I am creating a podcast about music from film, anime and games. I uploaded my first episode to Youtube and literally 9 out of 12 songs got copyright violations. I was pretty stunned as I chose songs that are not popular.

They were clips, and when it flags your video that many times within minutes of uploading, you know it's an automated system. my clips were about 1:30 to 2:00 minutes per song. Does anyone know if the Youtube copyright monster has a lower threshold of sample time or does it just look for any match period?

I saw tricks about speeding up or slowing down the audio, but I don't see conclusive proof that works.

But if I can take it down to 30 seconds or something per clip, I guess that would work to get people to my site to see the longer version. But still, that shit is fairly ridiculous. I also love how it knows that the offending sample is only a certain amount of seconds long, but chooses to mute the entire video.

It's not ridiculous.

It's copyright infringement.

End of story.

But if I can take it down to 30 seconds

Or less, and then it constitute as "fair use".
But check with your local laws and legislations for what's written as "fair use".
It might be different depending on country/state/province/territories.

Googling to copy/paste simple statements don't mean jack. Everyone does it on youtube but that doesn't protect them.
"No copyright infringement intended" doesn't work. I did that and still got flagged.
I had 45 seconds before warping the music and still flagged it for me.

My Game of Thrones music compilation got flagged are some bs music that wasn't even close to what was in the video, some weird worldy music that sounded so similiar to GoT that it got flagged as that and NOT as GoT.. That's how retarded YouTube is.