The Blue Hour

The Blue Hour is a conversation – a dialogue about life, literature, science, philosophy and everything in between.

The Blue Hour is a society podcast hosted by CiTR & Discorder Magazine, with 158 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

CiTR & Discorder Magazine hosts The Blue Hour, a society show with 158 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  The Blue Hour

  Dr. Leigh VanHandel on How Music Works — and How We Understand It

  Sep 15, 202656 min

  In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Leigh VanHandel, Associate Professor of Music Theory at UBC’s School of Music, whose research brings together music theory, music cognition, rhythm and meter, the relationship between music and language, and the ways we teach and learn music. Leigh began university as a science major, intending to pursue genetic engineering, before returning to the music that had been such an important part of her life growing up. Her path eventually led her to music theory and the emerging field of music cognition, where her interests in music, psychology, language and science could come together. Her research asks how music works, how we perceive and process it, and how our experience shapes what we hear. Her current work explores how we perceive and process tempo, what makes rhythmic patterns seem complex, and whether our native language can influence the way we perceive that complexity. She is also the editor of *The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy*, which received the Society for Music Theory’s Outstanding Multi-Author Publication Award in 2022. At the centre of her work is a deceptively simple question: how does music work, and how do we understand it?

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  The Blue Hour

  Hrishabh Srivastava: Probing Dark Matter with Nature’s Magnifying Glass

  Sep 8, 202653 min

  In this conversation, I speak with Hrishabh Srivastava, a PhD student in Astronomy at the University of British Columbia and a member of the Euclid Strong Lensing Science Working Group. Originally trained in materials engineering and data science at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Hrishabh transitioned into astrophysics, where his research focuses on strong gravitational lensing, dark matter and the enormous quantities of astronomical data being produced by the Euclid Space Telescope. Earlier this year, he was a finalist in UBC’s Three Minute Thesis competition with *Probing Dark Matter with Nature’s Magnifying Glass*. His research explores how the gravity of a foreground galaxy bends and distorts light from a more distant galaxy—a consequence of Einstein’s theory of general relativity—and how these rare gravitational lenses can be used to investigate the distribution of otherwise invisible dark matter. He is developing a method using Zernike polynomials to identify the geometric features of strong lenses in Euclid images, providing a simpler and more interpretable alternative to computationally intensive deep-learning methods. We discuss what dark matter is—and what we still do not know about it—how gravitational lensing allows astronomers to investigate something they cannot see directly, and how the Euclid mission could dramatically expand the number of known strong gravitational lenses.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  The Blue Hour

  The Psychology of Climbing — Patrick Boudreau on Flow, Performance and Nature

  Aug 27, 202653 min

  In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Patrick Boudreau, a postdoctoral fellow at the Montreal Behavioural Medicine Centre and Concordia University, about the psychology of climbing and our experiences of physical activity in nature. We discuss flow and other psychological states associated with excellent performance, why outdoor climbing can feel psychologically different from climbing indoors, and the role that nature, uncertainty and exploration may play in the climbing experience. We also talk about the mental preparation required for demanding outdoor adventures and Patrick’s ongoing research comparing the psychological effects of physical activity in natural and indoor environments.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  The Blue Hour

  Perpetual Evolution — A Conversation with Federica Mingolla, One of Italy’s Most Renowned Climbers

  Aug 25, 202648 min

  In this conversation, I speak with Federica Mingolla, one of Italy’s most renowned climbers, about climbing, freedom, ambition, motherhood, and the ways our lives and identities continue to evolve. Federica is an Italian professional climber, alpinist and mountain guide. Born in Turin in 1994, she began climbing as a teenager and went on to build a career spanning sport climbing, multi-pitch routes and alpinism. She is now based in the Aosta Valley, where she works as a mountain guide. She also holds a degree in Sports Science and is an athlete for La Sportiva and Petzl. Our conversation moves between climbing and life beyond it: instinct and uncertainty, ambition and compromise, becoming a mother, and remaining open to change. Federica describes herself as being in a state of “perpetual evolution,” an idea that became one of the threads running through our conversation.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  The Blue Hour

  Why Consumers Reject Cheaper, Cleaner Cars — Dr. Werner Antweiler on the Economics of Electric-Vehicle Adoption

  Aug 4, 202657 min

  In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Werner Antweiler, an economist and Associate Professor at UBC’s Sauder School of Business, where he holds the Chair in International Trade Policy and chairs the Strategy and Business Economics Division. He is also an associate editor of the journal *Resource and Energy Economics* and a faculty member of UBC’s Clean Energy Research Centre. Educated at the University of Cologne and the University of Toronto, his research spans international trade, environmental and energy economics, electricity markets and applied econometrics. His published work has examined the relationship between trade and the environment, renewable energy and electricity storage, international hydrogen trade, biofuels, vehicle emissions and transportation policy. He is also the author of *Elements of Environmental Management*, an interdisciplinary book bringing together environmental economics, law, engineering and business strategy. His latest paper, *Carbon Pricing, Capital Bias, and Electric Vehicle Adoption*, is forthcoming in the *Canadian Journal of Economics*. It examines why consumers may reject a cleaner technology even when it would cost them less over its lifetime—and what that means for carbon pricing, electric-vehicle subsidies and the design of environmental policy.

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on The Blue Hour. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.