India: A podcaster that plays the long game

Amit Varma is not afraid of the clock. In an era where short-form content reigns and audiences are bombarded with TikToks and Reels, Varma's twice-monthly interview podcast, The Seen and the Unseen, takes the long view, literally. The episodes of one of India's most popular podcasts, garnering some 225,000 downloads a month, stretch from two to twelve hours. No, that is not a typo. Twelve.

While many podcasters meticulously trim their content down to an hour or less, Varma leans into long, unhurried conversations, taking the time to dig deep into complex topics. His listeners don’t just dip their toes into discussions – they dive in, submerging themselves in sprawling, thought-provoking exchanges.

A journalist, author and serious poker player, the 51-year-old Varma has worn a lot of hats over the span of his career. He started in advertising, moved to television, and then spent two decades writing for publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The Times of India. Along the way he wrote My Friend Sancho, India's biggest-selling debut novel in 2009.

You might wonder – who has the time for six-hour conversations? Well, a lot of people, apparently. Varma understands something fundamental: people crave depth. In our hyperactive media world, he offers something different—conversations that breathe, where ideas unfold naturally, without the rush of the 24-hour news cycle.

DW Akademie: Did you always gravitate toward long duration times? Did each episode of The Seen and the Unseen, which you started in 2017, run several hours from the very beginning?

Amit Varma: My early impressions were that people have short attention spans. That you've got to hook them in the first 15 seconds, and you can't be longer than 10-15 minutes. Then I realized that podcasting was a whole different medium and I realized three important things about it that changed the way I do things. Number one was that people tend to listen to podcasts when they are a captive audience. Typically when you're working out like you're out running, or you're stuck in a train or a car, or you're doing errands. While you're out jogging, you're not going to keep flicking channels or keep changing podcasts. Realization number two was that people typically end up listening at higher speeds. It's very easy to gradually speed it up and listen at 2x or 3x. I've done all of those, and it becomes natural. And the third reason, I realized that people actually crave depth.

It is true that a lot of the time, all of us are in short attention span mode, where we are scrolling, scrolling, swiping, swiping. But it is equally true that there is another part of us which often craves to go deep into something, enter a rabbit hole. So people crave depth, and the rest of the media tends to be a mile wide and an inch deep. Audio podcasts, for these three reasons, are the best way to consume deep content. And as I realized this, my podcast got longer and longer.

How long?

It developed from a quick exploration into a particular topic, into a deep dive, into subjects which could often last two, three or four hours. Then deep dives into people, where I often do what is almost like an oral history. These episodes can be from six to 10 hours. My longest episode is 12-and-a-half hours. The longer ones are always the most popular.

What do you think draws listeners to your show?

I think human nature draws people to it. Because I don't think we fundamentally have short attention spans or have developed them in modern times. Think about it, how do we watch cinema? You know, earlier we would go to the movie theater and watch something for an hour-and-a-half, two hours. Today, we binge watch eight, nine hours at a go. We are a rabbit-hole species – you suddenly find something, and you dig deep. You'll go to Wikipedia, you'll check out a source, you'll watch 40 videos on it, and before you know it hours have gone by.

Let's say I get an author to my show, an expert on subject X. If all you want to know if about subject X you can go to YouTube and there’ll be 40 panel discussions, 40 half-hour podcasts, many sound bites, but it's the same damn thing again and again. But if you have a conversation with them about their lives, where did they grow up, what was their childhood like? What was their mom like? What was their dad like? What makes them cry at night? What do they daydream about? All of that stuff that's the meat of life. That's what people really get interested in. And once you can get into a person in in that way, then it is far easier for you to understand their passion for their subject, the different points of view that they bring to it, why they think the way they do. The whole world just opens up.

Do you see your podcast as a kind of a rebellion against the prevailing culture of short-form video or more about meeting a need?

I wouldn't place it in opposition to TikTok, Instagram Reels and so forth. Every form has a particular function and enables a particular kind of content. What long form does is enable a deeper kind of content where you can sink into yourself, where there is no hurry to make a point, where there is no pressure to come up with a pithy sound bite, and it can take you into spaces that shorter forms can't. An eight-hour episode is very different from eight one-hour episodes because just the rhythm of conversation is different. As the host, my ethic is never to interrupt a conversation, so the long form is particularly suited for that. But in my blogging days, I was actually doing short form written content, which were often just a paragraph or even a couple of lines. That can lead to its own kind of expression, its own kind of art. I'm not saying that any form is superior or inferior to any other, but every form allows you to do particular things that other forms don't allow you to do.

How do you decide when a conversation with your guest is done?

I think I let it go organically. I never begin with the fetish of, oh, this has to be at least so long. My sense is that okay, there are many, many things I want to talk about, and I will go with the flow. And as long as I am interested and my guest has energy, we will continue if they are willing. So the length is something that kind of flows naturally from there. It's not predetermined.

Is it hard to find guests willing to speak so long and really dive deep into themselves? I can imagine some people, maybe public figures or politicians, could be reluctant to do that.

I imagine that had I announced when I started that I was going to do 10-hour episodes, I would have had trouble getting people on. But over time the show has gained such a following that, in India at least, people know the show and they want to be on the show. They might even be fans of the show, or they've heard their friends on the show or people they admire on the show. So it is almost as if they come prepared to open up.

The Seen and the Unseen is downloaded about 225,000 per month. Do you have audience demographics? Who are your listeners?

I don't have detailed analytics since it can be hard via RSS feeds to get a lot of detail. There are ways to use different podcast platforms’ tools, but I tend not to do that because my ethic is I don't really care how many people are listening or who's listening. I'm going to do what I do, and if people like it, they like it. When I started, I told myself that I was not making content for the here and now but thinking what someone in the year 2050 can discover. And I want to build a body of work for them to consume and for them to enjoy.

Have you had conversations that just didn't flow? How did you handle them?

This might sound unbelievable, but in the last few years, no. By now, people know what they're coming in for, and I know who I'm inviting. There's a process there also that I'm only inviting people I find interesting and who I know will open up, which is why I'll never have politicians on the show, for example, because they’ll have too many filters.

My sense is that there are no such thing as interesting people and uninteresting people. Everyone is interesting and everyone's story has something to teach you. Everyone has depths that are not visible at first on the outside. And it's your job to make them comfortable enough that they can reveal those parts of themselves.

How is your podcast funded? Do you make money with it?

For the first five years I treated it as a labor of love and even today I have never gone looking for sponsors. Occasionally sponsors have come to me and said, "we'd like to do a commercial," and I say, "Okay, let's go for it." But that's not the main source of revenue. I have two sources which really opened up when Covid started. Back then, I announced I was never going to take the podcast behind a subscription wall, but if people want to pay to keep it going, here's a link. What I got in the first month was 10 times of my best-case scenario. It blew me away. In fact, that's when I first realized the love that people had for the show and the deep affection they felt for the whole project. That's enough to keep me independent. The second source opened up when I announced an online writing course called "The Art of Clear Writing." I'm still teaching it today and that still brings in a lot of revenue. My friend Ajay Shah, who I do a YouTube show with called Everything is Everything, and I started another online course called "Life Lessons." My revenue comes from these things.

Finally, do you have advice for people started out in podcasting. You’ve done very well although when you started, podcasting was basically an experiment. Could you share something you’ve learned along the way?

The advice I would give is for people to follow their hearts. The classic mistake that I see new creators make is that they try to imagine what the market wants. What’s the market gap? What niche could I occupy? There is only one niche you can occupy, and that is the niche that is you. Out of the seven plus billion people on this planet, the only thing that sets you apart is you yourself. You have to be authentic to yourself. If you are going to second guess what people want and try to provide whatever is trending for the masses out there, that is a sure path to mediocrity. You will get lost in the clutter immediately. Follow your heart – it can take you into short form or it can take you into long form.

Be open to experimenting and remember, whenever we start something, we suck. We need to do a lot of it before we get good at it. If we are fighting for validation, then right in the beginning, when we suck, we’ll get no validation and we’ll stop before we do enough of it to get good. But if you’re creating for love, then you won't care about the validation. Before you know it, you're good.

The interview was edited for length and clarity.