Hello, everyone. Welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I'm Sonal, and I'm here today with the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter. Welcome, Ash.

Good to be here. Thanks, Sonal. Thank you for coming here. So, you know, you gave a speech yesterday at Stanford, and you talked a lot about ties between Silicon Valley and the need for partnerships. But actually, I want to start with some place kind of random, which is you once said a

long time ago how you hated GPS. And I actually want to hear why you say that. Okay, here's why.

GPS makes us receive signals from satellites that are in semi-synchronous orbit, which are, by the way,

very expensive to launch and operate.

We do that in the Department of Defense, so that expense falls on us.

But it's not so much the expense as the fact that that makes it vulnerable to people who can

attack it.

It makes it impossible to use it in the valleys of, for example, Afghanistan or a big city where you're

shadowed from the satellite signal.

Okay, so you can't be caught.

From the satellite signal or in a place where the signal is poor, just like cell phone signals can be poor.

So, and we particularly, of course, in the Department of Defense, worry about enemies jamming

GPS signals.

So what's the answer? What would I like to do instead of launching these really expensive satellites?

I call it the GPS of things. And there will come a time soon, and we're working on this,

where on a chip, you will have an accelerometer, a gyro, and a precision clock.

So it's like a MEMMS basically?

Exactly.

Exactly.

Microelectromechanical system and mems.

And that chip will be in every object in the Internet of Things.

...