 Interviewing today, it's a great honor. Really happy to meet you, virtually. So shall we start? Yes. Okay. Okay, thank you very much. So I know you don't have very much time, so I'll go straight into the questions today. That's right. Well, we have like 40 minutes, so like... 40 minutes? Yeah, non-trivial amount of time. Yeah, please. Yes. So I want to start first with the role of the state and your views on it, especially you've mentioned, you've described yourself in the past as a conservative anarchist. Can you explain to us what that means exactly? Sure. So to be a conservative is to honor the traditions, to make sure that we do not sacrifice, for example, in Taiwan there's more than 20 national languages, each with its own indigenous or immigrant culture, right? So in the name of progress, we very quickly see that people with kind of solutionism mentality make progress on one axis while sacrificing the other cultures. And so the conservative part means that for the society to agree on a common value is more important than making progress, quote, unquote, and sacrificing traditional values, how dear by those like more than 20 cultures is their transcultural point of view. But the anarchism part of course means that we need to go about this change without coercive action. That is to say without making other people obey just simply because, you know, you monopolize violence or things like that, but rather making sure that people, given the common value that we form by this transcultural view on each other's positions, we innovate to realize those common values together without leaving anyone behind. But that's anarchism free from coercion. So in this anarchistic world, what's the role of leadership then, especially in a participatory society like you? Yeah, it's to maximize self-organization, obviously. And so in what way, can you give us six examples? Yeah, of course. So for example, in this public digital innovation space, everything that I engage in, including this very interview actually, is kept as either a public transcript or a video recording that's published so that people who lobby would not just lobby to me, but rather lobby to the entire public. And that's also why the lobbies who come here always argue from this global goals, sustainable development point of view because they know that every other stakeholder will also learn about this lobbying. And so this become a fundamental beginning of a connection that is more fruitful for self-organization rather than closed-door lobbying, which tend to not consider other stakeholders that's missing on the table. You mentioned in the previous discussion we had that you saw an end to hierarchy. Where would leadership be in that sort of like the end of hierarchy? Where would it actually, what can we, what can it do in that case when there's no more hierarchy? Yeah, I mean the internet itself is organized this way, right? We call internet governance based on the idea of rough consensus, meaning that the editors of the internet protocol drafts really have no coercive power. The internet engineering task force doesn't have an army or a navy. Yet we are using the internet protocol like right now and meaning that our telecom providers adhered to this protocol without any coercive action. And that's because those requests for comments that RFCs are edited in a way that maximizes self-organization to make sure that all the, not only telecom providers but application developers such as, well, we're using WebEx meetings. And so pretty much actually maybe the router is also manufactured by Cisco. But we do not actually need to be monopolized if your router is not made by Cisco but rather by some other vendor or if I'm joining from, you know, not the WebEx software but a browser. And the browser is many people together who maybe jointly developed this WebRTC, the real-time communication, so that whether you're using Firefox or Chrome or the Microsoft Edge, well, wait, that's the same as Chrome. Anyway, can work together in a way without, you know, one side forcing the other, doing any particular thing. So obviously we can do many fruitful things without coercive action because the fact that we're videoconferencing now is a testimony to the internet governance and web community. You've put a lot of effort and time in the Taiwan, the V-Taiwan project, the AI in particular. Can you explain the concept behind and how it's actually working right now? Sure. So at the moment, the V-Taiwan platform is governed by the social sector. I have transferred like all my route accounts, meaning the control over the machines that host the V-Taiwan software and so on to the social sector soon as I become the digital minister around four years ago now. And so I cannot really comment on the V-Taiwan community right now. But as far as I understand, they are now working with the parliament, with many members of the parliament because all the parties in the parliament now have signed on the open government partnership, open parliament network plan. So that the parliament's work itself also need to adhere to the open government principles and the V-Taiwan platform is now being used to get this consultation of the rough consensus what people's expectation of what open government means in a parliamentary context. But when I was still in the social sector and not as the digital minister, I worked on, for example, the same consultation mechanism by using, for example, UberX, which is a case of people who believe in algorithmic governance more than their regulations, argue that because it's more efficient, saves more fuel, saves more time, they don't have to get a professional driver's license. The machine can basically, through rating system and whatever, substitute for a professional driver's license or so went the argument in 2015. And there are some people who disagree, there are some people who agree by using an AI-powered conversation system called POLIS, we eventually realize that regardless of people's position, they all have common values around, for example, passenger liability insurance, for example, around the fair charging plans, for example, the search pricing and so on. The taxis also want to use search pricing or additional pricing when the car is specifically designed for specific needs or things like that. And so we take the consensus, table the ideological differences and then made a fair regulation that the taxi fleets and Uber alike can follow the same rules and that was a success. So AI in the open society is obviously one direction which Taiwan is heading towards. But we're seeing around the world a lot of nations look more inward. Do you think that's a temporary trend or is that something you are concerned about? By inward, you mean that they care more about using AI for domestic industry or something? Exactly, yes. Yeah, I mean, that's natural, right? So there are social innovation and there is also industrial innovation. These are like the two wings in a society, the right and the left balance one another. And so my main focus is just making sure that whenever there's new social innovation ideas such as distributed ledgers, it could be also applied in the industry, for example, when making a accountable like pollution measurements, devices and so on. If you take distributed ledgers into accounts or making sure that the mask availability can be audited in real time by people queuing in line and so on. And these are all ideas from the social innovation but it turned inward to take care of local economic or environmental issues. I don't see any problem with that with this open source community thinking globally but acting locally. But there's also another trend where people looking inward and shutting out people from outside. Possibly, they want to see border insecurity rather than what they foresee is an epic, so like chaos. Is that something you're seeing as well around us? Is that something you're concerned? Well, for me anarchism doesn't mean bomb throwing like chaos. For me it's simply maybe if you find that term not that easy to convey, maybe you can say Taoism which really is the same thing to me as conservative anarchism. And in Taoism the main idea is that we build a space, a safe space for the various different values to mingle with one another without imposing anything. That's the main idea. So because of this idea I really don't think one need to fear chaos as long as one is sufficiently feeling secure and safe in one's surroundings, in one's habitat. Now if one is not safe in their own place then of course one would be less welcome to other people. If I don't have a couch I probably would not participate in couch surfing communities because there's no room in my place for people to surf. And I mean this is very simple like human nature in Taiwan. We bond exporting of medical masks for quite a few months before we ramped up the production from two million a day to more than 20 million medical masks a day. And once we reach the sufficient production of masks then we lift out the bond and actually donated a lot of masks for humanitarian aid worldwide. But it took us like two months or three to ramp up that production and before that I think it's very natural to say we don't have sufficient masks for our own use. So sorry about that but we have to bond export for our one. I believe and you've mentioned it before that transparency is obviously a key pillar in anything you do as far as what the government does anyway. But there are states right now where that is not happening. Most recently of concern being Hong Kong how are we to see what's happening there and what's your take on what's if you have one on the situation there? Well Taiwan of course through our Hong Kong office a office specifically opened with a hotline for humanitarian aid we're doing everything we can to make sure that people who need a safe space as I mentioned to not only be vocal about their ideas or continue to run their independent bookstore or held the Oslo Freedom Forum for two years now and the reporter without borders which has its headquartered here and so on to make sure that people in Hong Kong can continue to voice freely their concerns and their ideas and continue to work with the world without fearing any repercussions. And so I still remember when I was a child that was in the 80s the late 80s Taiwan did not at that time have the freedom of the press the martial law was just being lifted and we relied on a lot of international journalists in Hong Kong to report accurately what is happening in Taiwan and so I think it's time that we return the favor so to speak. Is there is there a sense in Taiwan that of who are alarmed because of what's happening right now in Hong Kong? Well a few things right one thing is that of course there was a promise of like 50 years with no change that that's a literal translation in Hong Kong and I don't think it's 50 years yet and so of course I think the so-called one country two system model which the idea was Hong Kong is the prototype I don't think that prototype went exactly according to the original 97 imagination I think it's more like one country one system now and specifically the judiciary branch which was kind of the original promise is that the final appeal court stays in Hong Kong. I think nowadays people are seeing that that promise is also at a heavy discount so to speak and so yeah there's a cause of alarm because it says that whatever the original promise maybe was the best intentions was and it did not develop as it was originally promised specifically for the judiciary branch. Do you see any hope in the future that transparency will return to mainland China or is there still a very dark cloud that we can't see beyond? Well the experience in Taiwan taught us that I mean we suffered the longest martial law in history so we know something about you know keeping hope even when all hope seems lost and so yeah I think there's a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in that's a little quote and I think the important thing here is not to lose hope because of one leader or another leader being captured or being held in prison or being investigated or immobilized or slandered or so on I think the Hong Kong people have taught the world the idea of a bee water movement in which there's can be thousands and thousands of leaders each one can be a leader there's no limit to what one's imagination can do and you can actually get people mobilized using hashtags which are strictly speaking actually not leaders because when we think leader we think of a person but a right hashtag can mobilize even more people than a leader could and so this bee water idea from Bruce Lee I believe is also a very straightforward Taoist idea and so I think Taoism is what I personally think a good thing to keep in mind as do not to lose hope. I think this might be the same for other countries as well I mean maybe it's a pandemic people wanting to see more law and order or whatever but that seems to be democracy seems to be in a crisis right now. Not in Taiwan certainly not in Taiwan obviously but outside Taiwan especially. Do you see this as a temporary trend or what changes need to be done in in general I'm not talking about a specific country but in general two democracies for that to be a revival in trusting democracy. Yeah I think because people feel closer to hashtags than to their candidates their representatives and so that's a real challenge right previously people feel not specifically closer to representatives but they feel at least somewhat close to the people who you know do politics do democracy the devoting the referenda in some countries citizens assembly and so on were the institutions that kept democracy relevant but nowadays because hashtags literally mobilized more people than most representatives do and so people feel closer to each other or at least to each other's hashtags compared to to their representatives and so democracy seems quaint simply because the bandwidth like you're voting three bits uploaded every four years is simply not enough bit rate for for most people and so I think we need to open up day-to-day democracy making sure that people who care about things that gets responded in the here and now and so that's why transparency while important I think it's just one pillar the other one is accountability like the ability for the government to give an account of why we're doing this and also if there's a better idea from the citizenship then we just immediately amplify that idea into policy as evidenced by our daily CCC press conference the toll free number one I to two the pink medical mask traditional red skooker to disinfect the mask whatever all these are are invented by the civil society and they're very quickly amplified by the CCC and to me this daily expectation of the kind of blended volition makes the counter epidemic task force more relevant than pretty much any hashtag and in which case the idea that democratization is somehow a in a zero-sum game with public health like you have to sacrifice some democracy and economic activity to counter the pandemic that's just doesn't hold in Taiwan everybody feel that we're actually deepening democracy and invigorating economy while keeping the pandemic at bay and I think this like not a left wing not right wing but up wing thinking is only realizable with transparency and accountability so basically you're saying that this well and I've heard other people say there is a growing like digital nation people rather than talking about rather than feeling a feeling of belonging to a certain national tribe they tend to be more concerned about say something online maybe they have a a concern that like transcends hashtag can help yeah so so that's that you see as a growing trend in the future as well definitely I think people who feel alone in their neighborhood no longer feel alone when they find something that they can identify and it doesn't have to be purely online I mean the hashtag is also a perfect way for me to meet people who are nearby me who care about the same plane and then we can form also face-to-face relationship so it's not purely online but I think online is a great first way for people to get into the state of swift trust like quickly do something together and then learn more about each other whereas previously before the internet pretty much people have to know each other before they can work on large scale projects so in a way because of the internet the world is getting smaller but at the same time it's getting it feels more crowded people tend to be close more to not divided but they everybody hears about everybody's opinions and it's easier for arguments to start because you hear their their uncurated opinions and it's creating it seems to be creating a lot of you know polemic divide amongst people how how best to solve that polemic divide problem we're having right now well first of all I think it's just like limits your intake of polarized and has social social media and and that's something that I personally do I mean I spend more time in the places without reply buttons so that you can upvote and downvote but there is no pointless you know personal attacks and things like that so all the platform that we use Slido Polis join platform things like that don't have a reply button and so people would not waste their calories on attacking each other but would rather spend more time to talk about their common values and ideas and even when that the ideas diverge we can respectfully agree to disagree without name calling because literally there's no way to do a name calling on this social interaction pattern so I think whether it's anti-social or pro-social it's entirely a design choice and one can frequent both but give a healthy balance is very important for the mental health so do you need we need do you think we need a new social media select platform that has a different algorithm is that is that one that be one very very simple like functionality tweaks like recently Twitter made sure that if you start a tweet and somebody reply doing a personal attack even though you don't want to respond to it other people will and then the entire thread will be hijacked so to speak and Twitter introduce a very simple thing that says you know hide this reply from other people and so that person can still see it their friends if they look for is to see it but you're basically saying that this is not what this thread is for and it's a simple gesture right and we actually have this kind of like non-verbal signals if you're in a party for example if you start talking about something with with a group of people if somebody tried to hijack the conversation somewhere you can just turn to look someplace else right like indicating with your body that you don't want to go that way but that's numberable behavior was not available on Twitter and so it feels like you know everybody can easily hijack any thread and then they change the interaction affordances to make sure that that kind of non-verbal behavior can be signaled online and so I'm not saying that we need to tear down Twitter I'm saying that people more conscious of their interaction patterns and the platform making necessary adjustments that will then make a less antisocial experience for everyone I'd like to also turn now to so like inequalities in in big gabination that we have inequalities and and some people I'm sure you're aware of Tomas Piketty is his thesis about long-term growth of inequalities first of all obviously he he was mostly writing about 200 years of French history but do you see that how do you and what you see as a solutions to stop inequalities and to to regain to to basically get back more and more equal society so I so is this like globally because in Taiwan the genie index has stayed the same I think at least for the past 10 years so I don't know I think globally there's two things forces at play right one is that inequality was always there but nowadays with internet inequality feels more real like you can very easily see very transparently in the most suffering places it used to be that they're a distance away and if you just you know don't tune to the radio or TV channels that covers these places then you can pretend it doesn't happen but but nowadays of course with social media and specifically because of outrage travels very quickly has a very high r-value so to speak people can't cannot help but share the outrage that is triggered by inequality and it is good I mean outrage is a really good like highlighter for the society to focus on the problem that are structural and that needs surfacing I'm just saying that maybe the inequality was in some areas was even worse it was just before the social media we just simply ignore it so that's the first thing and the second thing is okay now that people see that there are inequality sometimes structure what what to do and in this the social media sometimes makes people suddenly feel disempowered rather than in the discovery phase which people feel empowered because everybody can contribute to fact-finding because this the issue seems so large so structural and that nobody can solve it by themselves otherwise it would have to be solved by now right and so people will strangely feel a sense of disempowerment because there seems to be like nothing we can do and so I think the way out of this and is very simply to to ask a simple question like what is the the one habits change one thing that I can do to make the injustice that I see happen less and so it's back to oneself but making it a social change I would for example use the ice bucket challenge as a example if you do the ice bucket challenge like like spraying very cold water a bucket of ice on one's head with no filming and with no people nearby like if you do this alone it's entirely pointless right it doesn't work it doesn't work at all so the whole point of the challenge is that you make it a social object so not only one can change one's habits be more aware in correcting one in equality or injustice but one need to be very loud about it and also invent new hashtags that then cost for action and if the cover action can be completed with a couple minutes just like ice bucket challenge and then it will also have a high our value and then this time it travels on hope and even on solidarity and solidarity in the joy that comes from the solidarity actually travels even faster than outrage I think it is the emotion that has consistently a higher our value than outrage and so the outrage is the beginning but this solidarity and joy in participating in behavior change together that's the outcome and I think that's the really the thing to do if one want to systemically reduce inequality rather than doing this alone one would then start movements do you have any examples of that in Taiwan I know I know you've got a very diverse culture you've got obviously the indigenous people you've got Islanders and and I suppose I don't know the term in English I think but there's a challenge but there's like people originally from the mainland as well I'm sure it was quite diverse in the beginning how did you and it probably still and it still is more than more than 20 national languages in fact yes so how do you get all these together not to so like to be become more equal to listen to each other then yeah I think this is about the transculturalism idea that I mentioned to be transcultural is to be open to other cultures interpretation of your own original culture and I think that really is the key like in the indigenous nation of Taiwan the leadership is doesn't really work with any gender stereotype right so no matter which gender you are you you can be a leader or in the amidst which is a major key and so on so there's many different social configurations co- existing in Taiwan and so our lgbt IQ plus community don't need to look far to other social configurations and models without getting trapped into any specific culture and specific vision and so I think that really inspires people to make sure that people do not get whatever their first culture does not limit their imagination of what the society can be so that's I think the important thing and the other important thing that you asked about whether you know people with very different background why do they not in a paraphrase just attack each other right I think it's important to to note that no matter where we are in Taiwan we're actually physically quite close even though it's 23 million people from the north most of the south most by high speed rails is just one hour and a half so even though it's very high density geologically it feels like a larger municipality and and this is important because then people feel that we're in a simpology together there is no simple us versus them if us and them is just one hour and half apart and that also helps and so why broadband is a human right is so important it's just to connect the most rural the most remote indigenous places together so that people can feel that we are in the same island nevertheless so in a way it seems and I was talking to some of my colleagues earlier it seems Taiwan was lucky to have so many diverse cultures what kind of advice can you then give to and if you can a to a culture that is or believes itself to be just one monolithic cultures there is there a way out of that it can be is there how can they become trans cultural in a sense yeah I think a few things like in Taiwan when we did marriage equality many other nearby like East Asian culture said that I mean it's unimaginable to them and and I said you know if you look into the people who campaign for the equality for the LGBTQ community in terms of marriage that they actually own a marriage right they have to feel that marriage means something otherwise they would not campaign for that particular right to be first to consider inequality and so actually they have much more in common when it comes to family values and so on than any pretty much any other coach who doesn't quite care about marriage and so that's something that we can have a conversation about and so through the two referenda that how many people decided that when two individuals where that's the subject for equality but when the two families wet that's just pertaining some particular coaches and these coaches think that people who are same sex newly wet do not automatically wet their families according to their family culture and that's why so when we legalize marriage equality we say we legalize the bylaws but not the in-laws so their families do not form in-law relationships now and so even though you talk about a mono culture I'm sure that across different places across different generations across people in different disciplines and so on there's bound to be things like this where we care about the same thing but we care about it from different angles so if we can innovate and find a way that are open to the interpretation from all the different positions while realizing the common values that we hold dear that's something that we can all live with and this is more important than the monolithic like this is something that's perfect right if you seek perfection then of course it's almost automatically excluding people who are different but if you only seek rough consensus that's to say we can live with it then it's not quite consensus it's more like consent and that will include more people and you will gradually become a chance culture so I mean there's obviously diversity in the sense of cultural diversity but sometimes there's you know economic diversity some people are not as well-off as others and I should I'm sure we were talking about economic inequalities earlier but how do we flat how do we go to I mean what's the best way to give individuals the opportunity to to rise above them and and so I flatten the inequalities in that sense in many countries in many countries getting a covid test is less expensive than going to see a doctor but in Taiwan is the other way around going to see a doctor going to a clinic is less expensive again than getting a covid test and and so it's very interesting how in Taiwan the health care the single-payer universal health care system covers not only citizens but also residents anyone who stay for more than half a year gets into the NHI system and the NHI system is pure socialism like people don't have to worry about getting sick and and this is very important because then it enabled when we encounter the pandemic people to feel that there's a safety net there and they wouldn't suffer neither financial nor social pressure if they develop covid-like symptoms and so they would just collect a mask using their NHI card and go to a nearby clinic and in that way we may show that people all participate in the public health as a responsible citizen and this single-payer system the kind of pinnacle of socialism in Taiwan is just seen as something that's at us every day that's something that people are very acquainted with in the past 15 years or more and the same goes for education and K212 education all the way is like free of charge and people can choose their own national language their own curriculum even if they are experimental education people up to one-tenth of the population but still covered by the state's budget when it comes to education so there are things like this that make sure that if you are economically even less well-off you can try again and again without worrying about your children's education or your old parents health care and that makes the opportunity more equal so so I'm my one of my usual saying that is that in Taiwan when you swipe your NHI card you're in socialism and when you swipe your credit card you're in capitalism and both systems coexist in Taiwan and say Social Democracy. What do you think of the basic income or the universal income idea I know that there have been some tests and believe it was in Finland and other places but and they've not been very conclusive but do you have a position on that? Well the thing is that in the social innovation lab which is here we heard many UBI conversations one of the UBI Taiwan's I think core member was a staff here in the social innovation lab so in the spirit of social innovation of course we run like international conferences on UBI and things like that the thing with Taiwan though is that UBI tend to get political support when there's a pressing problem that cannot be solved any other way in the country so whether it's like rampant mass unemployment or whether it's structural huge growing in quality or pretty much anything else then UBI will be lauded as one of the possible solutions the thing is that Taiwan has no pressing problem like that and so UBI remains a really good idea there's both games there's people who spread out idea advocates researchers who help on the economic models but we mostly work with other jurisdictions other economies outside Taiwan who are more pressing in introducing UBI to efficacy so we're happy to contribute our research capability this is similar to I guess COVID management because we're we're less pressed for the treatment in our research and development in the medicinal sector we have more capacity to share with the world so I mean on a global scale as I mentioned earlier the world is getting smaller and especially in industrial nations they're also getting older competition is on the rise for limited material resources and limited intangible resources such as labor how should nations navigate their way in such competitive times and can we continue to compete for these resources especially by destroying destroying them at the same time I'm not sure that labor is bounded and finite I mean if you have industrial robots human labor I mean I'm not sure that there's there's so much difference between human labor and robotic labor though I mean I simply don't think that there's a limited labor resource in the world most human labor if it's repetitive and it can be described in simple structures could be automated and is now being automated actually across the board and so automation I think shows us that even for resources that we consider scarce like the GPT-3 model can now complete a theoretical play if you give them the first scene and if you stand down then it completes the rest right and so even cognitive resources like the one that I just mentioned can now be helped by assistive automation and so I really don't think either in cognitive labor or in physical labor there is only bounded resources that's not what I'm seeing so in that case is there is there I think a lot of people are worried that AI robotics will replace human labor as well why is that a bad thing again it's not necessarily a bad thing but I think people are worried about it I think because their skills are probably not going to be updated fast as fast as a robot but what's what do you think are necessary well I mean you can sit back and relax right or you can go hike a mountain there's a lot of beautiful mountains in Taiwan and and even I know some robots that can hike a mountain very quickly much better than I do I will not dispatch them to hike a mountain take a photo and go back to me because what matters in hiking is the enjoyment of the of the flow right the flow of the hiking trail and of course we will not automate that because that would defeat the purpose of interaction and enjoyment and creating a common good right but if it's just about you know getting to the top of mountain to make sure that I don't know the telecom station the 5G tower is still operating then of course our flyer drone there because I'm not enjoying the climbing experience I'm just wanting to get something repaired and so I think it all depends on our values if we value as I mentioned autonomy interaction and the common good then all the AIS are just assistive intelligence they need to be value aligned to us and be accountable but if we over identify with particular skill sets then of course there is cause to worry but I don't identify with any skill set so I don't worry what do you tell young the younger generation what what kind of skill sets or what they should know and how they should basically face the future what what's your message to them yeah I think it just just lifelong learning right keep learning and making sure that there is that a support network of people who learn together who create together and the mindset is to me much more than any skill set so and how do you get older people who probably are less not always but some of them are less flexible about how do you get them to change their their mindsets then you still learn but slightly slower isn't everyone learns at their own pace I'm not saying that everybody have to learn equally quickly I'm saying that learning at one's own pace I mean it's the same as hiking right it's not a competition that the point is to to enjoy the journey and if you do enjoy the journey then actually raising to the top in case of hiking may not actually be the best choice because one would exhaust oneself and so that the point is that be realistic in what one can realistically learn in one's lifetime contribute what you have learned as much as possible and if there's something that's just not your cup of tea then there may be some other person can learn it and you can work together that's collaboration are there any particular things we need to learn for the picture or is just everything anything in general yeah the mentality to keep keep learning because it used to be that there's like standardized answers but with each innovation the standard that answers don't work anymore you have to work with a different reality and so I think just clearing one's cash right in one's brain in one's mind it's important because the reality is constantly being updated and I mean it's always like that since the beginning of time of human history at least but I think in recent years what used to be like standardized answers in the industrial area which is actually a very short time span in the human civilization is now being challenged so that we have to go back to pre-industrial times to be essentially just less on us instead of a specialized skilled person that need to fit like a cock in a machine I mean all these metaphor is not even 500 years old I'm sorry I forgot one question we briefly talked about earlier the economic inequalities and obviously every country is different and you probably are not that aware of the latest in Japan but are there any lessons in Taiwan's or commonalities in Taiwan's you know how they dealt or how they're dealing with economic inequalities that could be a lesson for Japan yeah I think we agree with Japan that the like longevity of human beings is not a drawback but rather a cognitive resource to the entire society the fact that there are many people who pass the traditional retired age still very much willing to contribute to the society if we do the universal design well I think it's a golden opportunity in Taiwan they are called the golden age the golden era so literally a golden opportunity and so intergenerational solidarity is very important and there's also a strong idea in Japan that AI is there to assist the people who are closest to the pain who are suffering and the universal access to those help is necessary not only in the largest municipality but also in the most rural places I see Japan society 5.0 plan I think we're very much in value aligned on this particular regard obviously an older generation is is a generation that needs to be more still be working and active and especially I think in Japan they talk about now life being up to a hundred or maybe even further than that so you know retiring at 65 no longer seems very logical well I retired when I was 33 so I'm no place to comment yeah I work just for fun then and and also for public benefits the main thing is that I would then associate only with like voluntary associations the social sector so to speak and I think that's a trend right for people who start a new enterprise after they retire they often choose a association a co-op a not-for-profit organization and because they already played that game particular linear economy game when pretty good at it and so they cease to feel a satisfaction when it's just about linear competition and so they work on I guess wisdom not just intelligence when it comes to the economic interactions and I mean if people retire at 65 and live all the way to 100 or so there's still plenty of time like 30 years of time to work on a more wise interaction in terms of organization obviously we live that long we have to be healthy as well we just that's the other problem yeah yeah but but that's also something I can help right so basically how do we you know you talked to earlier about bilingualism in Taiwan by Taiwan 2030 bilingual country project which is fascinating and super interesting but I want to go a bit more into detail you've already you talk about you talked about it not just being English and Mandarin it could be an indigenous language and then English yeah so how do you make that work for countries that have only one one language for example or technically have only one language I mean would it just be English I mean like yeah well it could be English and JavaScript right no I mean this is two general question each country of course I have a very different configuration but the point here is just to make sure that one is open to international collaboration exchange that's the most important thing and JavaScript of course is also a popular language when it comes to international exchange in Japan you may I'm sure you're aware that they do learn English from an earlier early time and it's still a bit of a struggle here how what kind of advice would you have but you're bound to to get beyond the current level or to get to become more bilingual well I think in Taiwan we're intentionally inviting more international people to be also Taiwanese like getting a gold card and staying here right so so they're Taiwanese right they may have dual citizenship and so on but they don't have you know the indigenous or Mandarin or holo or Haka as their native language they speak some other international language and the more diverse the composition of the population the more natural it would be for other people to start interacting and then there's really no other way around so just diversify one's own population I think that's a really a no-brainer so to speak and then beginning from that you would see different culture to start bossing obviously there's a big you know that being more important makes it more important to educate people either whether it's language or mentality what not you put a lot of effort in in educational reform but how much weight should we put on educating reform compared to other reforms you think it's top priority how do you think it supports pretty much any other reform right because in Taiwan the education reform that started with the experimental education act or even before that it's basically saying that people who believe the society should be reformed in such a way can start their own schools and their own curriculum as if that is the highest priority so so it's then lead to teachers and children's who study under very different cultures and without this kind of officially mandated culture so it increases the both the resilience in terms of the idea scape right so when the society changes the people who have already prepared for it can be the most resilient punch but it also increases dialogue when it comes to possibilities in the educational system and then when the social reform comes and I think the people who participated in the early education reform principles can now say oh you just go to look at that system or that system they have people who are talented who can then respond to this social change to the social reform so I think it's just diversifying the educational landscape prepares a society to whatever social reform that you have in mind and going back into your you know foreigners can come into overseas people can come into Taiwan and become Taiwanese what does that make basically in that in that case what is that nationality for you what what does it mean to be a certain nationality does it change the meaning of being Taiwanese or well I think being being Taiwanese is just to be open transcultural to transcultural innovation it's just a mentality a mind mind sets right there's really of course the national health insurance is there and universal education Robin as human rights if you think these are good ideas then then you can also be a Taiwanese so you don't have any push back in Taiwan I know in Japan there's it's a bit more the national identity is is how would you put it more conservative I suppose a traditional is is there is there any pushback in Taiwan or how did you manage to go beyond beyond the traditional problems of nationality or well if you start with a plurality of 20 national languages adding one doesn't sound so many right so it's it's I wouldn't say that you know you you can very easily copy what everyone does I'm not saying that I'm just saying that to me personally nationality is something that I don't over identify with I don't really think like is a useful abstraction most of the time and if it's not useful in any particular regard for example when we're having this conversation time zone definitely is more important nationality and so I wouldn't worry too much about it well we've got we've got about two minutes left so basically are there any questions you want to ask us in return and any thoughts you had as final messages as final message basically yeah of course I would like to know when you publish this can we publish the video or just a transcript okay I think Hajime son could I know it's gonna be published a bit later but I don't have the details for that you have some we are still in the process of coming up with that the deadline okay the public public man okay okay so just let me know later yeah it's fine I can embargo the publication on my side until you do and if you decide to do a video just send me a video if you don't we can have a audio recording I can make a transcript just let me know okay thank you so much okay and live long and prosper okay bye bye