Plain English with Derek Thompson

The Ringer

Longtime Atlantic tech, culture and political writer Derek Thompson cuts through all the noise surrounding the big questions and headlines that matter to you in his new podcast Plain English. Watch Derek and guests engage the news with clear viewpoints and memorable takeaways.

Topics: News Commentary, News

Transcribe the entire archive

398 episodes of Plain English with Derek Thompson 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/1594471023/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.

500 credits — more than the 398 you need, because the larger tier costs less. Credits never expire. Excludes VAT, added at checkout for EU customers.

Example Transcripts

AI Slop Is Breaking the Internet. Can We Save It? September 1, 2026
Why Everything Is Going to Keep Getting More Expensive August 25, 2026
Higher Education’s Age of ‘Insufferable Hypocrisy’ August 18, 2026

These are examples, not the full list — see everything available from this show via the API, get started.

Thousands of transcripts fetched by people building searchable podcast archives

Get any Plain English with Derek Thompson episode as clean, speaker-labeled Markdown — ready for your AI agent.

curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000787161903

No subscription. Credits never expire. Prices exclude VAT, added at checkout for EU customers. Try free with pt_demo.