I listen to a lot of podcast episodes (over 5,000 in the past 5 years [1]), but I don’t subscribe to podcasts.
The way I listen to podcasts is similar to how I consume web contents:
Search by topics/people, and Find podcast episodes to listen, then move on, not subscribing to podcasts. Search by topics/people, and Find web pages to read, then move on, not bookmarking websites.
For podcast recommendations, I’d suggest focusing on topics/people that you’d like to learn more. You can search and find individual episodes [2]. At this moment, there are at least 140,000,000 podcast episodes [3] - vs there were 25,000,000 web pages indexed by google in 1998 [4]
[1] https://www.listennotes.com/playlists/wenbin-fangs-podcast-p...
[2] https://www.listennotes.com/