podbot

Command-line tool for searching podcasts, listing episodes, and fetching transcripts from the PodBot index — a curated corpus of tech, VC, and business podcasts (All-In, a16z, 20VC, YC, Dwarkesh, Acquired, Odd Lots, and more).

Install

npm install -g podbot
# or
pnpm add -g podbot
# or run without installing
npx podbot --help

Requires Node.js 20 or later.

Agent skill

An agent skill that teaches LLMs when and how to use podbot for podcast research is published at wantpinow/podbot-skill. Install it into your agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) with:

npx skills add wantpinow/podbot-skill

Or copy skills/podbot/SKILL.md manually into your agent's skills directory.

Quick start

# List all feeds
podbot feeds list

# Semantic search for feeds about a topic
podbot feeds search "artificial intelligence"

# List episodes from a specific feed
podbot episodes list --feed 20-vc

# Semantic search across episodes and chapters
podbot episodes search "how to raise a seed round"

# Fetch a transcript
podbot transcript 20-vc/some-episode-slug

Commands

podbot feeds list

List all podcast feeds, optionally filtered by title.

| Option | Default | Description | |---|---|---| | --search <text> | | Filter feeds by title | | --limit <n> | 50 | Max results | | --offset <n> | 0 | Skip first N results | | --json | false | Output as JSON |

podbot feeds search <query>

Semantic search across feeds using vector embeddings.

| Option | Default | Description | |---|---|---| | --limit <n> | 10 | Max results | | --since <date> | | Only include feeds with episodes after this date (YYYY-MM-DD) | | --json | false | Output as JSON | | --debug | false | Show query timing |

podbot episodes list

List episodes, optionally filtered by feed or title.

| Option | Default | Description | |---|---|---| | --feed <slug> | | Filter by feed slug | | --search <text> | | Filter episodes by title | | --limit <n> | 50 | Max results | | --offset <n> | 0 | Skip first N results | | --json | false | Output as JSON |

podbot episodes search <query>

Semantic search across episodes and chapters. Returns episodes with matched chapter excerpts and relevance scores.

| Option | Default | Description | |---|---|---| | --limit <n> | 10 | Max results | | --since <date> | | Only include episodes after this date (YYYY-MM-DD) | | --json | false | Output as JSON | | --debug | false | Show query timing |

podbot transcript <feed-slug/episode-slug>

Fetch the full transcript for an episode.

| Option | Default | Description | |---|---|---| | --output, -o <path> | | Save to file (prints to stdout if omitted) | | --json | false | Output as JSON instead of Markdown |

License

MIT