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Babbage from The Economist Podcast Transcripts

The Economist · 605 episodes with transcripts

Babbage is The Economist’s weekly podcast on science and technology—named after Charles Babbage, the grandfather of computing. Explore the science changing the way we live from AI to genetics, particle physics and space travel with Alok Jha.

Spoken has transcripts of 605 Babbage from The Economist episodes, with the speakers named. The newest listed here is from October 6, 2026.

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Every Babbage from The Economist transcript in one script

605 episodes of Babbage from The Economist have transcripts. Fetch them all as speaker-labeled Markdown in one script — 1 credit each, and re-fetching one you already have is free:

archive.sh
curl -s -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/podcasts/508376907/episodes \
  | jq -r '.episodes[] | "\(.id) \(.title)"' \
  | while IFS=' ' read -r id title; do
      slug=$(echo "$title" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr -cs 'a-z0-9' '-' | sed 's/-*$//')
      [ -f "${id}-${slug}.md" ] && continue
      curl -sf -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
        -o "${id}-${slug}.md" \
        https://spoken.md/transcripts/$id || rm -f "${id}-${slug}.md"
      sleep 0.34
    done

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Latest Babbage from The Economist transcripts

The 2026 Nobel prizes for science

October 6, 2026

Geoff Carr (0:11)

I described the piece as the Stockholm Oscars, because it was quite like the Oscars. They make a real fuss of the prize winners.

Alok Jha (0:19)

Geoff Carr, the Economist's senior editor for Science and Technology, had the rare opportunity to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in December 1999

Geoff Carr (0:29)

They gave them chauffeur driven cars, and you have to dress up for the dinner on this in white tie, not just black tie, it's white tie, and you have tails and all that sort of thing.

And it used to be the case that Swedish maidens with candles in their hairs would go and bring coffee and breakfast to the prize winners in their bedrooms in the hotel. This no longer happens, partly for health and safety reasons, and partly, I think, for reasons of propriety. But it happened in my day.

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Any Babbage from The Economist episode comes back as Markdown with the speakers named, one credit each.

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  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000793693027

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