I hope exclusive podcasts don't become a trend. Podcasts are very good media format for informal education / learning. Instead of spending 30 hours reading a book, you can just listen to conversion among smart people in 30 minutes in podcasts. If there are more and more exclusive & paid podcasts, it'll become harder for young people (or people from poor areas) to access to the content.

ps, I built Listen Notes ( https://www.listennotes.com/ ) to be an independent podcast directory that helps surface long tailed podcasts (public & distributed via rss). If you want to build a better podcast app, you can use Listen Notes API to jumpstart your project: https://www.listennotes.com/api/