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.