The best podcasts for January 2019: The Rewatchables and How I Built This

 

Future Perfect, Vox

Effective altruism—a philosophy and social movement about trying to achieve the most good for the most people—is the ethos of this podcast about big ideas for improving the world. Most topics are surprising and take a different angle on a well-known problem: there’s an episode about redesigning prisons to be more humane and reduce violence, and another about whether lithium added to drinking water could help lower population rates of bipolar disorder, and therefore the suicide rate.

 

How I Built This, NPR

This time next year, we could all be millionaires. If we start a successful global company, that is. How I Built This is a series of interviews with founders of companies about how they started, and how they became a household name. It’s inspiring stuff, and the interviews they get (James Dyson talking Dyson, Richard Branson talking Virgin) are high profile. A large variety of companies are represented, from Airbnb and Instagram to Ben & Jerry’s, Lonely Planet and Spanx.

 

The Rewatchables, Ringer Podcast Network

Film podcasts are ten-a-penny, but this one—about films that people love so much they’ve watched them hundreds of times —is reliably enjoyable, with free-flowing and funny conversation. And there’s a big enough back catalogue, and a broad enough range of genres, that there’s bound to be an episode about one of your favourites. I liked the ones about The Devil Wears Prada, and You’ve Got Mail, whatever that says about me, but there are dozens more to choose from.