Until I get the surgery when I was 12 years old and that fixed the problem, the entire family knows that I really cannot feel upset, extreme joy, or anything that makes my heart beat too much.

Hello, and welcome to “Don’t Stop Us Now.” I’m Claire Hatton.

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Hi there. We hope you’re doing OK wherever you might be right now.

Yes, indeed. We’re heading into our eighth week of physical distancing and mostly staying at home right now. I know I’m certainly having my good days and my “not quite as good days.”

You can certainly say that again. Today is a very good day as we have a fascinating episode for you. It’s with Taiwan’s extraordinary Digital Minister, Audrey Tang. Audrey became the youngest government minister ever in Taiwan when she was appointed a few years ago at the age of 35. She’s also the world’s first ever transgender government minister.

It’s a remarkable story. Somewhat of a child prodigy who also had a serious heart condition, Audrey’s childhood was anything but conventional. She dropped out of school at the age of 14 to manage her own education, and at the age of 16 started her first successful software business.

Fast forward, and after some years working in Silicon Valley and further success, Audrey found herself moving from being a government activist in her own home country to a government minister.

It’s amazing. In this episode, you’ll hear how Audrey’s quick involvement in creating a valuable app has played a key role in Taiwan’s extraordinarily successful management of COVID-19, with the country never having to stop working. How her heart condition as a child means that to this day, Audrey doesn’t experience anger, upset, or even extreme joy.

How, in Taiwan, thanks to calling software coders and engineers program designers, there are significantly more women than men working in the field. Plus, Audrey’s unique ways of seeing arguments from both sides. Without further ado, sit back and enjoy this discussion with the remarkable Audrey Tang. Audrey Tang, welcome to don’t stop us now.

Hello.

It’s really great to have you on the show all the way from Taiwan. Thank you for giving up your time. We really appreciate it. Now, one of the first questions we like to ask just to help our audience really ground who you are and get to know just a little bit about you is, could you describe what you do today in your day job in just a couple of sentences?

My day job is Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of social innovation and open government. Today, I have maybe seven meetings around mask distribution, around using collaborative co-creation to combat the coronavirus.

Wow. We’re seriously living in strange times, aren’t we? I know that Taiwan has been one of the most forward- thinking countries. You were one of the first to respond to COVID-19.

We started last year, whereas many countries started this year. That did make a crucial difference.

It must have done. You’ve got only something like 388 cases today and 6 deaths, which is incredible when you consider how close you are to China. What do you think has really led to you being able to reduce the number of cases apart from starting in December versus starting in 2020, like the rest of the world did?

Starting from December, we strongly suspected that this is a human-to-human transmission. We did exactly as if it’s the same as SARS back in 2003. Now back in SARS, it took away 37 lives in Taiwan. We decided that it was 37 people too many.

Right after SARS, there’s a series of constitutional rulings, there’s a series of technological measures, and so on that prepared us for the next iteration of SARS, if you will. When this time came around, the outbreak from Wuhan last year, we started preparing to mobilize, and not only the government, but the civil society, everybody in the media, and so on, treat it as if the SARS came back again.

We very quickly started mobilizing to exactly the same amount of strands with the Central Epidemic Control Center and the National Health Insurance System kicking to the full gear, and so on. In a sense, we were inoculated by SARS.

Yeah, wow. It sounds like this SARS experience really got you to the point where you’re incredibly prepared. What’s it actually like day-to-day now in Taipei, for example?

It’s normal. People commute to work. The schools are open. People run their businesses. Aside from the air travel and tourism industries, which are hard-hit, every other aspect of the country works quite normally.

At the moment, we’re distributing medical mask, 9 per two weeks for adults, or 10 per two weeks for children. Like 95 percent of people on the street wear masks, and those who don’t keep a meter and a half distance from each other.

Wow. It does sound like you’re forward-thinkingness has got you to a point where not only have you managed the pandemic, but you’ve also got an economy that’s operating, which is fantastic.

They’re probably the only country in the world, practically. I guess it’s because Taiwan’s been confident that you’ve been able to isolate people who may be contagious, even if they’re asymptomatic. Is that right from the point of view of allowing people just to get on with life?

That’s correct. Contact tracing in Taiwan has been implemented. I think we and Korea are the two countries that implemented digital contact tracing really well. For example, for people who are under home quarantine, there is a digital fence.

If they return to Taiwan, if they’re a citizen returning to Taiwan, and they show no symptoms, they’re asked to self-quarantine in their home for 14 days. They were told that their mobile phone will basically keep track of their whereabouts.

It’s constitutional, but it’s only for 14 days. After the 14 days, their phone signals is no longer tracked. That’s one of the ways that we’ve been successful in implementing contact tracing.

It’s truly remarkable that Taiwan has been able to, for want of a better word, insulate itself so well and be able to be carrying on as normal. It’s almost like this bubble of normality in a world of disruption right now.

You touched on the digital tracking that’s been one way of keeping the rest of the population safe for those Taiwanese returning home via their mobile phone. I gather you’ve also recently, if I’ve read correctly, been getting back to your own coding roots as part of some of the work that you as Digital Minister have been doing during coronavirus.

Perhaps you could tell us what you as Digital Minister have been involved with.

Well, certainly. There’s a couple applications that are very popular in Taiwan. For example, there’s a real-time map that shows your nearby pharmacies. If you need nine masks right now, it shows you which pharmacies still have masks in-store.

You go there, you swipe your NHI card, you get nine masks, and then you can see, actually, after a couple minutes that the stock level of that pharmacy depletes by nine.

It is not only a very useful locator to which pharmacies to go to, but also a great public ledger, of sorts, that makes sure that people remain calm and know that there’s no hidden masks anywhere.

That’s my contribution, is mostly to work with the National Health Insurance Agency so that they publish the stock level as open data every three minutes instead of at the end of the day, as is usual of statistics by other countries.

If you only publish by the end of the day, it’s only the internal mechanisms in the government that can keep the pharmacies accountable. If you publish every couple minutes, then everybody can hold each other accountable.

It become truly participatory. The other application is called e-Mask. It’s that, if you still have a few mask in your home, and you don’t really need to rush to a pharmacy to pick it up, then you can at the comfort of your home use your mobile phone to preorder to your nearby convenience store and then collect it a week after.

I’d like to transfer now, step back, and explore Audrey Tang more, not just your role as Digital Minister, if that’s OK with you.

Of course.

Thank you. If we believe what we read, then your childhood was a little bit different to most. What are the things that stand out for you from your childhood?

I was born with a heart defect that prevents most of the not only mobility, but also the ability to feel truly upset. My grandparents and my parents told me that if I feel especially upset, then because my heart cannot pump so much oxygen into the brain, my face will turn people, and then I will feint.

Until I get the surgery when I was 12 years old, and that fixed the problem, the entire family knows that I really cannot feel upset, or extreme joy, or anything that makes my heart beat too much. I guess I remained calm more than most other children because of survival.

Gracious. I can imagine. Even as a young child, presumably your parents had to be very clever in managing you to manage your emotions.

Yeah, that’s right. My parents really got me a lot of entertainment, of sorts, of how to access to your emotions internally in an entertaining way. They explained, for example, the ideas of the Tao Te Ching, of the Taoism, and how people can be at ease with one’s emotions as a friend that’s living in your mind.

They also taught me how to take care of my own internal feelings, giving them names and verbalize them. Once you verbalize them, take a deep breath, and so on, then you distance yourself a little bit from your on-the-spot emotion and so on.

There’s quite a few self-help skills that I learned very early on.

I imagine, it sounds like, they’ve probably held you in good stead. How would you say you’re different today as a result of it?

I think that enabled me, in a difficult situation where people are very opinionated, to take all the sides. If I become enraged with one particular side, then I cannot really take the opposite.

Because I cannot even feel rage, even when people are busily fighting each other, I can remain calm and stay in a nonviolent position. Then build shared values out of those different, very strongly-held positions as a facilitator.

Truly unique perspective and skill that you have there. That’s fantastic. I gather as a young boy, as you were then, at about eight, if I’m not mistaken, you wrote a computer game for your younger brother to help him learn fractions.

I was eight years old at the time, yeah.

Amazing.

You were clearly so bright, but then school wasn’t a great experience for you, was it? Can you tell us a bit about your experience?

It depends on which school. I went through three kindergartens, six primary schools, and one year of junior high before dropping out. That’s 10 schools in 10 years. It’s a blur. There’s one unifying theme behind those different school experience in that whatever I wish to learn is just being written, just being researched.

It’s not in the textbooks, and so at some point, I just talked to my junior high principal saying that there’s this great new website called arXiv. It’s a preprint server where people publish journal papers before they get official peer review, or public peer review of sorts.

I just wrote them and emailed. They didn’t know I was just 14 years old. We can start co-creating research in real time. Everything I read there was like 10 years in the future compared to our textbooks.

I told my principal that I can read the textbooks, or I can buy the textbooks for the 10 years in the future. After considering for a couple minutes, my principal said, “OK, you don’t have to go to school anymore.”

That’s why I remain very optimistic about the innovation capability of career public servants.

Incredible.

Wow, so it was actually your teacher that said that you didn’t, that you could drop out of school?

That’s right, and they would cover for me. At that time, Taiwan did not have an experimental school law. We passed that a couple years after that. I will have to pay fine – my family, anyway – if I skip school, but they basically faked the record for me, so I can first study in the nearby universities and then start a startup of my own.

Wow, fantastic, and at 16, you started your own IT company. You were pretty successful at that. Can you describe, what was that like, starting your own company as a 16-year-old?

It’s a little bit challenging, because I am classified as a child worker, [laughs] meaning that my access to the boardroom and so on is limited. My mom have to be the shareholder and not me, because I am not at a legal age.

Despite all those age discriminations, from my viewpoint, it was quite an interesting experience. I get to learn that in the business world, it is not enough to build a product or a service — it need to fit people’s needs.

We built, for example, the first people-to-people auction sites like eBay in Taiwan. It’s called CoolBid. We build search engines. We build a lot of useful products. What’s even more important is to co-create with your participants.

That’s why I learned very early on not to call people users, because if you call them users, you distance from them. You don’t get to learn from them.

Then I think you moved to Silicon Valley when you were 19 years old. What were your impressions of the Valley back then, because I’m imagining it was either just before or just after the dot-com crash, the first round of dot-com crash?

I was at eBay and certainly went to San José around that same time. What were your impressions of it all as a 19-year-old fresh from Taiwan?

It’s a strange place. In Taiwan, we call programmers “program designers.” There’s more women than men in Taiwan writing computer programs, because designers are girls. Engineers are boys.

We call programming program design, so we have the reverse challenge of trying to attract more boys into coding.

Even today?

Even today, even today.

That is really fascinating that the language…

Yeah, we’ll come back to that.

Exactly. In Silicon Valley at that time, it’s a very male-oriented culture. Even in open source, or especially in open source communities, there’s online forums where, at that time, there’s women who are adopting a male nickname.

Not because they’re transgender or gender fluid, but because it avoids harassment. It seems very imbalanced to me. Later on, I would participate, for example, in the Geek Feminism Wiki, the Code of Conduct Movement, and things like that. Try to address some of those imbalances that I never experienced in Taiwan.

Yeah, truly incredible. Going back to the language of program designer, rather than software engineer, say, and things like that, is it as simple as just changing the language, or is there a heritage that comes with that in Taiwan?

You would think, if it was as simple as us changing the nomenclature, which I’m not going to say very well, in countries like Australia, United States, UK, wherever, we’d have done that. What do you think it is that really makes the difference?

I really think that the language made a lot of difference, because designer is about talking to people, and engineers is about talking to engines. Nowadays, with Siri and Alexa, the engines actually talk back.

In any case, talking to people, like emotional capability and so on, is usually taught even in kindergarten as something that girls, having a superior skill. If you say that program design is fundamentally about exploring design and talking to people…

That is to say, to stakeholders on a user journey and things like that – and try not to call them user journeys – that women will naturally be attracted to serve as role models and coaches along this side.

If you portray this as something that interacts only with engines, then it makes those advantages of people skills less useful.

Going back to your career journey, you showed great initiative and entrepreneurialism taking yourself off to Silicon Valley. I believe you sold at least one company and then also went on to be invited to advise Apple. What do you think were the keys to your success?

I think Linus Torvalds of Linux and Git said it best. Basically, he's just lazy and just rely on the work of others. That’s their success metric. [laughs]

No, I can’t believe that, Audrey.

No, seriously, it’s always my experience that, if I patent my work, if I hold close my “intellectual property” I did that, actually, in the first round in San José. Then I found out that people who want to contribute are all people who are in it for profit.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it also limits the stakeholders that I could engage. In the later ventures, such as the Raku Language, used to be called Perl 6, and the g0v movement – spelled g-0-v – in Taiwan which I have participated, we made sure that in the very beginning, we say we relinquish our copyright using the Creative Commons framework.

Then suddenly, everybody can co-create, and they can even say it’s their work, because I relinquish even the attribute right to my work. They can say it’s their work. More people joined, like tens of thousands, daily, on the g0v chatrooms.

I think the success truly belongs to everyone participating. I am just making the interaction space and holding it in-place after all these years.

Absolutely, that open source movement, I think, has just really been such a game-changer, hasn’t it? Changing topics completely, I know at about, I think it was around the age of 25.

It must have been when you were in the middle of these startups, you took the decision to transition to be a female. What was the trigger to make the transition?

There’s no trigger, per se. I’m naturally born with a testosterone level that’s around a 70 years old man, meaning that it’s between normal female puberty levels and male puberty levels.

I never really developed so much on the first puberty, anyway. It really intrigued me how it’s like to develop the brain through the female puberty, the relationship with one’s body, the higher resolution of feeling emotions with a sense of purpose, with a sense of empathy.

Not only with people, but with the environment, and so on. I read all about it, but there’s no firsthand experience. I really wanted to go through the second puberty to also get this firsthand experience, which went on for about three years.

Longer than which, of course, the families tend to suffer, [laughs] because of the heightened emotional sensitivity. In any case, I’m really glad that I went through the second puberty, and then I have a wider mental range when talking to people in their firsthand experiences.

There’s no single trigger. It just seemed like something that I would really like to explore and inquire.

What was the experience like?

It’s quite interesting, because along the same time, I was traveling around the world to more than 20 cities, holding hackathons, building the Perl 6, at the time, language. I also get to experience the different cultures around LGBTIQA+ around the different cultures.

In Taiwan, we’re very tolerant. People just get by my name with no problem. In Japan, they call me 鳳たん, which is a very cute, comical version of my new name and so on. I was actually in Australia as well.

People are very accepting and inclusive, but it’s less so in the nearby East Asia jurisdictions. There’s people who are afraid or people who are frankly just not so much understanding about the experience and so on. To me, it is also a chance to learn about the cultures around the globe.

No, absolutely. I can imagine it. If you put your curious lens on, it would have been very interesting, but it also must have been sometimes a little distressing. I suspect you’re going to tell me that you don’t feel like you’re courageous.

For me, you’ve made some really big decisions in your life that feel like they would come from a place of courage. Things like leaving school at 14, transitioning, and then, after this, you then went on to protest and be an activist.

How do you think you’ve been so clear of who you are and what you stand for? Which I’m thinking must be behind the courage at such a young age.

Again, I think I would go back to this inability to feel upset, because whenever there’s a new situation happening, it’s mostly the internal fear, uncertainty, doubt that makes people into a learned helplessness.

I think just having the immunity from the first experience, make sure that the fear doesn’t lead to anger. I may have some fear, but it doesn’t lead to anger, because I cannot experience anger. That doesn’t lead to hate, and that doesn’t lead to suffering, to paraphrase Yoda.

You talked about fear. I’d love to hear, are there times where you’ve felt fear or self-doubt about your, for example, ability to take on a new opportunity or to try and do something new?

If there have been those times, what have you done, or what tips have you used on yourself to push through those moments of fear?

To me, fear always leads to curiosity, and curiosity lead to learning. Learning, I guess, leads to joy. To me, it’s a very hardwired pathway in my mind, that whenever I fear something, I am motivated to learn about it.

I wanted to learn both about my fear, because that’s telling me that there’s some physical harm. There’s some mental harm that is on the way, and it’s very useful. It’s like an alarm bell. If there’s no fear, it’s like people who don’t feel pain. They can very easily get themselves burned.

I think it’s a very useful alarm bell. It’s just that, because I cannot feel anger or hate that led from anger, I have more mental capacity to feel curiosity.

Interesting. That explains why, I guess, you were able to, at the age of 33, I think, you decided to retire, certainly from the commercial world or the startup world and focus on things that you enjoy.

That’s right.

I think relatively soon after that, you became an activist. Is that correct?

I’ve always been an activist. The fight for autonomy in homeschooling and alternative education is one of the first movement that I joined, and I was just 12 at the time, 13.

I think it’s just that, after stopping working in a for-profit, but with purpose, manner, a working on a for-purpose, and sometime with profit, manner, it enabled me to connect more with the activism groups and charities before I fully occupied the parliament and helped the students live streaming their occupy.

You went from being an activist to being a minister in the Taiwanese government.

The youngest ever.

The youngest ever. What are your priorities as Taiwan’s Digital Minister?

The job description, which I posted on Twitter the day I become Digital Minister, was actually a prayer that I wrote in New Zealand the month before I become the Digital Minister. I was very inspired by the Maori chants that the Open Source Open Society Conference opened with.

I just wrote a poem, a prayer to celebrate that, and that became my job description. The prayer goes like this.

“When we see the Internet of things, let’s make it a 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. Whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here.”

That’s my job description.

Wow, I love that. There can’t be many people that have, one, written their own job description, but two, made a poem of it. Fantastic. We’ve talked a bit about the skills that you’ve brought to being the Digital Minister for Taiwan.

I think you don’t actually have a ministry. You’re across multiple ministries, is that correct?

My office delegates from each ministry. We have around 12 delegates from 12 ministries. They’re section chief level or all the way to director general level and work in a very horizontal manner.

The other half of my office is experts from the RCA, from IDEO, from CIID, professional designers, facilitators, and technologists.

You’ve talked about what lies ahead in terms of virtual reality, AI, and even singularity, or plurality. What role, if any, does your ministry, or do you have, in terms of thinking about helping the broader Taiwanese population stay relevant and get the skills they need?

One of the signature platform promises of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen’s first term, which currently has – let’s see – one month left, but she’s got elected, so we get four more years. One of the signature promises is broadband as human right.

Even on top of Taiwan, that’s almost 4,000 meters high in the Saviah or the Jade Mountain, you still have 10 Megabits per second in a 4G connection at around €15 per month and unlimited bandwidth.

If anywhere in Taiwan you don’t have that, it’s personally my fault. I will see that it’s fixed. It makes sure that people is not just being talked to, like in radios and television era, but rather they can become co-producers.

We start teaching not media literacy, as if they were users, but rather media competence, as if they’re producers, as early as the first grade as part of our basic education.

Making sure that people, no matter whether they’re 8 years old or they’re 80 years old, can be fruitful participants into civic journalism and other endeavors that makes full use of their unlimited bandwidth at no marginal cost.

What about for the average person listening now, like myself? What’s your advice on how we could best future-proof ourselves?

I think the most important thing is to take a deep breath and do not let anger control you. That is the most important thing. When you’re seeing a picture or a short clip that is designed to make you feel a sense of outrage and click share without fact-checking anything, you need to understand that this is a manufactured virus of the mind.

If only by taking a deep breath, you can take a little bit step back. Then you reduce the r0 value, the virality, of that message. Then it’s like wearing a protective mask. I think a habit of looking from a very social media, not from a passive consumer perspective, but rather from a producer perspective, is very important.

It sounds as if what you’re saying is that, as people go into the future, they’re going to get more skills for critical thinking and use technology better to really manage the information that they’re receiving.

That’s exactly right.

I know we are running out of time. This has been such a fascinating conversation. I think we could talk for hours and hours. One question we can’t let you leave without asking, because we ask all of our guests this, is what advice would you give your 30-year-old self, if you could go back in time?

I’m just 38, so it’s not…It’s just eight years before, I guess. If I go back eight years before, I would say that…No, I wouldn’t change a thing, actually. At that time, I was already planning for working on entirely for purpose and not for profit.

I guess I would encourage myself to do so even sooner than I actually did. I wouldn’t take three years to transition into entirely for-purpose. Maybe I’ve got enough savings, anyway. I should do that when I was 30 years old.

What a nice place to be. Yeah, absolutely. We wish you every success in pursuing that purpose, because it sounds like amazingly constructive things are happening. If listeners wanted to find out more about you and your work, Audrey, where should they go?

I am @audreyt, T for Tang. I am @audreyt on Twitter.

Fantastic, OK. We will share that link with listeners. It leaves it for me now to have the honor of saying thank you so much for this fascinating conversation, Audrey, and for giving us this time at a pretty busy time. We genuinely appreciate it so much, so thank you, indeed.

Thank you for the awesome interview, and have a good local time.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you very much. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Audrey’s such an interesting and impressive character, isn’t she?

Yeah, she certainly is. If I had to summarize Audrey, there’s something about the word duality that really seems apt to me. Her gender story, male, now female. The fact she’s a government minister, but also self-declared activist.

Then there’s also her ability to connect people from really different worlds and see very opposing points of view, and work with them more constructively.

Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. I loved her work on the coronavirus app. How remarkable that the Taiwanese never had to work from home, and yet they’ve had around 400 people with the virus and just 6 deaths.

I know. Those numbers are so small, because they’ve got a population similar to Australia’s, actually, about 23 million. The stats are remarkable.

Incredible.

It’s such a great demonstration of a key part of her ability to stay connected to the community, harness their ideas and other resources, and use her own phenomenal digital talents to help bring useful things for society to life, too.

Yeah, exactly. I also find it remarkable that she insists on total transparency for her work these days. For example, we had to agree to having the transcript for our entire conversation with her published by her ministry, as she does with every single meeting she has.

It’s really refreshing, actually. I can think of numerous other government ministers elsewhere in the world that I’d like to be that transparent as well.

Me, too. Well, that’s this episode done and dusted. Stay tuned for another of our new mini-episodes next week, and then a fantastic interview with New York Times Bestselling author and founder and CEO of Acumen, Jacqueline Novogratz.

She’s so awesome. Ciao for now.