I transcribed 272 episodes of my favorite Christian business podcast

Here's why, how and what you stand you gain

In my previous article, I said you could change your outcomes in life by just listening to podcasts. Darren Shearer has been speaking with Christian entrepreneurs and professionals since 2015. So he’s unconsciously created a bank of nearly 300 life-transforming conversations.

And that’s what I love the most about the Christian Business Leader Podcast. You have first-person accounts of how Christians practice their faith even in difficult situations, which many Christians find hard to do or don’t bother with at all. The guests he’s had on the podcast have been working out what it means to honor God at work or in business, so they’re examples you and I can learn from if we want to do the same.

As Philippians 4:9 says, “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.”

So, what would you do with over 200 of the most thoughtful Christian business voices of the last decade?

a question mark symbol looking like a light bulb

When I began thinking about a personal project I could challenge myself with this year, I wanted to do something that adds an educational value for you, who trust me with your time every week. So, finding a unique answer to this question has been top of mind since February.

I decided to start with transcriptions for three reasons.

First, and this is personal. If I told you I have a BA in Christian Studies, a Professional Diploma in Education, and I’m an MBA student, how would you merge these three domains?

Would you like more context? Okay. I’ve been a preacher’s kid for most of my life. I started teaching in a secondary school in 2011. Then, I started and ran a small business between 2012 and 2014, and a non-profit in 2022. I’ve been working professionally in the youth development and education space over the past five years. Last but not least, I’ve been a fan of The Chosen and other creative Christian productions. What stands out? Three words: Christian. Business. Education. This observation tells me that I am uniquely positioned to build something impactful for other believers.

Second, if you visit the Christian Business Leader Podcast website and click on any episodes, it plays the audio. It would have been nice to have each click open a new page with a podcast summary, useful links, and guest profile information. This is what you get when you click on other legacy podcasts, such as Tim Ferriss’ show. In fact, Tim Ferriss has a page dedicated to his podcast transcripts.

I could have written a fan email to Darren Shearer asking him to do the same. But I once emailed him asking to join his team, and got no response, which only strengthened my resolve to do something that adds value to his podcast instead. I hope starting with transcribing his published episodes is a step in the right direction.

Third, you cannot build a product without a knowledge base to start. In early 2022, I was working with Mrs. Ebele Chukwujama to start The Listening School, our starting point was a pioneer organization in listening intelligence worldwide, because they were leading in research and had created or curated seminal works on the subject matter. This is the very foundation of artificial general intelligence, which now empowers people to do things they otherwise cannot. Once you have gained a strong understanding of a domain, only then can you advance the field with your own contributions.

Transcribing all 272 guest episodes of the podcast was my way of creating a knowledge base to power what I hope to build next.

How I started

To create a knowledge base, you need inputs, basically good documents that contain the knowledge you need.

So, in principle, the plan was to transcribe all the guest episodes first so they would feed the knowledge base. Not all the episodes, but the guest episodes, because that’s what I want the knowledge base to contain. Moreover, Darren’s solo episodes mostly draw on his books and articles, so they’re already available in text format for anyone to read.

The mistake I made, which many people still make today, is assuming that once you tell AI something, you only need to back up and watch it bring everything to life as you imagine or maybe instruct.

But the reality is that even with a detailed prompt (even in Openclaw), you need to guide your AI tool all the way. It starts with a good plan you may have jointly developed, but it doesn’t end there, especially if you’re working with free accounts (the limitations could hurt your drive).

So, I wanted to take every guest interview episode Darren had ever published, all 280+ of them spanning 2015 to March 2026, and convert them into searchable, usable text.

I started by cataloging the entire episode archive. Using the podcast RSS feed, I built a master spreadsheet of all the guest episodes, recording each episode title, guest name, publication date, episode length, and direct MP3 download link.

Then I went through the list carefully to distinguish genuine guest interviews and episodes where Darren sat down with another person from his solo monologue episodes, because I noticed he used the same naming convention throughout, listing his name, Darren Shearer, as a guest on a few episodes.

The naming convention he uses for his episodes helped. The interviews consistently followed patterns such as “w/ Guest Name,” “Interview w/ Guest Name,” or “Interview with Guest Name” in the title.

When I had listed about 280+, I knew I had a reasonable list because he’s published over 300 episodes, and a good number of them up to 2017 were solo episodes. Next, I needed to transcribe them, and that’s when I began meeting some challenging limitations.

The limits of free AI accounts and other challenges

My first attempt at transcription was entirely manual. Basically, there’s no free online transcription service that allows you to feed AI multiple audios and get them as text on the same day. Trust me, I came to this conclusion after serious, extended trials. That said, I eventually found Evernote’s audio-to-text feature, which allowed me to upload audio files and receive text in batches of ten.

Hold up. There’s one step I haven’t told you about: downloading the episodes.

This, too, was a major bottleneck because I found no free online tool that could directly pull each episode from the RSS feed and convert it to text. I downloaded them on Spotify, but it didn’t save them to my local drive, and if it did, I didn’t bother finding out how to get them as MP3s because I could only manually download the podcast episodes. I wanted a method to bulk-download, or at least everything, in batches.

I found PodcasttoMP3 useful, though the bulk feature only allowed 100 episodes (in MPGA format, I think), so I used it to download 100 of the most recent episodes, but without a filter option, which meant I couldn’t select the guest episodes that I wanted.

I continued searching for tools, but eventually found Beamly, which allowed me to bulk-download only the 200 most recent episodes. I used it too. So, it meant I had downloaded 300 audio files in mixed formats, about half of which were duplicates.

Add to that the fact that I hadn’t succeeded in downloading only the guest episodes since 2015. I also found a tutorial detailing how to transcribe audio files in Google Drive with OpenAI’s Whisper. So I uploaded all the nearly 200 guest episodes I had after deleting duplicates and ran the script I got from this video. The problem was that I hit a limit on my free account, but it still gave me 20 transcripts in purely narrative format (without speaker labels or timestamps).

Frustrated, I paused downloading and set out to transcribe the files I had downloaded. This, too, was painstaking. I had to upload 10 at a time to Evernote, wait for the results, download the output, and manually split the combined transcripts into individual documents (because the product assumed all the files in each batch belonged in one document).

The other transcription product I tried was Audio Converter AI. Fortunately, it used the interview transcription format with time-stamping and speaker identification, but it only allowed single-episode uploads. I used it a few times, and that was it. It wasn’t sustainable. I used Evernote to transcribe most of the downloaded episodes.

At that point, there was only one method I had yet to try: coding. So, I turned to Claude, my favorite AI for problem-solving operational issues like this, and after telling it my goal and the struggles I had gone through, it advised me to use a Python Script (which it wrote to run Whisper on my desktop) and guided me through the entire process.

But first, I had to put all the guest episode titles. I downloaded titles in a spreadsheet, indicating which ones I had yet to transcribe, so the script would check my spreadsheet against the episodes in the RSS feed and both download and transcribe each remaining guest episode.

This method worked as planned. It used the Python script to read my master spreadsheet, identified which episodes still needed transcribing, fetched the correct MP3 files directly from the RSS feed, transcribed each one using Whisper, saved the output as individual text files, and automatically updated the spreadsheet to track progress.

It took me a few days to finish transcribing the remaining 80+ guest episodes this way, since I had to shut down my laptop at the end of my workday to let it rest, but it worked. There were only two issues at this point.

First, because the script was based on my spreadsheet, it didn’t automatically download and transcribe guest episode titles published thereafter that weren’t in my list. Second, the transcripts lack time stamps and speaker labels. Other than those, I call the project a success.

What do you stand to gain?

I have compiled the complete transcript library into a master spreadsheet. Every one of the 272 guest interview episodes is listed with its title, guest name, publication date, episode length, original MP3 URL, and a direct link to its transcript. I will continue working on this as I’ve found duplicates in the spreadsheet and a few lacking guest episodes at the time of writing this article.

This is the first public release of this project. I will continue building by God’s grace and share updates with you.

God willing, the goal is simple: anyone who wants to study, research, or do anything useful with this body of Christian business wisdom should be able to do so without starting from scratch. But to make it really immersive, I advise you listen to at least all the guest episodes. And you may do so on Apple Podcasts. I hope that this would ultimately advance Darren Shearer’s legacy.

You can access the full spreadsheet here.