The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 97. How to fight fake news and strengthen democracy (Audrey Tang)

Episode Date: September 8, 2024

Is technology destroying democracy, or can it be used to strengthen it? How did Taiwan improve public trust in politicians by 60%? Could the NHS be transformed by digital consultations for the better? The world's first digital minister, Audrey Tang, joins Rory and Alastair to discuss all this and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Audio Editor: Aaliyah Akude Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to the restispolities.com. That's the restis politics.com. Welcome to the rest is politics leading with me, Alist Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And today we are interviewing a member of the Taiwanese cabinet, Audrey Tang, who is the first global minister for digital and who has done the most astonishing thing. in particular, did a very unique COVID response in Taiwan, which had a completely different approach and achieved spectacular results, transformed the way the Taiwanese government engaged with citizens, really by changing democracy through technology, creating forms of virtual citizens' assemblies and much more. But Audrey is also a fascinating figure in her own right, and her journey into government, I think is also something worth exploring. So on that, over to you, Alistair. Now, Audrey, a couple of things looking at your childhood that strike me as being really, really interesting. First is that you have to really fight against pretty serious illness as a child.

So I'd like to ask you about that. But also, you do seem to be extraordinarily, ridiculously clever. You were reading classics at five. You were studying advanced maths at six. You were programming at eight. Then you dropped out of school at 14 and started your own full-time programme. programming business age 15. So just take us through your childhood of those two elements of it. Sure. I was born with a heart defect that simply means that whenever I get too upset,

either too happy or too excited or too angry, I would just faint and maybe wake up in a hospital or something. And so I learned very early on to be moderate in my emotions, practicing Taoist breathing and chi-gong and many other things. That's one part. But that also means that I get to focus. much more on programming. When I was eight, I was very interested in mathematics, but not in math, not in calculating. And so I first learned programming in basic without a personal computer, just writing on a piece of paper. But after a while, my parents did agree to get me a personal computer, and then I spent a lot of time just experimenting on the computer, all sort of ways that I can make it visualize or interactively display, all sort of the neuromest mathematical ideas that

was learning at the time, like chaos theory or strange tractors and things like that. So that was fun. But I went to three kindergartens, six primary schools, and one year of junior high before finally dropping out with the blessing of the head of my school, who said that since you're already doing research on the internet, with the people who published their preprints anyway, so she would not stand in my way to do more advanced research. And so after a year, I started a company with a few of my friends. If people listening to this, some people will have also been,

not many, but some will have also been very talented children. Are the lessons of some of the difficulties of being more of a prodigy as a child? What were the positives, what were the negatives, and what lessons would you share with other people who've been through a similar experience? There's a great question. I think there's two things I would share.

One is that it now takes almost no effort to find one's intellectual counter. counterparts online, whenever you feel like contributing to open source, to the internet commons, to co-create something online and so on, it is not actually difficult to find the counterparts. So the earlier you get to the internet and to, as I mentioned, get blessings on your environment to participate in research and collaborative development, the better. The other part I would say is that even though that somebody may look like that there very mature beyond their ages. It doesn't mean that they're comprehensively so among all the different

areas. And so it is quite easy, for example, to see somebody very erudite and like saying very complex sentences, very early, just like, you know, chat J.GPT or some other language models, and assume that they're equally mature when it comes to emotional intelligence, when it comes to social settings and things like that. But actually, these areas take longer to mature. And so, very clearly know oneself and also communicate clearly that which parts of you are not as mature as your other intellectual pursuits, I think that also helps to set and manage expectations. Sometimes when you were a child, did it feel a little bit isolating? Because presumably when you were much younger, when you were eight or nine or ten,

you must have been confused and sometimes frustrated by the fact that other children or even other adults were not able to focus on the issues that you were able to focus on. So you must have felt at some level a form of difference between you and other people. Yeah, indeed. When I was eight, I was bullied in school, and it really perplexes me. Why would the second in the class to basically wish me death so that he could become the first in the class? Because to me, it does not actually increases anything that he learns or anything like that. Because I work with intrinsic motivations more, I cannot fathom why would people behave that way.

So I actually read a lot of Pierschette, Winnicott, and the other child development psychologist, just to get myself to a frame where I can understand, you know, the family pressure, the relative lack of self-confidence, the relative status, that they're anchoring this child's self-worth on, and so on before I can finally see, oh, that is why they're behaving this way. Tell us a little bit about your family story as a way of thinking a bit about the bigger story of Taiwan's development. So my father's mother, my grandma, was born near Lu Kang in Taiwan, and she speaks like Dai Yi and also Japanese, Nihonga, growing up. And my father's father comes from Sichuan, and so speak the Chinese and Mandarin. And he came to Taiwan after the relocation of the ROC armed forces and the government to Taiwan in 1949.

At a time, the island was facing severe challenges. not just food shortage, but also lack of industrial infrastructure, among many other things. In the 50s, the government implemented land reforms, redistributing large land owners to tenant farmers in Suu. And so the 60s, we saw Taiwan shift toward export-oriented industrialization in a stronger agricultural sector and leveraging the low labor costs to attract foreign investments in Suon. And in the 70s and 80s, we continue to diversify our economy, moving to higher. value industries such as chips, which would eventually become a global leader. And in the 90s, we democratized, lifted the martial law, and became so-called one of the four Asian tigers. And

that's the time when I started learning personal computers and there's widespread democratization costs to directly elect the president, for example, in 96. And eventually that affected quite a few constitutional amendments that added a lot of things like universal health care and so on, to our constitution. As you know, this podcast is mainly about politics. And you became effectively a politician, but in a very, very different route that most politicians that we talked to took, you were part of this movement that kind of used tech to challenge the government, occupy parliament, and then became part of government. And you actually, you've had many firsts in your life, but one is that you became the government.

world's first digital minister. So you took all that stuff that you developed and learned through childhood and then took that into government. So just talk us through that process of how this protest movement became the heart of a government. Certainly. So after working with the open source community and many Silicon Valley companies on what's called enterprise social, which is productivity software, bringing people together with wiki or microblocking or things like that to foster the sharing of knowledge within enterprises, we were caught into action, so to speak, in 2014. Now, to set a stage, there was a widespread demonstration by students mostly, but also people who were worried about a trade deal with Beijing at March that year. And we have more than 20 NGOs,

each on a side of the parliament. And before they actually broke in, the students broke in and occupied the parliament peacefully for three weeks. The reason why it is one of those very rare occupied that even with half a million people on the street, it did not escalate to violence. Neither did it go nowhere. That was because it was live streamed throughout. And so G0V or Gov zero, which is part of the movement that fosters the civic technology and helping the civil society organizations with digital tools helped to facilitate conversations among those people who went into each corner of the occupied parliament. On one corner, they may have a deliberation about the 5G, sorry, 4G at the time infrastructure by the likes of Huawei or ZTE and so on.

Another corner may be the impact on labor conditions. Another corner may be on environment, another may be on the publishing industry, and so on. And so with the digital tools, we radically trusted the people who participated on the street and online so that every day, you literally see those uncommon grounds being built by people. So it's like a very large-scale citizens' assembly, although it is not randomly chosen by rather self-selection, in a sort of self-selection among like open space technology voting by walking to which booth. So yeah, so long story short,

the people who occupy the parliament open up the conversation in a nonviolent way with half a million people on the street. And so people could every day see the rough consent, that was reached among the occupiers. So in many senses, it was not a protest inasmuch as a demonstration that shows the Speaker of the Parliament that people do actually coalesce into something like a rough consensus after three weeks of nonviolent Occupy. And Speaker 1 simply said at the end of Occupy, yes, that is the direction we're going. And so the trade deal was cancelled and people embraced this idea of crowdsourcing at the end of that year.

Audrey, please help us understand how practically this system works. I mean, how on earth do you get 500,000 voices to reach a consensus and generate anything workable? Certainly. So in each corner that deliberates one particular issue, you can, for example, talk about a 4G infrastructure, whether we open up the core network to the likes of Huawei and ZTE. Another corner may talk about labor or some other things. And so when people have a conversation around that issue for each table, for each corner, there may be a facilitator or one or more people who record this in real time.

And in any case, it was always live streamed. And so the facilitator, many of them trained previously by the Youth Development Agency in Taiwan, is experts in what's called the focus conversation method, which is one of the facilitating techniques that tries to get people to accomplish. agree on the common facts and then reflect on each other's feelings. And so after a while, you start to see common feelings and a common acknowledgement of common facts. And those were then registered and published online to serve as agenda for the next day's deliberation, which tends to be more focused on specific issues. And Audrey, what lessons did this teach you about democracy? Because

often when we look at politics in the United States or the United Kingdom, we think about politics in terms of two political parties attacking each other. But you seem to be describing somehow 500,000 people with a facilitator, finding common ground much more easily. So what are the structural differences? Why does it work in this online platform better than it works in a parliament or a Senate? So first of all, that was a hybrid exercise. Most people participated on site, not online.

So when I say half a million people on the street, I mean, at the peak of the demonstration, like literally that many people went to the places around the parliament. But of course, people who actually had time to stay a full day for deliberations is a fraction of that. But nevertheless, we have many people who were not just interested, but also augmented with digital tools. They're willing to first check the facts, like they can enter their company name or company number, registration number to see exactly how does the cross-trade deal affects their particular business. And also the fact that it was registered, like transcribed and put on the record online, also made sure that people spoke in a more civilized fashion as opposed to, you know,

off the record, which many occupies tend to escalate or spur out of control. So I think the main lessons are first that facilitation in a way that de-escalates the situation and focus on issues at Hans is very important, but equally important is that live streaming and the fact that there's no escalation that would go unnoticed. The tech tool that was at the heart of this is called Polis, P-O-L-I-S. And Roy and I are talking to you, we're both in Scotland at the moment, where Polis means police. And I just wonder, you've presented a very kind of positive citizens' assembly type view of this, But is there not also a risk that this can be used for bad as well, used by authoritarian governments, used by bad players in the tech field?

So how do you weigh up that balance between technology that can be used as a force for good in decision making and the same technology that can be used for bad? There's many implementations of this online deliberation idea. In 2014, during the Occupy, I believe it's mostly hackpad. and Lumil, and we started using Polis the next year in 2015 when we deliberated about the Uber case. And you're absolutely correct that any tools like this can be abused. And I still remember that when we started to deliberate the Airbnb case after the Uber case, Airbnb Taiwan literally sent a email to all its members in Taiwan saying that please

go on the police platform and vote exactly this way to support the Airbnb. line and so on. So it is not completely unheard of that people would like to mobilize and to kind of game the system somehow and so on. There are two things that we have done that really improves the resilience against such ways to capture it. One is that on the police platform in particular, when you see people's feelings, like how do you feel about Airbnb or about Uber, it is freeform. So it is not just people voting on the predetermined questions. It is actually people sharing how they feel. And so when they see each other's feelings, which tends to be more nuanced than the standard questions, then they get into a much more deliberative mood. And so from our

understanding, less than one third of the Airbnb people, members in Taiwan actually voted along the Airbnb lines. And second, the system, unlike traditional social media, it does not highlight the divisiveness or hate. But rather, it acknowledged the device, but surfaces the kind of sentiments like in Uber. People would say, search pricing when the demand is high is fine, but undercutting existing meters is not fine. So it tends to surface those ideas that gets broad acceptance among the people who are on different sides of the ideological divide and just say that, oh, we will sort this to the top. And so lead by example. And so other people will then propose more nuanced, eclectic ideas. And so these two designs means that even if 5,000 people get mobilized

and vote exactly the same, they're just one dot in the visualization. They still have to bridge across the differences in order to surface the ideas that speaks to more than one science, essentially. And Audrey, we're obviously in a world in which we're very troubled by social media, troubled by X, troubled by Facebook, troubled by the ways in which these algorithms seem to encourage polarization and populism. Do you have any reflections on, firstly, whether you agree with that, and if you do, what could be done to improve the way that social media interacts with politics? Yeah. In Taiwan, we've learned long ago that this kind of town hall or alignment assemblies or this hybrid citizen assembly or citizens initiative or participatory budgeting

need to take place on an actual public square supported by the civil society and the government instead of taking place on private sector advertisement-fueled so-called social media. And so we built our own pro-social social media platforms like join the jov. t.w, which is the one-stop shop for all sort of citizen engagements online. so separate from Facebook or X.com. But I also see that, for example, community notes on X.com, they specifically learned from the polis exercise that Taiwan did. And so nowadays, you can actually co-create the notes that gets attached on those viral

X posts. And only the notes that speaks across the different party lines, different ideological lines, except by both sides, gets amplified into visibility. So I do see that this bridging algorithms are also being used by more mainstream social media, but much more pressure needs to be done from the civil society and from the regulators before we can see the social media that prioritizes this kind of pro-social ranking in civil. Audrey, how was this all used when it came to COVID? And how did that impact upon the way that Taiwan handled the COVID outbreak?

So a lot of the co-created policies that were deliberated on the joint platform, on the VTalong platform, ended up getting the investment from the state as digital public infrastructures. So many years before COVID, we already invested in the so-called civil IoT system, the Internet of Things system, that established real-time monitoring with citizens' participation, air quality, and water quality and on many other things environmentally. And so when COVID happened, people repurposed this real-time API infrastructure, but instead of showing the air quality and so on, it shows the next available mask for purchase when we started rationing out masks very early on in 2020.

And the same group, the G0V, Gov-Zero, Civic Tech people, as the Taiwan COVID response mandated contact tracing, also came up with a way that is much more privacy preserving. It came up with the idea of SMS-based contact tracing, where you just generate a random code as a venue owner, and the person who visits you, scan that random code and send the SMS to 1922, and that's it. So the venue doesn't even learn the phone number or anything,

and privacy is preserved, but that held forth until Alpha and Delta until the first wave of Omicron. And Audrey, can you, for international listeners, explain in simple terms, what this meant for Taiwan during COVID? What type of lockdown did you end up having and how was it different from other people? And what was the consequence in terms of public health? So Taiwan, for the first couple years into the pandemic, achieved, I think, among the lowest global death rates during that stage. And during all these three years and a half, we've never had a citywide lockdown. We, of course, had quarantines in border control, but we did not impose anything intercity and all the TSM and other companies, manufacturing sector, kept working throughout the pandemic.

And so that led to, I think, one of the fastest grades of economic growth in the world during those few years. And it also led to a kind of solidarity between our different sectors that led us counter not just the pandemic, but also the infidemic without government-minted to take down. on social media platforms, people by and large using community node-like techniques inoculated each other's mind by contributing to collaborative fact-finding. In addition to having been the digital minister, you also minister, this is a great title, Minister for Social Innovation. What does a Minister for Social Innovation do? I was ministering in charge of social innovation, youth engagement, and open government. So social innovation, to me, means that it is a larger sector, not just,

the more traditional co-ops or the social enterprises, but it also includes the advocacy groups, and it also includes like decentralized autonomous organizations and many new forms of organizations. As long as there is a clear way to measure the social impact of such organizations, we worked to make sure that the social sector, as we call them, have agenda-setting power when it comes to, for example, public infrastructure. So social innovation means that people closest to the pain, no matter how they're organized, are given the voice to not just voice out the pain, but also share the kind of solutions that they prototyped on the local scale.

So that through mechanisms like the presidential hackathon every year, we can uplift those local ideas, those local innovations, into national infrastructures. Do ministers in Taiwan have to endure the same sort of abuse online, and vile treatment from members of the public that most politicians in most democratic parts of the world have to endure? Well, I mean, I practice troll hugging. And so during my tenure of seven and half years serving in a cabinet, there's no shortage of trolls for me to hug. And so, yes, in a nutshell, but I think two elements are different. One is that because I'm non-partisan or non-binary partisan. I do not actually go to any party rally or identify with any party. So in this sense,

I can't serve the constituents without the more like party colored kind of attacks that other ministers and other political systems tend to kind of have to draw the line of which party you are in. And the other thing is that because we have a very mature way of turning this complaints and so on, into invitations of co-creation so that many trolls that engage me online, I measure only to respond to the constructive parts, and they ended up contributing quite a bit into social innovation. And when I invited them, for example, to my office hour. It used to be like every week, the social innovation lab, and many of them actually do come and contribute meaningfully. And so I think the way to kind of harness this conflict into co-creation is also quite interesting,

quite unique in Taiwan's high trust society. As a very smart person coming from outside government into government, what were the things that surprised you about government, both negatively and positively? The most surprising thing to me was that how many innovators are there in the Korea Public Service, how many innovators there are, like usually just around the Section Chief level, a little bit above and below, they actually are very close. to the pain. They actually do know how to solve wicked problems. They may not have the blessing of the directors general or the ministers to implement their plans, but they actually have it to figure

out years ago. So that was the most surprising thing. It was just because of anonymity. They could not talk about it. And so a lot of my work as minister is to design safe spaces where they can pseudonymously participate, like in the presidential hackathon, or that they can work with their civil society counterparts. And if the ideas didn't work, they can say, oh, I'm just collaborating with civil society. But if their idea win the top five place in the yearly presidential hackathon, the trophy is a projector. If you turn on, it projects the president giving you the trophy. And so if they get a presidential blessing that their idea will become public infrastructure project in the next fiscal year, then they basically change their career.

So by designing ways that lowers their risk and save their time when it comes to public sector innovation. We were able to engage many innovators across the different parts of the departments as well as in the local government. And Ordo you give us two or three really good ideas that came out of these hackathons. One of the good idea is to invest in the digital public infrastructure of sharing data in such a way that does not compromise privacy but allows people to analyze the trends when it comes to public health. when it comes to like sports data, people like me that has specific conditions, like what kind of exercises tend to be more useful and not threatening my health condition and so on.

So in many jurisdictions, people were still stuck in the old ways where you have to go to an enclave or you have to trust people to process the private data. But very early on during the presidential hackathon, we realized that these analysis can be done in a way that does not involve the raw data leaving the silos, but could instead using like zero knowledge and advanced cryptography to have the researchers put the algorithms to those individual silos so that they can get useful analysis for either environment, public health or sports or anything,

and do not compromise the privacy in any way. And so this kind of investment of computations over private data without compromising privacy as a infrastructure, I think that's one of the, very good ideas that came out of the presidential hackathon. Maybe one more non-tech example of an idea that was generated by people that she thought was good. For example, there was another team that came from one of the remote islands in Taiwan. And prior to the presidential hackathon, because the people who suffered armed at one's surgery and so on,

the local practitioners, the local medics, were not fully trusted by their family. they insisted that they fly a helicopter back to Taiwan for the full treatment, and there was a helicopter crash just before the presidential hackathon. And so they really worked on the problem of telecare, and they sussed out the problems like the broadband as a human right, whether it is possible to get digital signatures from the families, whether it is possible for the specialized doctors in Taiwan to remotely take care of the patients, whether it is possible to collaborate with we do things like non-invasive or potentially even invasive surgeries and so on, whether we need to change the law and so on.

So they really prototyped that during the few months of the presidential hackathon. And after winning the hackathon, we comprehensively change the law so that it allows for this kind of remote telecare and also work with the telecoms so that the universal service includes essential services including telecare. So that no matter how remote you are or how high up in the mountain you are, you can now enjoy the kind of bidirectional broadband that is required for this kind of medical procedures to work. And we also simplify our digital signature act thanks to the presidential hackathon. Okay, Alistair Audrey, quick break.

Hi, everybody, it's Dominic Samaruk here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest history, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite,

kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her.

We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. And we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. Audrey, another first, you're the world's first openly non-binary transgender minister. I just wonder if you could talk us through that journey and also whether that ever became an issue that

political opponents or media try to use against you in any way? Well, I would say that the Taiwanese people are far more chill about this, so that when I became the minister in 2016, I said that my party affiliation is not applicable, and gender is not applicable. And people are much more interested in the first part rather than the second part. So I was born with not just a heart effect, but I would learn when I turned 20 that I was born with a naturally low testosterone level,

that of a 70-year-old man or something. So I never feel that I was fully developed during my first adolescence. And so after learning that fact around when I was 24, I took then estrogen and so on. And so went through the second puberty. But again, I would say that not very fully, so that I now feel that in my mind there's not half of the people closer to me, half of people different from me, is really taking both sides. And so I would say it

really also affected my politics. If I feel that at one side of the debate, I really cannot see their viewpoint. Nowadays, I would just take a ethnographic trip to basically hang out with them until I can also see things from their stereoscopic vision. So I would say it's a net plus for me as a politician, and it was not like target of trolls and so on for the Taiwanese political scene. What does that say about China, Taiwan, that that is kind of not a big deal there? Because, you know, our politics at the moment is one of the most toxic debates that we have. And I can't fully understand why, but it has become quite toxic. So what can we learn from what you've experienced?

Well, I mean, in traditional Mandarin, all our pronouns sound the same anyway. And so there is no differences when you kind of pronounce. Give us that in Mandarin. What's the he-she-day in Mandarin? Right. So he-she-day are ta, ta, and ta, respectively. Right. And so, I mean, you can't try to make it very different on the written form,

but even there, there are gender-neutral ways to use it. That doesn't sound strange. So, I mean, in English, I said quite publicly that might pronounce it any or whatever. And so I don't really care. It cannot really offend me. And so I think that kind of default really also adds to the chill. You've been incredibly generous about government and colleagues and civil servants. But could you maybe, I tempt you to be a little bit more honest about some of the frustrations of government that you saw coming in from the outside, some of the things that are a bit more negative about bureaucracies. From very early on, I learned that you really want to practice

broad listening. Broadcasting, that's fine. That's a very useful technology. But even though we do have the technology that lets people listen across, literally have a million people, right? But for each topic, maybe thousands of people that can reliably, through sortitions, through citizen assembly, through facilitated conversation, that gets even more inexpensive by the year, really most public servants are not interested in practicing this kind of listening. listening at scale. And it boils down, I think, to the idea of signal and noise ratio. It is quite entrenched in their upbringing, in their lived experience, that the more people you listen to, the more noise you end up collecting, and just to absorb those noise, emotions and personal

attacks and whatever, that is part of this listening process is so time-consuming that even if they knew that it would reduce their risk by essentially pre-scanning for all the potential responses to various other political possibilities to soothe out the adjacent possible, so to speak. Even though that it does reduce the risk, they would not engage in this list in a skill unless they truly don't know what to do. So which is why in the first 2015 conversations before I became minister, the public service only worked with the government. of zero community on issues that they honestly don't have an answer about, things that are truly emerging like Uber and Airbnb, that even the different ministries have wildly different ideas

about. So they're okay with the people having that conversation because they don't have it figure out, but for things that they think they have it figure out, there is a real reluctance in listening at scale. Audrey, thank you so much for all your time. And if I can, for my final question, bring us back to where I started, which is the bigger picture for Taiwan. If you had to predict, would you think that at some point China will use force to retake Taiwan, as it were? And in that context, how much to the Taiwanese

people focus upon the American general election and the choice between Trump and Kamala Harris? Well, the PRC never took Taiwan, so that would be annexation. That would not be retake. Okay. In any case, I think they really started trying that, starting like 1996 or something, during our first presidential election. So it is not entirely news to us that they would want to put pressure and also want to influence presidential elections and also maybe create puppets, candidates. But fortunately, this January, all the three presidential candidates in our election summarily rejected the so-called Hong Kong. model, our so-called one-country two systems. So for once, they do not have an easy path into the Taiwanese politics. And so I think it speaks volumes about how the world has changed, even just during the past few years. A few years ago, we would hear from our international friends that, you know, just look at Hong Kong. Maybe it's not doing so poorly, but now nobody say that anymore, right? So basically, I think we now have much more support from

our fellow democracies. And many fellow democracies are also seeing that the Taiwan's examples, both during the pandemic and afterward, where if you radically trust the people in many policymaking issues, it actually advances democracy. And some people do trust back. So we do get a lot of invitations to share, not just the counter pandemic, but also counter infidemic measures to rebuild trust between governments and their citizens worldwide. So with the worldwide, community's eyes on Taiwan as supporting our democracy, I think that serves as a very strong deterrence against any of those PRC's annexation attempts. The People's Republic of China, particularly Xi Jinping, has often tried to argue that Chinese culture has a completely different

view on styles of democracy, on human rights. And yet it seems as though the model that you've developed in Taiwan is radically different from the model in Beijing. Incredibly progressive, incredibly inclusive, non-hierarchical. So how do you respond to arguments from the Beijing government that somehow there is something in Chinese culture which reinforces the type of system that they have in mainland China? These kind of deliberation, this kind of conversations among the different ideologies and the application of technology to find a common ground and so on. It is true that it is not exactly the same as like voting for members of the parliaments or voting for referendum topics and so on. It is much more exploratory in design thinking term. It is much more

about discovering the possible solutions and also defining the common values and so on. And I don't think it is like Western or Eastern. I simply think it is democratic or plural. In the book that I co-wrote with a lot of people plurality. We mapped the use of these kind of techniques in democratic countries, but also in countries that are not fully democratic. So I would say that it is just a general purpose way to get people to talk to one another. And if anyone has the capacity, as well as the willingness to listen broadly, then it also is a tool to regenerate trust. And so in a sense, I don't think it is incompatible with any culture. As my final question then, if you were going to be radical about the UK or Australia or the US or Europe,

what could we learn from you to make our democracies richer? Could you suggest a different way of thinking, a different way of involving citizens, whether it's citizens' assemblies, whether it's the use of technology, to make democracy more vibrant and alive? I want to highlight that the kind of deliberations that I mentioned can now be run even without a lot of investment into professional facilitators and so on. This March, we sent 200,000 random SMS to Taiwan's phone numbers. And so the message is the same.

How do you think about defakes and information integrity online? And so people who responded, they volunteered to join a conversation of 450 people online. And in 45 rooms of 10 people each, they were facilitated by the room itself, not by professional facilitators, which not only turns the real-time transcripts into like mappings of disagreements and also points of agreements, but also it can join the real-time conversation among the 455 different rooms into something like more nuanced group idea that is then read back to the groups during the planaries before breaking out into the groups again. If I just jump in, you said that the room does that. Do you mean that AI and robots are doing that?

The idea is that we invite people into a video conference. And the video conference, the online deliberation platform, did the speech to text transcribing and also the summarization, and also like prodding people who has been silent for quite a while to speak up more and ensure that if you disrupt each other, not for more than five seconds and so on. So it is a moderator in the shape of a chattering, basically. So the idea here is that it is then much more scalable. not just conversation or deliberation part, but also for people who were not selected into the

representative sampling, they can also help set the agenda and so on online, and again, aggregated by AI, by language models, into something much more coherent, much more nuanced. There's in Tokyo a young person, 33 years old, Anosan, that ran for the governor using this technology to crowdsource like 15,000s of ideas into a platform. that is highest ranked. Well, he didn't win the election, but it was very impressive. So I would say that both the representatives, as well as the administration branch in the UK, if you look at this generation of broad listening tools, there is not a lot to invest in and can really help you to map out people's common ideas. Like in Taiwan, when we had this conversation, people, by and

large agreed that the social media companies need to assume liability if they do not require digital signatures and KYC, know your customer, on the online advertisement. And it's passed into law just three months after the deliberation with all-partisan support and is now already in effect. So it can not just map out ideas, but also result in resolving issues that were structurally considered impossible because people can co-create more nuanced solutions. Audrey, presumably it doesn't solve everything. We're covering the Taiwanese election. And in some ways, the Taiwanese election seems recognizable. There's still violent disagreement between parties. There's accusations of corruption on either side. There's foreign governments getting involved. So it doesn't create a perfect utopia. I mean, so much of what we've talked about is wonderful. You know, your response to COVID, citizens discussions. But there are still limits, right? It's not that it's going to suddenly create utopian societies. Tell us a little bit of about the limits, the things that the technology can't do and the ways in which real life party democracy remains? As I mentioned, the cabinet members are not MPs. So when we prepare those draft laws and

budgets and so on, at the end of the day, it is in the parliament for the MPs to decide. And so no matter how much we deploy the discovery and define tools on the second part of the double diamond chart, the development and delivery, that is still well within. the political parties mandate and remit to do so. But I would also highlight that there is a real difference that we made, which is during 2014, people's trust in the administration was just 9%. Like anything the administration says, the people automatically revolt against that. In 2018, during the peak of our polarization, it wasn't that good, it was like 20%. But as we institutionalized these citizen initiatives, as we change the curriculum,

So people under 18 can meaningfully set agenda for a national conversation and so on. Nowadays, we're now enjoying a much higher percentage of trust. And people, by and large, trusted the democratic process, even though they might find issues on political parties or any particular parties. And we have been quite stably ranked as one of the leading democracies when it comes to trust in the democratic process by BTI and economists and so on. So I do agree that it doesn't solve everything. It doesn't solve animosity that the party members have toward other parties and so on. But it does instill in people. Like you don't have to

buy into this party or that party. There is this democratic process that is beyond voting, that you can participate continuously. Well, Audrey, it's been fascinating talking to you. You're now out of government. You left government recently, but you're obviously going to stay in this field. And I'm pretty sure you will have given our listeners a lot of food for thought. So thank you for your time and we love to talk to you. Thank you so much. Thank you. So, Alistair, what did you think of that? I hope Audrey won't be upset if she's listening if we point out that we had to do a few takes at various points because the technology in Audrey's Hotel in Tokyo was not quite matching ours. So this tech guru, we were winning on the tech.

Well, I really, really, really enjoyed that. I got a bit lost in the weeds at times because I'm a bit of a technophobe. But I think in terms of just the description of how the Taiwanese government was using digital transformation is so beyond anything, I think, that we've seen here or in most Europe or the United States and so forth. And then just the, you know, the personal story, this sort of life-threatening illness as a child, the child prodigy. I thought the discussion that you and she were having about child prodigy was really,

really interesting. And then this fact of her being the first openly non-binary transgender minister was interesting. And my God, isn't language important? The fact that in Mandarin, you know, he, she, the, how much easy would our life but this toxic debate B about trans if we had tar, tar, tar. Exactly. A couple of things I thought. One of them was an MP for a rural constituency. I was very interested in what she was saying about healthcare in a remote island. So I came in in 2010, Cumbria, and most pastly populated constituency in

in England, and my neighbour was having to commute nearly an hour and a half to Newcastle to see a specialist for Parkinson's. And it was just a chat. She didn't need to go in, and it was a tough journey for her. So we started down this journey of trying to get proper video consultation, telehealth, telemedicine, and it was unbelievably painful. We were barely making progress by 2017, seven years later. I remember talking to a group of GPs in Cumbria, and I hope they'll excuse me for being a little bit mean about them here, but I said, you know, why are you not really embracing video consultation? And they said, well, to be honest, we find it just as easy if people just come in and and sit in our surgeries. And there is she telling a story about how in a matter of months,

they managed to fix what would have been dozens of different problems all the way from the law, digital signatures, the time of the consultants, the quality of the broadband, in order to really make telehealth, telemedicine work. And my goodness, we could transform the productivity of the NHS and everybody's user experience if we did this. But what's unique here is not just the idea. The idea is pretty obvious, right? That, you know, if you're on a remote Scottish Island or you're in Cumbria, you could do a hell of a lot of your healthcare down, a good broadband connection if a specialist was prepared to get on the other end of the line.

The problem is how do you sort out the law, the civil service, the doctors, the unions, and make it happen. And that's the other bit of genius here. Yeah, and I guess with, you know, you think about the way that tech and our health service is developing and the worries that people have over Palantir and this sort of arch libertarian, Peter Thiel, being remotely near NHS. data and so forth. So when we got onto the thing about tech as a force for good and the force for bad, I think she still has a overwhelmingly positive view because of the experience that they've

had in Taiwan. I also thought it was interesting how kind of relaxed she seemed about China. She's sort of clearly quite confident it won't happen. I think that's fascinating. And I also think unusually in some ways when we're used to child prodigy, tech billionaires being pretty sort of spiky and outspoken. And you know, you talk about people. Peter Thiel or Elon Musk and their views on government, how extraordinarily sort of courteous she was. I mean, she began from the position. Essentially, she was saying in the UK system or a European or US system that the people

at the sort of junior mid-levels of the civil service often have the answers to many of the problems. It's the kind of top people, the director generals and the cabinet ministers who are blocking innovation. And part of the trick is allowing them to generate their ideas anonymously or to hide behind NGOs and civil society groups. to get their ideas through. I was really taken by her.

And I think the final thing for me, and then back to you, is what's an exciting vision for how we could re-energize our democracies? Because she was being a bit modest, though. They went from 10% of the population trusting their government to 70%,

70%. Within a decade. And of course, the problem that we have in all our countries is nobody trusts our government. And our democracies don't seem to be working. And partly they're not working because people sense they vote

once every four or five years and then they never get any say. Whereas what she's doing, and this connects to you in schools all the way through the school curriculum all the way through, you can engage and you can engage in a constructive way that isn't getting into the horrible, brutal sort of wrestling match of what she calls advertiser-funded private social media. I guarantee that Peter Kyle will listen to that with interest because, of course, that's his brief within our cabinet, the whole sort of digital transformation. So I don't know whether he's met Audrey, but we need to get them together. I think it could absolutely transform a lot of things we did in Britain.

And remember, often when we look at other countries like, I don't know, Norway or Denmark, we say, well, they're very small places, five, six million people, we can't learn much. Taiwan is a big population. And, you know, if they manage to do these things, there's so much that we could really learn. Okay, Rory, warm words and upwards. Almonds and upwards. Bye-bye. See you soon.