Welcome to radio 2.0.
Give it another 10-20 years and your 2 hour podcasts will be 30 minutes of morning zoo DJ banter, 10 minutes of guests, and 1.5 hours of ads.
We’ll have reached peak 90s all over again. With any luck we’ll avoid recreating the conditions for another Nickelback and can stay in the weird zone where Trip Hop and pop punk could chart at the same time.
> 2 hour podcasts
You have high hopes. Next YT tool will be to split anything long in 30s reels as brains will be completely incapable of focusing for longer.
And it will all be AI generated specifically for you live.
The 00's podcasts I listened to were often in 2-3 hour episodes, rarely well scripted (or scripted at all?), but a lot of fun and very amateurish. I re-listened to several entire series recently and the episode lengths were the only thing I think was worse than in newer podcasts.
On the other hand, if ads etc gets too annoying, I already have run all my downloaded podcasts through whisper to get transcripts with timestamps. Running some LLM to find ranges to delete would probably be quite easy. As a bonus I would be happy to also cut out all the filler repetitions that seem popular these days ("yes, X, I absolutely agree, [repeats everything X just said]"). Could probably cut 1 hour episodes to 20 minutes without losing any content.