 We are live from Texas 2019 at Sentara Grand Hotel. I am joined now by one of the most interesting persons in the world, and one of soon to be my favorite guests on the program as well, Audrey Tang from Taiwan. Good morning, Audrey. Good morning. I'm very happy to be here. So, I would have to say Sawadee Kap. Okay. The Thai way. Sawadee Kap. So, Audrey Tang is a digital minister from Taipei, from Taiwan, one of the guests here at Texas. So, how has it been for you the past two days? I was here in Monday and at a conference talking about disinformation. I'm really happy to be joined by across all the different sectors. And I saw that this is a very interesting topic for Thai people, after the election now. And so, I brainstormed with the civic tech societies and the different academics and so on to basically share the Taiwan model of no takedowns, but rather notice and public notice where the social sector can just add to the message instead of taking down any message. And it seemed to be very well received. What's the takeaway that you received out of the discussions that you've had over the past week? On that topic? On that topic, I think people very much want to trust each other. But they really also want evidence for their trust. I think people place a lot of value on trust, just as with Taiwanese society. But people also understand that blind trust is worse than no trust. And so, I think it is just this trust-building work that is usually done in post-elections in all societies that people can learn that if we have the same facts, different parties, different ideologies, different interpretations, but the same facts are essential to keep a society going. When you Google Transgender and Minister, obviously, it is you and you and you. Have you Googled yourself? Have you read your Wikipedia? Have you gone through all the information about you online? Yeah, I have, of course, but I cannot write to my Wikipedia. Yeah, you cannot write to your Wikipedia. No, because it's against the Wikipedia rules. Yes. I can fix typos. That's the only thing I can do. Do you get to fix typos? Yeah, I do. You know, reading about your history, it's so inspiring for so many people out there in the world and added to the fact that, of course, the gay marriage law has been passed only recently in Taiwan. Exciting times for Taiwan. Tell us more about your thoughts because we thought we were going to be the first, but you guys beat us to the punch. So tell us more about that. Sure. Marriage equality, I think, in Taiwan is a result of 12 years of what we call gender mainstreaming in the public sector. For 12 years, all the different policies, national policies, national projects, must pass through what we call impact assessment on gender. So we have a shared gender dashboard. We look year after year, like, for example, the balance of gender ratios in our parliament. In our national parliament, there's now almost 40% women, and the representation is very diverse. We have LGBT councillors, city councillors, and so on. And so just by measuring this, by making sure that all the public service has to go through the motion, if they're in the Ministry of Finance, they may think, oh, what does gender have to do with me? But they have to evaluate their gender impact, even on taxation and on all these different policies. And so with 12 years of this kind of work, the mainstream public servant become more accepting of the different gender expressions and things like that. Of course, having President Tsai Ing-wen as our president also helps on gender mainstreaming. And finally, at the end, we chose a legalization strategy that legalized the bylaws, that is to say the duties and the rights, instead of the in-laws, that is to say the families. So in the civil code, there's different sections. So in our marriage equality law, we hyperlinked, referenced the civil code on all the rights and duties of the bylaws, but leaving the in-laws alone. And so that made this kind of ingredients work for people with the more conservative generations, as well as people with more progressive generations. And the two referendums really expressed that will very clearly. So the law came out only a few weeks ago. That's right. And the whole nation was celebrating. Oh, very much so. So tell us more about what you saw on that day. Yeah, there was a tweet. On May 17th, 2019 in hashtag Taiwan, hashtag love won, not win. We took a big step towards true equality and made Taiwan a better country. That's right. That's from our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen. How has the mood or the feeling of, you know, your community, your country, how has it changed over the past few weeks? Do you feel it's a different air? With that law being passed? Yeah, I think so. So I myself posted on Twitter of a blue sky and a rainbow and basically saying, you know, love won and that dreams do come true somewhere over the rainbow. And it represents, as I said, very hard work across more than a decade of activists, but also a lot of restraint and deliberation by people with different, you know, religious beliefs and people with different backgrounds. I think the mood is that we settle on something that we can all live with. And this is very important because in democracy, if you're looking for, you know, beating the other half of the population, every time you have a new law, the society gets divided in half. But having this kind of reconciliation talks, having this kind of bylaws, but not the in-laws, having this kind of design, it actually made the society go together more because people respect their differences but also understand that we are united in our differences. You yourself, your journey, since you grew up being a transgender, what was the turning point in your life? Realizing that you want to serve your country and at the same time you need to be yourself legitimately. What was that like for you? Well, I'm working with the government. I'm not working for the government. So I'm serving essentially everybody, not just my country. But the point here, I think, is more white. It's, I think, by the time that I reached puberty, my first puberty, I went through two puberties in 1996. Two puberties? The first one was in 1993, to 1994, to 1995, and the second one around 10 years later. And so my first puberty also coincides with me encountering with the World Wide Web because the World Wide Web was just deployed widely around the world, around the time. And so on the World Wide Web, it seems like people generally just don't care about the gender because across the web nobody can really express themselves. Except, by the way, that they choose to be expressed. And so it allows far more freedom and experimentation in the different pronouns, different gender expressions, different societies. And by and large, it made me feel not alone because then people with intersex conditions, people like me, born with a lower testosterone level than average in males and things like that, we may be unique in our community of 100 people. But on the internet, on the right use net group, on the right web forums and so on, you can easily see thousands of people having the same lifting experience. So the tribe is not just a physical tribe anymore. It is actually an online tribe. Instead of being a tribalism, like just talking to people with the same tribe, the online people using hyperlinks made it very interesting and easy to talk with people who don't know much about these things yet. So that's the form of frequently asked questions, or FAQs. So I went online, I saw all those FAQs and I learned a lot from the international community. And I finally told my teachers, I don't want to go to school anymore because I've been learning so much, so many things directly with people contributing to science, technology and sociology. And the teachers went through that list of my email correspondences with leading professors and we co-create papers. They don't know I'm just 14 years old, right? And then my teachers all said, oh, just go with it. Yeah, you don't have to go to school anymore. So that really is a very empowering moment. I'm getting goosebumps right now. I heard that your IQ, have you gotten tested? Is it 180? No, it's my height. It's 180 centimeters. 180 centimeters is your height. So what told me that your IQ is 180? The unit is very important. For adults using the Waze test, the top is 160. Above that, the test has no efficacy. I see. Second time that you went through puberty. That's right. What was that? That was around 2005, 2006. So I decided to went through the female puberty, hormonal replacement, all those different chemical treatments, and as well as just a change of pronouns online. So it of course also widened my mind in a different way. The relationship with the body is different. The body is more sensitive to, you know, the gut feelings is more connected to the environment, to people around and so on. And so, yeah, I think those two puberty together gave me a wider range of what the words mean when people talk about their different experiences and also makes me more, builds more empathy with people with different life experiences. When people come up to you, what do they like to talk to you about? What do they ask you, especially teens or the younger crowd? Right, so I have office hours. So my office is open to everyone every Wednesday. So from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., anyone can come to me talking about anything. To your office? Yeah, to my office. So there's like a line in front of your office? Hmm, there's a booking system. Oh, okay, there's a booking system? Oh, sorry, I forgot about that. So people come on time and leave on time. Like, you get 15 minutes with RTV? You get 40 minutes. 40 minutes, okay, that's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot, yeah. So, yeah, anyone can book my time. The only condition that I have is that we must publish the entire transcript or video online. So this is for the benefit of the public. So it's very interesting because if we don't do radical transparency like this, people will tend to talk about things that are of private interest to them, right? Lobbying, asking favors and things like that. But because they know that it will be transcribed and published to the internet, they talk about public welfare. So the interesting thing is just by radical transparency alone, it changed the conversation with politicians, which is why I always encourage my colleagues to try this radical transparency. And so the younger people, people around 15 years old, are the most active, actually. They are the most active? Both on the office hours and also on our e-petition platform. Our e-participation platform, Join.gov.tw, has around 5 million visitors out of a country of 23 million people. So one-quarter of population. And the people who spend the most time on it are 15 years old and then 65 years old. 15 and 65. Yes. Interesting. Very interesting because they have more time, I guess. And also care more about public welfare instead of just private welfare. And so they raise very interesting points. For example, just this year, Taiwan banned the use of indoor drinks with plastic straws, with non-recyclable straws. And that was raised a year and a half ago just by a 15-years-old girl in the e-petition platform. So it very quickly gets more than 5,000 signatures and all the environmental protection agency people. So it must be a really senior activist organizing so quickly. But it turns out it's her civics class. Her teacher told the classmates to find something to petition for. I see. And then they were very active and found the best way to express this kind of movement. And it really turned into policy change. So I think the 15-years-old totally died away. What about the elder generation? What are they interested in? So the elder generation cares about staying relevant and meaningful in their lives. Even if they may be retired, they really want to join a meaningful movement so that they can support divisions set up by 15-years-old. And so this kind of intergenerational solidarity is actually mostly what we found as the most successful movements and startups. If you have people who are really young, people who are really old, and also the domain expertise of the stakeholders, if you're working, for example, on people with Down syndrome, it helps to have families of Down syndrome people in your board, right, in your board of directors. And these trilingual teams is what we found as the most successful to effect such a change. Trilingual teams. Yes. So teams that speak the language of the young, language of the elderly, and also the language of the stakeholder that they affect. What language do you speak, Audrey? JavaScript. Pearl. Pascal. Are you a nerd? Do you find yourself as a nerd? Of course. Did you grow up? Did people call you a nerd? Of course. Right? You do. I did call you a nerd, but I don't think I'm a nerd, but I'm just asking, like, have you been called that? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, the sales German newspaper just described me a rare nerd with empathy. Rare nerd with empathy. We need more of that in the world. That's right. We need more of that in the world. I wonder every day when you wake up, now this is our burning question, not burning question, but this is our question, this is the question that we ask all of our guests. It's your routine. Yes, what is your routine, Audrey? Oh, okay. So your routine is asking people what their routine is. Yes, that is my routine. Okay. So actually, I'll talk about my evening routine. Okay. So before I go to sleep, I reply to each and every one of the email. I archive my inbox turns zero, and I finish all the to-do items, and I just archive everything. So it's a completely empty, free of incoming messages by the time that I sleep. And I hold with myself in my mind the questions that I'm going to deliberate, the issues that are complex. I listen throughout the day, but I don't come to conclusions, and I just hold these patterns in my mind, and I get to sleep. And after eight hours, I wake up with innovation, with ideas, with solutions, and I write them down. That's my routine. Okay. I just got more goosebumps from there. I don't know why, but this is very insightful. So you clear up everything before you go to bed. Your mountains of incompletions have been cleared. The issues that need to be resolved are placed inside of your head. Without judgment. Without judgment. And you don't judge anything for that entire day, too. That's right. Right? You go to bed. And then you wake up with conclusions. With ideas. Every day. Every day. Now, how many problems or how many thoughts or how many issues you take with you into bed per night, like 10 or 15 or... Yeah, yeah. And it's easily that. Right? So how many meetings I have, like every day I have six or seven meetings. And so the unresolved issues just pile up without any judgment. And then I wake up with creative solutions. And if these are particularly complex, I may have to work harder. By sleeping nine hours. How many hours do you sleep per night? Eight. Eight. And are you a deep sleeper? Do you sleep deep? Yeah. You do. I do. You do. You mentioned about complex issues. And obviously there are different kinds of issues that you have to think about. Right? But not judging the issues at hand every minute of your life or you're still awake. I think that is a challenge in itself. So meaning that before you arrived here at this age, you used to judge. Did you used to judge before? Before realizing maybe I should just not judge. What was that journey like for you? Yeah, I think because I learned programming really, really early on when I was eight years old. Right? So for me it's like a musical instrument. I mean computer. To me it's like a musical instrument. So the individual notes are logic. And the melodies is the space that allows people to interact. And so I learned it very early on so much so that it become part of my thought pattern like computational thinking as people call it now. But it turns out not everything is looking for a solution. Too many people who grow up with programming so that everything can be solved if they just measure it right, if they just digitize it quote unquote. But actually the most creative solutions are the ones that are spontaneous that allows for a different direction that are not yet measured. It's measuring new things in the future. It's not keep measuring the old things. So I think I slowly came to realizing that when I started working on a new language called Pro 6, it's around 2005. Also coincides with my second puberty. And at that time I discovered that to create a new language is to give ideas, the patterns a different way of expressing, of essentially creating a new culture. And when you're doing this kind of creative work you cannot think of solutions. You must live with the problems, live with the burning questions as long as possible until they manifest themselves in a way that delivers the common values. And that is the true way for creation. Sometimes it might take years. That's right. Decades. Generations. A lifetime. A lifetime. A few lifetimes. Some five minutes. Five minutes. That's right. But when you know the answers there you know it's there. It's ready when it's ready. What are you going to be talking about today at TechSauce? There's two talks, two keynotes I'm going to give. One is about digital social innovation. How to use digital technologies to not just talk to hundreds or thousands of people as we're doing now. But rather listen to hundreds of thousands of people. So that's the first keynote. Can you give me some takeaways before you go on stage with that? How do you do that, Audrey? So one of the great things about the internet is that it enables people to express their preferences in a way that are asynchronous or meaning not at the same time. So for example, this is a real picture of people's opinions when in 2015 Uber first entered Taiwan. And so these are your friends and families on Facebook or Twitter that have a different opinion than you but they're your friends and families. They're not anonymous trolls. And we do this by asking people to look at the same facts and share their feelings. And on the same fact, you can feel happy, you can feel sad, it's okay, right? So after three weeks of sharing feelings we say the best ideas are the one that take care of most people's feelings. And so in this way we can turn it into a new regulation. And so the interface is really simple. You look at one statement, you say you agree or you disagree and that's it. There is no reply button because if there's a reply button you can attack the person. Feel tests of autonomous driving on public roads should have a predictable space and time boundary. That's one of the suggestions. So people would react to that. How do they feel? So when they agree, they move to where the people who also agree. When they disagree, they move in their avatar to the people who also disagree. And every time we see this shape at the end. We have divisive issues that are ideological but people agree to disagree. But if you only look at popular media you would thought that's the only thing that society is talking about. But no, actually people agree on most of the things, most of the time with most of their neighbors. And these are the things that we should focus our constructive energy on. And listen by skill. Those different crowd-moderated collective intelligence allows us to have a better agenda that people are supporting. And this allows us to find creative solutions while tabling the more divisive issues. Is this happening every day in Taiwan? Are the issues up in the air for people to talk about and discuss? Is it a policy there? Yeah, it is. There's a national policy. Actually multiple national policies that you can start this kind of discussion by 5,000 people petitioning or you can file a sandbox application for your new ideas or you can join the presidential hackathon that allows cohorts of 20 teams selected by the people and these teams deliver a prototype and the president gives a trophy to five winning teams every year. The trophy has no money, but it is a projector. If you turn it on the president herself gets projected handing the trophy to you. So it's very useful for internal negotiations and it's a presidential promise that whatever you build in the three months become public policy after a year at most. And so basically the government gives you ideas and it becomes part of public service and that kind of co-creation is the digital way of listening to 100,000 people and turning their good ideas into public policy. Great idea. And the other talk would be about... The other talk, I don't know because it will be crowdsourced. I would just start putting out the QR code asking people to using their phone to ask me questions and vote on each other's questions. And the idea very simply... You guys can check out more by going on to the Techsoft page. It's on the listening at scale, so it's 4.30. 4.30 p.m. today. Audrey, take us to 2020. What do you see happening for Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Thailand, in terms of economics, social discrepancies, in terms of growth. What do you see? 2020 is just next year. Yeah. So next year we will see the first deployment of 5G technology. We will see that previously there were many places that were rural that doesn't have good broadband connection start to have a really good like gigabits per second broadband connection. That means that people are going to live and have entertainment, have education, do business and so on without having to rely on land travel or air travel for that matter. We were going to see a regional revitalization where people can go back to their homes, to their communities and so on without having to be on large municipal cities. I mean, part of their time can still be here in the large municipal cities, but many of their time can be either tele-presenting or also in a virtual classroom to get people from all over the world together and share their empathies to share their different experiences. Previously it was very hard. Of course, nowadays using the fastest fiber optic, you can simulate some part of it, but then it's not people's real field experience. But with 5G, people can very easily just put out a virtual reality Google and then just walk and live with anyone and then that will enable a lot more social empathy with people in different circumstances and enable a new kind of economy where people transcend the physical boundaries. The possibility that, let's say, we're talking in this room, this screen can turn into New York real-time. We're looking out the window and the leaves are no, it's summertime there in New York. So real-time and then I can just swipe and it can be London, it can be Taiwan, it can be Taipei at any time and at the same time we can have more people coming into this room talking to us and you see people being more stationary in the future and moving less around the world, what do you see? I think people will choose to spend more time in deeper conversations just like we are having here. Because what we have with the mobile internet right now is kind of a proxy of real-human interaction. I mean, it's satisfied part of the human need, but you don't get to see the micro expressions with this kind of face-to-face conversation, you know exactly whether you're interested, whether where your attention is, whether I'm speaking too fast or too slow and things like that, but using live-stream technology at this point even if you know 1080p, you don't see those micro expressions, you don't feel the same line of presence, but with 5G it's actually possible to deliver those micro expressions and so people can form much more emotional bonds over a longer distance whereas before it was just impossible. Last and final question, this is in terms of safety, in terms of caring about your health at the same time, using digital, using phones, using tablets always on, always in that digital world what do you see will be required for a person to be okay with all these digital materials around them? I mean, as an event user of technology, where do you find that balance? When do you digital detox? I think the most important thing is to be intentional so I install a browser plugin called Facebook Feed Eradicator Facebook Feed Eradicator It eradicates the Facebook feed so if I go to facebook.com I don't see a feed, it's gone but I can still use Facebook intentionally you look for a friend, it's there you look for a page, an event, you watch the live stream, it's there the only thing that's not there is the non-intentional unpredictable feed that fuels the addiction and so the addictive part is Facebook is gone but the intentional parts remain once everything is intentional there's no need to detox because there's no manufactured addiction to social technology and the fear of missing out the uncertainty of missing something is gone as well so just to transform this with interaction with technology into something intentional you know what you're doing and then do it and technology helps you to get there faster I think that's the healthy relationship in terms of mental health but also of social health I wish Instagram would have that button turning that feed line off and I would just intentionally go in to chat with a friend about an issue that I have Exactly Audrey Tang it's so inspiring to be talking to you Thank you so much Thanks for watching everyone we're going to be going live again with one of the youngest CEO in the world and she's only 10 years old and we're excited to be talking to her this noon so stay tuned for that Have a great lunchtime