I’m sure there’s someone here who knows about Shortcuts and podcasts, amiright? 
How can I tell my Shortcut to force Podcast to playback from the start, rather than picking up from where I left off if I have already started playing it?
That’s what I had assumed, I had tried adding the Skip action but when it didn’t work, I assumed it was for music playback only. My setup is essentially the same as the one you show, but when the Skip action is added the shortcut runs okay the first time but thereafter only appears to run but doesn’t actually play anything.
I’m now thinking there’s a bug somewhere. On my iPad running 13.1.2 it doesn’t play at all, and on my other iPad running 13.2 PB2 it plays but without skipping back. On my iPhone running the shortcut throws an error “ApplicationNotFound”, but remove the Skip action and it runs the action from where playback was last paused.
What I did is different to what you have done (I’m not searching for a podcast in the directory).
Maybe try it like this?:
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/621a8f1feccc46128586aac9dc0d3a25
Thanks for that. I’ve tried your setup and it still fails on my three devices, it might play the first time but the second attempt it appears to run the action but nothing plays, and neither the Podcasts app nor control centre show any podcast at all. Remove the Skip action and it runs nicely, just not rewinding to the beginning.
Obviously the Choose actions you’ve included aren’t what I want, (I just want to tap a shortcut and it plays the latest, and if I have to break off I can tap again and it will play from the start again) but I’ve done it up as you laid out for the sake of testing.
Interesting side note: the “Selected Item” variable has been renamed to “Chosen Item” in 13.2, so if I open the same shortcut on my two iPads one says Selected and the other says Chosen. That’s not going to confuse anybody.
I’m guessing I’ve hit a bug somewhere but it’s hard to know where, so I’m going to leave this until I have 13.2 on all devices. Thanks Stephen for your kind assistance.