 Thank you very much for doing the interview with us today, so let's get started. The first question is, you started your own company as 16 and you are also a consultant for our Apple Bank Q and a civic hacker before we joined the cabinet. What have you brought to the job from your previous experiences and what do you hope to achieve as a digital minister? Yeah, I bring with myself the culture of the internet society on internet because people see rough consensus and running code. This is not a traditional representative democracy, but rather everybody with an email can participate with how internet works. And this idea of the internet that belongs to everybody is very different from the traditional democracy where most of the decision making power and agenda setting power are centralized in a few representatives. So I bring with me the spirit of open innovation. And what I try to achieve here is around the three ideas which is location independence, making sure that public servants can work anywhere. It's around voluntary association, meaning that people with a good idea can innovate anywhere from the society in order to contribute to public policy. And the third thing is radical transparency. Every single interview like this one or the meeting that I chair, I publish either the video or the transcript after 10 days of co-editing to the entire internet. So everybody can see not only what a policy, but also the why of policy making. Taiwan has been held as an example in contending the COVID-19 outbreak. In your view, how is Taiwan able to put it off? And how has technology helped fight the pandemic? So we use the three principles of fast, fair, and fun. Fast means that we responded last year, whereas more jurisdictions responded only starting this year. Because last year when Dr. Lee went down, the PRC whistleblower shared that there's seven starts cases on social media. It immediately gets noticed by the Taiwan equivalent of Reddit or the PDT and that escalated to our center for this control within the same giant. So starting the very next day, which is the first day of January, we started screening and doing health inspections for flights from Wuhan to Taiwan. So reliant collective intelligence and the fact that everybody with a single call to the hotline 1922 can feedback their idea into the daily life press conference of the Central Epidemic of Monsanto, which we established in January that before we have the first confirmed case, everybody can learn about the epidemiology, the scientific why, not just the what of the policies around sanitation, mask use, and physical distancing. And because mask use is so important integral to our response, we make sure that we use the National Health Insurance Card, which is a single payer system that covers more than 99.99% of the citizens and also residents. So everybody gets a ration mask and there's pervasive mask use. And finally, we work with the civil society people so that they can analyze where there's oversupply or undersupply of medical mask and we can change our strategy, for example, working with 24-hour convenience stores to make sure that more than 90% of the population have access, easy access to the medical mask for daily use. And finally, all of the CCC measures is translated by their spokes dog, the doji zongchai the shiba dog that translate this into very easy to understand, easy to spread means so that people will voluntarily share those scientific knowledges and so that it would have a higher R value than conspiracy theories and rumor and that's called humor over rumor. So next question is Taiwan is one of the most progressive societies in Asia and the region's first to legalized sex marriage last year. Do you think the battles have been one to make Taiwan more inclusive and equal or one more should be done? So many more should be done. For example, I'm a transgender. At the moment, Taiwan has not yet recognized domestic non-binary people or that we do recognize foreign non-binary people. When you enter Taiwan, you have to file your health declaration card. For example, there is a non-binary choice, but we're still working on that. So there's many more to be done for a GPTIQ plus people but I think Taiwan is firmly on the path of inclusion. So do you know the government is taking any initiative to do that? Yeah, certainly. Yeah, we're working on a new national ID system where the foreign people with a resident certificate at a moment which looks very different because the second digit is a letter, not a digit. So and the card looks different and everybody would say that even if you have a permanent resident certificate, you're not a domestic citizen with a national ID and so on. So we're working on making the environment much more friendly to foreign people who consider themselves to be also Taiwanese. That is to say, if they stay for more than five years, they can get the Taiwan nationality without relinquishing their original nationality. And so this kind of migration plan would also apply if that person is non-binary. That is to say, if they start off in a jurisdiction with a non-binary gender and when more of that sort of people begin to become also Taiwanese, that would be the time that we have to face our own non-binary gender system. So have you played a role in the progressive and reform policies that the government has been working on? If yes, what exactly? Sure. So I have been consulted on intergenerational solidarity issues because I'm not just in charge of the open government and social innovation but also around youth engagement. And so for many people who are under 18 years old where they cannot even participate in the referendum, the online participation system is the only place that they can participate meaningfully in the democracy here. So for example, there was a reform for our national identity drink. It's called a bubble tea, maybe you have heard of it. And there's often a associated plastic straw but a person with the pseudonym, I love elephants and elephants love me, proposed on the platform of e-petition that we should ban such a use of plastic single-use utensils because it's very easy for it to get into the rivers and the waterways and cause marine debris. And that's very quickly gone at more than 5,000 stigma chess and I lead the system of participatory officers where we meet everyone to determine two cases, to meet face to face with say the e-petitionists. And when we meet her, she's actually just 16 years old. And when we ask why would she start such a very popular petition, she said it's her civics class assignment. And so because of that, we very quickly popped various options of circular design. For example, you can redesign a drink so it doesn't require a straw or you can make the straw out of like literally a straw which is zero or even negative carbon footprint or you can use reusable glasses and so on. And so we pay out the petitioners with the makers of single-use utensils and ultimately starting last year, start banning such plastic one-time use straws for pick-up drinks. And so that's a really good example of a reform that's around environmental policy that started by someone who doesn't even have the voting right. You are Taiwan's youngest cabinet minister and the only transgender minister in the world. The only openly transgender. Sorry, the only openly transgender minister in the world. Do you get messages from people in Taiwan or abroad saying you are their inspirations or you're their role models? Do you reply to those messages and did you give them any advice about how transgender people might enter politics? Sure, I think it's easier for us because we don't have this binary thinking. We don't think that there is half of the world that's different from us. So it's easier for us to empathize. There's all sorts of different people because I personally have went through two puberties. I have some shared sentiments, some shared lived-in experiences and I can also empathize more with people who suffer from the different minorities and so on that's called intersectionality. And so I think transgender people as with trans-cultural people, trans-discipline people, transnational people and so on have a natural advantage at politics because we're more able to take all the sides. Do you think Taiwan has been inclusive towards transgender people or has they're still stereotyping and discrimination remains? Well, the national ID system still on the second digit that is currently still binary for domestic citizens. So that's one part that I would like to see improvement. But overall I think people are very tolerating of non-binary people and actually understand my point of that we're more able to empathize with more people. And the national ID system you're talking about the gender category, is the government going to work on that? As I said, for foreign people who are getting a resident permit in Taiwan, at the moment we're allocating the digit seven for non-binary people who migrate from their foreign passports with a non-binary field. As for domestic people, there's an idea of using the letter zero as a digit, but also later, oh, I guess. But anyway, to use the digit zero as the second digit in the national ID system, but that would require regulatory adjustment and I have not yet seen the draft. Do you expect it will happen in this, in the next four years? Well, I think there is a popular support for respecting other jurisdictions, non-binary people. I think there's broad consensus on that. As of domestic ones, that requires a dialogue among the international society. Going back a little to the last question, do you give out advices? Yeah, there's a kind of saying, there's a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in. It's a linear quote. So even though there may be many shortcomings, many injustices and so on, it also gives us a reason to work together, to collaborate and to make society better. So President Tai has started a second term last month when you stay on the cabinet. What do you think are the priorities for the government in the next four years and your priorities as a digital minister? Yeah, President Tai has said in her inauguration speech last time in her first term, that before we think of democracy as a showdown of two opposing sides, but now democracy must become inclusive, become a conversation between many different sides. And that's taking all the sides approach proved to be very successful. During the pandemic, you can see that people with all party affiliations of all different coaches and so on, all worked very well together to basically mobilize the whole society in order to counter the coronavirus. So we look forward to continue this sense of renewed solidarity to tackle not only the sustainable development goals within Taiwan, but also share the Taiwan module of how we have, for example, worked to resolve the pandemic with no lockdowns and also resolve the infodemic, the disinformation crisis with no takedowns. And these liberal democratic innovations is what we call Taiwan can help. And so bringing this message to international community and helping each epicenter of either pandemic or infodemic, that is a priority for us. And your priority as a digital minister, any special task you are focusing on? Yeah, as a digital minister, at the moment, because I'm a horizontal minister, I work with all the different ministries, but I do not work for any particular ministry. But it is part of the President's second term promise that we will look into a council or a ministry that specifically works with digital issues. So in the next year or so, I'll help to formulate the structure of that along with many of my colleagues. Yeah, like you said, President Tai mentioned in her inauguration speech, she's looking to create a new digital development agency. So can you tell us a little more specifically what the agency will be? Would you? Sure. So it requires, of course, a act being enacted by the legislators in order to set up such a digital digital limits council or ministry. However, because I'm not a legislator, I'm not at liberty of telling you what we'll end up become. But according to President Tai, it needs to, of course, at least look at, for example, the digital governance. It needs to look into internet governance, multi-stakeholder dialogue. It needs to look into, for example, cybersecurity and things like that. But as of what the extent and the scope that we'll have to get the legislature's approval and also cross-party consensus among all the four, actually five more parties within the parliament. So it's too early to say. As you were saying, you are working with all the ministries. So I'm just curious are, do you work with the Mana Affairs Council and what's your take on the current cross-strait relations or tensions, if you can comment on that? Yeah, sure. So we have many secondments that is to say people who voluntarily join my office from various different ministries. I heard that there's more than 10 people in foreign service who want to join my office. But we only have one secondment from each ministry at a time. So there's around like 12 different secondments. So when there is a secondment, for example, from the ministry of culture, interior, there was one from finance and he will return soon foreign service as I said, National Communication Commission and so on, education, of course. Then we learn something about how they work because we require that every secondment to work out loud, meaning that they need to share what they're working on with every other secondment to this office. But at the moment, the council that you mentioned did not second anyone to my office. So I have no idea. Or do you have any of your own observation of the current relations between Taiwan and China? Or do you see anything or any areas that can be improved? Well, I think during the pandemic, we strengthened our democracy. Everybody feel that they are much more participatory when it comes to, for example, fair distribution of masks, of the good, fun, humor-based dissemination of scientific knowledge. People learn to be kind of amateur epidemiologists. And so the civil society, which is very robust to begin with, along with the journalistic community, which is very vibrant to begin with, gets even stronger during the pandemic and everybody can see and feel that. Whereas in the PRC, the journalistic community maybe is under more constraint in order to, for example, share the initial whistleblowing of Dr. Lee will announce messages. And so I think during the pandemic, especially during the lockdown periods in certain areas, I think the civil society, which is not very robust to begin with, gets even more constraints because of the top-down approach that they took to counter the pandemic. So I think the pandemic served as an amplifier of the two different governing models that gets amplified under two different ways. Do you think more people from your also-reduced political background should enter politics? Yeah, I think people who look at politics as something that is mostly just a public servant performing fixed duties, that is a quite outdated view of politics. Nowadays, anyone with any innovation of how society could be better can contribute to the everyday decision-making. The old way was just because with the old voting system, you can only upload maybe three bits of information every four years. That's called voting, right? To the public decision-making. But now with the internet, not only we can listen to the politician broadcasting, like through radio and television, but through the internet, we can also listen to one another. So millions of people can now listen to one another much more effectively. So forming the collective intelligence was the right hashtag. You don't need a representative representing you. You can just start a hashtag and have a real dialogue among everybody who's interested in that particular hashtag. So what I'm getting at is that we're now in an age where democracy itself is being democratized. Everybody can't partake in public decision-making. And so in a way, also become a politic work. So Taiwan recently just recalled the mayor of Gaussian City. And some people, some media have held it as a landmark in democracy. Do you share that? Well, constitutionally, of course, there's always a strain of direct democracy in the constitution of Taiwan as a Republican citizen. And so direct referenda and recall, these are just directly specified in the constitution as the basic civic rights. But it was Zilden exercised and Zilden successfully exercised. So I think people learned more about the constitution because of these recent developments. You've also been involving Taiwan's fight against this information. And there are a lot of theory that most of the disinformation attacks might have originated from China. What's your take? Has Taiwan been successful to ward off this information attack? Yes, certainly we face a lot of propaganda. It's not even covered, it's over it, from various different narratives around the world. But specifically, for example, before our election, the presidential one, there was a concerted social media campaign that tried to paint the anti-ela protesters in Hong Kong as people being paid to riot and things like that. Of course, that's not true. They're just reusing a religious photo and just changing the caption so that people would think falsely that these young people are just being paid to, for example, herd the police or things like that. And so in Taiwan, we work with the international fact-checking community. So the town fact-check center attributed that particular caption to the Weibo account of Zhuang Yang, Zheng Fangwei, the central political and law unit of the PRC. And that Weibo account actually reused the Reuters photo probably without paying copyright fee license and then just changing the caption and tried to, I guess, dissuade the Taiwanese citizens from showing sympathy with people in Hong Kong. And so we faced that quite routinely. And our way is called notice and public notice where the town fact-check center publicly say that this is just propaganda from the Weibo account. And people who should see it on social media would see a line that links to the fact-checking reports so people understand that this is being sponsored by PRC. So do you, do you expect or are you worried that this information would get more rampant in the future? Well, I think as long as people have good, just like hand sanitation rules, people have good habits of thinking twice before sharing anything, of people volunteering into this fact-checking organizations, people understanding that there is a narrative going on that tries to paint in particular ways. As long as people stay vigilant, I have a lot of trust in the civil society of basically doing a public mental health protection of their own media competence. And there's also lifelong learning and also K-12 curriculum that strengthens our resilience. And also from our administration, we make sure that as long as we detect those trending campaigns, we push out a funny vaccine that is to say a humor over humor as I shared so that people who look at it and laugh at it will remember that there is a campaign going on and you don't have to believe that, rather you can check the source yourself as if you're a part-time journalist. There have been suspected cyber attacks on Taiwan's presidential office in some companies recently. Is Taiwan getting more vulnerable to cyber attacks? And are these attacks part of some coordinated campaigns and some new security? The critical infrastructures in Taiwan have always been a target of cyber security attacks. This is not news. What is news though is that we now have a act, the Cybersecurity Act, that says every critical infrastructure, every government agency in Taiwan have to have dedicated personnel for cyber security. And I think as important, if not more important than the personnel, is that for each new government project, now five to seven percent of the ICT budget now specifically goes to cyber security for penetration testing for threat hunting and for private seeming and other cyber security measures. We're looking to expand that budget in the next four years so that it's now five percent to seven percent of the ICT budget, but it may become five to seven percent of the total budget, which is a lot more. And so we work with a white hat hacker community who will do the penetration testing and tell us how they have done it so that the defending team, the blue team, will learn from the creativity of the red team that are white hat, meaning that they're responsible and ethical hackers. And so this culture is what we are building in Taiwan. And I think I look forward in the next few years where we would have even more of a cyber security industry than before. But for the more recent suspected attacks, do you see anything unusual or any, any moments? Well, I think what's interesting about recent news is that what we have seen from the individual events, they may actually work with the, for example, journalistic community, like directly emailing the journalist in order to form a certain narrative. And that is quite political in nature and not at all technical. And so this kind of political coordinated actions, of course, marks a difference between the pure technical, like hijacking of computers and this and so on. And so that, I think is the main difference. Do you have any speculation who could be behind this? So I'm in the administration and I'm not part of the president office cyber security team or the national security council counselor that worked with the presidential office. So I have nothing to comment on this. Sure. So do you think something should be done differently in president's first term? Like for the government as a general and for you, do you see like looking back? Is there something- You mean retroactively? Yeah, retroactively using something should have been done differently to make it better or anything that you see should be improved. Sure. I think the bundling of the referendum and the election was a mistake because when people look into the referendum ticket it takes time for them to read and comprehend it. However, when you're voting for a particular candidate people tend to get into this partisan thinking. So representative democracy and deliberative direct democracy on the same day in a same voting booth is bound to leave people feeling very polarized. And so that is why now we have changed the laws so it takes on alternating yes. It will be one year of the presidential election and then the next year referendum and then the next year mayoral election and then next year referendum and so on. But if we have started with these on alternating yes maybe there will be no the tension and polarization and so on that we saw in the mayoral election plus referendum that day it would be different. And for yourself, for your U.S. additional answer and so you wish you have done this. Sure. I think what I have done is mostly just to build a space for people to arrive to common values despite their different positions. I think I have held that space quite well. I wish that I could introduce the Sustainable Development Goals sooner because I started aligning my work with the SDGs around 2016, late 2016 and only started publicly advocating how I can help for the SDGs starting 2017. But SDGs were already passed in 2015. So it's a global goal that unites all the different countries. So had I a chance to go back in time I would start aligning my work with the Sustainable Development Goals at the second that I entered the office instead of waiting for around half a year. You have previously described yourself as an anarchist. Conservative anarchist. Conservative anarchist and advocate conservative anarchism. Do you still see yourself that way after being with the government in the next four years? Certainly I'm working with the government. I'm working with the government, not for the government. I'm working with the people, not for the people. So I'm at this kind of Lagrange point between the social movements on one side and the government on the other side. I'm not taking any particular side, I'm taking all the sides, but I'm trying to build this just as a base, as I said, for a common purpose to grow and to find things that we can all live with and I continue to hold that position. So you're still a conservative anarchist. Of course. Can you tell us, I know you've said that, but can you tell for this interview, what does that mean? Sure, so to conserve is to respect existing cultures, to be transcultural. That is to say, in Taiwan, we have more than 20 national languages and each represent one or more languages of culture from the Austro-Indian indigenous cultures to the waves of immigration, including of course the internet culture of rough consensus and running care and so on. And so instead of like a purely progressive development which made advance one of the coaches to the detriment of the others, we need to find innovation that take care of all the different culture, to be maximally inclusive, that's what conservative means to me. And anarchist means to do no coercive action, to give no orders, to take no orders, but rather work with a voluntary association with all the different sides. And so that means that when I introduce new measures to reduce the risk, to reduce the chores of the everyday time spent on bureaucracy or to improve the trust and credibility of the public sector, trusting the citizens more, I make sure that there's no sacrifices made to any of the ministries or stakeholders involved in academic terms and make only Pareto improvements. And that's what I mean by anarchism. So some Japanese media have dubbed you the genius item minister of the IQ of 180. That's centimeters. I'm sorry? 180 centimeters. Yes. Do you like that title or how do you like to be described? Well, I'm the digital minister, right? So IT, while it empowers digital, it's not equivalent to digital. So I respect whatever moniker they use, but digital is really different from IT. And my job description explains how exactly that's different. My job description goes like this. When we see internet of things, let's make it internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear the singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here. And the genius minister? Well, that's just a moniker, right? So if people use that, it's like a manga character. Of course, like the band of those monos sampled my voices into their hip-hop songs while I did not partake in their creation because I relinquish the copyright of the interviews that I make. Of course, they can just take and remix it. So I see it as an interesting remix. But they get your consent to add- No, I give the public consent to anybody, to all the creators beforehand. So they did not specifically need my consent. So they did not contact you beforehand? Of course, before they published, they notified me. And I said, of course, it's a public license. So they don't have to notify me. But I'm happy, I guess, that they did it as a kind of courtesy. So you like how the way... I did listen to that. And it's really interesting. So is it like a one-time deal, or are you hoping there could be...? It's not a deal, because I made myself available as material. So any creator can freely remix the images and video and sound that I made. And so in that sense, I'm just enabling more creations, but I'm not really creating directly with them. But either as a hobby or like a similar venture, will you be looking into more into the music? Yeah, sure. Of course, I like music. I listen to music, but at the current point, I do not have time to do music making. Have you read some reports that you go to KTV? You still have time to go to KTV? Or is that a continuing hobby for you? Yeah, I do sing a lot. But it doesn't have to be an institutional KTV. It could be just in my apartment or in a social innovation lab. But I do enjoy singing a lot. So what do you do outside, Warwick? Do you have any particular hobbies or how do you... Sure. So I walk to the social innovation lab every morning, and I walk back every day. And so I just start by to chat with random people, because people will say hi to me and they would have something to share, maybe about their life, maybe about public policy and things like that. So I enjoy talking to people when I'm on the way on the work or on my way off the work. So people actually stop you on the street and you respond? Yeah, and we just get to chat, yeah. Almost everything, yes. Sometimes they just want to take a selfie together. That's one too. And you never say no? Yeah, of course. Unless I'm in a rush, which I almost never work. So that's almost like a daily routine? Yeah, it's almost a daily routine. Can I ask how many people a day do you come to the office? Roughly, maybe two or three. Interesting. Or is there anything... I think we're through with a list of questions. So is there anything you want to add or emphasis? Yeah, so for more about the Taiwan module to counter the pandemic, just see TaiwanCanHelp.us. No, thank you, Taiwan. Okay, thank you.