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This American Life Podcast Transcripts

This American Life · 380 episodes with transcripts

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.

Spoken has transcripts of 380 This American Life episodes, with the speakers named. The newest listed here is from October 12, 2026.

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Every This American Life transcript in one script

380 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:

archive.sh
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

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Latest This American Life transcripts

Original Recipe

October 12, 2026

Ira Glass (0:01)

Hey there, everybody. So I'm not going to beat around the bush. For this week's radio program, we think we may have found the original recipe for Coca-Cola. And I am not kidding. I am not kidding. One of the most famously guarded trade secrets on the planet. I have it right here, and I am going to read it to you…

Merchandise 7X. Merchandise 7X is the cartoonishly super secret cloak and dagger name they give the flavoring mixture in Coca-Cola.

Mark Pendergrast (2:06)

The company has always said, and as far as I know, it's true, that only two people at any given time know how to actually mix the 7X flavoring ingredient and that these people never travel on the same airplane in case it crashes, it's this carefully passed on secret ritual and that the formula is kept in a bank…

Ira Glass (2:33)

Of course, this makes no sense at all. Why can't the two guys fly on a plane if the formula is sitting inside a bank vault?

Coke's official line on this these days is that they simply do not talk about how many people know the recipe. Though the reason that most of us think of it as one of the biggest trade secrets in the world, is probably because that's the story Coca-Cola likes to tell.

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Any This American Life episode comes back as Markdown with the speakers named, one credit each.

request
curl -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000795284457

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