Ear Hustle Live! | Wednesday, August 6, 8 p.m. | The Carolina Theatre, Durham
Over the years, Ear Hustle podcast co-hosts Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor have developed something of a “telepathic” ability to communicate with one another.
When the two first met, in 2012, Poor was teaching photography at the San Quentin State Prison media center, and Woods was serving thirty-one years to life for second-degree robbery, a sentence born of California’s three-strikes law, which factored in two prior juvenile convictions. In 2018, Woods’ sentence was commuted, and he was released; last year, he was also pardoned.
Ear Hustle, the podcast the pair launched in 2016, while Woods was still incarcerated, was created to illustrate daily life behind bars—from topical episodes about things like nicknames, long-distance parenting, and roommate relationships, to episodes that take longer looks at individual stories. The podcast, which now has 15 seasons out, has been downloaded 85 million times; this summer, Woods and Poor are on the road for the podcast’s touring iteration, Ear Hustle Live!, which makes a stop at The Carolina Theatre on August 6.
In recent years, prisons around the United States have begun to allow tablets that have some media, educational, and communication capacities (at a cost—the program has had criticism, as the service has a high price tag for prisoners and often nets a profit for the state), which has helped increase Ear Hustle’s reach. Today, the podcast can be heard in over 1,200 jails and prisons across the United States. According to Ear Hustle producer Bruce Wallace, the podcast has a particularly strong following in North Carolina, a fact the team says can probably be attributed to the 2017 introduction of Edovo tablets in North Carolina prisons.
And while something like telepathy may be necessary for the complicated logistics of making a prison podcast, Woods and Poor’s generous, intuitive rapport also extends to their dynamic, on-air and in interviews like this one, as they crack jokes and genially jump in to finish each other’s sentences. Ahead of the Ear Hustle Live’s Durham stop, the INDY spoke with Woods and Poor about how and why they make the show. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
INDY: I know you get asked a lot of the same questions about the podcast, so before we begin, is there anything specific to North Carolina you want to talk about?
Earlonne Woods: Yeah. Can you get J. Cole to come to the Carolina Theatre?
I really wish I had that kind of pull. Can you share a bit of background on how the podcast came to be?
Nigel Poor: We met at San Quentin in 2012 when I was a volunteer professor at the Prison University Project, and Earlonne—what were you serving? I never remember what your sentence was.
EW: I was serving two life sentences at the time, and Nigel—Nigel floated across the yard and came to the media center.
NP: I’d been teaching for three semesters. I was interested in life inside prison and storytelling, and I wanted to find a way to work on a collaborative project there. And so I got introduced to the Media Lab. San Quentin has a Media Lab, which is pretty unusual in prisons.
There was some other media stuff, but there wasn’t a radio program. And so we started with some other guys doing radio. I had no background in radio, and Earlonne didn’t, either. We got trained by KALW, a local public radio station, with Holly Kernan, a wonderful radio person. We did that for a couple of years, and in 2015, I wanted to try to do something different. I’m an artist, and I wanted to think about storytelling more from that perspective and not as a journalist. And so I asked Earlonne if he’d be interested in trying to start a podcast together. He immediately said yes. And then his second question was—
EW: What’s a podcast?
You were like, ‘If it’s creative, I’m down.’
NP: Exactly. If it’s something creative, Earlonne says yes. Well, he says yes to almost everything; he’s a very positive person. So we talked about what a podcast was, and on October 5, 2015, we sat down—I’m a real notetaker, I like to archive everything—we sat down and wrote out what we wanted Ear Hustle to be. We were very exact. We knew that we wanted to be the hosts: Earlonne as the voice of someone inside prison, and me as the voice from outside.
We wanted to call it Ear Hustle because ‘ear hustle’ is slang for eavesdropping [in prison]. We wrote out that we didn’t want to tell stories about crime, about how unjust the prison system is. We wanted to tell stories of everyday life in prison.
Our goal was to have it played inside all the prisons in California—35 prisons—because they have a closed-circuit station where they can upload audio, and it would play on all of the official TVs in the prison. So that was our goal. We were super excited about it. Do you want to take over from here?
EW: Then Nigel came in with this brochure from PRX public radio exchange and Radiotopia—it was a podcast competition, they were looking for the next best podcast. They did a callout, and out of what—1,536 other contestants?—we ended up coming in the top 10. We got to the top 10, we did the little interviews, and that took us to the top four, and when we got to the top four, we had to figure out how to make a podcast. We were like, ‘holy shit,’ because we had to submit three pilot episodes. We ended up doing that and winning the whole thing.
NP: We’re starting our 16th season in the fall, but I love to make it clear how hard this was to do inside of prison. No one had done it before. When you work inside a prison, there’s no internet, it’s very difficult to print, it’s hard to get on the phone. So we were learning together, with the help from PRX, how to make all of this work. And as I said, I don’t have a background in audio, really, and neither did Earlonne, but we just were determined. We knew what we wanted it to sound like. Honestly, it’s gotten better, but the original idea has not changed since October 5.
What have been some of the constraints and challenges of making the podcast?
NP: When we first started, Earlonne was, like we said, serving a life sentence. There was no [indication] that he was going to get out anytime soon. And so I spent probably 40-plus hours a week in the prison, working, and Earlonne was down in the Media Lab the same amount of time.
Because we didn’t know all the rules of making a podcast, in some ways, it made [things] easier, because we didn’t know what we were doing right or wrong.
We worked so hard, and I think because we didn’t know all the rules of making a podcast, in some ways, it made [things] easier, because we didn’t know what we were doing right or wrong. We didn’t know what rules you had to follow. For example, I would go in and work, but when I left, there was no contact between us.
I can’t call him; he can’t call me. We can’t even write letters to each other. We certainly couldn’t email, and so we were very clear about how it’s going to get done. We had to really trust each other, and we did. It was almost like we could communicate telepathically.
We had to learn to convince people to come down and be interviewed, because people are suspicious of what you’re doing. We had to gain the trust of the administration, too, to get them to say yes to this idea. And I worked on that, and Earlonne did too, for about three years. Luckily, Lieutenant Sam Robinson was the public information officer at the time, and without him, I don’t think this would ever have happened. He championed us and believed in us, although he did tell us, he let us enter the contest because he never thought we could win. And then when we won.
EW: We got in the top 10, and he started sweating.
NP: He’s since retired, and we really miss him. He’s a wonderful person. And then a huge thing happened.
EW: We were three seasons in, and I had submitted an application for a commutation to the governor’s office. I think it took about 11 months, and the governor commuted my life sentence and released me on the spot. The day before Thanksgiving 2018, he signed it, and I got the call. … And in the process of giving me the good news, they were like, “Hey, we love Ear Hustle.” Within 10 days, I was home. I think that was the longest 10 days—those 10 days were longer than the life sentence.
NP: Once Earlonne got out, there was a lot to figure out. My big question was, “Is he even going to want to do this anymore? He spent so much time in prison. Prison may be the last thing he wants to be around.” And luckily, he wanted to keep working on it, and it’s changed a lot since he’s gotten out.
We can travel together. We can do things like this; we can do the live show. We’ve traveled out of the country a bunch of times to do things for the podcast. We can now travel to other prisons and do stories. So it’s really expanded. And, you know, if he didn’t want to do it after he got out, that would have been the end of Ear Hustle—I mean, it’s our baby, and without us, there is no Ear Hustle. But he had to make that decision.
From the time we started Ear Hustle, I realized—and what I used to always tell the fellas—is, “Man, this shit is bigger than us, you know? It ain’t about us. This is about people that are marginalized. You know what I’m saying?” I’ve seen the power in that.
EW: I would say this. You know, from the time we started Ear Hustle, I realized—and what I used to always tell the fellas—is, “Man, this shit is bigger than us, you know? It ain’t about us. This is about people that are marginalized. You know what I’m saying?” I’ve seen the power in that. I’ve seen how, especially in, like, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, how my mere presence became an inspiration in a way.
I always go into the prisons just because of that. You know, when individuals see a cat come back in that was situated like them, they’re like, “man, I can do it.” It’s definitely inspiration. I always keep that in my mind. So when I do have the opportunity, I don’t run from going in prison.
Your producer [Bruce Wallace] mentioned the phrase “prison podcast movement” in an email. Does that mean that a bunch have sprung up, inspired by Ear Hustle?
EW: We took nothing and created a conversation around it. I think that [the podcast format] gives the staff of those institutions a better understanding of the people that they deal with. Because there’s not really conversation between staff and prisoners, in-depth.
You might only know or have heard about a person’s case, but you don’t know what that person went through, what they dealt with. So I think that Ear Hustle made people a fly on the wall in their life, and able to hear them from a whole different perspective.
NP: We get requests from incarcerated people who want help starting a podcast and from prison administrators, so it’s on both sides.
We’re starting workshops to help people tell their stories. We have a class that started a couple weeks ago. It’s about 16 months where we’re training women on all the forms of storytelling—audio recording, sound design. We’re putting together a digital class that can go on that tablet we’re talking about, so people can do a correspondence class, like an online class. We realize we can’t visit every prison in the United States to make stories, so we’re doing our best to try to assist them.
There’s been a bit more political consciousness around criminal justice reform and incarceration in recent years. Has that changed your work at all?
EW: It’s stayed the same. Early on, a friend of ours who used to volunteer, Emily Harris, came up to me when I was incarcerated, and she said, “I love the fact that y’all don’t try to hammer people over the head with policy. Y’all just tell stories.” I think I figured out long ago, if we wanted to talk about a policy, we won’t explicitly just talk about the policy. We would find someone going through the situation and see how it’s affecting them.
I was a three-strike prisoner. I was under the California three-strike law, and of course, I wanted every episode to be about the three strikes, you know, but that’s not what this is about. But I was able to find someone, Curtis Roberts—and he could be the mule of the story we did, “Left Behind.” And we can talk about the California Three Strikes Law that way, where people can see how it affects people. You know, this is a cat—when he was incarcerated, he ended up getting raped, the whole nine yards, and he was just a person that was a drug addict.
NP: He was serving 50 years to life, and his third crime literally—
EW: Was stealing $40 out of a cash register.
NP: I don’t like when people tell me what to think, and we want to have a really broad listenership. I feel like we give people the ingredients to get upset about stuff and try to make change in the way they can. I feel very strongly that what I can contribute is storytelling and listening to people.
EW: I think a real good example of that is when COVID happened. A lot of my partners—I’m in advocacy when it comes to the legal justice system—a lot of my partners were like, “Man, come stand out in front of prison and protest.” And I’m like, I’m not doing that. You know what I’m saying? We can do it from a whole different point of view. We did an episode called “The Bells,” where we had an obituary section and talked about everybody who died in the prison—
NP: It was like a litany.
EW: Yeah. And that was way deeper than standing in front of a prison.
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