising Heat Risk with the Pharma Heat Team
As extreme heat becomes more frequent and severe, certain medications increase vulnerability during these times. Older populations, in particular, continue to face this interference with their thermoregulation, with their layered vulnerability in a warming climate. Using county-level data across California, the Pharma Heat team created a more granular assessment of pharmaceutical risks using demographic and social factors that are not often analyzed together in existing literature. The Hot Ta...
3 Apr 2026
Season 2 Ep 1 - Sporting New Temperatures with High School Athletics
As temperatures continue to rise, high school student-athletes are among the populations most vulnerable to extreme heat. In today's episode, the UCLA Heat Lab explores how heat affects athletes across multiple sports through the perspectives of athletes themselves. We discuss football and cross country, where athletes face intense outdoor heat exposure, and explore how heat can also impact indoor spaces through sports like volleyball. We even explore swimming, an unexpected but important con...
9 Apr 2025
Ep 7 - Winter Warmerland
In this Hot Takes special mini-episode, we take a look at the concerning weather events of 2025, and how they led to the heartbreaking destruction within the Los Angeles community due to the wildfires that ignited in early January. Walking through the history of Los Angeles weather events and how we have seen the loss of our seasons in recent years, we try to better understand the causes and effects behind these destructive fires, and how we as a community can not only rebuild, but learn to p...
4 Nov 2024
Ep 6- Getting the Scoop on Metropolitan Heat with Dr. Kara Schlichting
Dr. Kara Schlichting shares her research on the individual experience of heat in metropolitan areas, offering a holistic understanding of temperature through her work with Melting Metropolis.
24 May 2024
Ep 5 - Bringing the Heat to Early Education with the Heat Lab Education Team
There is a critical need for more in-depth environmental curricula to prepare students for the climate-impacted world they'll soon inherit. The UCLA Heat Lab's education team creates digestible lesson plans about thermal inequality for students ranging from 4th graders to high schoolers. From mapping schoolyard shade to brainstorming cool inventions, join us for a behind-the-scenes look on the trials and triumphs of inspiring the next generation of climate leaders.
Check out shownotes at: https://tinyurl.com/hottakes5 (https://tinyurl.com/hottakes5)
22 Feb 2024
Ep 4 - Dismantling Carceral Ecologies with Dr. Nicholas Shapiro and Kate McInerny
Although many of us are familiar with mass incarceration and environmental injustice as separate issues, we often don’t put the two together. Through his Carceral Ecologies lab, Dr. Nicholas Shapiro does just that - examining unjust environmental conditions in the prison industrial complex. Join us, Dr. Shapiro, and special guest Kate McInerny we discuss the lab’s community driven research and delve into abolitionism.
Check out shownotes at: http://tinyurl.com/hottakes4 (http://tinyurl.com/hottakes4)
11 Dec 2023
Ep 3 - Unveiling the Hot Truth about Food Trucks with Sofia Sabra and Olivia Toledo
Many of us love food trucks, but the food we enjoy often conceal a hidden reality—the workers enduring extreme heat. This is thermal inequality, the idea that some people bear the heat so others don't have to. Join us in an episode with Sofia Sabra and Olivia Toledo as we unravel the often-overlooked challenges faced by food truck workers and brainstorm potential solutions.
Check out shownotes here: https://tinyurl.com/hottakes3 (https://tinyurl.com/hottakes3)
13 Oct 2023
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.
Check out shownotes here: tinyurl.com/hottakes2 (http://tinyurl.com/hottakes2)
23 Jun 2023
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. Dr. 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 engaging with nearly 200 years of heat research to tell 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.
Check out shownotes here: tinyurl.com/hottakes1 (https://tinyurl.com/hottakes1)
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
5 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
19 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 20 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
13
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
71
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