Big Ideas Podcast Transcripts
ABC Australia · 247 episodes with transcripts
Your front row seat to big thinkers at the best live events, forums, and festivals. Feed your mind. Be provoked. One big idea at a time. Your brain will love you for it. We love hearing from you about the show or events you are planning. Get in touch! Email: Bigideas@abc.net.
Spoken has transcripts of 247 Big Ideas episodes, with the speakers named. The newest listed here is from October 20, 2026.
Every Big Ideas transcript in one script
247 episodes of Big Ideas have transcripts. Fetch them all as speaker-labeled Markdown in one script — 1 credit each, and re-fetching one you already have is free:
curl -s -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
https://spoken.md/podcasts/164330831/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
doneAlready-saved files are skipped — safe to re-run after a top-up.
247 credits. Credits never expire. Excludes VAT, added at checkout for EU customers.
Latest Big Ideas transcripts
Clive Myrie on what Africa taught a foreign correspondent about our common humanity
October 20, 2026
SPEAKER_1 (0:00)
ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
SPEAKER_2 (0:07)
Hi, David Rutledge here. When politics comes unstuck, how can philosophy help? Around the world, democracy is under strain and questions of freedom and justice and sovereignty are all being fiercely contested.
The Unsteady State is a new series from The Philosopher's Zone, where I'll be asking leading thinkers what philosophy can tell us about how to respond in a time of wobbly politics. The Unsteady State on ABC Listen.
Natasha Mitchell (0:38)
Look, today on Big Ideas, a master storyteller, one of the world's most famous foreign correspondents and news anchors, host of the iconic BBC TV quiz shows Mastermind and Celebrity Mastermind. But when Clive Myrie was asked to do a travel story, he was kind of taken back because here he was, this tough, robust…
Clive Myrie's Italian road trip became one of the most watched shows on BBC Two. His Caribbean adventure won a British Academy Television Award. And then came his more recent epic African adventure, which became personal and something bigger than that too.
- Clive Myrie on what Africa taught a foreign correspondent about our common humanity
- Bringing Brett Whiteley's studio back to life — with Wendy Whiteley
- The ethics of transhumanism
- AI, art, and staying human - is creativity at a crossroad? Evelyn Araluen, Steve Tolz, Kirra Pendergast
- Amitav Ghosh and Luke Kemp on learning from collapsed empires
- Students and teachers are already using it — but should AI be in the classroom? With Eddie Woo and Leslie Loble
- You Must Take Part in Revolution — journalist Melissa Chan and artist-in-exile Badiucao
- Bones, CSI, X-Files step aside — here come the real forensic scientists
- George Megalogenis on the three shocks reshaping Australian politics
- The legacy of Jane Goodall —from chimp whisperer to changing how science understands primates
- The future of ageing — what will growing old be like in 2076?
- Can we change the future by reimagining it?
- Lyse Doucet —The history of Kabul’s finest hotel tells the history of a nation
- It's an ancient Hindu poem, so why does The Ramayana still resonate?
- Why literary giants like Margaret Atwood, Nobel laureate Han Kang and Amitav Ghosh wrote books that will never be read in their lifetime
- When you trust social media influencers more than your GP — what can only go wrong?
- Alice Pung's Unpolished Gem and her conversations with the teenagers who've studied it
- ABC National Forum — migration and the kind of country Australia wants to be
- Buying and Selling the Poor at The Festival of Dangerous Ideas — Rick Morton, Mark Considine, Emily Roy with Natasha Mitchell
- Helen Garner reflects on five decades of writing — an ABC Radio National Top 100 Books countdown special
- Why Diego Bonetto wants you to eat weeds
- Feminist trailblazer Gloria Steinem with Natasha Mitchell and guests on travels that transformed them
- Are kid's books too moralistic, worthy, or 'woke'? Andy Griffiths, Hilary Rogers, Tamuz Ellazam for Radio National's Top 100 Books
- Inside the life of Elizabeth II with royal biographer Robert Hardman
- Tech activist Cory Doctorow says the internet's been enshittified. So is it too late to save it?
- John Brack once painted his children. Now his adult daughter tells her story of life with the famous artist
- Roman Krznaric on why the history of human solidarity offers us radical hope, even now
- Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones and why all great music is a threat
- Stephanie Alexander with Adam Liaw on 30 years of The Cook's Companion
- Mick Herron, Suzie Miller and Benjamin Law on great adaptations — from the page to the stage to the screen, and back again
- Should social media be banned for over-16s too!? The 2026 Beaker Street Festival Great Debate
- Kerry O'Brien on the perfect storm destroying our politics — with Richard Flanagan
- Why Oz Harvest's Ronni Kahn wants you to join the "Order of the Teaspoon" to end food insecurity and waste
- Protecting Australia’s native plants
- Indigenous speculative fiction takes on the apocalypse — with Canadian sci-fi Indiginerd Chelsea Vowel
- Blast off! Exploring our solar system and beyond
- Too Dumb for Democracy? Why your brain struggles with good political decision-making
- What makes television? 100 years of tumultuous change
- CENSORED! CANCELLED! BOYCOTT! The future of artistic freedom and democracy in Australia
- Forget The Odyssey. These authors have their own mythical retellings — with Yann Martel, Nikita Gill and Zoe Terakes
- Africa in a shifting world order — can digital technology achieve what aid never could?
- How policy decisions today can hurt your kids in the future — are we even trying to get it right?
- The PNG environmental defenders taking on Australian mining giants — what is extractive justice and its toll?
- How can we design our way out of Australia's housing crisis? With Anthony Burke and Tim Ross
These are examples, not the full list — see everything available from this show via the API, get started.
Looking for a different show? Search for it to see whether it has transcripts you can fetch.
Thousands of transcripts fetched by people building searchable podcast archives
Any Big Ideas episode comes back as Markdown with the speakers named, one credit each.
curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000797217929No subscription. Credits never expire. Prices exclude VAT, added at checkout for EU customers. Try free with pt_demo.