I'm going through this now; I've wanted to learn Esperanto for awhile now, had similar experience going through YouTube trying to find the most optimal way of learning it, looking at reviews of different methods, when in reality I would have been better off choosing virtually any of the tutorials out there and just going with it.
To those curious, I've settled on Duolingo just because I realized I should just choose something, and it's free.
Felicxajn studojn! Check out the KernPunkto podcast for themed audio, "Esperanto Variety Show" Youtube channel for vlog audio, and Reddit /r/Esperante for text shorter than a book, and the /r/Esperanto [1] Discord ("Diskordo" in the sidebar) for text chat, and very occasional voice chat, but I suspect other tools are better for that (Amikumu?).
[1] /r/Esperanto is about Esperanto the language, meta-commentary or learning, often discussed in English. /r/Esperante is any topic, where the content is in Esperanto.
I will definitely check out the podcast; at what level do you feel I'll be able to listen to it and understand a reasonable percentage of what they're saying?
I've only been doing the Duolingo course for a little more than a week, and while I have enough grammar to do some very basic sentences, I'm far from fluent.
I don't know how to guess, I'd been learning on and off for a long time before I started listening, and I still can't understand all of it fluently. The things I like about their podcast particularly to recommend it is that it's a lot of content - 30 minutes or more at a time and loads of episodes, of consistently good recording quality, it's two people and sometimes a guest talking quite clearly so it's very regular speed and accents to get used to, and they talk about a topic each time so there's quite a lot of repeated vocabulary during one episode, and it's all talking no cuts to music.
Modern life distorted the notion of "most optimal", in older times I'm sure you had a much sharper sense of recognizing an opportunity and seizing every one that came.
To those curious, I've settled on Duolingo just because I realized I should just choose something, and it's free.