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The Joy of Why Podcast Transcripts

Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin and Quanta Magazine · 76 episodes with transcripts

“The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the cosmologist and author Janna Levin take turns interviewing leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time.

Spoken has transcripts of 76 The Joy of Why episodes, with the speakers named. The newest listed here is from October 1, 2026.

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Every The Joy of Why transcript in one script

76 episodes of The Joy of Why 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/1608948873/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 The Joy of Why transcripts

What Does the Fourth Dimension Actually Look Like?

October 1, 2026

Steve Strogatz (0:06)

And I'm Steve Strogatz.

Janna Levin (0:08)

And this is The Joy of Why.

Steve Strogatz (0:10)

A podcast from Quanta Magazine where we explore some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today.

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Any The Joy of Why episode comes back as Markdown with the speakers named, one credit each.

request
curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000792547300

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