Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share First Principles Daily
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
First Principles Daily
By Patrick
A daily narrative podcast that reasons about the world from first principles — the 'magic wand number' and the 'Idiot Index'. Episodes alternate between a concrete example of first-principles thinking... more
FAQs about First Principles Daily:
How many episodes does First Principles Daily have?
The podcast currently has 75 episodes available.
First Principles Daily episodes:
July 30, 2026Ep 55: Newcomen engines burned coal to reheat a cylinder they had just cooled every stroke, until… 
July 29, 2026Ep 54: Routine legal documents costing thousands today have an Idiot Index in the thousands… July 28, 2026Ep 53: For a century every photograph carried a real cost in silver, chemicals, and paper; silicon sensors collapsed the marginal cost of an image to nearly zero by turning photons into charge. July 27, 2026Ep 52: A prosthetic limb billed at fifty thousand dollars contains roughly fifty dollars of plastic and actuators—the gap lives in custom labor and process, not the materials. July 26, 2026Ep 51: Most food rotted before reaching armies or cities out of season until heat and sealed containers turned harvest abundance into months of usable supply at a small multiple of the raw food cost. July 25, 2026Ep 50: Rail moves a ton a mile with far less energy than trucks, yet the cheaper physics mode still loses on delivered cost. July 24, 2026Ep 49: A catalytic converter’s price is set less by its ceramic and steel than by a few grams of platinum, palladium, and rhodium whose scarcity keeps the floor stubbornly high. July 23, 2026Ep 48: Satellites that reach orbit often cost millions yet contain only thousands of dollars of silicon, aluminum, and electronics — the real expense sits in the process, not the atoms. July 22, 2026Ep 47: Before the integrated circuit, adding each transistor required another hand-soldered wire; afterward, billions could be printed onto a sliver of purified sand for a few cents. July 21, 2026Ep 46: Raising animals for protein wastes most input energy on the animal’s life; microbes could brew the same molecules for far less.
FAQs about First Principles Daily:
How many episodes does First Principles Daily have?
The podcast currently has 75 episodes available.