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

Transcript

[00:00:00] Natalie Gurzeler: Hello, this is the Hot Takes podcast by the UCLA Heat Lab, and I'm your host, Natalie. As global warming worsens, heat increasingly impacts people's daily lives, influencing health behavior, and so much more. But we often aren't very conscious about heat and knowledge of it doesn't get shared beyond academia and specialized fields.

[00:00:35] Natalie Gurzeler: In this week's episode with Professor Bharat Venkat, we will be discussing different ways of measuring and studying heat. His personal experiences with heat advice to people who are new to research, and how the HEAT Lab came to be. The Hot Takes Podcast is a production of the UCLA Heat Lab with production support from Chelsea Tran, Olivia Toledo, Tracy Tran, Jason Tja, Karina Brun, and myself, Natalie Gertler.

[00:01:01] Natalie Gurzeler: We are generously funded by the Green Initiative Fund, and you can email us at Hot Takes UCLA gmail.com with any suggestions or questions so we can work to improve your listening experience. Also don't forget to give the podcast a rating on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and follow our Instagram at UCLA Heat Lab.

[00:01:21] Natalie Gurzeler: And without further ado, let'as get to our conversation with Dr. Bad Ben Kat. Hello everyone. I am here today with Professor Bad Ben Kat. An assistant professor at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics with a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Department of Anthropology. He is also the director of the UCLA Heat Lab.

[00:01:41] Natalie Gurzeler: Professor Venkat, welcome to the Hot Takes podcast. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for joining us today. So in our podcasts, we like to start every episode with a little conversation warmup, which is our version of an icebreaker. So for today's warmup, we were wondering what is your, one of your earliest memories associated with heat?

[00:02:01] Natalie Gurzeler: For clarification, this could be just an instance in your childhood where you first recognized that heat existed or you became aware that, you know, we experience heat as human beings. 

[00:02:12] Bharat Venkat: Yeah, so I grew up in Wisconsin and I remember having pretty bad winters. Uh, I mean bad in the sense that it would snow a lot, and I would spend much of the day shoveling, shoveling the driveway and the sidewalks to get out, and then of course, snow would pile up in front of me.

[00:02:29] Bharat Venkat: So by the time I get to the end, it was all piled up again. Um, But I kinda loved it. I really enjoyed the cold. I used to run around barefoot in the snow. Uh, but I would also spend summers in, in India, in Chennai, primarily visiting my family. And the, I really remember the, the contrast between the. These really cold winters in Wisconsin and these really hot, uh, muggy summers in India.

[00:02:56] Bharat Venkat: Um, and going back and forth between these really different kinds of climates and different kinds of activities you would do in them, you know, in. Even though it was cold, it was always kinda fun to go outside as a kid. Uh, but in the kind of Indian summer, I mostly just wanted to lay under the fan or, uh, stay inside or, you know, I would go out early in the morning to the beach maybe.

[00:03:20] Bharat Venkat: Uh, but you really kind of learned different ways of existing in the world, different rhythms to life as you move between these kinds of climates and between the, you know, really different places. 

[00:03:33] Natalie Gurzeler: Did you say maybe you didn't really experience, besides your times at India in the summer, your experience of heat within the us as we know it's been getting increasingly hotter.

[00:03:43] Natalie Gurzeler: Was that only when you moved out of Wisconsin or was that well before then? 

[00:03:48] Bharat Venkat: You know, interestingly enough, Yeah, I've been interested in environmental issues and climate change issues for a long time. Even as a kid, I remember being really invested in that, and I remember Al Gore when he began to talk about climate change as being a kind of pressing existential concern, but I.

[00:04:08] Bharat Venkat: As a kid, I don't remember experiencing that viscerally. I don't remember having the experience of, of a heat wave until I was much older. Uh, you know, and now we, we live through heat waves here in Los Angeles every year. Um, same in India. You have constant heat waves and you know, untold. Illnesses and deaths caused by heat.

[00:04:30] Bharat Venkat: But that wasn't the experience I had growing up in Wisconsin, and that wasn't what people were talking about at that moment. Um, so I think, you know, things have changed. Of course, we were already experiencing climate change then, but I think the effects now are much more here and present and unavoidable and hard to look away from.

[00:04:50] Natalie Gurzeler: Um, yeah, I, I completely agree. I mean, growing up, I, even in elementary school, I remember I would look at the asphalt and you would see those little like waves on the floor thinking it was wet because it was so hot. Like you could visually see the heat waves. And even, you know, on the education team, when we go to the elementary schools, the kids tell us, some days it gets so hot at recess.

[00:05:11] Natalie Gurzeler: They're not even allowed to play outside. And even, I don't remember, even though I'm only a couple of years past that, even, I don't remember ever having to stay inside because it was physically too hot out. So I think it definitely is becoming, um, less and less avoidable and it's almost like we can't escape it at all anymore.

[00:05:27] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah. 

[00:05:28] Bharat Venkat: Did you ever have days growing up in school when they would close down school because of the heat? No, 

[00:05:33] Natalie Gurzeler: we, we never had that. Sometimes it's, it's kind of funny, we even wish we had it. We would be like, well, if the east coast gets snow days, why don't we get heat days? But it never actually happened, you know?

[00:05:44] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah. But I'm, I'm fearing it might be the new future when it's too hot. I 

[00:05:47] Bharat Venkat: think so. I remember, I remember snow days growing up in Wisconsin. I remember I would, you'd wake up and you'd see how cold it was, how much snow there was, and you would check. The news and there was always a kind of a, a banner at the bottom that was kind of scrolling and you would look for the name of your school and really hope that it was gonna be canceled that day.

[00:06:05] Bharat Venkat: Uh, and I think the idea of a heat day, uh, it really kind of struck me last year at UCLA when, I think it was over the summer they began closing down campus or closing down buildings because of the extreme heat and being unable to have enough electricity to kind of keep air conditioning running. Right.

[00:06:23] Bharat Venkat: So they, they wanted to really focus on. Kind of vital systems thing like labs for example, that had cooling to keep samples alive. Um, and so everything else was kind of shut down and, and they even told us, you know, if you have meetings, don't have them on campus. Don't come in, just do it all via Zoom. I thought to myself, these are, these are heat days.

[00:06:43] Bharat Venkat: We're, we're experiencing the, the kind of, A hot day version of, of those snow days that I grew up with. 

[00:06:52] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah. No, I, I remember even receiving those emails before I even started my first day here as a student. And I even remember, um, since I'm a first year in fall quarter when everyone's new, they were sitting in, um, I believe it was Moore Hall and some of my friends were like, I can't even physically be in that classroom.

[00:07:09] Natalie Gurzeler: They're not giving it air conditioning, they're not cooling it. It's just impossible to learn. And I think that's true. I think he even affects learning at any age. I would say maybe even worse for the younger generations, but even. For us. I remember fall quarter when it was so hot, I would sit in class and I couldn't think about anything.

[00:07:24] Natalie Gurzeler: Mm-hmm. I would sit there, I would try to listen, but you're sweating. It's hot. The person next to you over is heating. So it, it's really impacting us in many different ways. Um, across all the ages, I'd say. So even though a designated, you know, heat day might not have, um, happened yet, like it is with snow days, I think.

[00:07:42] Natalie Gurzeler: I more standardized thing is coming 

[00:07:44] Bharat Venkat: in. Yeah, and you know, education is interesting cause we already know that when it's hot you have a hard time focusing. You have a hard time paying attention to staying kind of concentrated on whatever the teacher's telling you. Uh, but you also tend to lose learning over time, right?

[00:08:01] Bharat Venkat: So we know that students in the schools without air conditioning tend to have learning loss that accumulates and compounds year upon year, upon year. Um, we even know that students likely do worse on days when it's hotter, when it comes to standardized exams. And, um, you know, I've heard from many students that their teachers would turn the air conditioning on only on testing days, right?

[00:08:24] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah. I, I remember that. I think that even had, um, I came from an LA U S D school. I went to LA U s D schools all my life, and I think part of the reason why they switched the school year to start in August versus September, I think it was to save money on air conditioning. They wanted to end earlier because then they don't have to spend all that money on air conditioning throughout the summer.

[00:08:46] Natalie Gurzeler: So even just for financial reasons, all education aside, everyone's really facing the pressure of this like, New era of heat that's affecting us at our schools and our communities. So I think, I think it's very, um, not just sad, but I think it's very concerning because these are the little changes that we can still handle to help mitigate it.

[00:09:06] Natalie Gurzeler: But at some point there's really not going to be much we can do. So we're gonna have to start focusing on. Permanent, you know, implementations of ways to mitigate this heat in our schools. Um, I know in your soc Gen five class you talk about how LA s d schools also, some of them are up to 90% asphalt, which is terrible for the kids because there's literally nowhere for them to be cool.

[00:09:28] Natalie Gurzeler: And if they can't feel comfortable at school, I can't imagine how they can really even be learning at 

[00:09:33] Bharat Venkat: school. Yeah, so I, I did teach a five week unit on Hedon Society as part of this course. And, uh, the, the, the, the lecture on L A U S D and on education I think really speaks to students because a lot of them are just coming out of that.

[00:09:52] Bharat Venkat: A lot of them are freshmen and sophomores are first and second years, and they're just coming fresh out of, of K through 12 education. And they have strong memories of, of these. Playgrounds where the ground burns you, if you touch it, are where the slide and the, and the monkey bars are just too hot and you can't really utilize the equipment.

[00:10:15] Bharat Venkat: Um, they have memories of being in classrooms that were too hot to learn where they're, they know they would rather just be at home or somewhere else because they're just unable to focus. Right. Um, and those things not being taken seriously as, As kind of real concerns, you know, that being told, oh, you're just complaining, just put up with it.

[00:10:34] Bharat Venkat: Um, when in fact it is a lot hotter than it used to be. And that these things really do have effects on our ability to concentrate, focus and to actually learn. And of course we know that there are deep racial and class based disparities in, in what kinds of students, what kinds of schools get air conditioning or get playgrounds with grass and canopy cover and trees and so on.

[00:10:58] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah, I remember there would be days in high school where it would be so hot and maybe we're coming in from lunch or we're coming into the next period, and the teacher would turn the lights off in the classroom because everyone would be so overheated we couldn't even stand having the lights on. So even just on that small scale, you know, We tried our best, but turning off the lights, I feel it.

[00:11:20] Natalie Gurzeler: It only can do so much for the student and they're learning, you know, if you're overheating in the darker, in the light, it's such a small difference. But, um, I guess turning a little bit away from heat within schools, but just education on heat and maybe just heat. Within countries itself. I know we, you've written your book, um, at the Limit of Cure, which examines what it means to be cured and what it means for a cure to come undone.

[00:11:44] Natalie Gurzeler: And you u you mainly utilize anthropological and historical methods, if I'm correct. That's right. Um, would you mind telling us a little more about your book and your research methods and maybe how those methods can be applicable to heat in. It's future. 

[00:11:58] Bharat Venkat: Sure. Yeah. I'd love to. So, so my book came out in 2021.

[00:12:02] Bharat Venkat: It's called At The Limits of Cure, and it came out with Duke University Press, and that book was really an attempt to understand. Tuberculosis in India, a condition that by all accounts is curable, eminently curable, but remains uncured or uncurable for so many. And India has one of the, um, highest number of cases of tuberculosis anywhere in the world.

[00:12:26] Bharat Venkat: Um, and a lot of cases of drug drug-resistant tuberculosis. So I spent about a decade, uh, doing research on tuberculosis in India. Um, ethnographic work in clinics and labs. Government officials, um, animal sanctuaries even, and archival work. Try to understand the history of tuberculosis treatment in India, which is of course part of a much more global story that involves sanatoria in Switzerland and in Australia, and involves British colonial rule.

[00:12:57] Bharat Venkat: It involves the development of antibiotics and their testing. Uh, but the project was really kind of interested, you know, in understanding the. Why it is that this admittedly curable disease was so hard either to cure or became very difficult to stay cured. You know, I would see patients who were told by their doctors, yeah, you're cured, you're done.

[00:13:19] Bharat Venkat: And they'd come back weeks, months, years later. Once again, sick once again in need of cure. Um, This, the work on heat, which has really been, I guess the last four, four to five years. It comes out of my experience of doing field work in India. Um, I remember, I think it was 2019, the summer I was in Delhi and I was going to, A hospital in the middle of the day and it was incredibly hot.

[00:13:47] Bharat Venkat: I was in Shaw so there was some kind of air whizzing past me, but you know, every time you get stuck at traffic you just really felt the swelter. Right? And I get to the hospital and I see that. It's closed. Uh, the doctors, uh, when I finally find them, they're, they're in the on-call room, which is the one room in the hospital that has air conditioning, and they've told the patients to come back the next day because it's just too hot and they don't want people waiting around.

[00:14:14] Bharat Venkat: They don't wanna be seeing people in these incredibly hot, um, clinical rooms or even outside. And they decide just to kind of call it for the day. Right. And. The funny thing is even though I was really hot, I just imagined that was normal and I've spent lots of time in India. But uh, it didn't occur to me that it was hotter than.

[00:14:38] Bharat Venkat: Usual, I didn't have a good way of gauging what was normal hot and what was dangerously unhealthy. Um, and that really made me pause to kind of understand, oh wow, people are reorganizing their lives. They are shifting the ways in which these institutions have worked to respond to the heat. Um, of course this has always been the case to some extent, you know?

[00:14:59] Bharat Venkat: I know it. You know, during the hottest time of the year in India, people will often try to prioritize doing outdoor activities earliest early in the morning or late at night. Right. To avoid the kind of midday, but to have a hospital just closed down because of the heat. That's something else entirely. Uh, and that may be really kinda consider, okay, we're, this is different.

[00:15:18] Bharat Venkat: Right. Um, And it's not simply that India is a hot place and or parts of India are hot. It's that now we're entering into this era where that heat is crossing a critical threshold. And that's what really kind of pulled me into this new research. So, 

[00:15:33] Natalie Gurzeler: I think that's extremely fascinating because I know for me, being in the younger generation, I never really experienced the before and after.

[00:15:43] Natalie Gurzeler: I've only ever lived during the during of the heat changing, so you know. This is all I know and this is all me and a lot of my peers know. So we've never really seen that pass. We could be well into the critical point and we would've no idea because that's all we've ever lived through. So I think it's really important that this type of research on heat is coming up now before it's too late, so people become more aware.

[00:16:06] Natalie Gurzeler: And I guess that's why the UCLA Heat Lab is so important because we're doing this heat research at such a critical time. Um, because it's not too late yet, but if we wait any longer, many may argue it is too late. Um, so would you mind telling us a little bit about the UCLA Heat Lab and why you created it here or wanted to form it here at UCLA to begin with?

[00:16:30] Bharat Venkat: Sure. So in January of 2020, I had just been at UCLA for about four to six months, and I was really interested in working collaboratively with students. You know, I had already kind of had this idea that I wanted to work on heat and, um, there's a broader concern with what I call thermal inequality, which refers to the ways in which not only heat is un unevenly distributed, but the long-term effects, the downstream consequences of heat.

[00:16:59] Bharat Venkat: Um, Those kinds of things are distributed in incredibly unequal ways along the lines of race, class, gender, disability, so on and so forth. Uh, but the heat lab was, I thought, a really neat opportunity to develop interesting interdisciplinary research projects that spanned in multiple directions. Um, looking at.

[00:17:23] Bharat Venkat: The effects of heat on laborers. Looking at how, uh, ideas about critical thresholds related to heat were developed, um, using subjects who were able-bodied, usually white men. Right. And so what would you do if you were to focus on other groups, for example, disabled folks, how would that change your metrics about what's dangerous and what's not?

[00:17:44] Bharat Venkat: Um, and the group quickly expanded. So we started off with about four or five students, and now we have between 15 and 20 at any given moment. And there's such a, there's a huge range of interdisciplinary projects where, you know, students come in with ideas as you well know. Um, a student says, Hey, I'm interested in studying immigration.

[00:18:02] Bharat Venkat: I'm interested in studying reproduction. And then we figure out collaboratively together, what kinds of questions can you ask? What kinds of methods do you need? What sorts of tools do you need to get ahold of? Uh, where can you get the requisite expertise? What should we read? And so we develop these projects that can take years, uh, but they really kind of operate and unfold on their own timescale.

[00:18:25] Bharat Venkat: Um, and it's just a fantastic space. You know, we have, you know, This, this cohort of students who are able to talk about climate change and health in these incredibly nuanced and, and amazing ways. Um, and to kind of carry forward those skills into their own futures, into their own research, into their own work.

[00:18:46] Bharat Venkat: Uh, and I really do think that we need that kind of interdisciplinary. Inter scaler complex way of understanding problems like heat problems, like antibiotic resistance, problems like climate change and health more broadly. And that's kind of the goal of the HEAT lab. 

[00:19:02] Natalie Gurzeler: No. Yeah. I mean, my experience with the heat lab personally, even though I've only been here for, um, three quarters now, actually times really, that's, that's a full year.

[00:19:10] Natalie Gurzeler: That's, that's a full year time's really flying. That's a lot of time. Yeah. Um, I, I, I just find it so interesting because people often ask, you know, what? Does heat lab do? Are you just literally studying heat from the sun, like how it's hot and I'm like, Yes, but no. I mean there, there's more to the heat lab than just the heat itself.

[00:19:31] Natalie Gurzeler: There's so much that goes on in the background in relationship to it that it, it's not just, oh, we're studying heat and how hot it is. It's like, how is this heat affecting so many different groups of people and environments and like all the nuances behind it. So I think. I do agree. It has given such a really interesting perspective on how to approach research instead of just such a direct, like, this is the topic matter, but how you need to pull all these different facts to, um, create this broader idea of what you're really looking at.

[00:20:03] Natalie Gurzeler: Well, 

[00:20:03] Bharat Venkat: so you actually got, you actually learned about heat lab through one of its activities, right? 

[00:20:08] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah, I, I, I learned about, Um, heat lab through my high school. The education team came in to do a lesson and I was sitting there during that lesson and I was like, this is fascinating. I've really never seen, um, science or climactic issues approached this way, you know?

[00:20:26] Natalie Gurzeler: And that's what really inspired me to wanna join because everything I had really learned in school up until that point, it's like, well, here's a concept. This is what this concept means. Next concept. They never really, I. Showed the why or the how, or even just the actual impact and how the impact is not the same for everyone.

[00:20:44] Natalie Gurzeler: You know, we always learn growing up, oh, the climate's getting hot for everyone. They're global warming, but global warming really doesn't affect everyone the same way. Some people don't feel it at all, and some people have already lost their. Lo, um, lost their lives, lost their houses, they lost everything.

[00:20:59] Natalie Gurzeler: We have climate refugees, which I don't think that term was around like 20 years ago. Mm-hmm. I think it's very new. Um, so I, it definitely inspired me when I was in high school. So hopefully if other people can hear this research and see what's being done, it gives them that perspective that maybe they were missing this whole time and really opens their eyes up to, um, what this issue really is at heart.

[00:21:24] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah. Um, sorry, I know that was a bit of a tangent, but No, that was great. Did did you have a, because with it being said that heat is not just like heat alone. Mm-hmm. Did you have a really specific goal in mind for the heat lab, or did you More so just wanna just see where it went after you started it.

[00:21:43] Bharat Venkat: Honestly, I really didn't, you know, I, I knew that I was committed to collaborative research and I was committed to interdisciplinary research and I was committed to training students to think and work in an interdisciplinary and collaborative way. But I didn't have an end goal in mind, and I still don't really, um, whenever.

[00:22:03] Bharat Venkat: New folks join the lab. They often ask, okay, so how long will this project take? And I'm like, well, how long do you want it to take? And then they'll say, well, what, what methods should I use? And I'm like, well, what would you like to use? What do you think you need to use to answer your questions? Um, and then they might ask, okay, so what is the output?

[00:22:23] Bharat Venkat: Should we write a paper? Should we write an op-ed? Should we do a podcast? Um, And my answer is always the same. It's, you know, it depends who you're trying to talk to, who you're trying to reach. Who do you think needs to know this? Um, and so, Yeah, I don't, I don't have, I have a set of principles. I have a set of, of values, and I think those values are about producing a community of folks who care about each other and care about this research and this work, and sharing it with others and who are committed to.

[00:22:55] Bharat Venkat: Um, ideas around social justice and environmental justice, but I don't have, um, you know, I don't need to produce four peer-reviewed papers or, or have things done by tomorrow. Right? And I think that kind of open-endedness is what makes it fun and makes it interesting and makes it not like, Your classes or your jobs or everything else.

[00:23:19] Bharat Venkat: It's really, I think, at least I think it's a special space. 

[00:23:22] Natalie Gurzeler: I completely agree. I mean, I feel like if you always try to quantify your research, you're either gonna feel limited or unsatisfied. You're never gonna really be happy with what you have. And I also do agree. I mean heat lab. From what I've heard, I've talked to other friends who are in research and they're like, I'm not really friends with my lab mates.

[00:23:41] Natalie Gurzeler: You know, like, I don't really hang out with them outside. Or they're like, oh, like, you know, I, I didn't know you guys had these types of meetings, or you guys work together like this. Like they hear me on Zoom and they're like, it sounds like you're having fun. And I'm like, 

[00:23:54] Bharat Venkat: well, Cherish the thought. How could you have fun while doing research?

[00:23:57] Natalie Gurzeler: I know, I, and I gotta tell 'em, I'm like, well, if you don't find what you're researching fun, maybe it's not the right thing for you to be researching. Mm-hmm. You know, you should, you should find joy in what you're looking into. Otherwise you're never really going to be able to, um, experience the full extent of what could come from your research if you don't have that passion in it.

[00:24:16] Natalie Gurzeler: And I think that's what's really special, especially because. Everyone in this lab has such a diverse background, um, not even just in their major, but just in their life experiences where they're from, what they've done, like leading up to this point in their life. And even that contributes to that interdisciplinary perspective because I.

[00:24:35] Natalie Gurzeler: Because everyone's in different backgrounds. Someone might be thinking of something you never would've thought of, you know? Mm-hmm. And I just think that's so exciting. Um, and I always knew I wanted to go into something interdisciplinary because if I stay too long in any really set box, I feel like I'm just going to get burnt out and it's not enough.

[00:24:55] Natalie Gurzeler: So I, I do think this is one of. This is a very unique lab on campus in terms of how we approach our work and what work we even do. Um, and is, is there anything, and because of these methods that might not be super typical of a research lab, is there anything that's surprised you about how it's turned out?

[00:25:16] Bharat Venkat: Yeah, I mean, I'm surprised every week, you know, every, every week someone says something where I'm like, wow, I didn't, didn't think about that. I mean, this, this podcast, for example, um, I think it was just a couple of months ago when, when Jason, one of our team members said, Hey, let's do a podcast. Let's get, let's get our own research, other people's research out into the world by doing a podcast.

[00:25:35] Bharat Venkat: I've never done a podcast before, so I was like, go for it. And. You all have figured it out and it's been amazing. Right. Um, similarly, uh, another, another team member, Desiree, you know, who's a disability studies minor, said, Hey, you know, we should really be studying how, uh, disabled folks, disabled bodies are differently affected by he than able bodied white men, which have been the kind of standard subject for heat research for the last a hundred years.

[00:26:02] Bharat Venkat: And, That was a really important good point and led her to kind of move that research forward to kind of think about those kinds of questions. Right. And uh, it really comes out of her own personal experience, her own studies. Uh, and I think that's what, that's when Heath Lab is at its best is when students bring their own intellectual, political, personal investments into that room and think, how can I bring this together with concerns about climate change, health, extreme heat?

[00:26:34] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah, I mean, it's important that you know, you have more than one perspective on anything you research because not everyone experience, especially with heat like. Um, not everyone is experiencing it the same. So that's, that's a really important take to look into. And in addition to that, um, I think people often, you know, they look at our website, they look at like our social media or like the crew neck, and they're like, what is the logo?

[00:27:00] Natalie Gurzeler: A heart? Like, what, what is that? You know, it's just like a blob of thermal color. Would you mind just kind of, Explaining briefly, like what really does the logo represent? Yeah. 

[00:27:10] Bharat Venkat: The UCLA Heat Lab logo was designed by Amisha Gani, who is this amazing illustrator, graphic designer. Um, she also makes clothing.

[00:27:20] Bharat Venkat: She does all kinds of stuff. Incredible, incredible artist. And she's also a staff member at the Institute for Society of Genetics here at ucla, which is my home department. And I came to her and I said, Hey, Aisha, I'd like to. Develop a logo for the heat lab and, um, I don't quite know what it should be. I knew it shouldn't be flames.

[00:27:41] Bharat Venkat: Yeah. Cause that's kinda the thing people go to, or the sun. It just felt like it was too, too obvious, not quite right. Didn't really feel like it captures what I was trying to do. Yeah. And stereotypical 

[00:27:51] Natalie Gurzeler: to heat, 

[00:27:51] Bharat Venkat: you know? Yeah. And I, I described to her, you know, I'm interested in, in health and the body. I'm interested in the built environment and how that mediates the effects of heat.

[00:28:01] Bharat Venkat: Uh, I'm interested in equality. And so she developed a few designs and a lot of them involved taking the human body or parts of the body and trying to incorporate the built environment into it to show how the built environment, in a way gets under the skin, in the way that it mediates the effects of heat.

[00:28:18] Bharat Venkat: Uh, and then using these kinds of colors, you know, reds and oranges and colors related to kind of temperature gradients. Uh, To make that that warmth and that heat and that temperature aspect more visible. And so ultimately she developed this image, which is a heart, uh, the shape of a heart and the heart's composed of buildings, of the built environment of the city, right?

[00:28:43] Bharat Venkat: Uh uh, and then you have those reds and oranges and blues and so on. And so you contain in one image, you know, human health, the human body, the built environment. And the problem of heat. 

[00:28:57] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah, that's really interesting because I know when I first joined I was like, I know it's a heart, but Yeah. And it has the thermal coloring, but I'm not entirely sure like what the deeper meaning is.

[00:29:07] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah. So I just think that's a good thing to really explain, cuz I don't really think we have it explained anywhere, you know? Yeah. It's just the logo. And with that being said, and how you didn't really want, you know, just a fire or a sun, because that's just a very direct interpretation of heat. Um, we often say here that heat is a multifaceted concept that many people struggle with defining, you know, we see it as a temperature and experience and inequality, et cetera.

[00:29:35] Natalie Gurzeler: How would you define heat for yourself? 

[00:29:39] Bharat Venkat: I think you've said it, you've said it already, right? Um, heat is all of these things. Heat is an experience you have. Heat is something that's energy. It is something that's contained or released. It is a form of inequality and it's also a source of pleasure and delight, right?

[00:29:56] Bharat Venkat: Heat is not always a bad thing. So heat is in a, it's, it's infrastructural to life. We don't have life without heat. So I think. My answer then is all of the above, and I think what's what's important is with any research project, it's to ask, you know, what is the form of heat we're tracking here and why so.

[00:30:20] Bharat Venkat: Do we want to think in terms of temperatures? Do we want to think in terms of, um, humidity? Do we wanna think about thermal experience? How people actually experience heat in this space? Do we wanna think about thermal burden? How much heat people are exposed to over time? Uh, all of that really depends on what you're trying to answer, what you're trying to figure out.

[00:30:38] Bharat Venkat: And so there's no kind of one answer. And this is also true kind of in the history of science. If you move across, say, physics or exercise physiology or chemistry, they all all have overlapping but distinct ideas about what heat is and how you define it. 

[00:30:56] Natalie Gurzeler: It. It definitely has a lot of different ways it can be interpreted and sometimes I feel that can make research a little bit tricky on how you really wanna approach this interpretation of heat.

[00:31:07] Natalie Gurzeler: Are there different research methods that you would say are commonly used throughout the lab for this measurement of heat? You know, it could be through like, Um, something very technological or just even, you know, a personal experience that we're just recapturing. 

[00:31:22] Bharat Venkat: So the methods always come after the questions.

[00:31:26] Bharat Venkat: So students in the lab have traditionally figured out what they're interested in studying and then began to ask, okay, how do we go about studying that? And then they've talked to. Experts and scholars and policymakers to figure out how do we do this effectively. So, um, to give you an example, the, there was a team in the lab that was interested in studying the effects of heat on food truck workers up on the hill.

[00:31:51] Bharat Venkat: Uh, where all the students live, where the dorms are, and they wanted to figure out how do I, how do, how do we gauge what's going on with these food drug workers? Uh, so one answer became using eye buttons. So they spoke to one of my colleagues here at ucla, Dr. Kelly Turner, who's an amazing, uh, urban planner, climate scientist, um, extraordinaire.

[00:32:11] Bharat Venkat: And really, um, someone whose work is well worth spending a lot of time with, especially when it comes to heat and. Dr. Turner turned them on to these eye buttons, basically really, really small. Buttons, basically metal circles that you can affix to various parts of a food truck and then get temperature readings over the course of several hours.

[00:32:35] Bharat Venkat: And so, uh, the students on this team collected data from a couple different food trucks, but they also wanted to understand not just what the temperature was, but they wanted to also understand what it felt like to experience those temperatures and how that affected people who work inside of these metal boxes.

[00:32:53] Bharat Venkat: As they connected interviews and oral histories with food truck workers and owners, um, to get a sense, you know, how how often have you fallen ill? Um, how do you manage dealing with the heat? Um, what kinds of people are able to deal with it and who can't deal with it. Um, they also looked at laws and regulations to figure out how does LA regulate food safety issues or worker safety issues?

[00:33:19] Bharat Venkat: So, That all of that requires a range of methods, right? From temperature sensing to interviewing oral histories, to looking at records, content, data analysis. Um, And what's been great about the lab is that the methods proliferate, right? So as, as new problems, new questions arise, people in the lab look, you know, they look across disciplines and they figure out, okay, what, what, what can we draw upon?

[00:33:47] Bharat Venkat: What sorts of tools can we use to begin to answer our questions? 

[00:33:52] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah, so there, there are lots of different approaches. You know, I think also a misconception is people hear heat lab and when they hear the word lab, they think like, oh, we have like little pipettes and little test tubes. We're uhhuh, you know, we're wearing lab coats and goggles.

[00:34:06] Natalie Gurzeler: But I think a lab, it can be so much more than that. And it's not just a wet lab that, um, Fits the mold of what you do with research. And so I think it's interesting there're just so many different approaches, kind of all researching the same thing, but you know, different things at the same time. And I think these developments in research are super important because if we want.

[00:34:27] Natalie Gurzeler: To start genuinely working towards, um, helping or minimizing the climate crisis, you need these kind of, um, abstract ways of approaching it without just being like, ah, the temperature, you know, it's 70 degrees, so it's getting hotter. Um, and with that being said, uh, the city of Los Angeles. I would say in recent years they have been doing more recently to address heat.

[00:34:52] Natalie Gurzeler: Um, and even recently they established a heat equity office led by Marta Segura. What are your thoughts on this, or do you think these are the steps we're needing to be taking to help this climate crisis? Or do you think we are going in the wrong direction? 

[00:35:08] Bharat Venkat: Well, I think appointing, uh, chief Heat Officer, which LA has done, um, in the form of URA and other cities have followed as well.

[00:35:16] Bharat Venkat: Uh, it's important because heat is a crosscutting issue, right? Heat affects transportation, the built environment, education, housing, energy, so on and so forth. And you. You need to coordinate between all of those agencies, all of those officials and staffs. And so having someone who is the point person who's able to move across and to work across these different sectors of, of governance allows for a coordinated approach.

[00:35:46] Bharat Venkat: So I think that is really important and I think increasingly we're gonna have to figure out ways to work across and not within our usual silos. 

[00:35:55] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah. Um, and with that, You know, we also have some other developments. Like very recently, Sam Block published the article and I believe the LA Times also published the article about that new, um, LA Department of Transit Establishment, uh, Lata.

[00:36:13] Natalie Gurzeler: And in the article he quotes that it is a shade and light. Lighting pilot for a gender equity action plan to address the needs of women who rely on public transit. Do you think, um, changes like this are really necessary or is it more so do you think it's more performative and it won't really help like the actual shape need for shade at bus stops?

[00:36:37] Natalie Gurzeler: Because, you know, there's been a lot of implementation of hostile architecture that doesn't really support shade because they don't want unhoused individuals living there. Would you think something like this is really, I. Going to make a change? Or is it more so just kind of like a figurehead for a deeper problem?

[00:36:55] Bharat Venkat: So on one hand, I. I applaud the kind of move towards finding creative approaches and solutions to things like shade inequity and trying to figure out ways of providing shade at bus stops. The other hand, I'm not sure that this is a particularly effective method. Uh, I don't really know much about who decided to do this and why.

[00:37:19] Bharat Venkat: Um, I think there are kind of. Better true tried and true approaches. And I, and I think part of the problem with bus shelter and, and, and providing shade is the fact that the city of Los Angeles has kind of sold over the rights to bus shelters, largely to private companies who are meant to provide. Both advertising and any kind of shading over these structures, and it's an expensive, complicated thing to do.

[00:37:45] Bharat Venkat: Um, so the problem is not just engineering. The problem is also about politics and economics and those kinds of issues have to be dealt with in a more fundamental way. You know, you can't treat climate concerns as epiphenomenal, as this kind of icing on top of the cake. You have to really think about what's the cake made out of Two.

[00:38:01] Natalie Gurzeler: That's, that's actually a really good analogy because I think that links back to the earlier idea of like the client, the idea that people think, you know, the climate is changing, everyone's affected. We need to help everyone when really, like, some people are drowning and the others, you know, they're, they're still onshore.

[00:38:15] Natalie Gurzeler: So I think this, um, I'm, I'm also excited to see where like this development goes. I'm not sure how effective it will be, but I guess, you know, only time will tell. And. Speaking of time, we hear rumors of a new book project, um, that might be potentially coming out. Would you mind telling us a bit about that?

[00:38:38] Natalie Gurzeler: Sure, 

[00:38:39] Bharat Venkat: I can try. So, uh, I'm working on a book right now called tentatively called swelter. A history of heat in an unequal world. And uh, it's really an attempt to translate that class I was describing earlier about heat in society, uh, to a broader audience to kind of think about heat from the level of the cell to the level of the planet.

[00:39:00] Bharat Venkat: And to think about how those skills connect and to think about the history of studying and understanding and responding to heat over the last 200 years, and the development of things like refrigeration and, and cooling and air conditioning that have radically transformed how we respond to heat and also in some ways made the climate crisis even worse.

[00:39:21] Bharat Venkat: Um, so it's really an effort to think. And work synthetically across disciplinary boundaries. So tell a story about heat that stretches from the food we eat to the work we do, to the ways in which we learn, right? Um, and to really help folks see those connections that aren't always obvious and always aren't, aren't always, uh, so apparent to us.

[00:39:49] Natalie Gurzeler: Nice. And what, what does the research process for that book look like? Is it very like hands-on or is it more so literature reviews or all of the above? 

[00:39:58] Bharat Venkat: It's a lot of things, so I. It involves interviews and interviews with experts. Um, which range, you know, so yesterday I spoke with architectural historian.

[00:40:11] Bharat Venkat: Um, I've spoken with policy makers, I've spoken with evolutionary biologists, I've spoken with engineers. It also means talking to ordinary people who experience heating their lives, which is almost all of us. It means doing ethnographic work with communities affected by heat. It means going to archives to study, to learn about how heat has been studied.

[00:40:34] Bharat Venkat: Um, you know, going back to your earlier question, what, how do you define heat? That's one place I go to look to see how scientists have defined heat, different kinds of scientists. Um, the way an architect defines heat in terms of thermal comfort is different from how say, Uh, material engineer would define heat in terms of reflection and how much heat enters into a building, for example, um, versus say how a thermal physiologist defines heat in terms of how it affects the body and its organs and cells and so on.

[00:41:03] Bharat Venkat: So, I. The research process for the book really involves trying to push myself to engage with all of this amazing research that's been done over the last 200 years across this range of disciplines to tell a, a synthetic story about how heat. Uh, came to be what it is today and how we've come to understand it, and it's kind of, um, how we've come to develop architectural understandings about heat and our responses to 

[00:41:28] Natalie Gurzeler: it.

[00:41:29] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah, so I mean, that itself is like that firsthand experience of just how interdisciplinary heat can be and how it really is such a. Uh, case by case basis and everyone's like personal interpretation of it can be so different. And I guess that also, you know, it kind of proves that research processes aren't necessarily linear.

[00:41:49] Natalie Gurzeler: They're not really start to finish and they're not, they almost never are. They never, never are. Yeah. Um, and I guess as the wrap up question then for this interview is, what is some advice you would give to young researchers or people who are looking to get into research maybe here at UCLA or really anywhere?

[00:42:06] Natalie Gurzeler: Great 

[00:42:07] Bharat Venkat: question. So I think something you had said earlier was actually great advice, which was, if you're not enjoying what you're doing, you're probably in the wrong place. Uh, if you're doing research and you find that you're bored or you don't really care, you know, maybe you're learning some cool skills, maybe you're getting a CV line.

[00:42:25] Bharat Venkat: But ultimately, It's not the work you should be doing if you're not excited about it. Right. So I think the advice I often give students is, you know, it's okay to quit. And this is something that I think people are often not told. People are often told you have to endure. It's important to learn to like stick it out and there's some value to that.

[00:42:42] Bharat Venkat: But I think learning to let go. It's really hard to do learning to understand yourself well enough to know what you're passionate about and um, and so that's something you can only learn by taking a lot of missteps, by getting involved in things that you realize later on you're not that into, and that's okay, but that's what you need to do to kind of figure out what you are into.

[00:43:05] Natalie Gurzeler: Yeah, I mean I think that's great advice. That's something even I myself, am trying to sort out personally and I'm sure lots of people around me and lots of people listening to this podcast. Um, to wrap it up, I just wanna say thank you so much for joining us on Thank you. Our first episode of the Hot Takes podcast, which is really exciting and 

[00:43:23] Bharat Venkat: my pleasure.

[00:43:23] Bharat Venkat: Thanks so much. 

[00:43:26] Natalie Gurzeler: You can read more of Dr. Venkat's work by checking out his book at The Limits of Cure and learn more about the UCLA Heat Lab on our website, heat lab dot hum, space.ucla.edu. We are also on Instagram at UCLA Heat Lab and once more, we would like to give a special thank you to the Green Initiative Fund for making this production possible.

[00:43:48] Natalie Gurzeler: And if you enjoyed our podcast, feel free to leave us a rating. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time on the Hot Takes podcast.