How long does it take to listen to Dan Carlin's Blueprint for Armageddon?

Blueprint for Armageddon is six podcast episodes covering the First World War in about 23 hours — longer than most audiobooks on the same subject, and made by one man with no institutional backing. Individual episodes run over four hours, which broke the format conventions of podcasting when they were released between 2013 and 2015. At 1.5x playback speed it comes down to about fifteen hours. Carlin describes himself as a fan of history rather than a historian, and the series is unusually explicit about which parts are contested.

The numbers

Total

23 hours 6 minutes

In hours

23.1 hours

Non-stop

1 days without sleeping

Covers

6 episodes on the First World War

At a realistic pace

an hour a day

That works out as

about 24 days

What this assumes

The six-part series at its published episode durations. Sources differ by about twenty minutes on one episode.

Published durations for episode four differ by roughly twenty minutes between listings, so the total is good to within about half a percent.

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