How the World Really Works

Vaclav Smil's 2022 survey of the physical foundations of modern civilisation, published by Viking. It covers energy, food production, raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, and environmental impacts through orders-of-magnitude numbers rather than narrative. Smil, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba, has written more than forty books on energy, environment, and population, and is the writer Bill Gates cites most often.

"If you want a brief but thorough education in numeric thinking about many of the fundamental forces that shape human life, this is the book to read," Gates writes. Smil is the writer Gates cites most often as having shaped how he reasons about climate and infrastructure — quantities first, narrative second. The energy-transition arithmetic in Gates's own How to Avoid a Climate Disaster runs on Smil's numbers.

For a founder whose product touches the physical world — hardware, logistics, energy, food, materials — this book is a first-principles reference. Smil shows that the global economy runs on four fossil-fuel inputs that no current technology can replace at scale, and that the transition timelines promised in board decks and press releases do not survive contact with the Joules and tonnes he deploys chapter after chapter. The lesson is not pessimism but grounding: build your strategy on the physics of the problem, not the narrative of the pitch. Gates says he waits for new Smil books 'the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie.'