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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 10, 2026Ep 35: Copper cables costing thousands per kilometer gave way to glass strands worth pennies once engineers treated data movement as a purity problem instead of a wiring problem. 
July 09, 2026Ep 34: A mile of subway can cost two billion dollars in one city and a tenth that in another, even with similar rock and water tables, because the raw materials and boring hours explain almost none of the difference. July 08, 2026Ep 33: Messages crossed the Atlantic in two weeks by ship until engineers treated the ocean floor itself as the medium and moved a word in minutes. July 07, 2026Ep 32: Burning fuel for heat hits a hard 100% efficiency wall, yet heat pumps routinely deliver three to four times more heat than the electricity they consume by moving heat instead of creating it. July 06, 2026Ep 31: Before interchangeable parts, a musket cost many times its raw iron and wood because every component had to be hand-fitted by skilled craftsmen. July 05, 2026Ep 30: Replacing a lead service line costs thousands of dollars, yet the pipe material itself is worth only tens of dollars — the price is almost entirely in the digging, records, and restoration. July 04, 2026Ep 29: Before Gutenberg a book cost as much as a house; afterward the marginal cost of another page fell toward paper and ink alone. July 03, 2026Ep 28: A century after insulin's patent sold for a dollar, vials still list for hundreds despite raw-material costs in the low single digits. July 02, 2026Ep 27: The real price of artificial light has fallen roughly ten thousandfold since whale-oil lamps, because each generation measured lumens delivered rather than lamps sold. July 01, 2026Ep 26: Most collected recyclables cost more to sort than the raw materials they contain are worth — except for a few that already beat that floor.
FAQs about First Principles Daily:
How many episodes does First Principles Daily have?
The podcast currently has 75 episodes available.