 Oh, we're postponed. COVID, it's been essentially more than three months, 100 days or more, with essentially no local cases. So we're in a very relaxed mood now. It's not my idea. In Taiwan, you see the government digital service always is something that GOV.TW in our website. And there's a bunch of people called GOV0 or G0V that builds alternatives to the government digital services as something that G0V.TW at any given time, there's around 10,000 people trying out different experiments to fork the government meaning to take the government service and make it better in an open way. So last February, when the masquerading scheme gets implemented, it's actually a few civic technologists in the GOV0 community that came up with this idea of visualizing the real-time inventory. So I call it reverse procurement. It's the civil society, the social sector already determined on something that should be done. And we just make sure that all the 6,000 pharmacies around Taiwan provide the real-time inventory numbers every 30 seconds. Last year, it was all about getting three-quarter of population or more access to medical masks and wearing them. But that was because the original strain had a R-value of around three or something. But this time because of the alpha and delta variants, simply wearing the mask is no longer sufficient. We need to shorten the time it takes to contact trace. That is to say, for each infected people, it used to take more than 24 hours to get a whole history in the public venues and so on to quarantine the person that were in contact with that infected person. It used to take a day or more. So the GOV0 people invented another scheme we call the SMS-based contact tracing. So people just point their phone without downloading any app, point their phone at the public venues QR code, and they send a toll-free SMS to 192.2, the counter-epidemic number. And that automatically shortened the contact tracing to less than 24 minutes. And that's how we put an end to our first really the only wave so far. Definitely. I do believe that we share many characteristics in common. Because the mask rationing, for example, I think just four weeks after we started interactive map and rationing on pharmacies, people in Korea also did something like that with an interactive map and so on. So we shared many things in common. Our vaccination system that requires appointments in advance and so on, we also look at how Korea is implementing a map of available vaccines and so far before designing our own system. So I would say that on those important measures of mask wearing, social distancing, of vaccine appointment systems and so on, we share many similar principles. Still I'm working with the government, not for the government. And still I'm working with the people, not for the people. My role is simply to make sure that we can trust our citizens. So instead of saying, oh, it's always the government's idea, the government's implementations, even on the counter pandemic with no lockdown, counter infodemic with no takedown, we take the best of breed innovations from our civil society, from the social sector and amplify that. So I still feel true to my original roots as a civic technologist to amplify, not to rule over our people. That is correct. As a minister at large, my office consists of secondments sent from each ministry that want to work openly with the people. I don't give them orders. Well, they don't give me orders either. And we don't force all the ministries to send people to my office. So for example, the Ministry of Defense never sent anyone. But the more people facing ones of culture, interior education, public policy, like diplomacy, and so on, communication, sea, ocean affairs, and so on, all have people in my office. Because I participated, along with people in the Gabriel movement, the sunflower movement, when we occupied in 2014 March, the parliament and nearby street for three weeks. But it's not just a demonstration against something, a trade deal, but it's rather a demonstration in a sense of a demo showing that half a million people on the street and many more online can actually form shared goals, form a good enough consensus on what to do with such a trade deal. And our consensus items were ratified by the head of the parliament. So the occupier was a success. So what we did essentially is to increase the bandwidth of democracy. Previously, people thought of democracy as each person just uploading three bits of information every four years called voting. But with the experience of the sunflower movement, we now know that democracy is something people can participate day to day with citizens petition and initiatives, with participatory budgeting, with presidential hackathon, many different forms for people who are not even at a voting age to participate, for people who are not citizens, but foreign immigrants and residents to participate. Well, hugging trolls, the internet trolls is my hobby. So I do this as frequent as possible. I use the Pomodoro working method where I focus on my work for 30 minutes at a time, believe maybe five, six minutes of rest during each Pomodoro each half an hour. So people quite predictably expect me to reply to the things that talk me in a constructive and humorous fashion every half an hour. So that means during a working day, maybe 10 times or so. First of all, 180 is my height in centimeters. It's not my IQ. For adults, IQ over 160 is impossible to measure. So I don't know. So to answer your question, the trick is very simple. I read before I go to sleep without sounding the words in my mind. I just scan the pages electronically and imprint them on my visual memory. And when I wake up, I always wake up with a more coherent view of the keywords within those books linked together. But I don't have a photographic memory. I don't actually memorize the entire page. I just memorize the connection between those words. So the trick is first to have eight hours or more of sleep. I sleep until I naturally wake up and then go back and use full text search. Whenever I need something from the laptop, I would just search on the full text of all the books I've recently read. So it seems like I have photographic memory, but it's actually the result of outsourcing my memory to this laptop. Certainly. So I attended three kindergartens, six primary schools, and one year of middle school before I dropped out on the second year. So on average, not really on average, literally each year at a different school. And so I guess it gives me a more autonomous learning style where learning is directed not by the teachers or the classes, but rather by my own curiosity and a sense of purpose. When I was second year in my middle school, I finally had a meeting with the head of our school, our principal. And I said, look, I'm very interested in this idea of swift trust, why people trust each other so quickly online compared to face to face settings. Yet we also distrust each other easily online. And there's nothing in my textbook that explained this. Actually, the researchers who are working on this problem answered my email directly because they trust me very easily online. They don't know I'm just 14 or 15 years old. And after explaining this to the head of the school, she said, okay, from tomorrow on, you don't have to go to my school anymore. I don't have anything to teach you. And since it's mandatory education, I will work the bureaucracy to give you room to do your own research. So from that point on, I think that the public servants, career public servants are the most innovative people in the world. And that feeling still resides with me today. Yeah, right. Right. So as I said, the head of school, Principal Du Hoi Ping, actually convinced my parents and grandparents for me, because she obviously sees the value of directing our own learning online. And she also understand whatever reason she initially wanted me to complete high school, a university degree, doctoral postdoc research. I'm already doing the equivalent of postdoc research with the leading researchers at that moment. So she sees through this bureaucracy and we form this good enough consensus that she is willing to innovate on my behalf. And I think that's the most crucial thing. It is to innovate out of a shared value. Yeah, it was from a character, the names Adrey Yu, from a German novelist's children's book, The Neverending Story. There's been some films made, I believe, from that novel as well. And I think in the novel, the name means a child of all, right, a child that's taken care of by the entire community. And this is always how I felt. I call it taking all the sides. If there is anyone in the society on the PDT or from a face-to-face meeting that utters something that I think I cannot comprehend, I always think it's my problem, it's not their problem. And I will learn from them by living there for a while or by asking nicely what is it that they actually mean to put myself in their shoes and so on. So essentially ask them to raise me, to grow my understanding. And that has always been a defining characteristic of my style in leadership and policymaking. It's simply to take all the sides so we can get some common values together. Yeah, and I see that their remixes, they give me enjoyment. The Japanese hip-hop band Dos Monos that you just alluded to, when they sampled my interview, which was put under a public license in Creative Commons, they didn't ask for my permission because they know they don't need my permission. I already publicly licensed for any purpose whatsoever to use my voice and my interviews, my portrait and things like that. So I wake up, see those internet memes, those remixes and so on. And I also learn from it. There are people who claim for me to shake bubble tea. So recently I made a short movie shaking the bubble tea and explaining why the use of various different bubbles and various different teas represent the spirit of open innovation and explain the digital democracy based on the concept of making your own bubble tea at home. Always it's my research interest of wanting to understand what makes people trust each other so quickly online and what makes people distrust each other, polarize into hate speech, discrimination, conspiracy theories online. What is the difference in the space design online that makes such a difference? So my research interest naturally took me to various different startups, to different companies. I work with the Siri team and Apple for six years. Work with the Oxford University people on the use of languages and computational linguistics with a startup called social text on social interaction design and so on. And all of this is just to answer this research question that really I'm fascinated with when I was 15 years old. And now of course I have also published on this topic even as a digital minister. And I also shared the ideas of fast, fair and fun to promote and more pro social social media. So I'm sure that I'm still doing the same research is just now supported by the taxpayers. Well, I'm proud to say I've never faced any discrimination as a the world's first openly transgender person in the cabinet. And the reason why I believe is that in Taiwan, we don't quite make such a fixed distinction between the gender roles within our culture, because Taiwan is not one single culture. I mean, we have 20 different national languages, most of which indigenous in the Taiwan nation, for example, the gender doesn't matter when a leader of a tribe selects their successor, right? So there's no distinction between a male hair and a female hair and different like the Amis is matriarchy and so on. So it gives us a much more transcultural imagination instead of fixed gender stereotype. And so that allows me to say instead of identifying as this or that, I say I had a puberty experience when I was 13 and another puberty experience when I was 24. But I didn't say I identify purely as this or purely as that. In Taiwan, I believe that the more senior generations took to marriage equality easier because they had the right to participate directly through the referendums. Because after our constitutional court ruled that marriage equality must be legalized somehow, the people in Taiwan spoke through two referendum that has passed that essentially defined the marriage equality as wetting the two individuals bylaws, but not the two kinships, not the two families. So not in-laws like father-in-law or mother-in-law. The kinship does not form between families if two people of the same sex wet to each other. And I believe this strikes a great balance, indeed a social innovation, taking care of a more family kinship-oriented thinking of marriage relationships for people married before 2007 in Taiwan. Some of them see this as a family-to-family thing that the two individuals are just kind of delegates from their family. But for people who register their marriage after 2008 when we switched to a registered early system, then it's all about the individual rights and duties that should be protected. So instead of saying one side wins and the other side lose, like an earthquake between two tectonic plates, it made the top of Taiwan grow by two or three centimeters every year. And we take the good enough consensus that they take care of all the different sides. So maybe this is something that people in our region in the Indo-Pacific can also see as a social innovation to maybe adopt. That's correct. I want also to highlight the importance of the civil society organizations, the more than 20 NGOs, that collaboratively occupy the streets around the parliament. It allowed anyone who cared about, say, labor conditions or environmental conditions. I remember once I talked exclusively about our then new 4G infrastructure and whether the equipment from the PRC vendors could be a Trojan horse. So it's a very focused conversation in the streets. And what we did is just to cross-pollinate the agenda that's set on the street with each other and also broadcasting it so that people online feel compelled to not only pay attention but also to be part of the Occupy movement. Right. So we are civic hackers. As a civic hacker, when we look at a system that has some difficulties coping with emergent trends, it's not a black hat hacker's work that we do where we exploit those vulnerabilities. But we are not doing a white hat hacker's job of repairing and fixing those vulnerabilities either. A civic hack forks, that is to say make a new system that doesn't suffer from the old difficulties. So it's a very different direction of hacking. It is more corresponding to the idea of hackathons like hackers' marathons. When we look at a common problem together, it may be about mask rationing, about shortening the contact tracing times or how to distribute the vaccines more fairly and so on and work to create broad new systems that does not suffer from the problem of the old system. That's how I like to explain the idea of civic hacking and our annual presidential hackathon lifts five winning civic hacking teams into national policy that's always going to be implemented on the next fiscal year. So the president rewards civic hacking by promoting five teams each year into her presidential agenda. Yeah, definitely. As I said, my main platform is simply for the public service to trust the citizens more. And for that, I think the situation has been very different as compared to 2014. At that time, if you ask a random public servant, is it possible to have a rational, sensible dialogue with 5,000 people signing on a petition? They will be quite afraid. There's a lot of anxiety, fear and doubt of whether it is actually possible to co-create with the people who occupy our government buildings. But nowadays, every twice a month we hold such collaborative meetings. People can sign petitions saying, oh, the tax filing system is explosively hostile. Or they can say, oh, there's too many plastic straws in our bubble tea takers or whatever. But instead of demonstrating just to protest, we invite the demonstrators to demonstrate their solutions and work together in a way that is multi-stakeholder. I think democracy demos the people and power crottos need to extend the definition of people. Already more than one quarter of citizens' initiatives on our petition platform are from people younger than 18. So before they get the vote in the voting booth, they can already set important agenda for our sustainability, for resilience, for the societal justice and things like that. And I believe this shows the middle schoolers, like I was also once 15 years old, that you don't have to wait until you're 18 to change the society for the better. And we must extend that to even younger people, also for residents, foreign immigrants, that don't yet have a right to vote as a non-citizen, but nevertheless has a lot to say on things concerning their livelihood. And we need to extend this also to future generations to make sure that we build a sustainable environment by making accounts to the entire environment rivers, mountains, and so on, who of course are also persons that has a stake within a democratic system. So explain the definition of demos of people, I believe is the most important. Yes, what we're doing is essentially iterate faster, to shorten the time it takes for people to form shared goals, and also shorten the time for the one single innovation that deliver on those goals to become national policy, as I just mentioned. But I think this would not be possible without the support from within the public sector. The public servants I meet are the most innovative people, as I mentioned, like my headmaster when I was 15. And the trick is that you need to work with them in a way that is across their silos. When we talk about the tax filing reform, for example, the facilitator for the breakout groups is not a public servant from the tax agency. They may be from our coastal guard or our ocean patrol. But when we talk about our ocean policy, how to enable more surfing amateur fishing and so on, well, that may be chaired, the breakout group may be chaired by a tax agency, public servant. And the reason is simple, the coastal guard also files their own tax. And the tax collector, well, they also serve or amateur fish in their spare time. So when they have this kind of conversations, they naturally take the position of citizens, because they are one of them. And then they use their public service expertise to speak out, to facilitate, to represent the case of the citizens, rather than playing the more conservative side within their own silos. Yes, it's my office in the cabinet office. It's not the social innovation lab where I have my Wednesday office hours, because that's literally a park. We tore down all the walls in a previously Air Force headquarter. So the sound is always very organic there. And since we are doing a recording studio like setup, we didn't use the social innovation lab place. We use the more traditional looking office. But indeed, in the social innovation lab, anyone can have 40 minutes of my time as long as they agree that the transcript or the video is published online. This is so that people only speak pro-social ideas. They always speak things that are good for our next generation, because otherwise it will look very bad on the public transcript for the next generation. Now I enjoy doing that because it empowers, for example, investigative journalism. For the journalists who want to give a different take on the policy that we make, they don't have to spend time on getting the scoop, right? They can read through the entire meeting transcript of various different sides of people's ideas instead of wasting time to correlate. This person said that, that person said that everyone has the same ledger of accounts to work with. And so the journalism people can focus on the thing that are actually contributing to the here and now instead of second guessing one another. And I believe that everyone is potentially a civic journalist. Only when people work in the media, share with the middle schoolers, the primary schoolers, the art of making journalism work, of media competence, not just literacy, can we get an active democratic society that deliberates on the public issues in a meaningful way? Yes. Yes. So we have an additional camera in addition to yours that's filming me right now. So it only contains the part of me speaking because you did not give your consent, right, to be part of the commons. Of course, I encourage you to do so. But even if you don't do so, the every word that I speak will be part of this YouTube video and people will remix it maybe in some hip hop song in the future we will see. And so this gives the maximum reuse value of the public and they know that what I have answered. And because I meet with journalists like you literally every day. So people essentially it's a ask me anything daily routine that people can ask to their heart's content. Definitely as briefly already mentioned currently no mayoral candidate nor members of the parliament can say they're against open government. All the four major parties in our parliament have signed on the national action plan of open parliament. So not only our administration have a national action plan, our parliament have another parallel plan. So in a sense what I'm doing is not about me. It is about showing that this process is viable for our career public service to want to uphold this. And indeed when I worked in this office first in 2014 as a reverse mentor a young consultant to previously minister Jacqueline Tsai of this office. It was on the nationalist party cabinet. It was before Tsai Ing-wen our president now won her presidency. So I've already been through one transition of the leading party before. So the point I'm making is that it is more a norm, a culture within the public service that we are building that it's okay and preferable to trust our citizens. So not only do we have as I mentioned the national action plans corresponding to the international standards of the OGP subject to independent review mechanism and so on. But also the party to party competitions are now shaped who is even more transparent, even more participatory, even more accountable than the other party. So I'm not having any doubt that whomever wins the next presidential election will continue this road to open government and digital democracy. Oh yes. Yes, definitely. And thank you for mentioning it. I think well it's open source, right? Runs KaiOS. It's free software operating system that I can modify myself. But the most important reason why I use a flip phone is because it doesn't have a touch screen. You see, not only is a touch screen addictive to me at least, it also shapes the way that I interact with people. If I have a touch screen, I sometimes just swipe without thinking about which posts or which items that I interact with. But with a flip phone, with a keyboard, I have to always think before I interact with people. So to utilize the five minutes every 30 minutes to its maximum extent in my experience, it's essential that I always use a stylus or a keyboard or some intermediary that doesn't confuse my brain that the phone is somehow extension to my hunt so that all the interaction with the social media remains pro-social and intentional. I do have the Neo phone with me, but it's more for memory rather. But I use another flip phone. The Neo phone was a sliding phone, not a flip phone. Well, we need to bring technology to where people are rather than asking people to adapt to the technology. So in Taiwan, if you have something to say to the central epidemic, you just pick up your phone and call this toll-free number 1922. So you may be someone really senior or someone really young. Maybe you have not used a broadband before, but it's really just one phone call away. And it's not voicemail or some automated call center. It's a real person, either a professional from a call center with a lot of empathy or supported by our charity, by the social sector people. But in any case, for example, last April, when a young boy, really young boy called saying, hey, you're rationing out masks, but all I got was pink ones. I'm a boy. I don't want to wear pink to school. All the boys in my class have navy blue masks. Well, it resulted in the very next day, 2 p.m. All the medical officers wore pink masks. And Minister Chen Shizhong even said pink pants is his childhood hero. And the boy became the most hip boy overnight for only he has the color that the hero's wear and the hero's hero, I guess, wear and the fashion brands double down. So for a while, pink is the most fashionable mask color until the pride parade changed that to rainbow. But anyway, the point I'm making is that even a very young person or a very senior person enabled by the 19223 number or their local community, their district managers, the pharmacists nearby, the convenience store staff and so on can interact fully with our digital democracy. Well, I think in Taiwan, we have, as I mentioned, a dedicated spaces for digital democracy on the social sector side, there's the PTT, which doesn't have any advertisers or shareholders has always been open source collaboratively governed for more than 25 years now. On the government side, of course, there's the joint platform, among other things. And the essential feature of these is that they are infrastructures in the digital realm, just like the university campus and the public parks or museums, public libraries, and so on. In the physical realm, these are spaces dedicated for pro-social interaction. If we don't invest in such digital infrastructures, then people will be forced to hold the digital equivalent of town halls on Facebook, for example, which would be like holding a town hall in the nightclub with smoke filled rooms, addictive drinks, private bouncers, you have to shout to get hurt and so on. And the same people will produce very antisocial interactions with each other. Now, don't get me wrong. I have nothing against the entertainment sector. Taiwan has reopened the entertainment sector, but it is not the place for us to have a town hall discussion. Thank you. Yes. So in next year, we're planning to make sure that the national action plans on open government is shared with all the democracies around the world. Today, we talked about how to counter the pandemic and the disinformation crisis, the infodemic, but I believe in the next year, something that is even poorer than the biological virus of ideologies, namely the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will capture people's attention too around the world. And indeed, for the past couple years now, 80% or more of our presidential hackathon champions are working on mitigating the climate emergency. So using digital and the global neighborhood that we have formed countering the pandemic together to tackle the structural issues of accounting for the carbon and other greenhouse gases that I believe is something that Taiwan can help and also digital technologies can help. And personally, I believe I will continue to work with the government and work with the people, no matter which social position or role that I play. Yes, I always quote my favorite singer songwriter, Lena Cohen, who says something about the digital democracy and the potential to co-create resiliently out of a crisis. Goes like this, ring the bells that still can ring, forget our perfect offering, for there is a crack, a crack in everything. And that is how the light gets in. Thank you for listening and live long and prosper, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. It was really awesome. And you really did very thorough investigative work. Thank you. Okay, excellent. And thank you for the very smooth interpretation. I used to be an interpreter and you did excellently. Thank you. It was great. Thank you. Cheers.