MIB: Ash Carter, Secretary of Defense


 * Interviewed: Ash Carter
 * Date: November 15, 2019
 * Link: https://ritholtz.com/2019/11/mib-ash-carter-secdef/
 * Transcript: https://ritholtz.com/2019/11/transcript-ash-carter/

Books by Ash Carter

 * Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon by Ash Carter
 * Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America by Ash Carter and William Perry
 * Ballistic Missile Defense by Ash Carter and David Schwartz
 * Managing Nuclear Operations by Ash Carter
 * Directed energy missile defense in space by Ash Carter
 * Keeping the Edge: Managing Defense for the Future by Ash Carter and John White
 * Soviet Nuclear Fission: Control of the Nuclear Arsenal in a Disintegrating Soviet Union by Kurt Campbell, Ash Carter, Steven Miller, and Charles Zraket
 * A New Concept of Cooperative Security by Ash Carter, William Perry, and John Steinbruner

Books Barry Mentioned

 * A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age by William Manchester
 * The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis

Favorite Books
RITHOLTZ: Quite interesting. Let’s talk about some of your favorite books. What do you enjoy reading? You’re a bit of a historian.

CARTER: It’s funny, Barry, I am and I’m all nonfiction because I love to learn about something I’ve never seen, never done, never will do. That’s why I wrote the book I did about the Pentagon. If you’ve never been in the Pentagon and you want to know how all the parts work …

RITHOLTZ: It paints quite a vivid picture.

CARTER: It’s an executive guide or a citizen’s guide to the Pentagon. It’s not about me, it’s about the Pentagon. I like reading books like that that’s why I wrote a book like that.

I read, and this may surprise you, textbooks.

RITHOLTZ: Okay.

CARTER: That may sound boring but here’s why. A text — if you want to learn something, a textbook is designed, it’s written to teach you.

RITHOLTZ: Sure.

CARTER: So, from a good textbook, you can learn a lot about a subject you don’t know and second, if you don’t like — if something doesn’t come through to you in the first textbook, get another textbook. I always get three or four of the same subject.

RITHOLTZ: Really?

CARTER: I like Mathematics. I like Physics. I like History and Language and so forth, too. Because then you can say, well, I’m going to — this — I didn’t get this guy’s explanation of a certain subject. So, I go to the corresponding chapter in the other one and read that and they’ve got a better explanation and you go back and forth.

I like doing that and it may sound like an odd — it should to people. But if you like to learn, try textbooks.