This American Life artwork

This American Life

This American Life

Each week we choose a theme. Then anything can happen. This American Life is true stories that unfold like little movies for radio. Personal stories with funny moments, big feelings, and surprising plot twists. Newsy stories that try to capture what it’s like to be alive right now.

Topics: Society & Culture, Arts

Transcribe the entire archive

373 episodes of This American Life 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/201671138/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 373 you need, because the larger tier costs less. Credits never expire. Excludes VAT, added at checkout for EU customers.

Example Transcripts

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 This American Life episode as clean, speaker-labeled Markdown — ready for your AI agent.

curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000786665201

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