The three-hour podcast episode is an absurd cultural artefact.

It’s become the default, the unspoken requirement for the Thinkers of Great Thoughts - the signal of seriousness.

If you’re an aspiring essayist, a fledgling philosopher-VC, or even just a self-appointed cultural critic, you apparently must drag listeners through an odyssey that stretches as long as Coppola’s Godfather. I find myself asking: why? What justifies this bloat, this endurance-test-as-insight?

I say this as someone who has listened to a fair few of them. I’ve let my afternoons dissolve to the sound of two people circling the same idea for forty-five minutes before one of them lands on a sentence worth hearing. I’ve cooked entire dinners, run errands, even fallen asleep while these marathon conversations spool on in the background. And today’s heresy: most of them would be better at one-third the length. One-fourth. One-fifth. Tighter, sharper, less enamored with their own sprawl.

We seem to have arrived at a culture obsessed with quantity as a proxy for depth. Long is the new shorthand for profound. A podcast that runs under an hour feels unserious, almost frivolous, no matter how carefully constructed. Meanwhile, the three-hour format has been coded as intellectual legitimacy. Surely, if you’re willing to talk that long, you must have something important to say. Except often, you don’t. Often you’re just repeating yourself in slightly different words, citing increasingly unsourced nonsense, hoping the sheer volume of conversation produces the impression of insight.

I think about the great essayists, the writers who could pack worlds into 1,200 words. They worked under constraints - the newspaper column, the word count, the editor’s pencil etc - these were tools and limits that forced discipline. You couldn’t meander forever; you had to decide what mattered. Podcasts have liberated thinkers from those constraints, but they’ve also unmoored them. The absence of limits has shown just how few people actually know how to land a point and walk away.

I’d hazard a guess that most “ideas people” are far less interesting than they believe.

Myself included.

The venture capitalist who sees himself as a modern-day Marcus Aurelius is, nine times out of ten, recycling warmed-over blog posts with a dusting of pseudo-historical analogies. The contrarian Substacker who insists she is blowing your mind with unorthodox truths is usually riffing on something that sounded fresh in 2017 but is now just a trope. When these voices stretch to three hours, the emptiness becomes hard to ignore.

Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, there always are.

Some interviews justify their scale. Some conversations genuinely do unfold in ways that need time and patience.

I’m sure your favourite // precious Deep Thinker™️ is one such.

But for each of those, there are fifty more that could be cut in half with no loss whatsoever. The cult of length has blinded us to the possibility that concision itself is a form of respect: for the listener’s time, for the coherence of the idea, for the art (and dammit, art it is) of conversation.

I suspect the three-hour format flatters a certain personality type. It’s a way of signaling stamina and presenting yourself as a figure so compelling that you deserve hours of undivided attention. The marathon = a performance of ego. And in a world where attention is the currency of power, who wouldn’t want to inflate the bill? But this inflation breeds resentment. It’s exhausting to be constantly asked to surrender half a workday just to keep up with the latest ramblings of someone who believes they are re-inventing political philosophy because they’ve read half of The Federalist Papers.

But the audience colludes in all this. People brag about “listening to the whole thing,” as though sitting through a barstool chat longer than the Director’s Cut of The Fellowship of the Ring was itself a gamified badge of seriousness. It’s a status symbol: look how much intellectual labor I can absorb! But is it really labor, or is it just noise consumption? How much of that three-hour stretch do you actually remember a week later? How many of those insights survive the morning after? How many achieve even a tenth of the cultural // personal impact of American Pie: the Novelization?

I can’t help but think this is a bubble that will soon burst. Culture is cyclical, and bloat has a way of correcting itself. The maximalist novels of the late twentieth century eventually gave way to the lean minimalism of the early twenty-first; the sprawl of these endless podcasts will eventually collapse under their own weight. There is a growing hunger for crispness and for clarity. Of course there is; we’re exhausted.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe there’s something admirable in the attempt // the rawness of unedited thought, and the willingness to chase ideas down long corridors and dead ends. But if I’m honest, I feel conned. I feel like my time has been stolen under the guise of profundity. I want these thinkers to show me they can compress, distill, refine. I want them to prove that they respect their own ideas enough to prune them.

This is what gnaws at me: the world is burning with problems that demand precision. And yet we’re drowning in meandering conversations about the metaphysics of hustle culture or whether Napoleon was a startup founder at heart.

I’m calling it: three-hour podcasts are a bubble. They are intellectual McMansions, sprawling monuments to excess that mistake size for substance. Like all bubbles, they give the illusion of permanence until suddenly, they don’t. Someday soon, people will stop pretending to have the patience for them. They’ll want their hours back.

And when that day comes, we’ll discover how many ideas can actually stand up when forced to occupy the leaner frame of an hour or less.

Call this a plea for restraint, for discipline, for a lost culture of editorial rigor - or just the whining of an out-of-touch scribbler with far less time on their hands than the dedicated audience of the Joe Rogan show.

Maybe that’s all it is.

Or maybe it’s the frustration of someone who has had to press pause too many times, who has stared at the progress bar crawling along at the halfway mark and thought: dear God, how is there ninety more minutes of this?

I’ll leave you with a question.

Lex Fridman’s interview with Elon Musk and the Neuralink team clocks in at 8.5 hours.

That’s almost double the spoken length of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Is the resultant content anywhere near comparable?