Despite the Saint Augustine quotes, philosophical tangents and chest-echoing laughs, it’s hard to talk to Christopher Lydon without simply shouting over his every word: “You invented the podcast!”

Because this man did invent the podcast. Well, his was the first voice to be released as a downloadable MP3 file on an RSS feed. Lydon, who now hosts the Open Source podcast, was helped by the software developer and fellow Harvard graduate, Dave Winer.

“Dave was the technical side and I was the mosquito on the side of the elephant,” laughs Lydon, his voice as smooth as a glass of red wine. “He told me he’d worked out how to syndicate an MP3 file. We did the first one in June 2003 and, obviously, I interviewed him.” As a journalist, Lydon had already covered presidential campaigns for the New York Times, run for mayor of Boston in 1993 and hosted the Ten O’Clock News on WGBH TV. He was, it’s fair to say, a safe pair of hands. “We just recorded our conversation at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, posted it on the web, and told people about it.” Did he realise what they’d done? “I felt like Samuel Morse tapping out his first code: ‘What hast God wrought?’”

Lydon quickly followed up that first recording with a happy birthday episode dedicated to the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. “In the middle of the 19th century, Emerson had the idea of a global species, living in a realm of ideas, with a human universal equality in rational thought and interactive culture,” says Lydon. “And suddenly, we had the tool.”

The tool was a special RSS-with-enclosures feed for Lydon’s Harvard weblog, through which he could post his interviews with leading internet thinkers, politicians and self-proclaimed futurists. Once released, they could be downloaded to iPods and other devices and lo, an audio movement was born. But aren’t we just talking about downloadable radio here?

“Podcasting is different to radio – institutionally as well as functionally,” says Lydon. “Podcasting was born out of the despair around the Iraq war. It was a political response to a giant breakdown in the American conversation, in the world conversation. I went to New York to demonstrate and the New York Times didn’t even cover it. Podcasting was about people speaking up in a time of traditional media oblivion.”

Podcasting was born out of the despair around the Iraq war … people speaking up in a time of traditional media oblivion Christopher Lydon

According to Lydon, podcasting should be “about more than hit shows, storytelling, more than a commercial gold rush. Especially in this Trump-Clinton debacle, we need a public language that means something, that’s credible.” When almost all of us are now walking around with the technology to record, upload and distribute our own voices to the internet sitting in our pocket, isn’t Lydon worried that the world of podcasting will become a Tower of Babel, with everybody shouting and nobody listening?

“At the beginning we used to say, ‘Every man, woman and child a broadcaster, a publisher.’ We couldn’t stand it if everybody was talking at the same time. But there’s that quote from Saint Augustine: God is a circle whose centre is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere. Podcasting is kind of like that; anyone who strikes a resonant note may be heard anywhere, and if it’s a great resonant note it might be heard everywhere.”

Lydon is happy that his Open Source recordings can be heard all over the world, but it’s just as important, he says, if one person in Myanmar hears it. “James Joyce said that he would love to have a million readers of his works, but it’s just as fine if one person reads it a million times.”

The original podcaster describes the medium with the kind of zeal others might have when describing jazz or poetry or politics – as something universal, emotional; something that can and should make a difference. “Despite what you might find from the Trump-Clinton campaign, there is an American conversation going on that’s very diverse, with a global attitude,” says Lydon, whose guests on Open Source have included Noam Chomsky, Mary Beard, Frank Rich, Joan Didion, Colm Tóibín and Philip Roth. “Listening and working the range of human curiosity, in fiction, in political news, in science is important. As an extension to the human, it’s much more exciting to me than Google Glass or genetic modification.”

‘The human voice is loaded with signals we can’t even begin to map’ … from left, the Egyptian artist Ganzeer with Noam Chomsky and Lydon.

But, of course, there is the nagging old question: how do we pay for it? “One thing is, we have a low budget,” says Lydon. “We also have a few generous angels. But we’re also moving towards asking listeners to support us. I would hate to see it become a capitalist tool. But so far we’ve managed to live simply and ask for help when we needed it.”

As well as Serial, Song Exploder and the Guardian’s own Biggest Story in the World series, Lydon also listens to Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History and Bill Simmons’ sports podcast. “It’s teeming now with all sorts of poets, comedians, philosophers – what Emerson would have called the good fanatics.” Part of the reason podcasting seems so open, says Lydon, is that, to some extent, it is more anonymous than television and less rigid than print media.

“It is fundamentally egalitarian but also incredibly expressive. The human voice is loaded with signals we can’t even begin to map. It’s very intimate, revealing. We think there’s a logic to making audio of this human music, but we also have the mission to keep that voice public.”

Finally, looking back over the 13 years since he recorded that first, pioneering podcast in a small room somewhere in Harvard, what advice would he give people looking to enter the melee? “Stick with it,” he says simply. “If it feels good, it is good. If it sounds good, it is good.”