It varied episode to episode. I'd usually end up putting 10-15 hours into research and writing but with some topics I couldn't tackle in 7 days, I'd have to slap a roman numeral after it and try to finish it next week. Or, come up with some sort of cop-out for the week entirely.

In one case [1] I ended up with a teaser + 3 parter that wasn't super congruent because research for part 3 sort of changed how I would have approached the script for the previous two.

[1] Killdozer Teaser - https://www.podcastdotcom.net/early-bird-news/2019/2/16/s2e4... I - https://www.podcastdotcom.net/early-bird-news/2019/2/24/s2e5... II - https://www.podcastdotcom.net/early-bird-news/2019/3/3/s2e61... III - https://www.podcastdotcom.net/early-bird-news/2019/3/10/s2e6...

It depends on how produced they are. Most of the ones I do are interviews of around 30 minutes. To be honest, most of the work is getting the interview scheduled and recorded. The prep doesn't take long, editing is maybe a couple hours, and posting with show notes maybe another hour.

In the case of the format the parent used, the work is in the research and writing the script.

Of course, once you get to podcasts with multiple segments, edited content from multiple guests, scripted narration, etc. that's a lot more work.

Not saying a weekly podcast isn't a number of hours work in any case, but it needn't be too bad once you have a system down if you keep it simple.