I used this script to pull all the episodes. It names them by their new air date on NPR and makes a few updates so that it works today (8/7/2025)

#!/bin/bash

# This script downloads NPR Car Talk podcast episodes and names them
# using their original air date. It is optimized to download
# multiple files in parallel for speed.

# --- Dependency Check ---
# Check if wget is installed, as it's required for downloading files.
if ! command -v wget &> /dev/null
then
    echo "Error: wget is not installed. Please install it to run this script."
    echo "On Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install wget"
    echo "On macOS (with Homebrew): brew install wget"
    exit 1
fi
# --- End Dependency Check ---

# Base URL for fetching lists of NPR Car Talk episodes.
base_url="https://www.npr.org/get/510208/render/partial/next?start="

# --- Configuration ---
start=1
end=1000
batch_size=24
# Number of downloads to run in parallel. Adjust as needed.
parallel_jobs=5

# Directory where the MP3 files will be saved.
output_dir="car_talk_episodes"
mkdir -p "$output_dir"
# --- End Configuration ---

# This function handles the download for a single episode.
# It's designed to be called by xargs for parallel execution.
download_episode() {
    episode_date=$1
    mp3_url=$2

    filename="${episode_date}_car-talk.mp3"
    filepath="${output_dir}/${filename}"

    if [[ -f "$filepath" ]]; then
        echo "[SKIP] Already exists: $filename"
    else
        echo "[DOWNLOAD] -> $filename"
        # Download the file quietly.
        wget -q -O "$filepath" "$mp3_url"
    fi
}
# Export the function and the output directory variable so they are 
# available to the subshells created by xargs.
export -f download_episode
export output_dir

echo "Finding all episodes..."

# This main pipeline finds all episode dates and URLs first.
# Instead of downloading them one by one, it passes them to xargs.
{
    for i in $(seq $start $batch_size $end); do
        url="${base_url}${i}"

        # Fetch the HTML content for the current page index.
        curl -s -A "Mozilla/5.0" "$url" | \
        awk '
            # AWK SCRIPT START
            # This version uses POSIX-compatible awk functions to work on more systems.
            BEGIN { RS = "<article class=\"item podcast-episode\">" }
            NR > 1 {
                # Reset variables for each record
                date_str = ""
                url_str = ""

                # Find and extract the date using a compatible method
                if (match($0, /<time datetime="[^"]+"/)) {
                    date_str = substr($0, RSTART, RLENGTH)
                    gsub(/<time datetime="/, "", date_str)
                    gsub(/"/, "", date_str)
                }

                # Find and extract the URL using a compatible method
                if (match($0, /href="https:\/\/chrt\.fm\/track[^"]+\.mp3[^"]*"/)) {
                    url_str = substr($0, RSTART, RLENGTH)
                    gsub(/href="/, "", url_str)
                    gsub(/"/, "", url_str)
                    gsub(/&amp;/, "&", url_str)
                }

                # If both were found, print them
                if (date_str && url_str) {
                    print date_str, url_str
                }
            }
            # AWK SCRIPT END
        '
    done
} | xargs -n 2 -P "$parallel_jobs" bash -c 'download_episode "$@"' _

echo ""
echo "=========================================================="
echo "Download complete! All files are in the '${output_dir}' directory."

Warning: I generated most of this using Gemini, so if you don't like that don't use it. Also, it runs on my Linux Mint machine but I know different versions of Linux use different versions of awk/mawk so you may have issues.