In early July for the podcast Business Review, I spoke to Chris Lydon.
Chris is the host of Open Source, the oldest podcast in the world.
It started podcasting 20 years ago on July 9th 2003.
I spoke to him about podcasting's early days as well as the future of podcasting and of radio.
And I started by asking him, what was it like sitting down with Dave Weiner to record the first podcast?
Did he think this was the start of something?
I did. There was a tingle of experimental adventure.
And I thought it was a moment because the Iraq War was already a moment.
In my view, a completely unexamined, undebated, illegal American war, a horror story unfolding.
And I thought on a podcast people could break the public silence and say just that. And they did. Some of them.
So it was very much around open viewpoints on there?
Not on a stuck American conversation. There had been no debate, no intelligent inquiry about that war.
Much less about George W. Bush in general. And suddenly the people had a voice.
I thought that was critically interesting and important.
The latest research says that around half of Americans are listening to podcasts every single month now.
Why do you think podcasts are now so popular?
Well, there are so many kinds, James, as you know better than I.
I think the American people are starving for good conversation and they find enough of it to come back time and again to podcast.
That's a very broad statement. But I think we're just we're evolving a new conversational system in this far flung democracy.
And podcasting has a peculiar place in it. A very energetic, interesting place.
I mean, instead of just bloggers and academics, podcasting is now, of course, dominated by very large companies.
And they're doing lots of entertainment and they're doing lots of, you know, other things as well.
What do you think of that? Do you think that's been a good or a bad thing?
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.
On the other hand, it's OK. They have their audience, I guess. Other people have ours.
I love the spirit of this little collective we belong to, hub and spoke, really some extraordinary people and voices all over the place.
Tamara Adichai does art criticism for real people.
Erica Hileman does her own reflections in the northern tip of Vermont with the natives, regular people.
And that's another peculiarly powerful voice. We do our own thing, but this is room for everybody.
The voice part is key. It has much more force, interest, punch than a letter to the editor.
I'm with Studs Terkel about, you know, this fabulous instrument, Vox Humana.
It's an amazing thing. Everybody get access. That's a leap.
Has podcasting changed the way you thought it would 20 years on?
Well, I'd say, yeah, it's bigger. It is more commercial. It's not monopolized.
You cannot monopolize human voice and it's still growing.
I mean, this is a very fluid world of media.
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.
Arguably. That's what radio was for. And of course, you have a tremendous radio background as well.
Where do you think radio is going?
That's a very good question and a dark sort of question.
I think podcasting is a terrible burden on radio, public broadcasting and otherwise.
I note that Vermont Public Radio has dropped the radio. It's now Vermont Public.
WGBH dropped the W as if to say we're not a broadcast station anymore. We're some sort of other service.
I think they're selling the peculiar brilliance of radio short.
It's cheap. Anybody can listen on a very cheap instrument, whether you're out farming or doing the dishes.
It carries the human voice.
I think radio has stopped believing in the higher calling of radio itself, and I think it's a damn shame.
Yeah. Where do you think if you were in charge of a radio station now, what would you be doing with that?
Well, I'd be doing a whole lot of things. I'd be doing a lot of podcasting.
I'd ask Erica Heilman to teach the world how to listen, but also how to listen to regular people.
Our podcast, I say with some chagrin, not exactly, but is public people, people who have written books
or maybe want to know the prize or hold a professorial chair somewhere and they're advocating something.
I would do what Erica does so brilliantly, which is just get the voice of listeners.
Jay Allison did great work on this from the beginning.
Listener IDs, but let people talk until the dime drops or they cough up the secret.
Yeah. Yeah. So getting lots more other people's voices on the air rather than just the silky, silky voiced host.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Says you of the silky voice.
And me too. They'll throw that at me too. But I've got an untrained voice.
I sound like my brothers. We talk the way our parents taught us to talk.
There's nothing trained about my voice, so we're going to keep it that way.
And it's a thrill having played that first minute of the first podcast so many times.
It's a thrill to see the voice behind me or see the face behind the voice.
James, let me ask unblushingly. What did you what do you get still 20 years out of that conversation with Dave?
It was very earnest. It was a it was a real moment, wasn't it?
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.
And I think it was it was such a change. And I think, you know, I'd like to ask you back.
That was, you know, clearly the first episode of Radio Open Source.
That podcast is still going 20 years on. How has that podcast changed over the last 20 years?
Well, of course, we didn't call it a podcast in that first thing with Dave Weiner.
He had said to me, you know, radio, I know syndication and programming. Let's see what we can do.
And that's what we did eventually became called a podcast and we put it out in the air regularly.
It keeps evolving. We call it arts, ideas and politics with Christopher Leiden.
It's pretty much anything we find interesting. It could be a book.
I'm stunned and thrilled actually that I'm to me the most satisfying shows have been about music from, you know, famous conductors,
but also to my own musical passions, Billy Holiday, Johnny Hodges of the Ellington band.
We did a wonderful show with Robin Kelly about the rediscovery of Errol Garner, a genius of incredible proportions.
And these things somehow tap into stuff I love profoundly. I didn't know it ever go there.
I did a podcast just a few months ago with my youngest brother who hate to say it, but was dying of ALS.
And I thought, well, he lived in Ireland in a community with handicapped people that he had invented.
And I thought, well, we can talk every day practically and make a kind of history of this of this disease.
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.
But it was an original thing and people did enjoy it.
I rediscovered my childhood, the magic of my parents and his.
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.
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.
You have a 20th anniversary episode just out, haven't you?
Yeah, with Erica Hellman. And there's another just unbelievable joy to discover.
That woman's voice. It's just magic. And it's more than magic. It's not just a beautiful voice.
It's a voice that says, talk to me. It's safe to talk to me.
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.
So that was it was just fun to stop and think about once again what what radio can do.
I was a child, so to speak, of Tony Schwartz, an advertising guy in New York.
And I met him through politics. He did commercials for George McGovern.
But his whole theme was and he did famous Coca-Cola ad, The Real Thing and all this sort of stuff.
But he said the message comes in through the ears. The video is just to distract you or to hold you.
He would do an office clock with the second hand moving slowly around only to tell you it's it's almost over.
But then he would deliver the punchline in a voice. And he believed that the voice was magic.
Even even in our evolution, listening to the sound inside the womb, the two hearts beating.
But then out on the on this on the plains of Africa, listening for trouble, listening for wildlife, listening for everything.
It's built into us. We learn so much by ear. And that enthusiasm is part of my work.
I was listening back to one of Dave Weiner's very first shows, Morning Coffee Notes.
And this is wonderful episode, which is just the the thunder and the lightning going on.
And Dave just commenting on the, you know, the tremendous noise and the tremendous light and everything else.
And it's the most fascinating list. Isn't that incredible?
I wish you could see it. You can't see it, but you heard that.
Well, there are many people who know their entire career to your pioneering spirit 20 years ago.
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.
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.
Three cheers and three cheers to you as well. Christopher Lydon, thank you so much. Thank you, James.
Pleasure.