 wheel. There we go. Very lovely to meet you Audrey. I feel honoured to have some of your time so thank you for making it. So yeah I don't I sort of want to want to hear everything direct but as you hopefully have gathered I've been I've read and listened to an awful lot of what you've been saying and what you've done and just and I'm pretty sure you will have read the emails and know the context but this idea that I'm working with this particularly this notion of a kind of what we're calling the citizen revelation now the idea of seeing people as humans who kind of of nature kind of want to participate and contribute and be part of making things better rather than as kind of selfish self-interested who just want whatever they can get I think as that as the sort of critical psychological shift in order to open up the sorts of things that you've been able to achieve is that's really what I'm what I'm working with and the purpose of the of the book I'm writing is to try and sort of encourage people to see see that world around them and so for me like the while I know a lot and like I say I'd love to go over it again and get into some of the details of it in a lot of ways but I know a lot of what's going on at the moment what I'm really interested in is sort of going back to like how this came about because as I understand it and as I sort of tell it at the moment in about sort of 2012 you were you were broadly Taiwan was roughly sort of where a lot of places are right now kind of in a kind of creeping oppression and it was only 2014 when and the and the sunflower revolution that actually that changed and and obviously 2012 when you start when GOV0 came together and so forth but but I particularly like to kind of like I say zoom in first in on a couple of moments and the first one is that sunflower revolution time and the final chapter of the book is going to at the moment is is titled that how to be an anti-hero and it's really the idea that that that what we need in this moment is for leaders to kind of step back rather than step forward and and I'm very interested in from what I've read and it's quite hard to find a lot of stuff in English but what I've read about speaker about speaker Wang in that moment and and I know he was he's Kuomintang politician and so and so on so yeah maybe I'd like like is my is my portrayal of that as and his role in particular and what was going on an accurate one and and what was that moment like I guess does that make sense yeah sure uh yeah the head of parliament Wang Jingping uh is an interesting character uh his favorite book is the same as my favorite book which is starting the Taoist scripture the classic and even though that he ostensibly is in the same political party as the president Ma Yingzhou at that point in time he isn't quite agreeing with the president on a lot of things and in particular about how to frame this occupy of the parliament uh MP uh all the different MPs have their own different takes but Wang Jingping stonestly refused to call in the police and because the parliament is kind of it's on its own if it if they call police police come but if they don't call police and say that what's going on is essentially a citizen's assembly then the police can't really enter either if the head of parliament keeps saying that and so I think this is really important because he's then see this participatory democracy as a essentially augmentation on what's going on usually in the parliament which is representative democracy uh and he built this as a kind of citizens democracy kind of thing and which not only gave it legitimacy but it's also of a kind of pygmalion effect right if you treat protesters as mobs they then they they riot but if they if you treat protesters as demonstrators that are here to demo a new kind of democracy they rise up to the challenge so it's not only of course MP wants credit but also a lot more MPs at the time but I think it's fair to call the MPs that at the time kind of told the president to stay the the police as being one of the instrumental enabling condition for the very peaceful three weeks of occupy so so lots of the other lots of the members of parliament join those calls yes yes yes yes yes specifically when when I personally went into the occupied parliament bringing with me this very long ethernet cable line and I was escorted as was other key gov zero people by um MPs of the DPP who essentially told the police that we are their guests who are there to visit the occupied parliament and so on so this gives this entire movement more legitimacy in the eyes of not just police but also to everyday people as well and so and they were MPs from both both the sort of major parties all the all the major parties it was it was DPP MPs that were more with with the speaker at that point there's DPP there's Tai Tai Lee and I think and I'm not sure of any non-wantinping KMT MPs that are like overtly pro occupiers but some of them at least said that it's not a riot or it's not a mob yeah but it's mostly DPP and also the Taiwan Solidarity Union and also the like the public referendum alliance like very senior people who have already been protesting around the parliament for quite some time even before the occupied begin also lent to the this idea of deliberation on the street because the main action actually took around the occupied parliament not within the parliament itself which is has a rather limited capacity certainly not have a million people yeah and when so you said so I knew you'd been there sort of the day before the occupation started but you actually you went in during the occupation I haven't realized that's right that's right and I tweeted about it actually so if you scroll back to 2014 March I have this Twitter thread that just goes on I kind of play-by-play of what kind of network connections we're helping the occupiers setting up and you were and so you were live tweeting what their conversations were and what they were what they were debating and discussing at that time a little bit but mostly just around this job of setting up a reliable internet connection after which I can be safe from a distance as to follow what's going on right and and they were and what did they need that intimate internet connection for to be to be broadcast right to to right to make sure that's the the truth spreads faster than rumors to make sure that people who are on the street can just watch the live stream feed of the occupied parliament and also making sure that the people who are like stenographers within the occupied parliament can just type IRC channel and gets this kind of play-by-play captioning going on in the screens that we mounted near the occupied parliament so that people can just walk by and see what's really going on it's been documented by this github page that I just pasted you oh great thank you for that and just so I'm very quickly just on clear so what was going on in that moment people they were actually it wasn't just the sitting like occupying they were they were discussing and debating how the yes and both within the parliament also by around 20 NGOs each deliberating one specific aspect of css da so the NGO that care about labor conditions will deliberate that part about human rights that part there's also one side of the parliament that I remember very clearly debating whether there are private sector companies in the prc that's people's rule of the china regime for our then new still planning 4g uh connection infrastructure so essentially what everybody is now having a debate right now around 5g we had that six years ago around the occupied parliament and the consensus was that the chinese communist party can swap leadership in any private sector positions anytime so amortized it will cost us more to do a systemic risk analysis and anytime we do do a upgrade as compared to working with no care ericsson and so the consensus on the street reached to the head of parliament and the national communication commission so we have been doing our entire 4g deployment since six years ago with no prc components thanks to one of the deliberations on the street wow and and so this was really the moment when people started to could could actually see a different kind of democracy going on right right so so as you just mentioned about citizens is when they feel that democracy is really the state-to-date thing not just about uploading three bits of information per person therefore yes uh or uh about you know being treated as users of the public service because you know users I don't know um there's some other industries just one other industry that also refer to their customers as users and so it's a very kind of addictive relationship and not at all empowering at all but I think it's when people would say that oh they they woke up and instead of being just users of the public service they become the co-creator of public policy lovely lovely okay that's fascinating and so what what what was the pathway because my understanding previously had been that after that moment uh everything sort of quietened down and and we kind of tracked along and then the president presidential election came in 2016 and and then you were invited into into into the administration is that right or what was that there was a mayoral election uh at the end of 2014 that's far more defining than anything so the year uh was 2014 and the election was around the turn of the year around the end of the year and all the mayoral candidates that supported it occupy gets elected sometimes surprising to even themselves without preparing an operation speech and all the mayoral candidates regardless of party that didn't well didn't so the the political mandate become very clear uh the uh mayor of thailand city William Lai uh campaigned on his second term on open government platform gets elected now is our vice president at this very moment the mayor of Taipei Co and like nonpartisan also campaign on open government as a platform and surprisingly had a upset win and now in his second term and so it really gave us a kind of new breed if you will of politicians that are basically saying we need to take whatever people did in the occupy and make it every day in our administration no matter how long it takes or how costly it becomes whether it takes citizens initiative or sandboxes or participatory budgeting or i-voting will make it work and that's their campaign promises and afterwards even the central government see that really there really is no way to go against this tide of participatory democracy and so they hired people who participate in the occupied as young reverse mentors to the cabinet and i was one of the reverse mentors that was then hired as a kind of consultant to the e-rollmaking project managed by Jacqueline Tsai a ministerial portfolio in the same office actually is the same office that I work now so i'm kind of an intern promoted full-time and that took place around the December 2014 and that and that was when so these you went in as reverse mentors to to the KMT leadership or or this was well it's interesting right because neither the like Jacqueline Tsai who used to be a director of law IBM Asia or Simon Zhang then vice premier and then eventually premier previously director of engineering google spoke the language of like traditional KMC I don't think Simon Zhang is even a KMT party member and so they are remarkably non-partisan and well if you don't like them you call them technocratic but if you like you'll call you'll call them non-partisan it's really a same thing so they they are remarkably trusting of the young reverse mentors me included to figure out a way that goes beyond the traditional party politics and so of course people who did work with them risk being labeled as KMT and many people did not work with them but for us who worked with them were not asked in any given time to endorse anything alongside the party line of the KMT because they themselves were not KMP members anyway and so just so I'm really clear they were these were the the elected leadership the people who had been in no right so yeah sorry but sorry for interrupt but this is important because us the the ministers in the cabinet are twice removed from election were double appointees people elect the president directly who appoints the premier who appoints us and so there's unlike in parliamentary systems where each of us would have a constituency we don't have a specific constituency my constituency is I guess homo sapiens and so the idea is that the people in the especially a horizontal minister the nine ministers with some portfolio I think the vast majority of us are non-partisans and there's continuity like John Deng the minister was a portfolio in charge of trade negotiation was my angel's minister of economy affairs and so and and we're non-partisans and so we plan on you know 10 years 15 years 20 years term with the expectation that some of us may actually serve 10 years or more regardless of the party leadership that was the presidential election so that's very different from parliamentary systems so in a way you're more analogous to a to a to a sort of a head of a civil service department in our in our world in in my book definitely definitely in the horizontal leadership part and in even in the men vertical ministries I think still there are more non-partisan ministers at this moment they're members of any party so it speaks something about the kind of non-partisanship within the administration but of course once we send any draft bills to the legislature that's purely party politics there that's where the party politics comes in right and was that and that was was there a has that has that changed from from before 2014 so so is it less is it abuse is that sort of become depoliticized or was that always been the case well that's a interesting question because how long did this always go we only get our presidential election in 1996 of course and so I would say that this configuration becomes somewhat stable around the last batch of constitutional amendments which did away with citizens assembly and installed this kind of semi presidential configuration I don't really think it's presidential or parliamentary it's something like a Taiwan model and so it was I think ratified into existence in 2005 so we have this system for just 15 years okay great and so I guess so that sounds to me like the the real moment of shift for you was was was beginning of 2015 rather than rather than the moment you became a digital minister really the bigger cognitive shift was going from gov zero to being a reverse mentor and so what was what happened then like how was that conversation where was where who who who made the invitation like what how did that happen yeah sure uh yeah the room where I happened uh was when uh Jacqueline Tsai attended the gov zero hackathon uh as a minister uh and pitching just like any other uh participant that pitches about a e rulemaking platform that will solve the representation problem because according to Jacqueline she want to build a system to solve teleworking but we don't have a teleworkers union at the time well not now and we she want to ask why do entrepreneurs register their company at Cayman Islands but not in Taiwan again we don't have an association of entrepreneurs that register at Cayman Islands and so none of these and eventually about Uber and Airbnb and so on so the the common thing about these emerging retail and issues is that there's no clear representational system that can work with the traditional focus group conversations uh instead uh each person just represents their uh own experience working with the gig economy platform economy or whatever uh and none of the teleworker can speak for another teleworker and so it requires not just listening but listening at scale and and that's what the hackathon pitch was about and so the VITAMIN project was born and a lot of people worked on it we successfully solved quite a few issues and Jacqueline made sure that all the ministries bring at least one issue to VITAMIN for deliberation and we prototype a lot of kind of online to offline work and in a nutshell I think the public service especially the more senior leadership level saw us as reverse mentors that demonstrates as in making a demo of things not as in protesting not as taking anything down but rather pioneering a new way for the government to trust their citizens more I wouldn't say all of them are on board but at least they didn't try to delegitimize us um I think around the turn of that year in December alone maybe early January I personally taught not only the 300 people rank 12 or higher that's the most senior career public servant leadership but also eventually more than 1000 public servants in all the different levels in the HR in the in the training classes and so aside from the foreign service which isn't part of that training program and I had no idea that existed until I actually become digital minister these other ministries have a really good working relationship on at least one pilot case with the reverse mentors at the time and sorry again so I'm get this right so this was so and I've just typed the name as I is a jackal inside that's right yeah that's right so uh yeah so it was a different spelling but okay okay cool thank you and then and and that was so and did you say she came to the hack to the gov zero hackathon that's right with the idea to create a rulemaking but her her she came with that idea yeah that's right and then and and that was when you guys put that together with polis and the amazing yeah we initially started with just this course which is another foreign software uh but when the uber case came and it's very evident that even the three ministries the minister of economy transportation uh and finance has very different views uh we're going to be swamped if we use traditional foreign moderation software and then we just introduce polis and polis has been a main state of rulemaking ever since then and that was that was during the year of 2015 so which zero hackathon was in early 2015 I can look at this yeah sure you can look at this up but and we can also do a kind of who is uh and just look at the so uh yeah it's right so vtaiwan.pw was registered on 2014 December so it's it's that date wow okay so all this happened and for you personally like what was that what was the that moment like like when when you found out jacklyn was coming like like what yeah what were the moments where you where you felt like that we're right we're in or was it all was it all back to that to that occupy like yeah that that was the whole point of that occupy it's not like we want to occupy the parliament every time there's a controversial issue right it is that we really want to prototype what's it like to listen and scale with half a million people on the street many more online how can we get something like a rough consensus going and I think I feel this sense of like anxiety like fear uncertainty and doubt from the career public service because they were very much afraid that whatever hard work they they did can be just nullified by random people spilling this information according to them on social media and it may just just reduce their work trivialize it and cancel their work if they do not have a way to communicate not just what of the policy is made but the why of the context of policymaking with the citizens so there's a lot of FUD about this kind of direct democracy or participatory democracy many people fear that you will devolve into populism and so that's the sense that I get from the career public service and Jacqueline to her credit didn't think that we can solve this once for all but she thought that it may work if we just try some really like emergent like on everybody's kind of mind crowdfunding and things like that what why don't we just figure this out together because it's not like we can consult the tele-workers union it's not like there's kind of magically a crowdfunding law template that we can copy it's not like they're saying a fintech sandbox at that time the uk doesn't even have a fintech sandbox and so nobody knows what's the right answer anyway so why don't we just give it a try and so I think it's this experimental like fail fast and publicly and and then ask the people who complain to to join the task force and make it better over innovation attitude that really attracted me to the work and and did you know Jacqueline before that at all not at all not at all yeah and and I guess like so I think I think in what you've just said I know the answer but you're I mean were you were you worried at all because it sounds like in a sense you were you were sort of stepping as she was kind of you were going you don't know the answers either right so you didn't know how this was going to work but well there's a there's a couple of things um I think one of the the point is that Jacqueline herself joined uh the cabinet only around the end of 2013 so she's not even one year in uh when the occupy started she's just four months in uh and so um it's not like she has a lot of inertia uh going on so she is happy trying out whatever because she's rather new to the job too uh and so that's uh I think what gives this kind of solidarity across generations uh between Jacqueline and because you're a team and the other thing is that we have had some experience of participatory rulemaking working with people who cannot represent each other it's called internet governance we've been doing this and I've been personally doing this since I was 15 years old uh since 1996 and when I participated first in the pro community and then IETF uh W3C or whatever and that's how the internet has always wept so it's it's not that we don't know the right process uh to go through this process of rough consensus of discovery and defining common interests and so on it's more about writing a adapter between the uh code of algorithm to the code of text and law which are two very different normativities and we bring the the um conditional native uh know how of how to make this kind of rough consensus work just look at how Wikipedia works for example uh but then we also need to make sure the career public service understand this in their terms and that they can operate it on their own without uh each of them having to go through this full you know cyber culture sci-fi cyberpunk uh training right so so that's the main point yeah live long and prosper yeah live long and prosper yes but that's it it is go on so that that's the moment um uh so sorry yeah just going into that thing so when you were you were 15 and you started doing this work on internet governance and that was so I understand yeah and and this was so this was when so I I've read that you you you sort of dropped out of school yeah yeah that's right yourself thought um can I can I go to this thing I mean I please tell me if you'd rather not and I like I said it's fine it's fine it's fine but like that your your trans identity and kind of and and so I guess I'm tempted to project again like the story that's probably that might well be wrong is like as a as a as a young person growing up like feeling uncomfortable feeling like a little out of not quite accepted and the risk would be that you would sort of live online and kind of and detach from society but it seems like you kind of engaged in society through through the internet and so I'm just I could you I'm like I'm stumbling around sort of what what is the story of that how do you think that your identity has played a part in what you've done so in what way well on the internet really nobody cared about your gender right the the face of her community in particular doesn't care about my gender and and I think it's really important for me to feel safe in the kind of self self expression working with people who identify as non-binary who were most of my co-founders when I work on my first startup in 1995 most of them are very non-binary or at least very sympathetic of non-binary issues and so on so it helps to to set a a safe space and a norm around which that this kind of exploration expression can be realized and also I realized that it's not like Taiwan is particularly monocultural patriarchy or whatever I need to move only slightly just an hour's ride or something to go into the matriarchic community of the Amis indigenous nation or the Taiwan nation that doesn't care about gender with selecting their leaders or the Atayal nation which is a very different relationship with the nature and the Bu Nong nation who treats the Saviyada the top mountain of Taiwan as a long-lived spirit and we're just stillers to them so so I don't have to step far to go beyond this westernized kind of gender stereotype GDP linear growth industrialized transition whatever that dominates the western part of Taiwan the eastern part of Taiwan is far more diverse inclusive and actually before I decided to drop out I did spend quite a few weeks in the Atayal mountains with the indigenous nations people and that really helped me to to go beyond this linear progression of individual careers the very westernized ideas this is when you were like 14 15 years old yes wow I had no idea that there were there were these sort of indigenous indigenous kind of still thriving in Taiwan yeah they are they are we they're they're now all national languages so we pass the national languages act and Taiwan now has more than 20 national languages most of which indigenous more than 20 national I had no idea there's the ignorance like I just have this image of Taiwan as like high-tech nation as as basically a kind of an extended suburb of Taipei in my yeah that's the western part Taipei that's the right image but not the eastern part and so you went that's fascinating I'm I'm trying to and and you still so are those are those people kind of part of the project you're now running definitely when I was participating of zero early 2013 the really the one major project I went on is the Moedict the Ministry of Education Dictionary project which is a crowdsourced dictionary and not only working with the Taiwanese Mandarin, Taiwanese Hologian, Taiwanese Saka which are the three ethnic Han main languages but also I would say Amis which is the major archie that I just referred to and there's many people who are very much into for example just using their indigenous names instead of kanji if I their name are currently our president's office spokesperson who last year when she was MP she was one of the main leaders on this movement she used to be spokesperson of the administration so I worked with her a lot and she's Amis I think even our president is one sixteenths Taiwan or one eighth anyway the the idea is that each of us all have a very transcultural heritage and this transcultural heritage really informs the open government work and sort of work on sustainability because for us the negotiation with the indigenous nations is more diplomatic it's more multi-stakeholder it's less about this federal municipal imagination it's more about this first nation second third nation negotiations and that gives a very different picture as opposed to you know Taipei and its peripherals image that you just conjured up the radical imagination is so much more open you have that so I've just Amis the spelling I've just put is that right yeah that that's exactly right yes I'm gonna look more into the I had no I like that I've been looking at the idea one of the one of the things I'm talking about in the book is a is a is sort of retelling and revisiting the history of the history of humanity as a kind of homo civis that the sort of the city like participant kind of and matriarchy is a is a main like understanding the matriarchal cultures and how they how they operate is a major part of that the idea that actually it was at the sort of birth of the birth of the state that we lost are kind of that we lost an awful lot rather than this being a kind of progression through interesting fascinating and just like that the moment like the moment of coming into government then so so I can understand that you would have you would have yeah I like this I can I can almost imagine obviously I can't complete but I can almost imagine like how finding that finding that tribe as it were and building but then coming into government for the first time because government or is or is government or is the culture was the culture fairly open like was it was it difficult did you did you was that a moment of kind of stepping out of a comfort zone or we have you had to sort of educate people as to who you are and how and think and trans 101 kind of stuff or is that was that difficult and not really or if you just not really not really I think in Taiwan because there's so many coaches going on right just three languages in and alone and more than 20 if you count and that's not even county English which is not part of our you know national language but maybe in 10 years time but so basically because of this there there's a lot of I wouldn't say tolerance there there's a lot of fascination about the kind of innovation that can happen if you make a transcultural view which is essentially looking at our own story but from a story of a new culture that you approach only when you're an adult so it's almost like a reinterpretation of one's own life story but from a different perspective then nevertheless share the same island right and so I think that's what most people understand especially people in the public sector that have been subjected to more than 12 years of gender mainstreaming work where each and every work that they do have to be assessed by independent social sector members of the gender equality council to make sure that there's a dashboard that measures the gender equality of each and every major bill and each and every major budget item that's more than 200 a year and because of that there's a real theory of change that's just keep pushing forward and that's why we now have a parliament where there's more than 40 women which is really good by Asian standards but okay by Nordic standards so that's the story of the change by the early feminist that made intersectional and that went all the way to for example marriage equality and the other kinds of kind of transcultural progressions so I'm caught between all those different things and because my position is always a very meta position like let's figure out a common value out of different positions so I don't face any opposition. Lovely thank you so where what's the what's the edge of your learning at the moment like what's hard so like Taiwan and is it going international is it the sort of Taiwan thing is it because obviously the global context and the geopolitics are threatening for you as as a culture yeah I mean I mean we're happy to help and not only sending masks overseas or mask plants but also holding physical pride parades that kind of is quite rare this year in the world now and all this is showing Taiwan to be a kind of regional if not worldwide value center that if you hear from any of our other regional neighbors that in order to combat the coronavirus you have to make sacrifice on human rights or in order to combat disinformation you have to make sacrifice on democracy or whatever and you can just point at Taiwan and say you know there's the telemodo they actually grow by GDP and by many other means without sacrificing human right or democracy while also taking care of the pandemic and the infodemic and just this explanation of how we actually did it by trusting the citizens I think just make sure that people from Hong Kong to Thailand to any of our nearby jurisdictions currently making the societal conversation have a kind of real firm ground on which to not only anchor their narratives but also a safe space that they can work with international correspondents to tell their story and do you think that's do you think that's going well like obviously I'm a long I'm a long way away right and in Britain Taiwan I mean I I've titled the piece I wrote like the nation you're not allowed to learn from like we never hear about it yes well but but you you have bubble tea there right so sorry you do have bubble tea is there I hope bubble tea bubble tea it's just a tea with some tapioca in it and like sushi which speaks for Japan we usually joke about if you have never heard of the Taiwan semiconductor company if you have never heard of any of those Taiwanese contribution to the world you can go to your nearby friendly bubble tea place and then have a taste of Taiwan it's open innovation because as long as you put tapioca balls or really any chewy stuff into any sort of tea you can call it bubble tea and it's a symbol of open innovation huh okay good I've got that um but it but it feels like so uh Jacinda Ardern has talked about the Taiwan model like do you think help me understand do you think it's do you think it is gaining pace do you think do you think more people are talking about Taiwan you've been locked out of the WHO you've been like how do you think that that sort of that's not to be spoken about as a template is is going I think WHO just recently praised the Taiwan model too so yeah they did they did and especially around master use I think WHO really kind of come around on that particular issue and so I think it is a good thing right even though that we don't have ministerial access through the WHO system for obvious reasons we do have some scientific access and the scientists that we well in Taiwan's case is the same because our top epidemiologists happen to be our vice president but in many other countries where it's not the case their scientists are telling their ministers that you really need to learn from Taiwan they really need to get into contact so we before the World Health Assembly this year just a few days before held a we held a 14 economies and countries kind of pre-WHA, WHA where we share the Taiwan model and there's just a non-stop of conversations ever afterward just last week alone I had maybe 10 different countries course talking about the Taiwan model like two days ago I was virtually in the German Bundestag working with the many MPs across many different parties all very eager to learn how we did this digital currency without invading human right or over collecting any data we didn't collect before the pandemic that's a very specific question but it goes on to show that people are interested in how the Taiwan model could be adapted to their jurisdiction not just about this kind of just very overall description of the Taiwan model as a kind of inspiring spirit which was kind of what I alluded to in my previous question but for Germany and other nations that are looking to reducing the R value anything that can reduce our value a little of tremendous use today yeah sorry one thing I'm meant to ask very which I think is quite a quick point but the way that the where the internet works so you you're able to do more and I'm not a technologist but you're able to do more kind of open source work than most countries and that's an infrastructural point right is there somewhere I can you can point me to learn about that a little bit more yeah sure there's of course the dg plus plan the broadband that's human right and things like that so I am happy to point you to some like basic visions and frameworks but if you need like specific answers to specific policy choices then we can talk more about those too but let me just pass you a few like really broad overview stuff about digital opportunities and the innovation collaboration and inspiration part of the AI strategy cool thank you I'll dig into that and I might pin you with this yeah yeah and and just just so that you don't mistake that we're all brochures here is the civil IoT which is a little bit more on the details on how exactly it works to enable co-creation and that's basically that there's a there's a there's a slightly different infrastructure to what exists in the UK or Germany at a basic fundamental level yeah I think I don't know about the UK but in Germany they are fascinated about this idea of broadband as a human right like anywhere in Taiwan even top of Taiwan 4 000 meters you're guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second if you don't it's my fault it's that simple and it's of course requires a lot of auction design and spectrum design and things like that to make sure that it really works but it's just like the single payer universal health care when it comes to communication health and education Taiwan is pretty socialist as ideas go it's everything else that we're a liberal democracy but on these three metrics we're a social democracy okay cool and so that's a nice segue into um into like that last thing I'd love to chew a bit with you which is the the philosophy like and what so you've described yourself as a conservative anarchist which is just Taoist using western labels but yes yeah that's Taoist in western labels yeah can you say a bit more so I guess my um I sort of identified politically as a as a liberal um as a and and my and my the party I'm a member of is called the liberal democrats it's um so the language and to me my sort of understanding of those terms is liberal means believe in people and believe that that people should and democrats believe that people should have power so it's like that's exactly right yes and and so what but you're so and and to me that's almost so anarchists suggest I mean and I've read I've read Kropotkin I kind of I understand anarchist is as simple as saying we give no orders and take no orders it's that simple and why conservative and well if you have lived with the Amis people or the Atayal people uh you probably know what I mean by conservative because if you go to referendum if you go through representative democracy it's very likely that's because of the liberal order the liberal economy that their ways of life their oral culture not at all written culture will get invalidated in the name of progress and I'm a conservative in the sense that I want to conserve the coaches especially the oral coaches that are important to me culturally and also part of the internet culture too because internet is a kind of fundamentally anarchist experiment and at the core of internet is this permissionless innovation thing which can very easily actually be disrupted if the governments think that it knows better like for example claiming sovereignty over the internet or things like that and that's the internet culture is also something that I would like to conserve so conserve to me means just you know making sense of the traditions not disrupting the traditions in the name of progress but rather make a way so that the tradition still makes sense to future generations and that's a kind of very long term like seven generations point of view and I understand that's what the original term conservative means when it first talks about monarchy in western standards because monarchy has been around for thousands of years but that's not the case for the indigenous nations although they have something resembling monarchy I don't think they are monochistic in any given definition of the modern Westphalian state so the thing that I conserve may not be the same thing that you know loyalist conserve but it captures the image of a kind of running a conservancy like protecting what's important across the ages how do you see the relationship on the similarities and differences can you speak a bit more to the to the internet culture and the indigenous culture like yeah certainly so the internet culture and indigenous culture that I'm aware of in Taiwan both rely heavily on this idea of commons of I don't even know the British equivalent here we call it the social sector right people who work with the commons mainly reinvest into the commons and co-govern the commons with anyone who care about the commons and that forms a sector in its own and the public sector which is the state and the private sector which is the businesses are all well and good but legitimacy wise the social sector is of a higher legitimacy than either the public or the private sector and so that's the configuration that's what the internet's open multi-stakeholder model means and also is what the indigenous kind of agenda setting process means for the indigenous culture to continue through the wisdom of the the elders transmitted to the very young people instead of just relying on code of law or a code of algorithms and so it's actually a very simple insight it's mostly just that people who care have to say and when people care enough and can lead away other people kind of learn by example and by osmosis instead of by hierarchies as in the state bureaucracy or by purchasing power as in the free market so so that's the very basic like a very high level overview of things of how the social sector is organized and i think internet is one of the most pure social innovations out there that proves that there could be a social sector as a sector. Fascinating is it really some the in the ideas i work with we we talk about a shift across the last 100 years from from subject to consumer to citizen in society yeah and and increasingly i've come to see it that that actually it was citizen subject consumer citizen that the sort of the grand historical narrative that it was that and and so sort of yeah we began our sort of birthrightist humanity as citizens and then and then imposed but the um or actually sort of the subject mentality almost the um one of the one of the um things i'm fascinated by i'm sure you know the work of martian wecleur and the the so those phrases like the medium is the message and and and then first we shape our tools and then they shape us yeah yeah and and don't hate the media be the media yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah because it's that it's that to my mind the transition that we are making is is that consumer to citizen shift it's like or could make and and the risk of the subject sort of mentality reforms and i mean i just listen so i'm just thinking with you now that the the idea the role of the web so as a medium is like so television was a consumer medium you could choose between the channel but but there were a very few people behind deciding what was on the internet isn't really to many medium right so right the web is the the other way around there's uh many web masters but not many people viewing right and so this is essentially uh people are by default producers so in taiwan indicated of curriculum we teach now media competence uh data competence uh digital competence uh we did away with the term literacy because literacy to me suggests that people are consumers right power that's that's a huge mind shift yes i love that is there anything i mean i think i've got my uh my question's answer and then some is there anything i can do for you or anything you're like you're you're one you're working on or anything like it seems seems almost this sort of arrogant offer to make but is there like if there is then then let me know yeah sure our foreign service um like the the person that uh is in charge of our foreign service twitter account really like your medium posts uh and uh i will go on the record saying that if it's kind of less uh critical of the uk and may actually cause our foreign service trouble if we retweet it you're a message we would like to retweet more of your message okay so i need to write i need to write some things that are that are still still just a factual but perhaps slightly less angry yes uh and and then and then i'll work with our foreign service to get your uh messages retweeted uh by by the foreign service people yeah excellent i will try and be uh try and be a better ambassador a more acceptable ambassador for taiwan amazing um audrey i it's been a real treat to spend some time with you and i hope we can do it again sometime but i will um i'll keep you posted on where i get and uh and try and as i say try and be a more effective ambassador but in the meantime live longer prosper as they say yeah peace and long life uh and send me the recording and we'll make a transcript together yeah i'll i'll get i'll i'll do both i'll get a transcript made and i'll send you back okay bye