 Audrey, today is the Dalai Lama's birthday. Happy birthday. And I thought we'd, happy birthday. I guess he's something like 845 years old, or depending on how you look at it. And I thought we'd start with a quote from him. The future is very large. And I wanted to throw another philosophy at you to see how you react. It's that infinite diversity in infinite combinations. Does that ring the bell? Mm-hmm. Sounds very familiar. That's a, it's a Vulcan thing. I wasn't sure how deeply into Star Trek you were. Uh-huh. Yeah, I really like the Star Trek worldview in that there's real collaboration, not just like people in extraterrestrial skins, but doing human things, but actually like fresh perspectives across true diversity. And I think that is one of the perspectives I want to bring through my work in the digital or plural ministry, because in Taiwan plural and minister, and digital minister would be the same words. Plural and digital is both written as Shu Wei. Very good. I want to touch on a philosophy for a moment, cruising through your stuff. There's Lao Tzu, there's Confucius, there's Ubuntu, Victor Hugo, Seven Generations, you touch on ancestor stuff, calling yourself a good enough ancestor or you're striving to be a good enough ancestor. Is there a central core of philosophy that you can point to that is, that is yours perhaps above and beyond anarchist, which we'll get to in a minute. Uh-huh. Yeah, I would call it plurality, right? Collaboration across diversity. I wrote in my job description, we hear singularity is near, but the plurality is here. So what is here and now is the plurality. And what did you mean by singularity there? Singularity means foreclosing other possibilities, right? Ah, very good. What would be a definition of anarchist for you? Not giving orders, not taking orders, voluntary collaboration. I love this definition, the abolition of all unjustified hierarchies. And we'll get back to that in a moment. Sure. Your father, just a few personal notes, your father was intimately involved with Tiananmen Square. And your mother was a teacher who involved with indigenous peoples, and they both seem to have profoundly directed your life. What did your father's involvement in Tiananmen Square peak your interest in this kind of real-time communication, coordination, and collaboration? Was that, did that play in? Yeah, I mean, the difference between Tiananmen and pretty much any other social movement before that is that it's the first movement that has been covered by digital photography, footages, right, the Tankman and all that, and it allows a global perspective on things. It's like it's happening with the immediacy and we are watching from afar, I'm worrying about my dad, actually feel the sense of co-presence of something like we're there, right? This year we've seen like the Ukrainian situation, the assault attempted annexation of Ukraine, compared to the pre-internet digital photography era, like we felt that much more closely compared to the places where there's no internet coverage and so on. So Tiananmen, I guess to me, when I show the journalism, there's one thing about just writing about it, there's another thing about this immediacy in journalism that brings everyone in into the square, so to speak. Very good. For a minute, you brought up Ukraine. What kind of job do you think Mikhail Fedorov is doing as the Ukraine's digital minister? He's in a very difficult position and he's sort of adapting telegram to any number of purposes. That's a very difficult position. Do you have any thoughts about his situation? Well, not just telegram, but also DIA, right? They already had a app, a kind of citizen's wallet that doubles as public participation, but also holding of driver's passport, vaccine certificates and so on before the pandemic. So in a sense, they're well equipped to bring the citizenry into what we call all-out mobilization. There's also the more lighthearted parts like you can stream Eurovision on DIA to boost people's morale and so on. But at the end of the day, it showed us that it's not about this authoritarian emphasis on efficiency. Authoritarians may be very efficient at making mistakes but and committing to it, but the democratic resilience relies on apps like DIA and before DIA Prozora, which is the public procurement website and all those open government movement is not just about bringing in more effective or efficient governance model, it is also about resilience and this democratic open source intelligence in the times of conflict. You call yourself a digital migrant and you were incredibly young when you migrated to the internet. Could you talk about that a little bit about what drove you to that world and what you found there and how you grew into it? Yeah, I wouldn't quite call myself a refugee, but it's something like that though. When I was 12 years old and I just got this heart surgery, I could barely move, I was just recovering from this major open hearted surgery. So because of that, there's a lot of limitation of what I can do in the physical world. I've been like for eight years before this surgery, told that I may or may not survive to the age of surgery. So it's a little difficulty in the analog world, whereas in the digital world, we're not founded by the physical distance that I have to travel. So if I have a friend that is many, many time zones away, nevertheless, if I just adjust my sleep patterns a little bit, we can be literally neighbors in the same time zone, in the same circadian time zone and then working on synchronous collaboration very quickly. So to me, I think internet brought to me a new kind of kinship, a new kind of tribe. People who care about swift trust, putting internet trust instead of losing that trust and so on very quickly, regardless of their original time zones or disciplines or culture or even languages, very quickly become very good friends. So that's my tribe, I guess, when I migrated in. And how old were you when you came to the United States? Well, as a visitor, I'm quite young, but to stay there in a significant period of time, I think it was when I was 17, 18. And then of course, I then toured around the world, including staying for quite a few months in major US cities in 25, 26, 24, 25. Yeah, so that was back in, I don't know, 2004, 2006. So there's a lot of tech talk we can get into, but the real miracle magic alchemy that you created, manifested and continue to generate is trust. I sat with a friend of mine who is tech savvy and really got into the whole contact tracing thing that you did with COVID. That was astonishing things. And understand that a lot of this stuff will be covered in our show notes, so we don't have to backtrack to explain a lot. But so I said, okay, we've got QRs, we've got SMEs, we've got using the phone companies, we've got numbers that vanish and here's even a court case where somebody was, could prove that this person was involved in this crime but they threw it out because you couldn't do it. And they just said, I don't believe it. And I said, look, you see this, you see what he did. I drew it out on paper. So somehow you were able to create trust. I mean, I'm sure you didn't sit down and discuss the ledger thing, blockchain and all that to people. I would like you to talk about the string of trust moments that you were able to create. And maybe it starts with the sunflower revolution. And there you are in the corner with 300 feet of ethernet creating a conversation in real time with 500,000 people in 20 organizations. But that to me is the real magic. And if you could just address the creation of the trust to where it is now, because you've managed to leverage these moments to keep sort of opening and opening to broader and broader applications to bringing Taiwan to your rank, if you're ranking these things, you're ranked 11th, from 31st to 11th in the economist democracy scale. So if you could address that notion. Yeah, we're now the first and foremost democracy in Asia according to economists. This is a very strange feeling. And because I was born in a dictatorship in a much a lot, right? So really it's not about me. It's about, I would say it's a model of Taiwanese morality where we celebrated ideological differences and then just co-created something that works okay for everyone involved. There's no like bloodshed in our peaceful revolutions toward democratization. We welcome all sort of different like pro more libertarian individualist view of things, but also a very social democrat view on universal healthcare like human right protection and labor movements, the various gender mainstream movements and so on. There were all part of this on our Occupy 20 NGOs not sharing a lot of constituency just Occupy the Parliament together. So back in 2014, if you hop to one corner of the Occupy Parliament, you'll be hearing a very different conversation in the other corner of the Occupy Street. One corner may be talking about a 4G network, Huawei and ZTE and things like that core telecommunication network but the next corner is talking about queer theory and then how like the cultural diversity is having strength and the risk being decimated if the publisher all come from more authoritarian backgrounds, fund funding and things like that. So it's a real cross-pollination of the views on a trade deal certainly, but on the aspects of the trade deal that people care the most and it's these moments when the moments of care amplify through professional facilitation, non-violent communication of space technology into the digital realm so that it can spread cross-pollinate to people who previously didn't care about those things. Suddenly it became a moment of trust as you said because people found that it's easy to start trusting each other to take good care about the aspect that I do not know a lot about in this trade deal and so which is why after three weeks about the pot with the 300 meter cable and all the co-presence work we managed to set on a set of rough consensus a coherent 40 months, not my list and that was then ratified by the parliament. So it's important to note here when I talk about this to other people they assume that Taiwan is like Estonia as a homogeneous culture, but it's not at all incredibly diverse and as you said there's a generation that grew up as I don't know if you experienced the 228 incident and white terror, but there's a lot of kids that there's generational huge generational differences indigenous peoples. So to create that trust across this plurality this very diverse society was quite a feat. How much, if I may, how much do you think that the trust has to do with you? Do you think, do you think that it was like Audrey Tang is doing this, so I now trust this? No, I think very, very little, because I mean all the social fabric was already there, right? Certainly I wasn't the reason that we've got 20 national languages, right? That was the minister of coaches work with many of the indigenous and Daiyi and Hakka populations and but that directly translates for example into when we do our marriage equality work because in the 20 national languages there's major keys. There are the Taiwan nation doesn't care about gender when choosing the successor of the chief and so on. So there's a plurality of motives that were not caught into this binary thinking and I really think that the international community really just anchors this plurality thing on me because I'm very conveniently non-binary, non-binary in all things. So kind of a proof of existence that it is possible to do the impossible, which is to reconcile that the binary like worries about your friends will probably think that enhancing privacy and effective contact tracing surveillance is a binary that you cannot reconcile. You have to choose between one and or the other some compromise instead of through privacy enhancing technology actually make both sides grow better. So I may very convenient figure ahead but I don't think really those 20, 30 years of tradition have allowed to do with me personally. The distributed ledger sits under the hood with so much of this stuff and it's not clear how far it can go. How much farther do you think you can ride distributed ledgers? Can they really do the, there's a lot of hype there. It'll do for the transmission of assets, what the internet does for the transmission of information and you have distributed ledgers at the heart of a lot of what you do. What's your take on that? Sure, distributed ledger or polycentric ledgers is already the backbone of pretty much everything, right? Open source mostly runs on Git which is a polycentric distributed ledger. The collaborative documents that we all use based on operation transformation or conflict free replicated data types does a distributed ledger and not a chain but a cyclic graph or whatever, right? So I mean, this is already a fundamental data type of today because we thanks to the distributed ledger that we see for the first time that the anti-rival goods, the things that gets more valuable, the more you share doesn't have to be pegged on a rival good, a scarcity like a bounded book or a CD or something that is tangible and rival, right? And you don't have to put a lot of digital restriction management, rights management but really restriction management to make it a pseudo rival. So I think this is already the zeitgeist. Now, if you're talking about decentralized ledgers, bitcoins and so on, of course, it seems that currently the use is still mostly in places where the fiat, the existing institutions fail and so when you want to get donations across to Ukraine they're very useful in that case because the institutions that are polycentric kind of crumbles in such situations. I think it's a very good fallback failsafe but whether truly decentralized ledgers can and should augment the distributed system of polycentric governance, I think that need to be evaluated on a case by case basis suddenly when doing civic participation across jurisdictions or you want to get to some sort of common good like funding allocation across like income measurable interest and so on. These are the places where this decentralized paradise become very useful because you do not have a bridging institution to service the distributed distributor of the ledger but again that needs to be evaluated by the very Australian like case by case layer by layer approach. It's commenced all the way down and maybe some layers is distributed and some layers is decentralized. So let's sit with this trust idea for a moment. So you've gained this trust, there's a successful nationwide conversation about this trade deal with the PRC and then there's a whole process where that's done, it's peaceful, the students cleaned up after the demonstration which was a nice. And then your previous digital minister, Jacqueline Sy, I'm not sure if I'm saying that right. So she's watching you do this and here's a trust moment where she's saying this person knows things and can do things that I cannot do. And she reaches out to you and there's this process where you are sent out to find a digital minister and you come back and say in all honesty, it's me. Can you boil down those moments for us and with that idea of trust kind of fitting its way into, did she have to give up power? It's two different moments. The first moment you pointed to was around the second half of 2014 where indeed she invited me and a bunch of other GovZero G0V civic hackers to be her reverse mentor, meaning people younger than 35 will point out new directions to a cabinet minister but it's in a partnership position. It's not like she actually gave up power but she did delegate a lot of those power into the facilitators in situations like the UberX example, the Airbnb example, many other examples. So that's the 2015 moments of trust. It's a not directly citizen control. It's not a devolution of any kind but it is a genuine partnership, I call it people public partnership and then private sector joins later. But the second moment you pointed out was 2016 and it's not Jacqueline Tsai anymore because Dr. Tsai, another Tsai, Tsai Ing-wen is in power in May 2016 as our president. So her premier, Lin Xuan, head of cabinet did just ask me whether I would like to help finding someone like Jacqueline Tsai who could be a digital minister for the new cabinet. And then I asked my friends and they're all busy with their business and so then I'm like, yeah, maybe I can do it. And I think these two are really bridging moments because Jacqueline Tsai and her premier, Simon Zhang and Lin Xuan, they're non-partisans or pen partisans. They're really not strongly affiliated with any particular party's candidates. So they were able to do this very peaceful transition and create a remarkably pen partisan zone that is open government so that all the four major parties nowadays sign upon this agenda and compete in a pro-social way like being more transparent, more participatory instead of just saying, oh, this is a blue thing, this is a green thing. Now we don't do that in the topics of open governance. So now you're at the position where you are walking this, I don't know if you're familiar with the term of an eddy line. It's in a river where you have the, you know, one stream is the river's going one way and the eddy's going the other and there's this line in between them where all this kind of craziness is. So we've got this clean, beautiful, mathematical language on one side and screwy human beings on the other side. And you are trying to figure out, you are bridging that gap. I'd like to read a couple of your quotes at this point. Our shared values are hiding in plain sight. It's both an art of human communication and the science of service design. And here are my favorites. We adapt technologies to the values instructors we already trust. Taiwan has put online collaboration at the core of its governance. The idea is to bring technology into the spaces where citizens live, rather than expect citizens to enter the space of technology. The premise is this, the government must first trust the people with agenda setting power, then the people can make democracy work. Do you have any further thoughts on those statements? Well, I mean, all these are very, you know, trust intensive, right? It's not lies of work. It's not capital or labor intensive. It's trust intensive. And without a certain threshold of trust, the contact tracing system one and two to SMS simply is unimaginable, right? It's simply outside of the, not just the overtone window, it's outside the realm of imagination. So I think it's not about thinking of human beings as messy or mathematics as beautiful and clean, because I don't know poetry to me is also simple and clean. And there's a lot of different lines of thoughts, epistemic thoughts, lines of traditions. And I think the messiness only comes when you want to dominate with one, maybe very instrumentalist, utilitarian, or the ontological, whatever. You want to begin with a worldview and then you see the other worldviews as messy because well, they don't conform very well to your map, right? They have their own maps. But if your worldview is simply plurality, collaboration, cross-diversity, you celebrate a diversity and you optimize for the mutual trust. And then suddenly everything become very simple and nothing is messy. Everything is the way it is. The Tao follows what it is, right? The Tao follows the natural. So, well, that brings up that wonderful story with your grandmother and the ATM. I mean, here you have a situation where you have technology that can work, but your grandmother's going, hell no, I'm not going to do that. And you go, okay, okay, that's too far of a trust thing. I mean, there's definitely a dance between what's the most, the straightest line between two points technically and what people will accept. Yeah, I think it's about the norms. Much as the so-called artificial or authoritarian intelligence, worldview wants to maximize this kind of data first approach, right? Just yield to the data. Data produces the code, produces the norm. Everybody just conform to what the data said. Or as I mentioned, the decentralized individualist like the code says that a Bitcoin cannot be double spent and I trust only that and not any of the norms of the institutions, which means the code should set a norm, should then collect the data. I think what I'm advocating is the other arrangement of things where we begin with the norm and the norm determines the code, which then determines the data. And in the example you just outlined, it is the norm of my grandma and my grandma's friends of a similar age, 80s, 90s people, they trust enough maybe the ATM to give them cash, but they do not trust the ATM enough to send money out to deposit, it disappearing into the machine or to mistype and then their whole savings gone, right? They're okay with ATM as a cash dispenser, but they prefer to spend cash so that they know exactly how much is being spent. They can count on it like literally, count on the coins. So I mean, this is very, very visceral and it's nothing that we can just write right off, right? So then we design the process with them, nothing about them without them, where they use the universal healthcare card, which they know cannot be used commercially, get this receipt and they use that receipt to pay in cash over the counter and they feel very safe. And of course, the staff at the counter in the convenience store may have to pay extra attention and work initially, but because the 90s people teach the 80s, people teach the people in their 70s and their 60s, you end up with the network of advocates that distributes this knowledge. And so paradoxically, you do not have to spend a lot of resource to so-called bridging the digital gap because there's no gap anymore if the norm is there. Right. So you've just brought up, I'd like you to dig in a little more on the whole relationship, the inverting the data to the code. There are two Facebook stories I wanted to touch on and that's one of them. Can you outline for people what the difference is between writing code to the data and writing the data to the code? Because it's a very important distinction. Yeah, certainly. So the idea of a data-driven coding is that you do not have to have this intention of the justice, right? If you think about the code of law, a lot of the design of the court system and the code of law is about this intention of justice. If things go wrong, there is a trustworthy way to get a reconciliation or redress or things like that, right? There's this whole justice system with significant public participation. I mean, the jury system and so on. But if you say data first, then that means that you trust whatever is commonly held as the bias or the stereotype. Basically you're saying then the stereotype is right and the judge could be automated because most of the time the judge just conform to the case president anyway. So why don't we just automate away that particular stamp and then just say, you know, if the machine says it's right, if the statistic says it's right, who's all this biases? They must be right. But then it shifts the burden of seeking justice from the entire system into just a few who were previously underrepresented in the collected data. And they, because they were already probably quite vulnerable to begin with, is less likely to appeal to this inequity. And so it basically reinforces whatever inequity there is, but actually painted that as normal because now data determines norm determines code. So that is of course a very different interpretation of code and of justice that we nowadays see in the most authoritarian societies and jurisdictions where if the data says that you are a green code, then you can enter a building. If the data says you're a red code, you cannot enter a building, but sometimes, you know, this red code is not because you call the virus, you got into contact, but just because some local government official doesn't like your petition ideas and then they recorded you, right? And so the data first one, it makes the distance between a inequity or an injustice situation into seeking justice like very, very long because it's a indecipherable algorithmic language between your pain caused by the system and the actual redress required. You have to navigate the algorithm that is produced by the data, which is unlike the people written code, the algorithm written by the data is more often than not indecipherable. There you go. The other Facebook story is when some of the major platforms came in around a presidential election, you somehow negotiated without breaking out the iron fist saying we have utter transparency here. Are you gonna play Google? We need to know where your money's coming from. We need to know these things because that's how we do here in Taiwan. That's the norm. And so, yeah, so Twitter did not and Google did not, but Facebook did. So I was wondering if there's some, maybe an anecdote in that story what those negotiations were like and if they point towards, is there any number of stories about these massive corporations that say no, no, no, but when they're forced to, they very quietly in one corner or another say, well, yeah, of course we can do that. So was that like? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Google eventually joined, I think, on the court and Twitter voluntarily disclosed those coordinated inauthentic behaviors, but globally without saying that Taiwan made us do it. So they respond differently. But Facebook actually also didn't say Taiwan made us do it. It was one of their whistleblowers after they quit the civic integrity team said that Facebook at its time 2019 only paid significant resources in the very few selected jurisdiction that there's a real chance of social backlash and so on. So, I mean, right, well, which in a sense is a convocation of our known first approach without, as you mentioned, an iron fist. We basically said, just look, there's a real possibility of you facing a social sanction. If you do not do what even our government already agreed to do, which is publishes open data to empower the investigative journalists that all the spendings toward the campaign cannot be masqueraded as just social political advertisement. It must not be funded by the extra judicial sources, just like our campaign donation. And it's not like it's our government position. Those activists occupied our control unit and brought out Xerox photocopies of those printed freedom of information printouts and reverse engineer that they run this otaku character recognition campaign OCR to massively parallelly made it a game to reverse engineer the campaign finance and so on. So it's not like we had a choice or people virtually demanded it. So if you don't do that, beware something like that may happen to you. And so I think this really is quite different compared to many other jurisdictions ways to handling the relationship with the multinational platforms because they previously were, if they're doing this top down way, there's always a possibility that the people can be played against this regulation because the big tech is also pretty good at manipulating people's emotions. But if we first say that, you know, this transparency stuff, it's actually a direct result of people's outrage. Then we are already at a co-creative relationship with the people who already have this trustworthiness surplus. And then it's very difficult for the multinational in a trustworthiness deficiency to start a kind of uphill trade negotiation vis a vis this kind of collective demand. So this kind of negotiation, the rough consensus, I love the term. There are some zero-sum issues though. I love the whole, the way you resolved gay marriage. It's bylaws, not in-laws. That's a really perfect little negotiation of saying what really are your issues here? Okay, so we're not marrying families. Here's what we're limiting this union to. Is that okay with everyone? So that was what a lot of people would say, there's a zero-sum issue that you nicely negotiated through. But I mean, sometimes a bridge gets built or it doesn't, a pipeline gets put in or it doesn't. Have you run into a situation where you just, somebody just had to say, hey, I'm the president and we're doing this? No, I think the difference is just the bridge that's built and the bridge that's under construction. But all websites are under construction, right? So it's not like the fact that we're still inching toward reconciling the different worldviews. This proves those bridging attempts, right? We came quite close in 2018, 19, where the, not necessarily a president, but certainly the many legislators feel kind of impatient of our very contact tracing like way of doing fact-checking on the social media, right? They are basically saying that it's going into community spread now. If you're still doing contact tracing, you cannot eradicate or eliminate this virus of the mind. You have to do a lockdown basically. And by lockdown, I mean administrative takedown. They were pointing at some nearby jurisdictions where the Ministry of Justice or really an administrator can simply force a post down. But I pointed out two things then. First is that it actually fuels the conspiracy theories. It's not like Facebook is the only public sphere. There's many public sphere civic infrastructures. And even if you issue the takedown orders to everything that you can see, there's still things that are end to end encrypted. There's still underground networks. You mentioned telegram, right? And it's very unlikely that we can actually issue takedown notice that affects the telegram and what's have a signal of the world and result is just like the old bad old copyright files where people then find it habitual to break the law just because they want to torrent something, right? So then it's not a good site for each and everyone. So which is why we built another bridge. It's not just about fact checking, which is like contact tracing. Anymore, we focused then on humor over rumor, packaging the clarifications with an even higher transmission rate that is hilarious. And then people after laughing about anti-bodies in their mind so they don't spread as conspiracy theories anymore. So notice and public notice, very important, but humor over rumor is the bridge that we thought across which bought us some time so that we are not forced by the ruling party's legislators or other legislators in the parliament to adopt a lockdown or takedown approach. So that was pretty close. But just like we thought of the pandemic now without a single day of lockdown, we end up proving that this is actually not just possible but designed. So let's stick with the humor over rumor for just a second. So in terms of if you want to apply our values to this situation, what the people, I'm sure you saw your podcast with Tristan Harris and you're in a divided detention. And what's become clear is that moral outrage is incredibly contagious. And was this a conscious decision on your part that humor is perhaps equally contagious and the best way to fight moral outrage in terms of our values and people? Or do you like the fast, fair and fun thing? Are you just kind of a fun guy? And that's just how this work out. I already said optimized for fun back in 2005, 2006. That was my slogan, right? It was this whole pro-six later Raku movement. And still it's, I mean, just a few days ago, I was installing the latest Ubuntu Linux. And I think in the second screen or something, it says that Ubuntu is optimized for fun. I'm like, oh, okay, my philosophy. So this mean optimized for fun, obviously to groups in the free software community. And just by saying that we're optimizing for fun, that was a conscious technique, like troll hugging the trolls. Again, we have in the pro-six now Raku channel, a bot that just hugs the trolls. So people doing their work do not have to spend all their time on this intimate relationship thing, right? But bot hugs you, right? So whenever you do something troll-ish. So I mean, this again took that outrage away. You hear me say troll hugging or the hug, but you laughed about it. And this whole trolling thing suddenly become kind of dealable, right? You're not afraid of trolls anymore. So yeah, I think this is the power of humor and optimizing for fun. I've been advocating for that for a very long time, even before joining the public service. Yeah, you hired comedians. One of the first thing you did, that was absolutely brilliant. Let's make people laugh. How are we doing for time? It's 7.51. Nice, I don't have anything. I can do it in four hours. Well, anyway, I have an hour, but yes. Very good, thank you. So to me, in order to get the capillary action of people participating, that there's real magic in real time, that people can see their impact, their action, things are manifested, they buy a mask and they see that number drop one on there. Everyone's looking at the same data. And I love the phrase, country in constant dialogue with itself. So a couple more quotes. In addition to lowering the barriers to democracy, this approach is also a process of mutual understanding. When the public sees results of collaboration, it leads to more participation. Only through this cycle will it be possible for citizens to provide concrete feedback and even further by applying, adjusting, and contributing to the civic tech community. So you're forming shared goals. So there's something, once you, this is the magic, this is what I keep trying to understand is you broke through a barrier and once people tasted that, so if you're jumping into Plato, it's how do you get people to, in the cave analogy, how do you get people to turn around? Well, Audrey would say, hey, give them real time feedback. So that would start to turn the people around in the cave. The other quote is, everyone can participate in the democracy in the here and now. See and feel for yourself in it, not a ritual that's practiced every two or four years, something that is continuous practice every day. So any, any thoughts about that before I ask specific questions? Certainly. So, well, I'm not being facetious when I say this conversation I can hold for four hours because I really don't have anything in the next hour or two. So we'll see how long it takes. Thank you. Okay. Right. So back to this. Yeah, I think of our new ministry, ministry of digital affairs. The logo is Moda, M-O-D-A, which means in Spanish or Italian fashion, right? So, in a sense, this fashion work, this is bringing something that's avant-garde, that's something is cutting edge, but then suddenly people just starting to put on pink masks because the... That's a great story with the kid in the pink mask. Right, central epidemic, command center, oh, oh, this is. So the boy that put on the pink mask suddenly is not a ally. They're suddenly at a avant-garde, right? He's the coolest guy now. Four fronts of fashion and that other boys have to rush to somehow find a pink mask at least until the rainbow masks become very fashionable. But anyway, so that increased, what we call MPI, non-pharmaceutical intervention, but it doesn't feel like intervention anymore. It's become a symbol of pride, symbol of self-expression and so on. So it's like a collective cod game. Suddenly you have to collect all the seven rainbow colors of masks to complete the set and so on. And people were just putting on masks as a show of pride, as a show of expression, not a show of obedience, right? Which is, I'm aware that in the U.S., during that time, early 2020, it was very much centered on, oh, does it mean that I'm on mute or things like that? But in Taiwan, it's the other way around. It means that I'm expressive. So one of the, what is the largest real-time conversation that you've been able to hold? The 500,000 people with the sunflower revolution was astonishing enough, but how large is that expanded where you're holding an ongoing, I mean, is it the whole country now? They kill? It's the whole country. Oh, it's so amazing. The mask rationing map has been applied to also rapid test rationing and so on. And the app to that power stat the National Health Insurance Express app is, I think, installed on at least 10 million active users. So even more phones in the country of 23 million. So that's like literally half of our active population. And a lot of them just use it to participate in altruism, right? There's a function that says, if you don't collect your mask quota, you can click to dedicate that into international humanitarian aid for our foreign service to sense to people around the world. And at least like seven million pieces of mask were collected this way. So yeah, we use that for all sort of public participation. I love that the policies phrase, input crowd output meaning. That's a lovely phrase. Do you work fairly closely with them? Is that an ever-evolving situation? Yeah, yeah, we're in constant contact. And it's not just on a application level, but also on a kind of theoretical level because that the main insight of police is that it should be resistant to simple mobilization where thousands of people just joined to vote exactly the same. In voting system, in voting system, we talk about clone proof, but it's the clone of candidate, right? We're now here talking about the clone of participant which is like the civil attack in distributed letter community, right? Attack of the clones. And so to be resistant on that, your measurement must go beyond one person, one vote or just counting the head counts. Basically if 10,000 people join and they are of the same head, like just one head and the rest are headless, I don't know, zombie spots, right? Then it shouldn't count at all, right? So the main insight is that you have to increase the plurality, the degree of collaboration across diversity. If you just reiterate the same party lines and people join vote exactly the same, they are probably a bot because this police is a very high dimensional space. Each sentiment, each statement, each resonance with a feeling or opinion is one dimension. So with 99 contributed statements, this 99 dimension, in those high dimensional spaces, all, everyone is very individual and the distance is very large. But if you see a very close cluster, they're probably bots, they probably shouldn't count. And so in this way, we basically say, if you cannot convince people in all the other clusters in the galaxy of this high dimensional space, then it just counts as one vote. And so this core inside has been then applied by Vitaly Buterin, Pooja, Glenn Weyer and so on in the decentralized society paper, which is unrelated to Polis as a utility or tool, but it is very much related to Polis as a philosophy. Incredible. And the detail that this hones down into, again, the alchemy of getting people to see themselves in these massive conversations, and that's dashboards. Do you have anything you'd like to say about the subtlety and evolution of how somebody can see themselves amidst a million people and go, that's me. I know that's me and I recognize myself. Yeah. I think there's a real kind of you are here in moments in the dashboards. Exactly. I'm Waldo. Yes. Yes, yes. Yes. And I mean, all of you, you're all Waldos. And it's a perspective vortex, right? So being a pro-social way, right? So I think the point I'm making is that you're here, but this you is a plural view. So the plural you means also that you as a intersection of all the communities that you belong, you identify with, as much as you can say that the people constitute communities together, you can also say those communities collectively constitute you. So you is the plurality of the communities you are in. And by doing this, police give community first-class citizen status. So unlike, for example, corporations, which is a fictious person that enjoys just a subset of human rights, the communities phrase like this is much more like natural personhood in the Maori or Taiwanese indigenous thoughts, right? The rivers, the mountains, the spirits are already there. They are already persons even before human become persons. And then their interests must take at least the same priority as the humans. So we become just stewards of those larger than us persons. And so it's not just I am here, but also the community, including those long life spirits that constitute part of me. We're all here together. And that is that you are here moment. Excellent. One of the phrases you mentioned and it's difficult to articulate is the people closest to the suffering have the most powerful voice. And I don't know if that boils down to quadratic voting or, but how do you, how does that, I mean, that's an incredibly compassionate and again, where people see themselves, they feel like they're a part of this, they're in, there's no alienation. How do you, how does that work that the people closest to the suffering have the greater voice? Yeah. I think this of course is related to quadratic funding and so one, in a sense that it seeks to raise the less fortunate to the one half power, right? The square root power, but without getting too mathematical. I think the intuition here is very simple. If you are the intersection of all the different communities, then it must be more often than not that you are in a position of privilege in some of the communities, but your community or you in the communities are in a position of vulnerability in some of the communities. So each and every one of us have some part that is in the place of suffering, but each one of us also more often than not have some parts in us, in the community, sort of the communities we enjoy that is in the position of superiority. But the problem of the traditional low dimensional democratic process is that the parties or the political counting basically encourages this linearity of projection so that there's only one or two most divisive issues and it's only your strong sentiment on that particular issue count to the detriment to the points that you also want to make that you are in a less fortunate position, but you probably have to vote for this party because they advocate your primary objective along this dimension and so on. Your one thing, right? So Polis or any high dimensional democratic process including quadratic voting and funding is about saying, no, we have this high dimensional space and bridges are easier to build once you have higher dimensions and the people's unique combination of experience of your suffering on one side but privileged on the other side can complement very well with people who are suffering on that side but privileged on this side. So it's natural for you to coordinate. There's a natural anti rivalry between both of your positions and it's between two of you that those bridge and narratives can be discovered that you both care about the sanctity of marriage, right? The long-termness of commitments is just that one cares about family values and one care about human rights but these two can be reconciled and then you build bridges across this and then you empower these two people closest to the pain to the benefit of everybody involved. Wow, that's just brilliant. And it's the goal is so obvious and the path is so considered, I mean, nicely done. So it's still with this idea of just getting people hooked on it so you no longer, the engine's running, you no longer have to, you've got this thing going and so now the whole idea of reverse procurement is absolutely brilliant. That's almost the final hook that you have kids in schools, you have a situation where if you come up with 5,000 signatures on a petition, you automatically get that meeting with the cabinet member, you've got your hackathon, your presidential hackathon, there are any number of pathways for people to get ideas into the government but what, is there a next step there? Is that something that you're developing and you have a next thought? It's like, okay, there's a next step here. Yes. Yeah, I just yesterday gave a public or not a lecture conversation with the academicians in our national academy. So they're very brilliant people in their fields. And then one of them pointed out that in this people-public-private partnership, the researchers are not a natural part of this because everything I said was about delivering state and civic capacity to respond to the emergencies of our times, the challenges, which is all well and good, appropriate technology, co-creation, but there are something that must take a very long horizon to realize and from this point, maybe it was not until 2040 for people to see a inkling of social application but yet they, the academicians, the leading researchers, they are thinking at least on that horizon or even longer. So this co-creation, which is a short horizon, like one year or even like just next week is great but it doesn't get us out from the local optimans. It gets us very quickly to the local optimans which is to be recommended but it doesn't get us out really from the valleys, right? So that's a great point. It is a really good point. And then I committed just yesterday then to do another presidential hackathon. Presidential hackathon runs from March to September every year. Throughout the six months, right, we've got quadratic voting. Even this year, Ethereum Foundation is probably considering right now to join via quadratic funding and so on. So it's got a real ecosystem going on. The private sector in the people body, private partnership is well into the fold but after this September where we've got a champions that maybe realize in the next six to go year, maybe we start a longer idea fun that targets not 2024 but 2040. And then the participants will be leading researchers coupled with science fiction authors coupled with people who can do immersive experiences and movies. Like let's just live in that future for a few moments, right? It's like Gibson living in virtual reality for just five minutes. Love his stuff, right? Right, so that was before the engineers solved the VR business problem. Yeah, he was the first. Yeah, but that was that brief glimpse is sufficient for him to say, yeah, we'll just be jacked into this system in a neuromancy style, right? In like X years from now, decades from now. So this bridging the future, I think the few is called speculative design must be given its own six months stage so that they're not captured by the service design of today. Service design is very important but speculative design equally important. Right, because as you pointed out in your marvelous conversation with Yvonne Harari, it's the same technology that's being used in North Korea, that's being used in Taiwan. So you're looking into the future and trying to sort of future-proof this involvement with people and that's so wise. Here you are, oh my goodness. Look, are you surprised? Has there been any personal surprise when you started this? You're sitting at the Sunflower Revolution and you're having these thoughts and you're thinking 40 years ahead but what along the way did you accomplish that you sat back and went, I can't believe that worked, this is so cool. Was there, have there been any things that surprised you that worked or that didn't work? Yeah, I was very pleasantly surprised when the contact tracing system actually got the support from our judicial and the Ministry of Justice who very wisely ruled that it's not a wiretappable communication, it's not communication as per wiretapping rules because it must be deleted in 28 days and wiretapping usually goes on and retain for at least six months and evidently because of different data retention and necessities that they are not the same thing. And that's a very clean legal argument that I cannot make myself. And I'm not aware of any other jurisdiction making this argument, right? In Australia and Singapore and South Korea you usually take the reason along a kind of balance doctrine, right? You have to have this sense of proportion and so for very serious crimes you can then use some contact tracing data because the public benefit and life saved and things like that. But no, it was just like that. No, the civic tech people said is for contact tracing only and the nature of the virus says that if you keep it for more than four weeks it doesn't make sense anymore because that's longer than the two week transmission period. So it's even like the RNA properties of the virus determines the data retention period which means that it conforms to a different norm. And I think it's a celebration of diversity and plurality that collaboration across diversity is saying that the public health has its own logic. We should not force it to come measure with crime investigation. And I think it's a beautiful legal argument. Oh, yeah, somebody must be relieved to you to find like thinking minds out there when you're throwing this stuff out there and somebody says, yeah, let's do that. And you're going, whoa, that's a surprise. And from that, I mean, here's a couple more of your quotes because everybody, when I try to explain you to people it's like, it's gotta be hackable. And your quote is how to negotiate with the violence of the mind. Thinking together is the vaccine. The collective is immune to divisive campaigns. So it's back to this capillary action people are not involved. And you even pointed out that the nature of data coming at you is better. So you have, well, we need this data. Well, we also have because we care universal healthcare. So that transfers across platforms easily. And people see that it works. And now it's not big brother. It's one of your great original quotes. I'm not here to make citizens transparent to government. I'm here to make a government utterly transparent to citizens. And the more they build this the less hackable that it is. Are you confident that Taiwan is out has broken through that hackable sound barrier that you're in a now a safe place that you can take additional steps? Or are you still having to watch your back? I mean, if it's hackable, we're already gone, right? Because there are like literally thousands of attempted to not just cybersecurity but information manipulation attacks toward Taiwan. So we're battle hardened, right? And that's the word. So, and I think that's why people trust for example, the Estonian X-Row system because again, they have some nearby jurisdictions that actually did take a lot of work to hack into their systems. It's an analogous situation between China and Russia. You know, you had people pounding on you from the outside. Right, so it's not a theoretical or armchair argument. Basically, what we have to design with the assumption that it will probably get hacked one way or another. So it's defense in depth, right? So just hacking one layer doesn't harm the other layer and you get detected for easily. But also because it can also be understood by White Hat hackers who have a very strong incentive and interest in keep the system functioning well, right? Which is why Bitcoin doesn't suffer from many cybersecurity incidents because, well, they are very heavily incentivized to keep it secure. Everybody will hold a stake in the system. So even though nothing is encrypted on Bitcoin, it's just a digital signature ledger. It's not encrypted at all. Still, it's very unhackable in a cybersecurity sense. So that the more transparent you are and the more people are interested and incentivized in keeping this model going, the less likely that will fall victim. So this is the complete opposite with the security through obscurity mindset. Right, very good. So I've watched a number of your videos where there are any number of people from the West leaning forward in their chairs, struggling to figure out how to do the crawl, walk, run thing in the West. And it's interesting to me that the people fighting the hardest, Taiwan, Estonia, Ukraine, are the people that have living memory of authoritarianism. And one of your quotes is, people often ask me about the future of democracy. To me, democracy's future is based on a culture of listening. Taiwan has no legacy systems of representative democracy. And I'll stop there with that quote. But when you look at the West, I had always looked at the West and I mentioned this before that we've got the, there's this arrogance in the West about, well, we had the Magna Carta and if you're not blooded into the Magna Carta we're demonetized and Greek democracy, you're not gonna make it. And yet there is what I've always seen as roots. I'm now seeing as legacy, as perhaps decay. And there's so much power and there's also scale, which is a whole other question. I spent a bunch of time in Estonia. And I went to their state of the union address right after the Soviets had, they had their rocks up with the attack. And it was just President Rutol with one camera and one microphone talking to 12,000 people in the arena. And it was a state of the union. He said, here's what's going on. As opposed to the circuses that the larger companies go to. And I thought, okay, wow, 3 million people, 23 million people in Taiwan. That's a scale. So let's say with this, we'll circle back to the idea of Western. Do you, when you look at Taiwan, you go, yeah, 23 million people, that's about right. 200 million, I don't know if we can do this. How would you break that down? Do you think in terms of scalability and things working or not working? Yeah, I think mostly about whether there's a critical mass of mutual trust worth. Yes. That is the phrase. That is the phrase. Above that critical mass, like just, you cannot go wrong. Like anything goes really. I said it's a widened corridor of freedom, right? So this idea from Ashimoglou and friends, right? There's this very narrow corridor where the state capacity and the civic capacity are just balanced so that they can trust each other and you cannot move easily unilaterally from the state or the civic sectors without the other parties coordination because otherwise it will feel like you're decimating the other parts, right? You're either, you know, putting on lockdowns or you're occupying the parliament in a decidedly nonviolent way here but not in other advanced countries. So anyway, the point here, what I'm trying to make is that unilateral action along the state side or the civic side are considered dangerous because the corridor is narrow. But that corridor is narrow because the critical mass of trustworthiness has not been reached. But if you have collective peak experiences together, like occupying the parliament in a nonviolent way that resulted in something endorsed by all the major parties, then the corridor is wide enough so that the state, when we try something like the contact tracing system, we don't immediately get demonized but then immediately we have to of course set up the reverse accountability, the judicial interpretation to balance the civic side. But we get to make that unilateral move and then the civic people when they start mass demonstrations saying that we fork the government but with love. We do not feel threatened that the people protesting on the streets says the environmental protection agency is hiding the numbers. Our PM 2.5 census show that the air pollution is much worse than you said and then the EPA can actually say, okay, let's work together. Let's collaborate. Let's work on the distributed ledger. Let's work on each other's models. The shortcomings you see in the industrial areas, let's just take your air boxes and install it on the lamps in industrial parks. And so it become very natural for the civic to act unilaterally, right? To kind of prove the government wrong but the government's instinct would be, oh, let's go create. So we widen the corridors. So I think the focus here must be on making this peak experience. Yuva Harari repeatedly said if the social sector, the communities work against the pandemic when the state capacity fails is properly recognized and amplified, maybe then post pandemic, people will have much more common things to talk about. But if it's just lockdowns and unilateral state surveillance or things like that, then that will become normalized in some jurisdictions. So let's circle back then to all these people from all these countries in the front of their seat, trying to figure out how to create this moment. And the whole, I mean, you flew back from the US for the sunflower, I mean, you weren't just watching on TV, good luck guys. I mean, you went back and you plopped yourself down and you helped manifest this critical mass or this critical moment that flipped this over. What advice do you have for Western people stuck with any number of legacy systems where, I mean, do you know who Nina Jankiewicz is? Do you know that name? Reansett Bell. She was the homeland in the US, the Homeland Security Disinformation Officer for Homeland Security that was derailed by misinformation. How was the World State Information War? Well, she was just trying to, I mean, one of her things was I'm with FEMA, here's, right, that's exactly her. She got blown out of her nomination process by misinformation. So that was a very narrow box that was, I just wanna make sure people in disasters know where the food is, where the blankets are, where to stay away from. This is the kind of very concrete disinformation or misinformation I'm interested in. So that foothold didn't work. It worked in maybe Iceland, Spain's got some stuff going on, and of course, Estonia. But what advice has seemed to have worked when all these people from the Western countries come and say, where do we start? Because I really thought FEMA would be perfect. Disasters, real-time data that works, that's valuable. And it didn't. So has anything worked for other people that you've gone, hey, this is a nice little turnkey for these other democracies that are trying to break into real-time? Huh, there's a lot of different strengths here, right, in the question you just asked. I'll just pick one. I would say a lot of this, when you call it a governance board, it sounds like people already have wide, rough consensus on what governance is. And so the work is mostly just the members of this board carrying out the governance, right? But we didn't quite do that in 2017. We didn't set a disinformation governance board. And the reason why was that we really want to only focus on information manipulation. That is to say it's not just false, but rather it has a harmful intent. It intends to cause social harm. And the reason why that instead of a broader disinformation or even broader misinformation is the focus was because without this shared urgency and clarity of purpose, that the word governance just means very little. That it means almost nothing, or it has a negative meaning, meaning that people look at that word and then think very different things so that governance would become even less possible, right? So I think it's about not a arbiter of truthworthiness or trustworthiness. It's not even about being an arbiter. It is more about some way to build civic journalism capacity, digital competence into each and every persons, no matter what their political affiliation. People want to follow their favorite parties and YouTuber covering the counting of the counts because they went to vote. They want to know that the count counts, right? So how to make the YouTubers of very different party affiliations all agree that transparency in the counting process, what should it look like? That is the first step of the competence in digital and media competence. And obviously it reduces harm no matter which ideological position you are in because kind of by definition, right? If you're harmed by people counting the votes, you're probably not part of the Commonwealth, right? The democracy, right? So people who want their counts to count is the common denominator when it comes to election like fair coverage. But if you go even just a little bit beyond those purely factual things and this concerted information manipulation they want to harm the public if you just go a little bit more than that and step into like the newsroom fact-checking regime. We don't even do that in time. We don't even think about doing that in Taiwan. What we said, this is entirely for the professional journalistic community. It's not a state's capacity or it's not in a state's mandate to arbitre journalism. So I think there's a delineation here and a demarcation here that I wouldn't say that a Taiwan model is obviously right but that is one strand that we work and walk very carefully back in 2016-17. Yes. I have two more questions. Are we good? No, I mean, I can go on for hours. But yes. I can go on for days. So well, one thing that I don't think we can get into right now but if we substitute the word scale for power then now we're talking about because once you start mucking around in somebody's, once you're goring somebody's ox and a lot of these Western countries are incredibly powerful. So it's not the question you're stepping, as they said, what was the phrase? Don't rub another man's rhubarb, Batman. That's once you're stepping in you're taking somebody's power that's another question that can be substituted for scale. And that's what we run into in the West is that you're in order to give power to the people and get people involved on this level that you're talking about. Somebody else has to give up power. No, it's not the case, no. Okay, so help me out there. Not at all. So, I mean, there's power and there's power, right? What you're talking about is more like power that is stored in barrels of oil, which, well, nowadays, very geopolitically important, but I'm mostly interested in this riverous aspect. So if you have one barrel, that means somebody else somewhere else have one less barrel of oil to make power. If I may, the power I'm talking about is that there are some people saying, if I can keep these people angry and morally outraged, then I can do these things that keep me angry. Yeah, yeah, yes. And so what happened to the traditional? Yeah, positional status power, right? Within a network of beliefs or within an institution, right? So you're talking about market power, institutional power that is based on information asymmetry or like computational asymmetry, there's all sort of asymmetry that enable a asymmetrical relationship, right? Things that anarchists don't do, right? The opposite of anarchism. So, but my point here is that's not the only kind of power. Laozi talks about indulging mysterious power and mysterious power is something else entirely. But I don't want to now sound like a Zen or that was Guru, right? So I'll just use some Western thought patterns instead. This is what Manuel Castells called network making power in his theory of power in the book Communication Networks and many other related works after that. So the point I'm making is that if you focus on network making power, that is to say the power that is created like the internet that doesn't take away the power of sysops, the system operators of the institutional networks that operate the internet, but rather focus on the interchange layer, the TCPIPs, Dominion Systems and so on that to each participant, to each institutional sysop participant, it increased their power vis-a-vis other institutions. But at the same time, it made that power distributed meaning that if you don't like your telecom provider and you don't want to be holding to that asymmetric information computation, there's now a lot more possibility around the world that can provide a more fair service to you that you will then be able to route outside of your, unless you're landlocked or sea locked, but then even then there's Starlink and folks that you can then go to a different dimension. So increasing going to your opening, increasing the dimension of possibility, status, what network making power do. And in doing that, we're operating on a very different idea of scaling vertically. We're not even scaling horizontally. This is more like scaling deeply and scaling deeply like fashion, like norms. And so what operates on cultural and mimetic sphere that is unrelated to the institutional power, which is why what I'm doing really, I always write digital ministry with a lowercase M because it's really just preaching, right? Listening to confessions, I guess, right? This is this mimetic work, cultural work that is unrelated to the uppercase ministry, which is giving orders and giving unilateral command and things like that. So I think, but it does take, it does take a strong alignment to not wanting to make a mark to the world, to someone who practiced this very dullest way of power making because at the time you give in to your personal urge to leave a mark to the world, then that's when you think institutional modes of exchange top down hierarchies become very useful and powerful. And then once you think that is powerful, then you lose the trustworthiness that's required for the network model and the community model to run. So I think this inner piece of making peace of not doing anything of Wu Wei, that is actually the key to make this non-competitiveness work vis-a-vis existing power networks. So go ahead and take a shot at being the Zengu root. You said you did a Western thought pattern. Go ahead and work the Eastern side of it. Because this is a very important point that you're making. What you're sort of saying is like, okay, so they figured out the shadows even better in Plato's cave. These people are mesmerized, they're not just shadows, they're holograms. We can't figure out how to break through this constant stream of disinformation to start, to have this moment that Audrey enjoyed at the Sunfire Revolution. So go ahead, take a shot at- Okay, okay, all right. This is when I started to recite all that zing. So 10- Go for it. Can you keep your soul in its body? Hold fast to the one. And so learn to be whole. Can you center your energy? Be soft, tender. And so learn to be a baby. Can you keep the deep water still and clear? So it reflects without blurring. Can you love people and run things and do so by not doing? Opening, closing the gate of heaven. Can you be like a bird with her nestlings piercing bright through the cosmos? Can you know by not knowing? To give birth, to nourish, to bear, and not to own, to act and not lay claim, to lead and not to rule. This is mysterious, pal. Wow. That was, I love the title that you're not a politician, you're a politician. And there it is, that's beautiful. To the children. So part of what you're doing and getting this trust and building this ongoing real-time dialogue, a country of people talking to themselves, the whole air quality effort is downright brilliant. And again, we'll talk about it in the show notes. And I love two of your quotes. It is impossible to teach, but easy to learn. That kind of fits in with your poetry a little bit. That's one of your lines. And like flowers, they already know how to grow. It's about nurturing in their direction. So do you have, right now the children in these schools are overseeing the air quality of Taiwan? They're also fact-checking presidential elections. So do you have, so they are getting data savvy on every level. Again, you couldn't teach that, but it's hands-on. You have to get your hands on there. And that's how you learn. Do you see a next step for the children or for making people digitally data stewards, making them good stewards and helping Taiwan as it grows? Yeah, I talk about the kind of idea-thon, right? The 2040 researchers, speculative designers, science fiction work in the next half year starting in September. And very early in the brainstorming process, we realized that all the school children, especially primary school age, is a natural science fiction speculative designer because they're not bounded by the institutional, whatever business as usual, is in their life experience, they have not experienced the learned helplessness of things. They're not constrained by the old technological upper balance and limitations. And so to them, it's natural to think about 2040 because by 2040, they're the adult part of the society. It's natural to think about that. So I think we really need to move the agenda setting stage from previously maybe 17 years old, 15 years old, nowadays more to the 10 years old or to the eight years old. And then we're talking because then when we're talking about a long enough horizon with a bounded and limited imagination, maybe some of the best immersive experiences will be in some wild idea speculation of a year's old. So I think that is the direction we're going. We don't know what we'll unfold about where we'll find out collectively. We have a marvelous poet, William Stafford, and one of his lines, I'm sure I'm gonna blow it, but it was something like, it is so many years until they learn that there is anything that isn't music. And the other one, which comes to my next question is the darkness is deep around us. And so I'd like to talk about the future and what you see for the future and a couple more of your quotes. Once people get the idea that you don't need a government to do governance, then people get into the true spirit of collaborative governance. It may take a generation or more for people to see the state as a useful illusion and only use that illusion whenever convenient. And then I really, I had thought I understood Ubuntu before listening to you, but the idea of completing each other as in the pieces of a puzzle. So you don't have to get tangled up in Marx or Hegel or teleologies or deep. That's one of the things I love about you is that you don't get mired in these depths of, I don't know what you call it, mental gymnastics. Philosophical hermeneutics, yeah. Well, it's there and it's beautiful. But the idea of Ubuntu is very simple. It's like for this to work, for Taiwan to work, for people to become immune to the kind of misinformation, moral outrage, it's because they're incomplete. It's because there's something else shooing away at them and that they are susceptible to these other things. The moral outreach is the final symptom. It's not the disease. So the key to wellbeing is connectedness and digital technology connects people to people. And then I love your AI play here. Assistive intelligence, AI can become anti-social space. Also AI, authoritarian intelligence, which we talked a little about, empower individuals to be connected, therefore increasing wellbeing, not users, but valued customers capable of co-creation. So when you and Yuval were talking, and I've read other of Yuval's stuff, I love his take on, okay, so we create imaginary stories and then we believe them. So you have to, don't get trapped in your own story and make sure you create the right story. So one of his points is that human beings dominate the planet because we can organize stories. Yes. But the problem is, is that what motivates us is always some weird story. It's always a myth. It's always a nation. And that here we are at the crossroads where we must organize around science and facts, climate change. We have to organize around this new story. We've never done it. It's new territory. And so already you're thinking in terms of 2040, 2050, when you talk about the illusion of governance and anarchy and getting rid of unjustified hierarchies, I don't know if you're talking about, and this is what's great about Ubuntu. I don't know if you're talking about evolution or more perfectly and better completion, which is a less loaded term. So what, talk to me about what you, look in your crystal ball. I'm sure you've thought about it. What do you see? Because if I may, there's one more thing. I think the path that you're on is the path to what Yuval is saying we must go on. All right, the safety and shit, yes. Yes, I love that word. You're on the path. How do you see this unfolding? Taiwan's on its path. You see twists and turns in the river that still need to happen. What would you like to share with us about that? Yeah. Well, I think of evolution, I think less about this industrial age and imagination of survival of the fittest, but I think more of how previously barely organic stuff started to become multicellular and to develop this very sophisticated chemistry, like literally chemistry between them and then live forms are formed, right? So I think organization, social coordination-wise, we're not at apes and cheetahs and tigers stage of things, we're very much still in the single cellular, multicellular, organic life form stage of things. That is to say, while we have very sophisticated connectivity, technological capability, the social organizations, the social innovators are still, as I said, repeating the old stories of learned helplessness, right? So it's becoming a, it's not just a routine, it's a trip that has been going on for too long. It's a battery. Learned helplessness, gosh. Right, so if you stay in a learned helplessness for too long, it's like having your wings clipped, right? You don't even know you have wings anymore and you hear one, two, two contact tracing and you say it's impossible because it's learned helplessness, right? It's well outside of your zone of not just comfort but visibility in the imagination. So I think one must be quite bookmasterful and about it, right? To just be a simple starter of conversation of imagination and then just to steer the wind a little bit to a certain direction so that this very small but real peak experience can happen between people who previously did not think that social technology is a sort of technology. That social coordination across diversity is actually possible. And then from that personal experience, they grow, right? So it's not about making troll control. It's about to help the trolls grow, right? To make sure that the trolls start telling good stories to each other. And I don't think there's trolls and there's humans. It's not like it's a different state species, right? A different stage of evolution. Think that I think it's mostly just there's this troll-ish side of us. There's the more human care side of us. And as I mentioned, the puzzle pieces need to find the other puzzle pieces where they're more troll-ish on the side that you know a more humanistic way of coordination exists but they complement your more troll-ish, your hurt, your previous trauma of learned helplessness. And then by working together, both of you were liberated from the previous traumas. So you're almost talking about a teleology going back to biology that there's this millennial, if not millions of years of organization systems coordinating, evolving as loaded to where does that is. And so that is, do you believe in teleology? Do you think you don't think we're unimprovable mammals? I think we can get somewhere. I know neuroplasticity is real. I've been neuroplastic myself. So I mean, this is not a leap of faith. This actually happened to me. I worked very closely with the French psychoanalysts for years, spending like 45 minutes every day, four days a week, either on the couch in Paris or through tele-psychoanalysis. And really that there's this technique of neuroplasticity that one can just look at one's circuits mentally and then learn not to identify with it and then build a, what we call a cell function, right? A function of your bed's minds, psychoanalyst as represented by a iPad in my mind so that now when I fall back into any old habits, I also have a habit of building new habits of a neuroplastic habits, right? That's a great habit. Right, that is the psychoanalyst in my mind. So it is possible I have gone through it. I have not done psychoanalysis as an analyst but I understand the basic theory. So yeah, this is a lot like how they are up and right with the alternative medicine, right? Inform does anything goes science philosophy because there are peak experiences, both individually as a dyad, as two people, as a group that we can then mentally anchor to so that to form neuroplastic habits over ourselves. I think the dawn of everything by Greba is just like painting this retro story of human civilization has been doing that all along and it's a great book. In English, the word empathy doesn't pop up until the early 1900s. And I'm gonna do a podcast with our wonderful state poet, her name's Paisley Rectall. And her take is that it wasn't, books didn't seem to quite do it. It wasn't until movies that you could sit and look at someone else's life without them looking back at you. That it emerged, that's when empathy comes in. And with empathy comes, it's something that if I may, that you mentioned in another interview that having gone through two puberty had made you very empathetic. Is there anything you'd like to address about that? Things that you learned in those two journeys sort of weaving those two journeys together and going, wow, I know something that 99.9% of humanity doesn't understand. No, no, no, I know something that 99% of people do understand, which is their own puberty. So I think that's the difference in seeing things. I don't say I'm the person who went through two puberties. I'm more like whoever you are when we're having this conversation, I'm more like whatever you've gone through, there's something that I've gone through and let's just focus on that part. So I wouldn't just say things just to be cool, to show off, to say, oh, I've gone through this, you haven't. It's the other way around. I never thought that, right? Yeah, it's the other way around. So, but what I'm trying to say is that the intersectionality is not about uniqueness. Intersectionality is about a constant bridge building from shared lived experiences and a willingness of saying, oh, if you are someone who I don't even know how to begin building empathy, maybe that's my problem and I need to hang out with you more. I need to do a ethnographic, well, really just hang out with your group journey together so that I can also see the world from your side. So it's an open invitation. It's not like, I'm so unique. I combine like 17 multitude sustainable goals. It's more like whatever your goal is, let me sustain it with you. That's the difference that I'm trying to paint. Wow. So to finish up with this quote, to me, democracy's future is based on a culture of listening and then the president Tsai Ing-wen, I'm sure I'm saying it wrong, at her inauguration three years ago, she said, before democracy was a showdown between two opposing values. Now democracy is a conversation between many diverse values. And you ask the question, is this scalable learning? I'll cut that out. Is this listening scalable? And that seems to be the key. Do you think this listening is scalable? I think learning is scalable. I like your way of putting this because learning as scale is much more dynamic. When you're saying listening as scale, that's the word that I used to use, but that was before this whole Cambridge Analytica thing. And suddenly listening as scale takes a very echelon quality to it. Because previously it takes something active to listen. So passive data collection is not the same as active listening as scale, but Cambridge Analytica and information and emotional manipulation is a kind of listening as scale because it's an active participant in the dialogue, you try to like active listener and listen to you to say more things about yourself. But I like a psychoanalyst, which is doing this strictly for the assistive purposes to restore or help on your dignity. This is the Cambridge Analytica is trying to dehumanize you, commodify you so that they become the only buyer of your attention and monopsony buyer of your attention so that you don't talk to anyone else, just talk to them. So they listen as scale, but your speech is no longer as scale at the agency is taken out. So after that, I still say listening as scale, but I always say millions of people listen to one another as scale instead of one person listen to millions of people because that part became like very, very difficult to defend after Cambridge Analytica. So I think that the point I'm making is that, but when you're saying one person learning from millions of people, that just works, right? Because it is obvious that whatever I learned from you, it's an anti-rival, right? It's not like I'm learning about your viewpoints like this way of saying scalable learning to sell it to some advertisers so that you see more learning advertisements in your Google stream or whatever. Obviously when I'm say learning, it means that I improve myself, I improve my worldview. So it's much more dynamic, it's much more dyadic. And so, yeah, maybe I'll switch to say scalable learning from now on because in learning, one is listening, but one is not just listening, it's listening with a purpose, a purpose-based learning and then project-based learning, problem-based learning and so on. But first, the purpose and learning is, I think one of the great purposes that unites the relationship together. So you're hopeful, I'm very hopeful. There you go. Hey, Angie, my wife has been watching. Angie, have you got a question for Audrey after all this? She just got her PhD in the exact kind of learning that you're talking about. Excellent. Yeah, I... Angie, wanna pop one? Yeah, can you hear me? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I was very interested in talking in what you were saying. I studied using a special kind of analysis that's called Epistemic Network Analysis which looks at the networks between people and how they relate. So it's very interesting. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah, where... I think when I introduced this idea of a reflective space on open data, I liken it to the reflective telescopes. Prior to reflective telescope, people wasn't even sure that the traditional telescopes, Saturn or whatever, it is real, like whether it's objects of knowledge is disputed. And that's partly, of course, the instruments are not well understood, but also because the cultures around the proper use of those instruments are not calibrated enough across societies of knowledge. So I think a lot of the work, I think we're imagining here or actually doing on the ground, it's just to calibrate the context so that the telescopes or microscopes or other scopes become properly part of our epistemic fabric instead of just by these selected few and then everybody else have no clue and then there's a natural divide between the people who say, there are the fact-checkers and the people who say that that's not fact-checking. But see, and that's the beauty of you, Audrey, is that this is an academic conversation. You are doing these things. Oh yeah, I'm the trim tap, I'm afraid, but yes, I'm literally the trim tap. So that is astonishing. The world is a better place for you, Audrey. And I don't know if you have anything else that's on your mind that you'd like to say. I just want to give you the floor for a minute if there's something that you'd like to cap this off with. You've been incredibly generous with your time. Sure, sure, sure. And which is why it took so long because I wanted to give this conversation my undivided attention. And it took quite a few months for me to schedule this block of time. I'm so grateful. Sure, and me too, like Michelin. I think a lot of what we talked about, I understand you phrase your questions so that people feel that there's something tangible, that's something that actually exists on this world and that this learned helplessness is not the NLBO of things that the agency toward learning a skill is within reach basically, which is very good. And I just want to say that maybe it's not about emulating whatever we did in Taiwan. Maybe, as I mentioned to the new local folks in the UK, if it feels better for you to call it a New Zealand model, call it a New Zealand model. Don't call it a Taiwan model because for the British people to prepare for the next pandemic ideologically-wise, New Zealand feels closer. But it's exactly the same model. So what I'm trying to say is that maybe this conversation is the beginning of an inspiration. However, find something that is closer in shared experience, in shared challenges, and then in closer time zones, and just start small. And more often than not, when your scale is not 23 or 2 million, but 2,000, like literally your community, this works very quickly. You can very quickly see the dynamic change, the trim tab, right? The community doesn't go by you ignoring you. You can just change the way you think and then 200 or 2,000 people changes just like that immediately. And that's the peak experience that I always keep referring to. I'm certainly not saying that it must start to work on the network a scale of 23 million. It's interesting that we managed to make this scale work, but most of my learning, when I was eight years old, full of imagination, was just at a consumer co-op, that is maybe just 20 people. But still I learned a lot with the co-op, with just 20 people. Audrey Tang, if you ever come to the US, come visit us. Design National Park is one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and we would welcome you and embrace you and take care of you. Bless you, Audrey Tangs. Thank you so much for your time and your incredible thoughts. Thank you and live long and prosper.