Audio fails to load only when Aipods are connected?

Today when I went to play a podcast downloaded to my phone via my fully charged airpods, it would fail to play and skip to the next podcast in the queue. Same thing would happen with a podcast I then tried to stream.

I tried the same with Spotify, a downloaded song and a streamed song, and neither would play, rather it would just stay at 0:00 and skip to the next song.

I also tried Audible, with an audiobook I had downloaded, and Audible gave me an error message along the lines of 'the title could not be played'.

Then, when I disconnected my airpods, I had no trouble playing all of the above via my phone speaker.

I know my airpods were connected because they made the noise when I put them in and I saw that my phone was connected to them. I also tried turning on/off bluetooth, and disconnecting and reconnecting my aipods with no change.

I know it wasn't a streaming issue since I was using downloaded audio, and audio that wasn't downloaded streamed no problem through my phone's speakers.

This also keeps randomly happening to me, regardless of wifi/cellular connection (today it happened while on a walk where I never have trouble connecting). It's not frequent, but pretty frustrating when it happens.

Any ideas?