

I’m on the RSS feed (not Spotify, Apple, etc.) and was able to listen to most of the back catalog without ads. When I was catching up, ads weren’t playing in episodes older than about 1 year.
I had a similar ad experience with The Dollop, another good podcast.
It’s odd; in the old episodes, 5-4 includes ad bumps (e.g., “It feels like a good time to take a break”) but then immediately resumes the episode(“And we’re back”) without playing an ad. Maybe they switched advertising partners and didn’t bother to update old content?