editing a 3-person podcast in premiere takes forever

Text-based editing helps a lot for podcasts too. Premiere transcribes the sequence and you can cut ums, false starts and tangents by deleting the words in the transcript. With three people talking it saves me more time than the multicam switching does.

are you cutting each camera by hand on the timeline? that's what makes it slow. select all the clips, right click, Create Multi-Camera Source Sequence and sync by audio. then turn on the multi-camera view in the program monitor, hit play and just press 1, 2, 3 to switch to whoever is talking. you do the first pass in real time and only clean up the edit points after. if even that's too much, there are auto multicam plugins that switch based on which mic is loudest. they get you maybe 80 percent of the way.