比尔·盖茨这次推荐的书是《数字不会说谎》，作者是瓦科拉夫·斯米尔。这本书可以概括为"关于这个世界你需要知道的71件事"，包含的信息量很大，能让你对这个世界有更加清楚的认知。瓦科拉夫·斯米尔是比尔·盖茨很喜欢的一位作家，他还有其他著作，例如《能源神话与现实》、《能量与文明》、《材料简史及材料未来》等等，有兴趣的也可以读一读。
Vaclav Smil's books are amazing.
They give you a very deep understanding of how civilization is developed.
Here in this book, "Numbers Don't Lie", he's boiled it down into 71 Things You Need to Know About the World.
This is the most information he's ever put in a book, and yet probably the most digestible.
A great one is about batteries.
He explains to keep the electricity system reliable is going to be very hard if we only have weather dependent sources like solar and wind.
He gives examples like Tokyo and what needs go on with batteries and how little change in batteries there's actually been.
But it's nothing like microchips, which sometimes confuses us to think that exponential improvement can just show up everywhere.
One of those facts that you just have to go; "That's wild, I wouldn't have expected that". is the reduction in alcohol consumption.
That was stunning to me, and you know, when I was reading this thing, I said to people, "Hey, how much wine people were drinking in 1850, versus 2020"?
