 That's a long day for you, right? Because you've got a keynote speech at 3. Two keynotes. Two keynotes today. Three interviews. And two meetings. Alone. And what? He wants to sleep. Sleep for 8 hours. It's good. There's no jet lag. It would be terrible if I had jet lag, but I don't have jet lag. So this is good. I hate jet lag. I just back from New York. That's really terrible. Yeah, like 12 or 11 hours. Okay. Alright, we're going to start with the first question. Time. How would digital transformation currently drive Taiwan's economy in your part of view? That's certainly. So in Taiwan, we have broadband as human rights, meaning that anywhere in Taiwan, no matter how remote it is, if you don't have 10 megabits per second, it's my fault. And our 4G, a limited data connection, is about only 15 US dollars per month. And so this is one of the cheapest anywhere in the world. And because of that, we're seeing a difference in the patterns of the economy. Previously, because of transportation, because of broadband connection, people tend to concentrate on the largest municipalities, Taipei, or Galsheng, Taijong, right? Right. But now, because of broadband connection and the almost free 4G connection, people are much more willing to work in the satellite cities or even back to their homes in the rural and indigenous areas, because what previously required maybe dozens of people to start to form a local social enterprise or a collective and things like that, now most of them can be still in other cities with only one or two key people going back to that locality. So we're seeing a much more equal growth of the cutting edge technologies. For example, self-driving vehicles that may be a good to have or nice to have in large cities, but actually drone delivery and things like that are very, very useful in rural areas and even in remote islands. So all the new digital emerging technologies are actually the first useful and must have not just need to have in the most excluded places. And once these places serving as kind of like sandboxes to prove for a year that this emerging technologies can really solve a local issue, for example, with the age and farming population, the farmers really need drones to help them to do spraying or to do other maintenance or robotic maintenance of their fields and things like that. And if things really work like this, they can then spread across the world, but also to other regions in Taiwan. So I'm seeing a really radical transformation in the regional revitalization enabled by the new technologies. You just mentioned Taiwan got the cheapest unlimited data connection. One of them. How come? Because in Thailand, we are waiting for 5D technology and the cause of serving in Thailand is not that cheap. And how could Taiwan do that? Yeah, I think that's because we have Robin as human right as kind of the top most political. So there's no president that would go against Robin as human right. We have a constitutionally protected education budget and everybody is very much aware that even the students in the rural indigenous places don't have access to Robin Internet. Their education suffered and they cannot learn from the best in other places in the world. You will create a digital divide, not just economically, but also culturally as well. They will be excluded from the general population. And so because of that, I think it is a strong political will across all the different parties about making the Internet access as fair as possible and as affordable as possible. I think that's the result of this idea of just people who are telecom operators have this societal beauty to take care of the places where it doesn't even make economic sense to operate. But once they're kind of convinced to operate there, that place will grow and eventually you will pay back. But it requires a very long-term thinking. Wow. So political direction tremendously matters. Yes. I think Dr. Tsai Ing-wen said Robin is a human right when she was campaigning for the president. That it really matters. I really like it. The second question, how does your government support start-ups and young talents in terms of digital inclusion? Yeah. So digital inclusion of course means that no matter which generation you're in, which background, which ethnicity, which field you're focusing in, one must feel that's the one who can control the decision-making around the technology that affects someone. This is what we call nothing about us without us. So in a few ways. One is that we offer, as I mentioned, a sandbox. A sandbox is something that you can challenge the national government on any regulations or policies and to adapt to an emerging technology. For example, there was no regulation for self-driving vehicles. But now there is a law authorizing anyone who think they have a regulation for a new self-driving vehicle. They can just write it as a proposal and try it out for a year. The same goes for FinTech. For example, there was a proposal about using people's telecom bills to calculate the affordable loans that they can lend instead of like transactions with the bank. And so it's an interesting way to essentially allowing telecoms to become, you know, evaluators of loans and credits. So especially that's for marginalized or young people because they have to pay telecom bills anyway. So they can calculate their credits this way instead of relying on a bank account before and things like that. And that is, again, there's no regulation for that. So they just write their own regulation and try it out for a year and so on. And so any startup can just do this year-long experimentation in that open while sharing the data with everyone. And so it makes sense only if you have an idea that really makes the society better. Because otherwise by the end of the year the society will say, oh, it's not a good idea. We think the investors are paying the duetions for everybody. So it basically combines economic innovation with social innovation. That is to say, your innovation if managed to convince the municipality or wherever you're doing the test for a year, then we accept and your regulation become our regulation. So this is why we call regulatory co-creation, making the startups essentially also policy makers by trying out. And we encourage as many tryouts as possible because the quality of startups is very uneven. It's a very, very long, thick tail. You don't really know where they will end up. So only by open innovation a large amount of swarm like experimentation can we converge on something that really solves the social issue. So that's the first thing that we do, the sandbox. And the second thing that we do to encourage startups is that we encourage them to identify their work through the Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs. Yeah, the United Nations Global Goals. And so we have a central registry, S-I-T-A-I-W-A-N, the GOV, the T-W-S-I-T-I-1 for social innovation. So we encourage everybody to declare what their company or cooperative or association is trying to do. And we have the formula, what we call a mission, a market and a measurement. So the mission is to make the world better in some way. Market is the service or product that you're interacting with the society. And the measurement is the yearly report of what benefits you have measured that you have done to the society. And for any social innovation organization that are willing to provide these three metrics, we list them on this catalog and we encourage people to buy from it. If you buy five million dollars of such social entrepreneurship products, I personally come out and give you an award. And so we integrated basically everybody who focused on the same social problem to form ecosystems by themselves. And we run the Asia-Pacific social innovation partnership award to encourage the most unlikely partnerships across the sectors. The first prize this year went to the Sikong De Wa fashion village lab to upcycle their fashion industry waste into sustainable products, upcycled products. And we also recognized Carrefour, Taiwan for working with the cage-free chicken in associations to promote animal rights and animal welfare and things like that. So the more unlikely the partnership is, the more highlighted we do. And I write personally columns Business Week Taiwan, Apple Daily and so on to highlight those common values despite different positions. So this kind of ecosystem building is the second thing we provide as a social or environmental goal. Strong sandbox support and ecosystem. And social innovation ecosystem. Social innovation ecosystem. We know that regulators and innovators they're fighting all the time, all around the world. And how could Taiwan government deal with regulatory limitation in order to, how could I say, actually drive the economy? But we cannot regulate something that we don't have personal experience of, right? That is the whole idea of sandbox is that we see it in action for a year and then we decide what to do with it. So this kind of co-experimentation or co-design of norms, I think is very important. If self-driving vehicles come to Taiwan and say, oh, I want to just have some road to drive, it's okay, of course, if it drives slowly it goes in a way that's caused the maximum comfort around this population. But if they just go and just hop on the main street in a high way and then accident happened that would actually drive exactly the conflict you saw on the regulators and the innovators. So having a safe space dedicated to experiments, everybody who steps in understand they are in an experimentation zone and have the experiments start with data sharing. That actually is a key to make sure that the regulator developing REC tech and innovators developing FinTech or other agriculture technologies can top I to I on the same facts. And so if you cannot measure something, you cannot digitize and make decisions about that with evidence, it will be about personal superstition. So actually using sandboxes and using experimentation fields, everybody can then see the same evidence and there's no rational discussion around the feelings about the same facts. As a digital minister of Taiwan, we know that blockchain is back on the news. We know Facebook live or online, right? And you couldn't pronounce it. How do you think about that? So I think in Taiwan, we say distributed ledger technology or DLTs. We use that already in our everyday public service to make sure that people who measure air quality by themselves, as well as the environmental protection agency can work on each other's data without tempering each other's data because it's written to a shared distributed ledger. We also have very quickly STO regulation that makes sure that equity based crowdfunding can use the newest crypto vehicles to make sure that everybody is based accountable in their securities, due diligence, and things like that. And so I think we're very progressive when it comes to using technologies to further the social good, but that is with the aim to further the public good. If the regulators think that something detrimental has negative externality to the social good, they may ask the innovator to approve that it's actually positive to the society in an experiment for a year, right? So that is basically the regulator's device. It's not we designing the strategy for crypto or things like that. It's that we being humble and say, you know, I don't think it's a good idea, but you have a year to prove me wrong. That is the basic attitude that we're taking. Do you really believe that in the next decades our world will have only one single currency or something like that? Do you believe such a thing? Well, I mean, I think part of the promise of blockchain is that everybody can design their own currencies and their own markets. For example, Ethereum is not a currency itself only, right? It basically enabled the different innovations of smart contracts that essentially create its own currencies. So I think the right to mint alternative currencies, but also the technological underpinning to make sure that the innovations happening on one currency can carry over to the other currency. That is what is important and also why the Ethereum community is now working on market design and mechanism design with going while and regular exchange and things like that. I think that gives people a different take on economics because economics was to constraint a central currency and a central market regulated by central bank. But people are now starting to see that anything that can be digitized can be a market and once it is a market, market design, mechanism design can enter into the foray and make sure that people play fair and disclose their private preferences in a way that are best for the public boot. For example, in our presidential hackathon we used quadratic voting and that came straight from the Ethereum community to make sure that people who vote on the cases that get our three months coaching end up demoing to our president and the president gives five winning team a trophy. The trophy is a presidential promise that if you turn on the trophy which is a presentation device it projects the president's image handing the trophy to you and that is a promise saying that your idea in the three months prototype will become public policy by the next year. So we maintain that indefinitely for you and so this kind of public sector innovation is also affected by the market design mechanism in the form of quadratic voting and so I think this everything that is aimed at the currency design is actually made possible by the newest technologies and not the over concentration of one single currency but it gives our one single language in the digital world, right? In the digital world, the first thing and let's imagine together oh, I've got 15 minutes left how could you imagine the world in the next 10 years how could block change and AI significantly change the workforce the business landscape and our daily life in Asian countries? Yeah, well I think one of the best things about those emerging technologies is that it enables, as I said a location independence the problem of transportation usually limits the different development potentials of different areas but once you can have access to education to medicine, to drone delivery to entertainment, whatever using broadband in 5G alone that actually creates an opportunity to a much more fair development opportunities around the world and in different regions you're not as limited by the physical transportation options you can actually get a full education of best university or college even if you're in the most rural of places and so I think that will transform the workforce so that people understand the repetitive skills the skills that people usually associate individual competition to those will be automated away and so there is less emphasis on individual competition in a school because that's an artificial thing that is artificial competition between groups may be still existing but competition between individual in the same group that is going to go away because anything that can be simply measured and linear and I run a little bit faster than you these things the robot will run 10 times faster than us anyway so anything that can be precisely measured as the basis for individual competition will be automated and so I think people will become much more pro-social in the sense that we spend most of our time working on the human values of autonomy, of interaction of developing a common good and things like that and the repetitive skills the competitive skills actually is the realm of machines that is the direction we're having nowadays we know that everybody goes mobile we talked about that statement all the time and any recommendation for the business to get through this transformation yeah, great question so I think the mobile makes it possible for people to integrate the experiences in their everyday lives people used to talk about user experience assuming that the user is exclusively interacting with one single business at a time it's a more transactional view but actually now we talk about the human experience at any given time maybe interacting with different businesses and different associations different entities once you go mobile you're not trapped in the front of a computer you're walking around you're swimming you're doing all sorts of different things while interacting with the different entities around you and so I think that would cost for a more coherent design that is more holistic in nature that involves much more participation from the human that are not only consumers but actually creators of the experience so the more room that the companies can have on their relationship with their customers to make them essentially stakeholders and co-create the experience the better it will become we see it very early on with say Flickr making the photography a social object that people can comment on each other's photos and things like that that was in the very very early days when people call it Web 2.0 but nowadays I think the mobile technology enabled we have essentially not Web 2.0 but life 2.0 where we constantly interact with each other in a myriad of ways so the more inclusive and the more stakeholder driven it is I think the more prosperous we are business being are you so she made the etiquette no really do you have Facebook account or do you really take a selfie photo or something like that I do have Facebook account but I install a browser extension called Facebook feed eradicator that took the feed away and so I use Facebook as a browser I look for something I search for something I go to someone's profile I watch a live stream I use messaging I use audits but I don't have the feed which is the only part that sells addiction that manufactures addiction because that's the only thing that's unpredictable in Facebook everything else you do something you expect to see something but it's only the feed that you don't know what will come but isn't it interesting that oh how is my answer right now and my close friend or something you really don't know that right? they will tell us if they think it's important for me to know interesting do you believe that there would be another platform or how could I say live of the Facebook era or something like that well Facebook itself is changing right Stuck said that he is also taking the timeline away so maybe we were prototyping for him but in any case the Facebook is going into more of the way of Slack business they already made the interface change in their workplace by Facebook product to make it much more Slack like much more concentrated on groups and sharing inside groups and even someday you know into any encryption in groups just like in the line messaging system so I think Facebook is definitely going that way they call it future as private private groups I'm sure but what I'm seeing also is that Facebook has to make this change because people's idea of what the online life is has changed after a few years of working with timeline people understand that the value that you put in the time that you put in is actually far more than the value you get out of it and that makes it the same shape as a company that sells addiction and that doesn't last long because our mental facility get adapted to it and we need stronger and stronger stimulus to stay addicted so it's not a sustainable business model and Facebook knows that and so I think even the private sector would get changed in a way that is more pro-social and less about just selling idol addiction Do you really trust Mr Zuckerberg? I have met him Great answer When the teacher when you was 15 you left the school right and you mentioned that they all agree and allow you to just get out of the school and live your life and start learning on the world life Do you think why they agree because in our culture Asian culture education and certification is really crucial for our life but why they agree? A few things First, I already because I walk first place in the junior school science fair I'm already guaranteed to a senior high school anyway so no matter I go to the school or not I can get into the top senior high school if I want it's just kind of I don't want to the teachers I'm more of a peer to them of kind of the same age adult to them because I can make my own decisions I already have a guarantee of senior high school whether I use it or not and I argue it in a very precise way saying you know the end goal that the teachers tell me is that I can start doing research on AI, cognitive science linguistic or whatever in the top lab and they thought that you would take 10 years to maybe get a GRE get overseas get admitted to a lab doing postdoc work or things like that but I showed them you know I just emailed the author of a very popular you know scholar and they don't know that I'm just 15 years old and we just start collaborating together and so I showed them that the endpoint can be very easily reached without going through the richness in the certifications for 10 years and so after seeing that I mean they're all evidence based people right? so the evidence of me just collaborating with scholars around the world of the archive community and they're like yeah maybe you know this technology but it makes sense so you can leave your school if you're good enough no if you manage to convince your teachers using the language she's an idiot or using the language that they use is always important I think now we're leaving some people say we are living in platform economy we know the live vacation we know Amazon we know we're excited all the time when Alibaba launched some new features on new business model what do you expect for the next economy or any business landscape in the next digital era right I think we haven't exhausted the potential of platform economies the platform economies to this point are mostly privately owned with a few exceptions like Wikipedia right and so I think what we are going to see is a democratization of platform builders it used to be very difficult to build a scalable large platform right and so the people who have the concentrated powers of capital of human resources are mainly the one that take care of the largest platform but that trend is actually changing we see more and more people going to to have a chat with the more and more people setting up their own chat servers with the more and more people going back what we call a re-decentralization of the web the web starts decentralized then it becomes decentralized and then now it's re-decentralized and so just having those different platforms used by large open source tools and contributing their know-how to the wider community enables through open source a different configuration of platforms on people who value their own control of their own platform lives and so I think like for example took off when nobody expected to but I think people really have not exhausted the potentials of a community owned of a collectively owned of a cooperative platform we're now seeing mostly the potential of privately held platforms but this kind of social sector platforms I think we're just starting to see the beginning of it right time are you are you afraid of Alibaba's move which particular actually every element but some people in Thailand they are afraid of something that could dominate our life or manipulate something in our life in platform economy you really I think so right so just as with the last centuries of consumer awareness campaign many consumers at that time did not understand they have protected lives when it comes to counterfeit goods to products that are under quality and things like that so a massive education campaign is done so the consumer understand the legal right that they have against the people who sell the quality that are part right but now in this century what we have is essentially privacy loss and GDPR for example from the Europe guarantees that people have the right to as for copy to as for update deletion probability and things like that but GDPR is empty if the people don't know how to use it it gives us a broad wide tradition of privacy act and I understand Thailand is going to our same direction as well in a year right and so I think what's most important is that the general population understand no matter how large the platform is they actually is subject to the data fiduciary duties the duty is that if I trust my data to you you must use it in my best interest and I can ask for account accountability of whether or my best interest it's just like a relationship with your lawyer your accountant your psychiatrist right if you're they are not acting on your best interest you're free to take your business elsewhere and the state must guarantee your right to take your business elsewhere without too much unfair too much hassle right and so all this is protected of course by the GDPR framework and even in the privacy act framework before that but very few people is on is just this general idea of education campaign and also making sure that even primary school students learn through the air boxes for example a personal measurement of air pollution producing data so everybody become data producers everybody learn the data stewardship and it's only when they are in the position of the data operator can they actually understand what those duties are and why they're important and then they can we're coming to the last couple of questions we would expect that technology should help create well peace or may or a day may or something and we see today in the trade war between US and China seems like technology is one of the most important reason for causing that how do you think about that well I think technology doesn't solve problems or cause problems people solve problems and cause problems with technology and technology is useful whenever you can measure something if you can turn something into numbers or structured data technology allows you to act on it but for things like the conflicts in the human society sometimes not quantified at all sometimes there is no members behind it sometimes it's just ideology right and so for these things there is very little that technology can do to help which is why I think we should develop more social technologies that allow people to see common values despite their differences in positions in that sense the sustainable development goals is an important social innovation that will give people the numbers to talk about it right I can say I'm the digital minister I'm focusing on Go 17 17 17A 176 and so on and this become kind of common language and index that we can then put the cooperative frameworks on and partnerships on without those social technologies I think just by capitalistic technology alone we can of course fix some problems that you will also cause other problems and images cancel at each other out at the end so the social technology in addition to the industrial and capitalistic knowledge I think is the key to address the common problem that we have you once say you you don't work for the government today and Andre Tan works for no I work with there's nobody who works for no of course yeah I don't take orders and I don't issue orders I take suggestions and my ideas I give my opinions and ideas but it's always on a voluntary basis every ministry can choose to send one person to my office to learn together to rank their own score they plan their own work the only thing I ask is that they work out loud meaning that they let the people see what they're working and earn their trust by trusting the people first impressive and what is the the most scary thing for you or what are your concerns today no internet access economy crisis trade war world war three or the upcoming fierce platform or something like that are your concerns really concerns today I think my main concern is that people stop listening to one another the technology make it very easy for people to broadcast their opinions it starts from radio and then television right so it's too easy to speak to a million people and that costs arguably the world war two and then internet starts with the promise that you can now listen to millions of people together and that millions people can listen to each other but it's just a possibility if you don't exercise that possibility if you use the internet don't need to broadcast your ideas without listening to any ideas then actually it causes fragmented tribalism in the human society and each one of course have their own populist ideas that appeals to tribes but it actually doesn't make sense for the general population so I would argue it's not true populism true populism talks with the whole population and listens from the entire population I think that is the goal that we should aim for and we cannot gather people get trapped in their virtual realities and stop listening to one another then we have a real problem because then we don't have a society anymore I love that I would like the world to recognize you that extraordinary genius geek or super super transgender minister or any kind of type of people you want the world to recognize you I think I call myself a conservative anarchist conservative means that I want to preserve the traditions of different cultures and instead of destroying them you incorporate them anarchist means that I don't give or take orders that I want people to join through horizontal peer-to-peer collaboration rather than horizontal combining relationship and so yeah if the world remembers me as a conservative anarchist I would be very happy that's really great and tie yourself up thank you very much thank you thank you very much and this is a really good place