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Bill Gates: 13 books on science and innovation


Liberty

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Thanks for sharing. We notice that Gates is a big fan of Prof. Vaclav Smil.

 

According to Vaclav's bio:

Vaclav Smil does interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy, environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical innovation, risk assessment, and public policy. He has published more than 30 books and some 400 papers on these topics.

 

Here are two of his lectures on Energy transition.

 

 

 

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"I’ve read about 80 books a year for the past 50 years. I come from cultural breeding. I don’t have a cellphone. When you spend all your time checking your cellphone messages, or updating your Facebook (of course I don’t have a Facebook page) then you don’t have any time for reading."

Vaclav Smil

 

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  • 5 months later...

A couple of days ago I finally started reading 'Energy Transitions' from Vaclav Smil and this guy has a very interesting view of the world indeed. Recommended. I can also highly recommend watching some of his youtube videos (as mentioned above). Bill Gates indeed seems a voracious reader. He keeps recommending books to us mere mortals :). An update after a couple of months:

 

Ten books recommended for the TED crowd: http://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/10-Books-Recommended-to-TED

Best books he read in 2013: http://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Best-Books-2013

His bookshelf: http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books

 

There is quite some overlap with books appreciated on this forum: he recommends Charlie's Almanack, The Checklist Manifesto, The Box, The Black Swan and Tapdancing to work, among others. I'm not especially interested in reading books about some topics he likes (diseases, education) but I think it's occasionally good to broaden your horizon so I'm probably going to order a few random books he recommended that are not related to finance. Any suggestions? The Tobacco atlas sounds interesting for some reason.

 

His blog itself is also recommended. He's doing some interesting stuff, for example promoting research to design better condoms (11 contenders). According to Gates on Reddit "a sensitive topic". If only he could convice Buffett to start a blog too.

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