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In early July for the podcast Business Review, I spoke to Chris Lydon.

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Chris is the host of Open Source, the oldest podcast in the world.

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It started podcasting 20 years ago on July 9th 2003.

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I spoke to him about podcasting's early days as well as the future of podcasting and of radio.

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And I started by asking him, what was it like sitting down with Dave Weiner to record the first podcast?

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Did he think this was the start of something?

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I did. There was a tingle of experimental adventure.

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And I thought it was a moment because the Iraq War was already a moment.

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In my view, a completely unexamined, undebated, illegal American war, a horror story unfolding.

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And I thought on a podcast people could break the public silence and say just that. And they did. Some of them.

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So it was very much around open viewpoints on there?

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Not on a stuck American conversation. There had been no debate, no intelligent inquiry about that war.

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Much less about George W. Bush in general. And suddenly the people had a voice.

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I thought that was critically interesting and important.

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The latest research says that around half of Americans are listening to podcasts every single month now.

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Why do you think podcasts are now so popular?

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Well, there are so many kinds, James, as you know better than I.

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I think the American people are starving for good conversation and they find enough of it to come back time and again to podcast.

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That's a very broad statement. But I think we're just we're evolving a new conversational system in this far flung democracy.

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And podcasting has a peculiar place in it. A very energetic, interesting place.

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I mean, instead of just bloggers and academics, podcasting is now, of course, dominated by very large companies.

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And they're doing lots of entertainment and they're doing lots of, you know, other things as well.

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What do you think of that? Do you think that's been a good or a bad thing?

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It's not the way I expected it. I mean, the instant commercialization of this space was a surprise and I'd say a disappointment.

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On the other hand, it's OK. They have their audience, I guess. Other people have ours.

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I love the spirit of this little collective we belong to, hub and spoke, really some extraordinary people and voices all over the place.

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Tamara Adichai does art criticism for real people.

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Erica Hileman does her own reflections in the northern tip of Vermont with the natives, regular people.

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And that's another peculiarly powerful voice. We do our own thing, but this is room for everybody.

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The voice part is key. It has much more force, interest, punch than a letter to the editor.

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I'm with Studs Terkel about, you know, this fabulous instrument, Vox Humana.

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It's an amazing thing. Everybody get access. That's a leap.

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Has podcasting changed the way you thought it would 20 years on?

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Well, I'd say, yeah, it's bigger. It is more commercial. It's not monopolized.

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You cannot monopolize human voice and it's still growing.

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I mean, this is a very fluid world of media.

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But I think if the Marshall United said, take me to your real voices to get the pulse of this nation, I'd say try the podcasts.

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Arguably. That's what radio was for. And of course, you have a tremendous radio background as well.

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Where do you think radio is going?

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That's a very good question and a dark sort of question.

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I think podcasting is a terrible burden on radio, public broadcasting and otherwise.

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I note that Vermont Public Radio has dropped the radio. It's now Vermont Public.

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WGBH dropped the W as if to say we're not a broadcast station anymore. We're some sort of other service.

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I think they're selling the peculiar brilliance of radio short.

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It's cheap. Anybody can listen on a very cheap instrument, whether you're out farming or doing the dishes.

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It carries the human voice.

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I think radio has stopped believing in the higher calling of radio itself, and I think it's a damn shame.

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Yeah. Where do you think if you were in charge of a radio station now, what would you be doing with that?

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Well, I'd be doing a whole lot of things. I'd be doing a lot of podcasting.

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I'd ask Erica Heilman to teach the world how to listen, but also how to listen to regular people.

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Our podcast, I say with some chagrin, not exactly, but is public people, people who have written books

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or maybe want to know the prize or hold a professorial chair somewhere and they're advocating something.

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I would do what Erica does so brilliantly, which is just get the voice of listeners.

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Jay Allison did great work on this from the beginning.

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Listener IDs, but let people talk until the dime drops or they cough up the secret.

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Yeah. Yeah. So getting lots more other people's voices on the air rather than just the silky, silky voiced host.

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Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Says you of the silky voice.

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And me too. They'll throw that at me too. But I've got an untrained voice.

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I sound like my brothers. We talk the way our parents taught us to talk.

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There's nothing trained about my voice, so we're going to keep it that way.

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And it's a thrill having played that first minute of the first podcast so many times.

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It's a thrill to see the voice behind me or see the face behind the voice.

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James, let me ask unblushingly. What did you what do you get still 20 years out of that conversation with Dave?

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It was very earnest. It was a it was a real moment, wasn't it?

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It was a real moment in technology where all of a sudden we were moving away from blogging of the written words to the spoken word.

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And I think it was it was such a change. And I think, you know, I'd like to ask you back.

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That was, you know, clearly the first episode of Radio Open Source.

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That podcast is still going 20 years on. How has that podcast changed over the last 20 years?

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Well, of course, we didn't call it a podcast in that first thing with Dave Weiner.

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He had said to me, you know, radio, I know syndication and programming. Let's see what we can do.

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And that's what we did eventually became called a podcast and we put it out in the air regularly.

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It keeps evolving. We call it arts, ideas and politics with Christopher Leiden.

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It's pretty much anything we find interesting. It could be a book.

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I'm stunned and thrilled actually that I'm to me the most satisfying shows have been about music from, you know, famous conductors,

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but also to my own musical passions, Billy Holiday, Johnny Hodges of the Ellington band.

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We did a wonderful show with Robin Kelly about the rediscovery of Errol Garner, a genius of incredible proportions.

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And these things somehow tap into stuff I love profoundly. I didn't know it ever go there.

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I did a podcast just a few months ago with my youngest brother who hate to say it, but was dying of ALS.

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And I thought, well, he lived in Ireland in a community with handicapped people that he had invented.

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And I thought, well, we can talk every day practically and make a kind of history of this of this disease.

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And his life was so glorious and so much fun and so creative and productive that it almost outweighed the incredible injustice of his ALS.

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But it was an original thing and people did enjoy it.

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I rediscovered my childhood, the magic of my parents and his.

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There were six of us and turned out to be a very wonderful, wonderful set of lives privileged by good, good heads, but wonderful parents and a generally good steer in life.

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So there's a surprise. You couldn't imagine that as a commercial radio piece, but it ran for about 30, 40 minutes and it's good.

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You have a 20th anniversary episode just out, haven't you?

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Yeah, with Erica Hellman. And there's another just unbelievable joy to discover.

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That woman's voice. It's just magic. And it's more than magic. It's not just a beautiful voice.

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It's a voice that says, talk to me. It's safe to talk to me.

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And she's had incredible results with that. Among her neighbors, I mean, among her friends, among people she doesn't know of all kinds.

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So that was it was just fun to stop and think about once again what what radio can do.

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I was a child, so to speak, of Tony Schwartz, an advertising guy in New York.

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And I met him through politics. He did commercials for George McGovern.

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But his whole theme was and he did famous Coca-Cola ad, The Real Thing and all this sort of stuff.

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But he said the message comes in through the ears. The video is just to distract you or to hold you.

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He would do an office clock with the second hand moving slowly around only to tell you it's it's almost over.

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But then he would deliver the punchline in a voice. And he believed that the voice was magic.

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Even even in our evolution, listening to the sound inside the womb, the two hearts beating.

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But then out on the on this on the plains of Africa, listening for trouble, listening for wildlife, listening for everything.

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It's built into us. We learn so much by ear. And that enthusiasm is part of my work.

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I was listening back to one of Dave Weiner's very first shows, Morning Coffee Notes.

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And this is wonderful episode, which is just the the thunder and the lightning going on.

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And Dave just commenting on the, you know, the tremendous noise and the tremendous light and everything else.

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And it's the most fascinating list. Isn't that incredible?

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I wish you could see it. You can't see it, but you heard that.

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Well, there are many people who know their entire career to your pioneering spirit 20 years ago.

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That's funny. You know, not the least of the interesting things was that neither Dave Weiner nor I ever made a dime on on what we what we were in on creating.

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But that's life. I mean, it's it's made the world it's no it's made life a lot more interesting for a lot of people.

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Three cheers and three cheers to you as well. Christopher Lydon, thank you so much. Thank you, James.

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Pleasure.