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Throughline Podcast Transcripts

NPR · 510 episodes with transcripts

Throughline is a time machine. Each episode, we travel beyond the headlines to answer the question, "How did we get here?" We use sound and stories to bring history to life and put you into the middle of it.

Spoken has transcripts of 510 Throughline episodes, with the speakers named. The newest listed here is from October 20, 2026.

HistorySociety & CultureDocumentary

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510 episodes of Throughline 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/1451109634/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 Throughline transcripts

Can the polygraph test really spot a lie?

October 20, 2026

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

This message comes from NPR sponsor A24, presenting You Can See Everything. Thirty-four days before she set to begin her prison sentence, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes invites Nathan Fielder and a camera crew to move in with her family and document their every move. This jaw-dropping, once-in-a-generation…

Rund Abdelfatah (0:28)

It's springtime in Berkeley, California, 1921 A group of college-aged women are whispering to one another in the halls of their dormitory.

A man named John Larson arrives on campus carrying his brand-new invention, the cardioneumopsychograph, an early version of the polygraph machine.

Ken Alder (0:51)

And there's been telfering in the sorority, including a diamond ring's gone missing and a bunch of other stuff. And Larson is asked to solve the crime after the old school police guys just can't do it. They just started asking these women, they realize it's an inside job, but they don't know who did it.

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Any Throughline episode comes back as Markdown with the speakers named, one credit each.

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  https://spoken.md/transcripts/1000796715731

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