She’s so awesome. Ciao for now.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

Yes, thank you.

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, ...

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 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, ...

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

What was the experience like?

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?

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.

No, I can’t believe that, Audrey.

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?

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?

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?

Yeah, we’ll come back to that.

Even today?

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?

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?

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?

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

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

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.”

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.

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.

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 ...

Amazing.

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 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?

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

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’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.

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

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 ...