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Past Present Future Podcast Transcripts

David Runciman · 348 episodes with transcripts

Past Present Future is a bi-weekly History of Ideas podcast with David Runciman, host and creator of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology.

Spoken has transcripts of 348 Past Present Future episodes, with the speakers named. The newest listed here is from October 21, 2026.

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Every Past Present Future transcript in one script

348 episodes of Past Present Future 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/1682047968/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

Already-saved files are skipped — safe to re-run after a top-up.

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Latest Past Present Future transcripts

Can Universities Survive? The Thousand-Year Story Part 2

October 21, 2026

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:31)

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David Runciman (1:09)

Hello, my name is David Runciman, and this is Past Present Future, the History of Ideas podcast. Today, it's the second episode in our new series about the long history of and the current predicament of universities. It's the second part of my conversation with historian William Whyte about the history of…

William, we ended the first part of this conversation with the great crisis of the 17th century, that the universities survived. By the 18th century, it was clear it had not been the end of the university. Is there a point in the 18th century where we can start to say that for people working in universities, for…

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Any Past Present Future episode comes back as Markdown with the speakers named, one credit each.

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  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000797382422

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