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What I learned from reading Mark: A journey to the heart of history's largest nonterritorial empire by Jeremy Stern.

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0:00 — "For these, I set no bounds in space or time. I have given empire without end." — Latin verse from the Aeneid, recalled by Mark Zuckerberg

2:55 — "Carthage must be destroyed." — Mark Zuckerberg on Google

2:59 — Sean Parker observed "this kind of imperial tendency" in Mark.

3:35 — "Either a Caesar or nothing." (Zuckerberg's shirt)

4:25 — "What is it like to be one of the most powerful men in human history, who, by age 42 has secured a place in the books that'll be written about his era for centuries after his death?"

4:55 — "People call him arrogant. He's not. But time after time, his arrogance just turns into truth."

7:25 — "One day they will be out of office and eventually dead, while Zuckerberg, whose majority control of Meta's voting power makes his removal effectively impossible, could in fifty years still be ruler of his empire."

8:05 — "The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire." (The Dictator's Dilemma)

14:15 — "I think we all have a void in our lives, and the lucky ones find something that fills that space to make us more optimal, to make us a better human being. Mark filled the void with fighting." — Zuckerberg's MMA coach

16:40 — "There have been too many things that I've tried to build and then have been told, 'Nah, you can't really build that,' by the platform provider. At some level, I'm just like, 'Nah, fuck that.'" — Mark Zuckerberg

18:05 — "Meta's capital expenditure this year will exceed the military budget of every country on Earth except the United States, China, and Russia."

18:15 — "This is how it is for him; there is no stopping. He is not like the others of his vintage, who all at some point abdicate, or sell, or are overthrown."

20:15 — "I'm never going to stop." — Mark Zuckerberg

31:15 — "Mark is the fucking Terminator. He's actually not an asshole. He's not a miserable fuck. His source of advantage is he's never happy. He just doesn't fucking stop." — A researcher at a competing AI lab, who formerly worked at Meta

39:55 — "This is who I am. I love this. I didn't set out to build a company. I just love building things." — Mark Zuckerberg

40:35 — "You can't take this away from him. He wouldn't be him if he stopped."

What I learned from reading Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America's Richest Man by Vance Trimble.

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0:00 — "To him, making money was only a game, a test of his imagination and expertise to see how far he could drive a business concept."

1:35 — "Sam's idea was absurdly simple: buy cheap, sell low, every day, and while doing it with a smile."

2:15 — "If he adopts a business course that doesn't work out, he's neither too vain nor too blind to see his mistake, to say so, and to change his heading one hundred and eighty degrees."

3:34 — "The secret is work, work, work. I taught the boys how to do it." — Sam's father

4:34 — "Sam Walton plunged into this new world of merchandising with the keen and furious dedication of a quarterback who was one touchdown behind with two minutes to go."

5:55 — "Boys, you know we don't make a dime out of the merchandise we sell. We only make our profit out of the paper and string that we save." — J.C. Penney

11:10 — "No, I'm not whipped. I found Newport, and I found the store. I can find another good town and another Ben Franklin. Just wait and see." — Sam Walton, after losing his first store

11:35 — "I insist on buying the building that the store is in. I need control over my own destiny." — Sam Walton, arriving in Bentonville

11:45 — "My store will be number one. It's important for me to be the best. Not one of the best. I must be the best. I want to be the leader in the category I compete in." — Sam Walton

13:05 — "Sometimes hardship can enlighten and inspire."

13:15 — "That same boredom and frustration triggered ideas that eventually bought him billions of dollars."

18:55 — "Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity, the things that we were forced to learn and do because we started out under financed and under capitalized." — Sam Walton

19:30 — "If they had something good, we copied it." — Sam Walton

24:35 — "This is just part of the education process. I'm still learning." — Sam Walton, on his hands and knees examining a competitor's display

25:00 — "You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient." — Sam Walton

30:55 — "Remember Walmart's golden rule. Number one, the customer is always right. Number two, if the customer isn't right, refer to rule number one." — Sam Walton

31:35 — "Move from Bentonville? That would be the last thing we'd do unless they run us out of here. The best thing we ever did was to hide back there in the hills and eventually build a company that makes folks want to find us." — Sam Walton

32:05 — "I had no vision of the scope of what I would start, but I always had confidence that as long as we did our work well and were good to our customers, there would be no limit to us." — Sam Walton

32:55 — "He also had a very interesting competitive strategy in the early days. He was like a prizefighter who wanted a great record so he could be in the finals. So what did he do? He went out and fought 42 palookas. And the result was knockout, knockout, knockout—42 times. Walton, being as shrewd as he was, basically broke other small-town merchants in the early days. With his more efficient system, he might not have been able to tackle some titan head-on at the time. But with his better system, he could sure as hell destroy those small-town merchants. And he went around doing it time after time after time. Then, as he got bigger, he started destroying the big boys. Well, that was a very, very shrewd strategy. It’s an interesting model of how the scale of things and fanaticism combine to be very powerful." — Charlie Munger on Sam Walton's strategy

37:30 — "We have a low resistance to change. We call it our RC factor." — Sam Walton

39:45 — "Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find your competitive advantage. We rank number one in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales." — Sam Walton

48:20 — The day the market dropped 500 points and knocked a billion dollars off the value of his stock holdings in Walmart, reporters asked Sam what his reaction to the disaster on Wall Street was. He hadn't heard about it.

What I learned from reading Bloomberg by Michael Bloomberg.

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What I learned from reading The Mind of Napoleon by Napoleon.

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Some of my favorite quotes:

0:00 — " The book gives you insight into the mind of a man who combined energy of thought and energy of action to an exceptional degree."

0:30 — "Work is my element. I am born and built for work. I have known the limitations of my legs, I have known the limitations of my eyes; I have never been able to know the limitations of my working capacity."

0:52 — "He knows that men have always been the same, that nothing can change their nature. It is from the past that he will draw his lessons in order to shape the present."

1:33 — "All my life I have sacrificed everything: comfort, self-interest, happiness, to my destiny. Destiny must be fulfilled that is my chief doctrine."

2:33 — "A consecutive series of great actions never is the result of chance and luck; it always is a product of planning and genius. Is it because they are lucky that [great men] become great? No, but being great, they have been able to master luck. What is luck? The ability to exploit accidents: The vulgar would call this luck, but in fact it is the characteristic of genius."

3:30 — "Hesitation is fatal; once an action is begun, it must be followed through with the utmost exertion of the will."

3:44 — "If I have any ambition, it is so natural to me, so innate, so intimately linked with my existence, that it is like the blood that circulates in my veins, like the air that I breathe."

4:14 — "To have lived without glory, without leaving a trace of one's existence, is to have not lived at all."

6:25 — "Without great men, we have only mediocre men, and if there had never been anything but mediocre men, we would still be half apes."

7:20 — "The great majority of men attend to what is necessary only when they feel a need for it-the precise time when it is too late."

7:30 — "True character always pierces through in moments of crisis. There are sleepers whose awakening is terrifying."

9:11 — "Be successful! I judge men only by the results of their actions."

11:15 — "The truth is that everything around us is miracle."

15:18 — "Men of genius are meteors destined to be consumed in lighting up their century."

16:13 —  "A man must know himself. Until then, all endeavors are in vain and all schemes collapse."

17:53 — "All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything, neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity; the less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything."

18:12 —  "What I am, I owe to strength of will, character, application, and daring."

19:27 — "Imagination rules the world."

20:58 — " History I conquered rather than studied. That is to say, I wanted from it, and retained of it, only what could add to my ideas. I spurned what was of no use, and I seized upon certain conclusions that pleased me."

26:01 — " It is better to eat than be eaten."

26:08 — "Appetite comes with eating."

 27:43 — "It may be possible to arrest the surge of progress or to throttle it, but not to destroy it."

29:01 — " I have read your letter. It is utterly worthless. There are too many words and not enough ideas."

31:08 —  "Without talent, without knowledge, there is no equality but the equality of misery and servitude."

33:46 — Napoleon to someone who hasn't studied history: " Speak as little as possible. Your knowledge is too limited, and your education has been too neglected for you to engage freely in discussions."

36:08 — "The corpse of an enemy always smells sweet.”

36:44 — "If you wage war, do it energetically and with severity. This is the only way to make it shorter and consequently less inhuman."

39:30 — ""In war, men are nothing. One man is everything."

40:20 — "Death is nothing, but to live defeated and without glory is to die every day."

46:23 — "Conquest made me what I am. Conquest alone can keep me there."

46:34 — "Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me."

47:13 — "My soul is made of marble. Lightning has found no grip on it and had to slide off of it. I have no fear of becoming their victim. They will be biting into granite."

What I learned from reading Distant Force: A Memoir of the Teledyne Corporation and The Man Who Created It by George Roberts and The Outsiders by William Thorndike.

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Some of my favorite quotes:

0:00 — "He aggressively repurchased his stock, eventually buying over ninety percent of Teledyne's shares."

0:45 — "He was known as The Sphinx for his reluctance to speak with either analysts or journalists."

1:25 — Charlie Munger: "Singleton's financial returns were a mile higher than anyone else's, that they were utterly ridiculous."

2:00 — Buffett: "The heads of many companies are not skilled in capital allocation. Their inadequacy is not surprising. Most bosses rise to the top because they've excelled in an area such as marketing, production, engineering, administration, or sometimes institutional politics."

4:10 — Singleton: "Our conclusion was that the key was cash flow. Our attitude towards cash generation and asset management came out of our own thinking. It is not copied."

4:30 — Buffett: "Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If one took the hundred top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton's."

9:40 — Singleton: "If anyone wants to follow Teledyne, they should get used to the fact that our quarterly earnings will jiggle. Our accounting is set to maximize cash flow, not reported earnings."

10:50 — Singleton believed buying stock at attractive prices was self-catalyzing, analogous to coiling a spring that at some future point would surge forward to realize full value."

11:50 — Singleton: "I don't reserve any day-to-day responsibilities for myself, so I don't get into any particular rut. I do not define my job in any rigid terms, but in terms of having the freedom to do whatever seems to be in the best interest of the company at any time."

14:35 — Singleton: "If everyone's doing them, there must be something wrong with them." (on share repurchases by Fortune 500 companies)

26:30 — Singleton: "Teledyne is like a living plant, with our companies as the different branches and each putting out new branches and growing so that no one business is too significant."

28:35 — Singleton: "We work our heads off to increase our own capability at collecting and promoting the right people. To the extent that we succeed, the whole company will succeed."

32:30 — "What's unique about him is that I'll ask him a question about one of these companies that I've asked him to supervise, and he always knows the exact numerical answer. That's the kind of fellow that you pick who runs a company and does it well."

35:00 — Singleton: "There are tremendous values in the stock market, but in buying stocks, not entire companies. Buying companies tends to raise the purchase price too high."

41:35 — Claude Shannon on Singleton: "He always tries to work out the best moves, and maybe he doesn't like to talk too much because when you're playing a game, you don't tell anyone else what your strategy is."

42:00 — Singleton: "We are not particularly persuaded by quick, temporary gains. We'd rather get something permanent, and that takes time."

44:40 — Munger: "Henry Singleton was the smartest single human being I've ever known in my entire life."

45:00 — Munger: "Henry was a lot smarter, but Warren had thought about investments a lot longer." (distinguishing raw intelligence from accumulated experience)