Meet Inherited Creators Georgia Wright and Jules Bradley
In preparation for our upcoming event at KQED Live, YR Media Eco-Party Hour, we caught up with Georgia Wright and Jules Bradley, creators of the Inherited podcast about the show and working with YR Media (this interview has been edited for clarity and length).
What inspired you to start Inherited, and how did the first season (produced before your partnership with YR) come together?
Jules Bradley
Georgia and I were in the same year of undergrad at Brown University, but we didn't really know each other very much. We just followed each other on social media and a couple of years out of school we were in these totally opposite places. Georgia had been doing internships and freelance work in writing and audio and I had been doing very boring environmental policy work in DC. Georgia was getting involved in the sunrise movement, and had this idea of starting a climate podcast, and as an incentive for you to get started, you made an Instagram account for it, right?
Georgia Wright
I figured if people followed me on the account that I had to do it because I had an external audience!
JB
Well, clearly it worked because Georgia followed me, and when I looked up one day I thought what is Hot Planet podcast? And why does it follow me? And I realized it was Georgia starting this climate show, and that was very much my intention with getting into audio, and so I just DM’ed her saying “I can do whatever you want to help out.” I had no skills in it yet, but Georgia jumped on the opportunity to have a collaborator.
GW
I also want to back up for a second and give Jules a little more credit. She says I had no skills, but you came from environmental policy in DC. So yes, from an audio perspective you were a total newb, but from a climate perspective I was still pretty new, whereas you had studied environmental policy in school and had these job experiences, so it felt kind of like a yin-yang merger of our skills. I was a person who was in media and communications and storytelling who was coming to climate, and Jules was a person who was in climate who is coming to storytelling. So it ended up working out really, really well.
Another thing that was so amazing about working with Jules was that she just taught herself how to be an audio producer from scratch. She's signed up to all of these workshops online, she took advantage of every single free resource and workshop, she just literally was like “this is my passion, and i'm gonna work at REI and make money, and then I'm going to teach myself how to be an audio producer,” and she did! Now she's a senior producer, and it's only a couple years later. When people ask me if it’s too late for me to get into the audio world I say, definitely not and here's a great example of how it is possible to pivot if you set your mind to it.
JB
Well, Georgia always showers me with the most compliments, and it makes me blush. But I will accept that, because now I actually teach a course called Make Your First Audio Piece!
But anyway, that was our first year with inherited. Georgia was really involved in Sunrise, I was starting to learn audio, and we would just have these big brainstorming sessions once a month and we kept honing in and started gathering some tape in February 2020, so we entered into the early pandemic with some tape and some ideas.
We set this arbitrary deadline to release a trailer on Earth Day, and we did, and it attracted attention from Amy Westervelt [executive producer of the independent podcast production company Critical Frequency, which specializes in reported narrative podcasts], who's still our executive producer, who wanted to support us.
GW
Amy really took a chance on us because she saw that we were a show that could hit a niche in her network, Critical Frequency. It felt crazy to have somebody who was willing to mentor us like this, and really walk us through what it took to get the show off the ground.
I always like to say Inherited has been a story of mentorship from the start. We were just people who were just wandering into this world of audio and climate storytelling who didn't necessarily know how it was gonna go and what we were doing and we got mentored by Amy, and another mentor at the time Rekha Murphy, who both gave us a lot of really, really valuable guidance, and now we're in this amazing position where we are feeling secure in our own audio careers and now we get to bring in and mentor other people.
We’ve always thought it doesn't make sense for two white girls in New England to be the faces of this incredibly diverse movement full of amazing voices and leadership across the world. It became very clear early on that we would need to leverage our success with the first season into getting funding to expand and bring in new voices to the show
That’s why our partnership with YR Media has been so incredible. It's just been amazing to be a part of the organization that's so value aligned and mission aligned.
What has it been like to work with YR on Season 2, and what has that allowed you to do?
JB
Coming in with Inherited was my first entrance to YR, and it feels like it's the perfect place for the show. We never wanted this to be the Georgia and Jules show where we were these host personalities that people would form a parasocial relationship with. In Season 1 we were telling the stories because it was just us, and we just could not and would not be a show where we would rely on other people's free labor, especially young folks of color.
When we first started with YR we had to pinch ourselves a couple of times – right around the time we accepted our storytellers for Season 2 last summer we were like, “Oh my God!” There are nine people who are making stories for Inherited, getting paid to do it and getting this training and opportunity. We maybe could have built that over the course of a bunch of years and a lot of work, but with YR we were able to plug into this existing network of storytellers and the resources and training you provide.
GW
It's amazing. The network of resources and young people who are so eager to work on storytelling and learning new mediums and learning about podcasting.
Our show has been so strengthened in content and quality by the fact that we have the resources we do now. We have a sound engineer, we have marketing people who have helped us with press, but more than anything what's valuable is the way that we have brought in all these new voices. When we put out a call for pitches for Season 2, we got over 70 pitches from 20 different countries, and I just cried a lot that week because I just could not believe that that many people had heard of us, let alone care to pitch us.
It was really validating because we always believed there was so much possibility in this show, and sometimes when we were pitching it ourselves we felt like we were the only ones who saw it. So to be with YR, which really sees the power of youth as an incredibly fertile ground for creation has meant more than I can even put into words. It makes me so hopeful, too, that this is a space that people can come into and continue to tell stories, even after Jules and I are no longer even remotely qualified, as “youth” (And we’re pushing 30, so maybe we’re already on the edge there…).
We're eager to continue to have Inherited be led by young people and young voices, and it’s very comforting to be part of a program that's so well established as being led by young people for 30 years. yeah.
How did you choose just nine storytellers for season two from those seventy submissions?
JB
It was not easy! Georgia came up to me in Portland, Maine and we spent an entire Sunday going through every single pitch.
Our pitch process is really important to us – we're artists and producers ourselves and we've pitched for so many residencies and applications and things like that, and the majority of times we've just never heard anything back. After this experience we actually understand how much time it takes to go through them, but it is so dejecting, especially for young people, to hear nothing so we were very dedicated from the start to respond to every pitch and treat each one with care.
Over the course of the next week or two, we individually responded to every single person that pitched us. We split them up and we each wrote something we liked about it or offered other shows that might be an interesting place for them to pitch and offered our support
This isn't patting ourselves in the back. I think it really shows how much that matters, especially young people. We got plenty of responses that were like, “thank you so much for saying that.” I actually just saw a tweet today of this very established writer, who posted a response from the New Yorker when they pitched something back when they were 16. Whoever was reviewing pitches there was very kind, but also had a couple of really great words to encourage this person, and they said that that response is why they’re still a writer today. It's so important. We want these young folks to pitch us again and again. We want them to pitch elsewhere to keep pursuing audio.
GW
We're hoping to have pitch workshops in the future, where we can work with young people to help them develop their pitches for us.
If one of the readers was going to listen to just one episode to hook them into this recent season, where would you point them?
GW
Oh, it's so hard! My instinct is Episode 2 or Episode 3. They’re both pretty representative of the sort of complementary stories we featured this season. Both have one story that's a little bit more reported, and one that's a little bit more experimental. In Episode 2 we have this amazing story from Maggie Wang on noise pollution which is a very poetic, sound rich piece – that one is really special, especially complimented with Jasmine Hardy and her more classically reported piece about lead poisoning in Oakland schools.
But the reality is that every episode is different and special and wonderful in its own way!
JB
I mean, they really should just listen to all of them! I was also going to say Episode 3. It features a storyteller visiting her grandparents’ sugarcane farm in western India to report on the young farmers affected by drought which was really incredible.
What’s next for Inherited?
GW
We're excited to welcome a new cohort of storytellers, and also have the experience of doing Season 2 with YR. It was a little bit of an experiment last year, and this time I think we're going in with a lot more confidence, which is great, and usually makes better products, too.
What are some other podcasts that inspire you, either in the climate space, or just in general?
GW
One thing I always recommend is this incredible climate fiction podcast called Lake Song. It was made by a troupe of Chicago stage actors who got together in the pandemic because live theater wasn't possible and they created this beautiful, beautiful radio play about climate resilience and environmental racism. It's so gorgeous. It’s a show that sonically really speaks to me, but also really works alongside us thematically.
Another show that we might be doing some cross-promotion with is As She Rises from Wonder Media Network. They do climate poetry from poets around the world, so they've got somewhat of a similar setup in terms of sourcing work from a wide variety of people. A lot of shows are very host-centric, which is not a bad thing – I love Still Processing, and that’s a great host-centric show – but it's cool to see other shows pushing those boundaries a lot.
JB
Anybody who's interested in climate journalism should listen to Drilled, and the other podcasts on Critical Frequency. Drilled in particular – the first season was truly game-changing for the climate world when it came out and remains really, really amazing journalism.
Season 3 of Inherited launches July 2023. Follow @inheritedpod on Instagram and Twitter to hear when it drops, and you can follow Georgia on twitter @georgiafrets and Jules @jayy_gee_bee. Listen to Seasons 1 and 2 here.
