I mean, how does GPS work?

Yeah, people are like, oh, I'm just realizing.

I have no idea.

No, it's such a good question.

One of the people in the book who worked on it in the 80s, he said, the thing is, you really need to understand this is a computer in the space talking to a computer in your phone or wherever talking to a computer on the ground stations.

This is really complex computing and physics that's happening.

And it's pretty incredible because this concept was developed and honed in the early 70s before we had personal computers.

What are some of the other systems, industries, places where GPS has become central for how we operate?

I, you could probably go for hours on this topic, but, but just in a nutshell, what is the story, the history of GPS?

GPS?The GPS system as we know it now is, is from the early 1970s and it essentially emerged out of the end of the Vietnam War as a tool to bomb more precisely.

Um, this had been a real issue in the Vietnam War, um, this pr- this lack of ability to really precision bomb and there were a lot of different competing systems within the US military.

Um, you know, systems that could do one thing better or another thing better.

Um, there had been a predating system that came out of the late '50s and so this was sort of a refinement of a lot of ideas that had been building and building and building.

Um, but yeah, it was essentially a, a tool to make bombing more precise and it needed to work in three dimensions because you were really thinking at that time about, you know, fighter jets or missiles or things where you were working in three dimensions.

So you have the system and it's sort of in the bowels of the Pentagon, it's designed, they're testing it, they're trying trialing it.

Well, who operates those satellites? Is it still the military?

What was going on during Desert Storm that they went, maybe it's not so great that civilians have a worse option?

Yeah, I think they'd already realized how this dependence, this civilian dependence had just sprouted, right? And I think it had been the case from very early on in the GPS project.

It had never been classified, for example.

It had always been open to civilians, but you really had to know what you were looking for.

And so it was adopted very early on by mapmakers, by surveyors, then by academics.

It started being adapted to doing all kinds of surveying.

So that's why all of a sudden you have, you know, in the early 90s, you have freeways in Los Angeles.

How did it used to work? So before, how did institutions, you know, before we had GPS, what kinds of technology, how did the world function without GPS? It's like, cast your mind back.

But it's far more than that, isn't it?

Yeah, it's far more than that.

So many people were like, oh, you're writing a book about the car sat-nav or something.

I said, well, it might be quite, it could be quite a good book, but it would be quite a short book.

It's really the tip of the iceberg.

Not that much of the book is actually about this consumer experience with GPS.

And even though it's so, so, so transformative to our daily experience, I mean, I've been to Oxford Circus a million times from my house.

easy is it to do that?

Is that right?

Yeah, so I used to track oil flows kind of around the world.

I used to work for Wall Street Journal and the Dow Jones, and then I was working for S&P Global.

And I was just sitting at my desk one day, and a colleague sent me a story about a weird incident in the Black Sea.

And this was quite soon after Russia invaded Crimea.

Mm-hmm.

And all these ships were turning up at this Russian port, Novorossiysk, which is very close to Crimea.

Talk about where we are with those risks and how intertwined it is with the global economy and with virtually everything we do.

These are all similar operating systems to GPS, but how- how do they compare to GPS? How are they different?

Um, they're not that different.

Well, I should say, I mean, the Chinese system is by far the newest.

It's from 2000 onwards, so they think it can be used for multipurpose, uh, for communication.

Probably all the things that it can be used for, uh, the Chinese government will definitely not be saying.

Um, the US GPS Advisory Board said, you know, it's a tool of- of hard and soft power for the Chinese government.

So there will be some variations, but, you know, when you look at GLONASS, it's kind of, it's very close comparison to GPS.

What, what is GPS emblematic of now? Where does that leave us?