 off to talk to you know our team here. We have colleagues from six countries and we all need us to say really honoured and excited to have you with us. I must say I feel a little bit awkward addressing you Audrey because you are Taiwan's digital minister but I do know that you prefer people to call you Audrey. Yeah we don't do this the right honourable or whatever. Yeah or Minister Tang. Yeah just Audrey it's fine. Yes yeah so thank you Audrey and I have shared some of your bio with our colleagues and everyone was just fascinated you know with your you know your childhood how you grow up how your child prodigy and how you've continued and now you know the Japanese have told you IT's a genius minister. The role you played I think you know in sort of like putting Taiwan ahead of the curve when Covid first broke out and most of all how you've been such a big champion of social innovation and I think in the last four years you have done nothing but being such a huge champion and supporter of social entrepreneurship and social innovation in Taiwan and I think my colleagues and I cannot thank you enough. I think you've graced every SE summit you've come from the SE year-end parties you've come for DBS 50th anniversary gala dinner so you know really really we are just so privileged. We thought that you know in this one hour we would sort of maybe for you to perhaps share your views on why social innovation is so important and how you coin this term social innovation versus social entrepreneurship and how you see it playing such a key role in society today and then I'd like to also spend about half an hour opening up the questions I've got some questions lined up already for you also so if that's okay with you Audrey. Can I see those questions are they available somewhere I mean I can just you know dive right into the questions I also think that's more interactive. I do have the questions with me I think I can arrange for them to be sent to you or something because I don't know how to post those questions. Sure sure yeah sure I'm just pasting my personal email to the chat and feel free to send a copy to my personal email and and it's me personally who read them all. You don't have the Audrey bought somewhere. That's right that's right and also I think I'll just begin with really my gratitude and appreciation because before I got into this job five years ago as digital minister in charge of social innovation already the idea of social entrepreneurship is only you know visible in time because of two very important organizations one being DPS and in addition to DPS the UDN vision project these two one in the banking sector and one in the media sector collaboratively defined social entrepreneurship for most of the social enterprises in Taiwan previously we have co-ops we have many like credit unions and so on many local community building projects and so on but they don't collectively refer to themselves as social entrepreneurs and by settling on the social entrepreneurship is a shared label co-set by of course SE insights and so on but mostly by UDN vision and DPS we share the common best or better practices across all the different sectors and really builds this new idea called the social sector previously in many other jurisdictions it is known only as the nonprofits or the charities or the voluntary sector or the third sector or whatever but what we are seeing in Taiwan is that the social sector or社会部man often takes the lead when there is a new situation emerging situation in Taiwan for example our counter pandemic efforts or the digital innovations are driven by the social sector the masquerading map the sms-based contact tracing qr check-in system many many systems they were not government technologies they were not private sector technologies these are social technologies invented by civic technologists in the social sector and this is what enabled us to counter the pandemic with no lockdown and also counter the infodemic that this information crisis with no takedown because if we concentrate the power to either a few large corporations or a few large ministries then we basically decimate like reduced by 10 percent every time we introduce such a top-down endeavor we will make the social innovators job harder to do because everyone just you know obey what the government say that people should do without understanding or without remixing it into new potentials but because of this emphasis on social entrepreneurship people who are willing to contribute to counter pandemic or counter infodemic efforts understand that they can work with these people in the same social sector to gain the legitimacy to build a new norm on ways to check in on venues on ways to you know find the nearby pharmacy that still have mosque and so on or remix some cute dog memes to convince people to wear a mask or whatever and so they can actually empower the people in the front line in the field and then our job in the executive union or the cabinet office is just to amplify those new practices that emerges out of the social entrepreneurship scene and convince the other private sectors to join and support these new norm and so this is what I call people public private partnership it's not we procuring service and products from the vendors it's the other way around it's the social entrepreneurs procuring reverse procuring stable APIs reverse procuring the visibility of their products and services and so on that we can provide in the public sector so this is like my five minutes pitch I would like really to engage the Q&A to delve deeper into the specifics of this social entrepreneurship and innovation ideas right on Audrey so so perhaps maybe I could ask you so in your mind when you define social innovation because I think it's a term that you uh yeah what what is it to you and there's a lot of talk about ESG these days you know about sustainable development and ESG so it's if you see so the social sector as the S in ESG or what what is it to you and how do you see it in in that that context that's right uh to me social innovation uh means everyone's business with everyone's help uh or in Mandarin so the first part everyone's business means that it is serving a common purpose with everyone's help means that it's a model of open innovation everyone not the people who are already in the supply chain or who are your shareholders or customers like literally everyone who are affected by this common issue may contribute through open innovation into something that other people may pick up and remix and make it even better so the common purpose and the open innovation are the two kind of pillars of social innovation and digital social innovation of course amplifies this so that even people who are on different time zones may join social innovations together previously social innovation and so I mostly refer to community building that people who are physically neighbors but in the digital era of course people who care about the same thing are naturally neighbors and so in a sense the SDGs are 17 neighborhood and the 169 smaller districts uh within it does the concrete targets within the SDGs so anyone who choose to index their work their impact using the SDG vocabulary is basically declaring their household registration in one of those 17 virtual neighborhoods for them to co-discover and to join the partners previously they may not know because one is in social sector another one is in the private sector some people are in the public service and so on but because we all index our work in SDG terms and even the educational facilities like universities in Taiwan also index their university social responsibility or us r courses using the SDG 169 specific target as the common index so on our social innovation platform if you know which SDG target you're working toward you have a set of natural allies who are your neighbors which can of course then innovate together with you so everyone's business with everyone's help but this everyone is natural neighborhoods formed toward the common index SDG goals and and you know you you talk about the infodermate and digital innovation and all that so the world is just changing so fast you know so you feel that the social sector everyone's business everyone's help that how do you ensure that they stay ahead and and not lag behind you know I mean because the pace of change is so daunting or do you think that's a concern at all you know yeah the pace of change is so daunting which is why we rely on the collective intelligence in the social sector to tell us where the world is heading right in Taiwan in 2019 December on this forum called the PTT there is a post from Dr Lee Wenliang's message that and I quote seven new star's cases are discovered in the Huanan seafood market end of quote now in many other jurisdictions in many other social media forums the same message may have be shared there but only in Taiwan on PTT after 24 hours of people just powering in their expertise to triage that message so to speak after 24 hours we realized this is probably legit and on the first day of 2020 we start the health inspection for all five passenger coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan and the reason why is that the PTT is in the social sector it unlike Reddit or Facebook or other social media it has no shareholders and no advertisers it's just a student pet project from national university that's been running in an open source manner for like 25 years or something so this shows the importance of collective intelligence because only on those more pro-social social media systems can we truly get this like advanced radar from something that's coming in to the people with expertise and share the interests who can triage it and just amplify the signal and other noise so do you feel with that sort of philosophy that it would also weed out any negative news or fake fake information and things like that is that how they would you know because there's positive positive and negative right i mean so how do you kind of weed out how technology could also kind of be more disruptive in a bad way than in a good way do you feel that the social sector would somehow mediated and kind of like call out the fakes i mean is that what it is yeah yes it that's exactly the case in a physical space we have this idea of civic spaces or public infrastructure like a town hall a public library a museum a national park whatever right and we when we hold public deliberations or hearings in a town hall in the building itself in the interaction patterns there's certain patterns that encourage pro-social behavior now on the digital space we're seeing exactly the same emerging in the more pro-social spaces such as the ptt or our national petition platform the joint platform and so on and if we classify these as important infrastructure even though it's made of bits not of concrete then we can subsidize or invest sufficient funding for those public infrastructure to serve the purpose of town halls and so on but if a government and the social sector do not invest in these pro-social digital public infrastructures then people who want to deliberate to talk about something that people would talk about in a town hall will be forced to do so on say facebook and that would be like holding a town hall meeting on the local district's nightclub with very loud music smokefield room you have to shout to get her private bouncer's addictive drinks and so on and and with audio respect i mean the night night clubs and so on serve an important social function it's just a social function it's not democratic deliberation right right yeah okay so Audrey so we emailed you the questions so i've got the questions yeah yeah so um i you know can read some out to you or would you like to kind of go through it and pick and choose a limit up to you yeah sure sure yeah so i'll just paste each question to the chat without reading it aloud i believe everyone can read the chat okay yeah so um yeah for the first question i'm most proud of the fact that i still get eight hours of sleep every night even working as the digital minister and i heard i read that you clear your inbox and you've got nothing left over every day so how do you do that and still sleep eight hours a day i know right so i do that through this idea called the pomodoro method so i work in a very focused manner for 25 minutes and then take five minutes break and during those 25 minutes of focus nothing interrupts me so by sending me um you know instant message or whatever i don't read it there's no vibration or notification until half an hour later so all my colleagues understand that it's not that i don't read their messages is that i only read it every half an hour and so because of this i get to batch process because if you read your messages all the time then you're basically caught into this kind of distraction filled mood where you have to wait for this person to complete their thought that person to complete their thought and so on but when i check that every half an hour then it's like emails right everybody have already completed their preliminary discussion and thought and so on i only have to say this makes sense or this looks good to me or that person you have to consult them and so i can make such decisions very quickly like 30 seconds and so on but if i check my inbox like every five minutes i wouldn't be able to work at all so the pomodoro method is a pretty good method i've been practicing that for more than 10 years now see i see okay and what keeps you awake at night that continuing on that question and if i could add on to that related to that so what do you see as your biggest challenges you know in the next you know let's say 12 to 18 months yeah i'm always asleep at night nothing keeps me awake recently i think the only thing that awakens me at night was a pretty large earthquake but other than other than like physical earthquakes i think i i sleep pretty well but it doesn't mean that i don't take my job seriously it's just that i do my work when i sleep mostly when i'm awake i listen to all the various different stakeholders positions ideas and so on without passing judgments so i don't say this is good this is bad or whatever i'll say i always sleep on it and then i go to sleep and after eight hours i often and almost always wake up with a more synthetic idea more synthetic innovation that take care of the kind of good enough consensus and that everyone can live with so i do my work at night when i'm asleep i don't know how i do this work but i usually wake up with pretty good ideas and when i i'm forced to you know handle like stakeholders that are very much intentional with each other or like more than five or six different stakeholder groups and so on i work longer i put in more hours i sleep for nine hours or even 10 hours and then i wake up who is a pretty good solution okay i see dang i got it all wrong okay i think like yeah i need to sleep more than yeah okay so the the next one is um uh at least in your view one of the most effective ways for corporates you know to partner with governments you know to help drive um you know social innovation and support the community well just check out what the dbs is doing yeah quite seriously i i do think that uh in promoting social entrepreneurship dbs chose a way that involves the the people within dbs so it's not just one single department the csr department or the bd department the hr department so one it's literally all the departments who are engaging with the social entrepreneurship in a way that truly builds partnerships and i do believe that when the government see that the social entrepreneurs are tackling the same issues that the government is tackling and also in a way that's provably more effective in some of the emerging trends and so on and dbs also helps by proving that it's actually more effective than governments by calculating the sroi srs and things like that right so when the social entrepreneurship provably does the government's jobs better it makes a democratic government really happy because we can't put our tax dollars elsewhere and then rely on the social entrepreneurs uh to tackle these emerging issues so basically the social entrepreneurs supported by dbs and the entire social entrepreneurship ecosystem is like research and the public exploration is like development so whenever we see something that is emerging in between our budget cycle because really we can only allocate our national budgets once every year so between two years when some emerging situation comes and the social entrepreneurship is getting really good tackling it then we just say you know we can't speed them we must join them and then we just adapt whatever norm that the social entrepreneurship have already said and adopt it as national policy so when people figure out for example how to replace the plastic straws our national identity drink the bubble tea into circular economy upcycle norms and so on it's really easy for our environmental protection agents to simply point to those socialpreneurs entrepreneurship and say just do whatever they're doing okay that's going to be our national standard uh one year down the line or things like that so moving on to the next question sustainable development is a priority in today's world do you have any specific focus areas that you are extra passionate about yeah sure sure yeah as the digital minister my focus is on SDG 17 and that is a partnership for the goals because I believe that in the digital realm what we are doing is to make sure that what previously may seem as zero some games like the environmental value against economic development social justice versus new innovations or things like that on the digital realm we can always think of ways to leverage the network effect the almost zero marginal cost of innovation and so on and just brainstorm out of ways that seem zero some into ways that are positive some and to do that more specifically I mean target 17 18 get everyone to publish reliable data target 17 17 to encourage effective partnerships across sectors based on those data we call it data coalition and then 17 6 open innovation to share those technology innovations to collaborate with developing economies and other jurisdictions and so on so every year we run a presidential hackathon from the spirit of SDG 17 and this year for example we're focusing on climate action for our international track yeah speaking of climate action I think you do know that at DBS we support amongst other things a big movement to kind of reduce food waste because we believe that food waste actually contributes to or rather not we believe but we know that food waste contributes about 8 to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and so it's something that you know we all need to eat to live and so everyone can play their part in reducing you know this GHGs and and hopefully to slow down climate change a bit yeah so definitely I think upcycling is really really exciting to me because it shows the economic incentive right for consumers to engage in higher valued upcycle products like this this jacket is made out of upcycled jeans and so and if we can do it to do jackets certainly we can do it with agricultural products like making good jams or whatever drinks and so on out of the previously upcycled material right okay thank you so okay let's maybe move on because we've got quite a few questions here I think one you you play and continue to play a key role in leveraging tech and innovation to deal with COVID-19 in Taiwan what were some of the challenges and how did you overcome them? Sure I think during the pandemic one of the most challenging thing that we face this May on our truly the first wave right in Taiwan is that it was really cumbersome to to check in to venues because a lot of people who have smartphones do not actually have the expertise to install new apps there's at least 20 of people who can use whatever built-in app there is on their smartphone but cannot install new apps so if you introduce new apps for checking into venues or to navigate to google forms or things like that chances are that they will not want to do that and they will resort to pen and paper which carries its own transmission issues while virus transmission issues and also information transmission issues so what we did is not to dictate anything we just look at the gov0 g0v community which is Taiwan's leading civic technologies hub and we see already that people there are brainstorming on ways to use just the building app in a smartphone to complete check-ins through sms because if you have an iphone you know what I'm talking about you don't have to unlock anything right you just swipe which gets into the camera you point it to a QR code and it shows the sms and just click send and then within like two seconds you complete the check-in and you can just walk in and so without unlocking your phone this made the kind of initial friction of adopting new habits much easier right so I think the key here using digital technology is not that we're asking people to work with our technology is the government working with the people working with the technologies that already invented something new and we just made it very easy to to get such QR codes and so on so in other jurisdictions usually it takes months to innovate and to get the procurement contract right to roll out something like that of course if you're in an efficient jurisdiction like Singapore that may be shortened to one week or something through the gov tech unit by in Taiwan because it's like a swarm hundreds of people trying out different prototypes and all we did is just to pick the prototype that makes the most sense so our innovation the sms 192 to sms system took just 72 hours before millions of people adopted it so it's like really fast and fair and also fun so it was overcome through collective intelligence against through social innovation and the next part of this question is what do you think the next frontier is for social innovation you know is sure I believe that the sdg push that made the entire investment ecosystem really care about esgs is really the the upcoming frontier five years ago when I took up this job people were saying that the social entrepreneurs you know have the the wars of both worlds because they have to make a profit and they also have to explain their purpose and not many people would understand their purpose and because the business is usual the business which does nothing will do do not suffer social sanction do not suffer any disadvantage right so even if they continue to to burn energy in a you know non-contributive way to fighting climate change and so on they will have no problem at all getting investment loans and things like that which puts the social entrepreneurs that really care about climate action at a comparative disadvantage but five years later we're now seeing this to to change happening I think in DBS you're you're beginning to roll out this new strategy of stopping to giving loans to do the companies that contribute a lot to burning you know carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and so on so in Taiwan we're seeing that our public listed companies are are already doing that voluntarily but soon they will be also doing that in a mandatory fashion because of our our new you know green financing policies so the social innovators far from you know carrying an extra burden suddenly become the the best coaches to coach this freshly forced into ESG larger enterprises to guide them into proving their social value and using their investment in a truly pro-environment and pro-social way because otherwise they might face social sanctions so really this frontier of if you're not part of solution you're part of the problem in the investment scene I really think is a tremendous opportunity for social entrepreneurs right Audrey if I could ask you this question related to that so as much talk about ESG and and I think at the E because it's the environment it's about green and all that I think a lot of people it's it's more easily understood S is less clear and probably more misunderstood do you agree with that and how could we help people to understand the true value of the S in ESG sure so the the S I always read it as stakeholders right like how how well you're communicating with the stakeholders this is like my other portfolio the open government portfolio because the government of course always works for the people but nowadays most of the problem cannot be solved by government alone so instead of just saying okay we're working for the people we must say now we're working with the people but how do we know what the people truly want right if we use posts surveys and so on they're limited by our initial definition of the problem but we don't want to be limited but by that which is why we engage the I want to say citizens but also residents really and people too young to vote like pretty much everyone who have something to say about our governing direction and so on like if they feel strongly about our counter epidemic efforts they can just pick up the phone call this toll toll free number 192 and and speak to a really empathetic listener about how they want the counter epidemic effort to to change and sometime it results in like a policy change within 24 hours like last April a young boy called 192 saying you're rationing our mask or I get this pink mask or the boys on the class have blue ones and I don't want to wear pink to school do something about it and then the very next day on 2 p.m. press conference all the medical offices including minister or or pink masks and the minister chen our commander for central epidemic common sense even said pink panther was his childhood hero so suddenly the boy became the most hip boy in class for only he has the color that the heroes wear and the heroes heroes wear I guess so anyway so so the point here is not a top-down gender mainstream or anti-bullying or whatever this is about just taking in new stakeholders information and turning it into really a meme right something something new that people would like to share idea was spreading and things like that and so that is of course stakeholder engagement people would get much more encouraged to continue to call 192 to just last year more than 2 million phone calls to contribute to our counter epidemic efforts so that's the s the society right if the entire society all the stakeholders understand is in everyone's interest to contribute to your mission then your company your esg strategy can leverage the collective intelligence of your entire not just customer but also supplier like basically anyone who care about the same thing that you care about right thanks okay let's move to the next one the pace of tech advancement is progressing at exponential speed you know businesses banking all being disrupted how do you and your team stay on top of the changes and when you roll out digital innovations do you ever fear they may fail and how do you overcome those fears yeah not every technology is exponential i often refer to battery technology which is definitely not exponential it what looks initially exponential maybe sigmoid right so so what i'm trying to say is that exponential speed only appears if each incremental change also feedback into the velocity of the change but sometimes the technology advancement doesn't quite work in that way sometimes people think this is good enough and then just move on their energy on something else and so what i'm trying to say is that instead of you know part of the hype cycle is buying into every emerging technology instead of buying into those emerging technologies i sometimes say no let's just bring technology to the people let's the people who actually need those technology dictate what kind of technology are worse investing and so instead of saying you know we're staying on top of things we're staying on the bottom of things right where we want to understand deeply at the bottom why people use this technology and why those people don't when we roll out for example new ai strategies we emphasize that each and every like middle schooler using those ai models and so on are given a education curriculum that focus not on literacy which is comprehension but on competence which is co-production co-creation so they can take those ai models change a few lines to assist themselves in in a better way they can install new say air boxes that contributes to climate science by measuring things as part of that also learning about data stewardship and data bias when they learn about journalism it's not just about reading news but about fact checking the presidential debates and forums and so on in real time working with the mainstream media and things like that and these are all technologies but these are socially developed technologies democracy itself our voting system and so on is also one such social technology that we're always thinking about how to improve the the bit rate of democracy not just three bits per four years which is called voting but all sort of day-to-day ways to improve such technologies so instead of staying on top of the change or leading the change what we want to do is to understand the real societal needs and then work with the innovators in the field to empower the people closest to the pain to remix whatever service we provide like Lego blocks that they can piece together using the open apis and in this way there is no fear of failure because all we are providing is like a toolkit one slogan that I often use is emandering Kaimen Zao Ju Ni Xing Ni Lei which translated is something like you and we're building behind open doors right if you can contribute then it's your turn right so so go ahead and do it so for all people who say okay the ministers in a digital service sucks and we're like hey here's a invitation to our collaborative meeting show us what you can do better building upon the api that we're already doing so just by inviting all the complaints into co-creation tickets there's no failure because failure is just a invitation for more contributions so that's why you have your regular Wednesday meetings where you go out and conduct all these workshops too yeah that's exactly right that's exactly right and if you're complaining on Twitter or social media and mention my name and if I think your ideas are better I immediately thank you and say you're amplified meaning that we're adopting your ideas next week or something right okay thanks Audrey so let's move on AI is a polarizing subject Elon Musk and Jack Ma are known you know are notable for having high profile debate on whether it's either helpful or harmful to human kind what are your views on it you know and and you know on its ability to be harnessed for good and again other potential dangers here sure for me AI stands for assistive intelligence meaning that it's assisting me not replacing me it's like my my eyeglasses which help me to see you better but it doesn't replace me right and it should not say show those papa advertisement and I have to wait for 10 seconds before closing it because then otherwise it would it would not be working in my best interest would be working in the advertisers best interest so that's the alignment and if my eyeglasses broken I can take it and fix it myself or in a nearby repair shop and so on without paying one million dollar license fee to the manufacturer so it's also accountable and if something is both aligned and accountable to me then to me it's assistive otherwise it's taking agency away from me and I call it authoritarian so AI may be authoritarian intelligence which is like really harmful to democracies but really helpful to authoritarian regimes or it may be assistive intelligence which is really liberating for democracies but may pose a threat to authoritarian regimes so it all depends on which configuration of society you want it could be either assistive empowering the individuals and the interpersonal relationships or it may be authoritarian make the decisions for you interesting so now we have all of a new definition of AI assistive intelligence thank you that's very interesting next question this is a bit of a long question so I'll read it out the the internet was responsible for one roughly 1 billion tons of greenhouse gases a year sustainable web is an approach to designing web services with the goal of reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption what are your thoughts that this is a must do especially for businesses with sizable digital presence yeah I do believe that as a way to raise the awareness this is very important right by saying that it needs to be clean efficient open honest regenerative and resilient we promote a whole new thinking like me wearing this jacket is also promoting the sort of thinking right to think about upcycling all the time so I think it's very inspiring on the other hand of course I do believe that the web even though it burns some energy it also designs helps to design systems that without the web would be unable to do a lot of open innovation happens on the web and that include the cutting edge you know green energy projects the science projects that without which there's no no hope to tackle the climate action together so I think we also need in addition to pay paying attention how we build those technologies also on how those technology may be may be used right the future is already here it's just not evenly distributed right as many people likes to say for example when bitcoin did not have any competitor when bitcoin was the only of its kind not many people talk about the greenhouse gas emissions of the bitcoin mining but when for example ethereum declared that it want to undergo sustainable transformation to ethereum 2.0 which would only use one fraction of the you know energy that ethereum 1.0 used to use then it puts a tremendous pressure on people who endorse bitcoin because then they have to justify why they are still using a greenhouse gas emitting distributed ledger technology so by serving as examples as early movers by taking energy innovations from one sector or one project and moving into another project I think we can also contribute positively not just to maintain our own project to make it clean up efficient and open but also share it as best practice or at least better practice for other projects yeah no I agree that I mean I think we need to kind of take a step back and look at the totality of it versus the individual portions here okay so moving on on the same topic of the web if you can travel back in time and change one or two things about the internet you know for the better good what would they be and why yeah yeah I do think that on the beginnings of the war iweb which is designed to be co-editable like every individual visitor is invited to co-create to edit a web page on a version controlled system a little bit like what google docs is doing now but it's actually part of the original design on the next step machine if I understand correctly by Tim Berners-Lee but when internet explorer popularized the web it did not include that the composer part right it's just a reading part and multimedia part and so on so then the early internet became a little bit like tv and then when people perceive it as a tv then it becomes quite natural to think about the funding mechanism as funding tv channels which is advertisement and then that's introduced into the web standards cookies and other technology that makes the advertiser job easier but makes individuals job harder to to maintain this co-creative relationship so if I can change one thing I'll just go back in time and include google doc like capability into the original versions of web browsers from day one so that people understand the web's value is not just in advertisement but in the co-production the social production of value as people are rediscovering now yeah again the power of the collective I noticed that seems to be a very powerful concept in your mind that you know you actually do practice in a big way in Taiwan that's that's exactly right yeah okay so the next question I mean you know I mean I had the privilege of meeting a few times Audrey and I knew about your background but then when I read again in preparation for this meeting and all that I was just completely wowed by you know your your illustrious career so this question is from one of my colleagues you know so far be professional or personal you've done so much amazing things do you have any regrets you know to date and yeah yeah I do have a regret last year we we focused on the use of face masks of properly wearing it and washing it and so on and we were quite proud that using the rationing system we get three quarters of people wearing mask at all times and so on and then the virus mutated and they become airborne and the mask doesn't matter as much as good ventilation but by over focusing on our early successes when I got my job AstraZeneca in April I had a very hard time convincing my friends and family to get vaccinated because they thought and rightly in last year's context that they wear the mask and wash their hands and keep good social distance and things like that and then of course by May we have our first wave and we were poorly vaccinated as a country back then and of course now we're you know over 10 million doses and we do have a pretty good supply of vaccines now and the willingness seems pretty good it's likely we'll meet 70 or even 80 percent by the end of year but we we did lose like two months worth of opportunities if we just panic a little bit more right by April so that's one of my bigger regrets right right and now Taiwan is manufacturing your own vaccine as well I saw your president yeah the Medigen yes yes Medigen that's right yeah yeah okay so moving on this is one question but actually it's got four questions built into it has technology made us less human is it foolish to be wary of technological progress does technology always make life better and are we overly dependent on digital technology so yeah yes no maybe maybe sorry let me try again okay right so has technology made us less human yeah I think like writing is a technology from the early ancient greek days people have already argued quite persuasively that writing makes us less human because we rely less on the complete context of our interpersonal relationships to tell our stories we put more faith on something that's written but it does not actually have the nuances of the actual social configuration and so on so people become more alienated to each other and so you can find in early greek philosophical writings so my point is that that's that's how technology works the society reconfigure ourselves around technology and to me the main question is that are we leaving people behind are there people who are affected that do not have a say on where the society is heading vis-a-vis new technological developments if a technology is shared in the entire society in equity like writing eventually did then it's it's pro-social it's helpful but if a technology do not disperse equally and when as time goes on actually concentrates power to few people and take whatever little power that ordinary citizens had away from them then that's anti-social technology so technology always made us different always changed the human condition but I care about democratization of technology and I use that word in its original sense like making the society more democratic not just it's you know cheaper and more accessible okay understand yeah I get back to the power of the people and the collective right yes no one's left behind so the second part of this I guess you kind of answered it is it foolish to be wary of technological no it's not yeah yeah this technology always make life better I guess if you do it in a right way yeah yeah and last but not least are we overly dependent you know on digital technology yeah I think that here I want to elaborate a little bit more maybe maybe we are but it's not the technologies enslaving people or limiting people restricting people harming people it's always people harming other people through technology so I want to get this relationship right right so so it's not a abstract tech somewhere that's good or bad it's some people who want to use tech to empower others or some people who want to use tech to take rights and agencies away from others so by talking just about tech it's like putting too much attention and energy on the tools on the instruments but I think our discussion should always say where is the what's the power relationship when you introduce technology is it aligned with the people who are affected are they accountable to the people who are affected by it if we keep asking these two questions and get good enough shared values and then innovate based on those shared values then we wouldn't go anywhere wrong but if we don't do this then maybe maybe we will hurt part of the society right right and I guess that sort of nicely leads into the next question because you said it's not about technology it's about how people are using technology to harm other people yep so similarly in this question here what are your thoughts around how much misinformation and disinformation that is on social media and how can we actually put technology for good in this you know use technology for good to kind of perhaps maybe weed things out or kind of better govern or release things is that at all possible yeah of course so in taiwan we counter the infodemic through the power of cute dogs and memes some cute cats as well so when when people see something that is obviously a rumor or something instead of you know fighting against it we have dedicated people in each and every ministry we call them participation officers or p.o.'s and those around a hundred people and so what engage with professional comedians or even are themselves professional comedians and the ministry of health and welfare for example employs this companion animal very cute dog called zong chai and it was very cute memes like when you're indoor cube three she buy inus away when you're outdoor cube two or a very cute dog putting food to their own mouth saying wear mask to protect your own face against your own washed hand and things like that so using those cute memes and when people feel very relaxed seeing this it actually gets more viral this idea of fun and happiness and sharing actually reaches more people than the disinformation about mask containing 5g antenna or whatever right so anyway so so the point here is to to build a certain lie-heartedness a certain easiness of making fun of ourselves and then engaging with the people because that this information is mostly a symptom it's mostly not a root cause of a lack of trust if you have a good friend that you just chat every day and just you know have dinner or lunch every every week or so and you can hear them talking every 2pm on your your conco or whatever then if you hear something bad a rumor gossip about that friend you just check with them right the next time you meet but if that friend never replied to your email only talk in like a very bureaucratic language and only respond to your call every you know once every 4 months then of course you're inclined to understand that friend in a way that's maybe far removed from the truth and there's a ripe fertile ground for disinformation to grow so the closer that we are to the citizens that the more trust we put into the citizens the more trust we get back and so maybe sort of switching gears a little bit I know you're a prolific reader when you were five years old you were reading Chinese classics and all that already so so what what what what are the recent books you've read you know what and any books you would recommend to us sure sure uh yeah uh what what I read nowadays is mostly papers I have moved beyond books now but I do read novels for fun recently I've been reading uh the lady butterfly for mosa or kuei leihua is one of the tv series in the public tv in taiwan that talks about the sikalu nation like many many years ago which signed a peace treaty with us marines and so on so it is a it's a whole new light on taiwanese history and if you're interested in that story you can either read dr chen yao chang's novel I think it's translated to japanese the english version will be out soonish I believe I'm not sure but uh or you can you can watch for free the public television for international viewers that's on taiwanplus.com I think in a week or so at the end of this month we'll just premiere on taiwanplus.com I see I see yeah Audrey maybe another question that's not on this list but you know what what we've noticed with the pandemic uh taking on such a prolonged you know taking on like it's almost like 20 months right now since the first outbreak uh the incidents or how this has impacted general mental wellness and mental health of of of the general population seems to kind of uh it seems to be showing up in in many ways I mean how do you think you know as a society we can actually address it and and help to kind of you know make things better or at least prevent it from getting worse yeah yeah I do believe that this global neighborhood right I wake up nowadays uh to a canadian and american counterparts and during the day of course I have a chat with you folks now but uh later in the evening I will talk with people in europe or in africa but always around literally the same topics right pandemic prevention vaccination things like that so I do think that engaging the global neighborhood really makes a lot of sense it first it relieves our our subjective burden like we have to figure out a lot of solutions now everyone is encountering pretty much the same thing and also it makes our personal sufferings seems worth it like like heroic even in a way because you get to contribute your your practices to other corners of the earth who may be you know just one week or one month away from meeting the same challenge as your meeting now so so I I do believe that engaging in online communities with kind of shared suffering and figure out some best practice and better practice together it could be as easy as you know translating a meme picture or sharing part of the the taiwan model or any other model of pandemic prevention but then you're making a social impact far beyond your own time zones we're all time zone travelers now it's not time travelers right right andrea I mean you you start off as you know taiwan's youngest digital minister first minister without portfolio when you joined the cabinet in 2016 um and you have a long illustrious you know career path ahead of you but let's say you know I don't know 50 years from now when you look back you know what what is the legacy you'd like to leave behind is all the time yeah mm-hmm yeah I would like to say that I would be really happy if I'm remembered as a good enough ancestor not not a perfect one mind you because a perfect ancestor actually takes liberty and freedom away from the descendants by designing a perfect system if we design something that's just good enough right like the internet itself that's good enough it leaves a lot of rooms for the new generations to innovate and so yeah some people say that we we need to take care of planet earth climate action and things like that because that's all all we have and some other people say no in 50 years we'll have other planets that the earth is just a cradle we can't stay in cradle forever but I would like to say if we can't learn to be good enough ancestors on even this cradle we can't govern other planets either right so let's start small let's start with us right and already you mentioned earlier on about your eight hours of sleep right yeah what else do you what else do you do to unwind and decompress them yeah mm-hmm well nine hours of sleep so in addition to putting more hours to sleep and observing the pomodoro method one thing that I do a lot is to hug the trolls trolls are people who are on internet that makes personal attacks or some other you know social messages that are frankly speaking antisocial right but when people say something mean or something targeting me on social media and so on I thank them I see them as contributors to a corpus like oh language can be used in such a way I learned something new and then I respond only to the part of their uttering that could be construed as constructive so if they make 100 words attacking me personally but five words when read in the right light maybe construed as something quite constructive then I just focus my reply on that so first of course is pedagogical right it shows people that it only pays to construct some new ideas about policy not just complaining about policy but also it's it's just plain fun right it's it's very a very humorous way to associate to those words so the next time I see these words I would just like literally laugh out loud and that takes out the detention a lot in my daily job as well thank you Audrey and and you know just I'm conscious of time you have about three more minutes um if you know I mean I mean you're such a brilliant mind you know and you know you I mean you have this very very almost like kind of a constructive collective you know refreshing view about how to tackle problems you know and to do it with people not for people um and so what what advice would you have you know for let's say for for DBS you know how can we become a best bang for a better world because that's that's our vision here so so if you if you are CEO and all that what what would some what what what what should we do to become best bang for a better world okay that sounds like a three hour seminar I've got my three minutes right right so so theory of change so I think I'll just read my job description I wrote my job description uh five years ago when I know that I'm becoming the digital minister but how I did not have a digital minister before so people rightly ask the minister what would you do right so uh I explain okay I'll further the sustainable goals I'll focus on go 17 uh in particular not just 17 but 17 17 76 70 80 and so on and the HR department said you know ministry I don't think the population the citizen memorized SDGs so instead of talking SDG targets you must talk in plain language so I translated those SDG targets into plain language which is my job description I'll just read it to you now it goes like this when we see the internet of things let's make it an internet of beings when we see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality when we see machine learning let's make it collaborative learning when we see user experience let's make it about human experience and whenever we hear that a singularity is near that is always remember the plurality is here that's it thank you for listening wow wow wow that's that's so amazing yeah thank you so much Audrey just I think let's all put our hands together to thank Audrey for her time thank you so so much and uh truly we are deeply honored and and we feel very privileged and I want to say thank you for spending one hour with our team here we have about 100 over of us from six different markets but I think you know we will definitely remember what you've told us and taught us today so thank you so much again and take care god bless you yeah thank you live low and prosper yes you too yeah yeah okay guys thanks for calling in we will kind of I guess regroup and recap what we've learned from Audrey today but I think there was a lot to take in and I think her job description was quite an amazing job description so now maybe we should go back and think about writing our own job descriptions but thank you everybody take care