I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear In Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

People, you know, that's been in prison five years, ten years, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty years.

People don't know what was what was happened to you. Not that some people cared, they might not care.

But when they hear a person and they look like, man, he's just a regular dude, he's just like me.

He just made a bad decision in his life, you know. And I go back to him like, look here, man.

You want to continue being a statistic in prison? Or do you want to get your story out?

That's Irland Woods, recently released from San Quentin Prison after twenty years inside.

For the last three years, he's been helping inmates get their stories out in a remarkable podcast called Ear Hustle.

Ear Hustle is produced in collaboration with Nigel Poor. Nigel is a woman who met Ear Lund when she was a volunteer teacher at the prison.

They both came to visit with me in our Manhattan studio.

This is so great. I can't tell you how happy I am to be talking to you today because if you don't have the best podcast in the world,

it must be one of the top two. It's just great. Next year. Wow, that's amazing. Thank you.

We're next to him. Can you believe we're hearing that?

Look, look, you know, I mean, I find it hard to listen to your podcast without getting emotional.

And I'm sure that's true for many, many people. I mean, I'm thinking of one where you were talking to inmates about what it was like, what they missed the most.

And simple things like eggs and bacon.

Opening the refrigerator. Yeah.

The opening and looking to see what's there, having a choice.

But then when you get into what's really the most painful thing that they miss, their family, the kids, all those conversations,

all the conversation with the kid who had found out that first he found out his mother went to prison for 17 years.

And then his father has to tell him that he's going to prison.

My brother. That's just what was the relationship?

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