Ear Hustle’s Journey From Prison to Podcast (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: We do a podcast called Ear Hustle. It started in San Quentin State Prison when I was a volunteer there and Erlon was serving a life sentence.

[00:00:07] Speaker 2: I wasn't a volunteer.

[00:00:08] Speaker 1: We got the idea to do storytelling about everyday life in prison. We started doing it on the radio. I asked Erlon if he wanted to do a podcast so we could do more long-form storytelling and then he said.

[00:00:19] Speaker 2: What's a podcast?

[00:00:20] Speaker 1: That was October 5th, 2015. And so we worked on the idea for a couple years and the original idea was that we were gonna do a podcast to play inside all of the prisons in California which there are.

[00:00:29] Speaker 2: 35, it's about 33 now.

[00:00:31] Speaker 1: We ended up entering a podcast competition for Radiotopia. Out of how many people?

[00:00:35] Speaker 2: 1,537 contestants in 53 different countries. We ended up winning so it put us on a bigger platform.

[00:00:42] Speaker 1: Then we had to learn how to make a podcast because we didn't know how.