…and the bi-weekly tours on social innovation. If you’re interested in that model of governance, I’ve written about it. I’ll be happy to share.

Exactly, which is why I have weekly office hours…

That sort of proposal, the premier says, “It’s fine.” Then it’s policy. That’s the sequence. The official meeting is every four months, but every two months between those, we run feasibility meetings so the premier just has to say yes.

For example, our winners in the International World Skills – like Olympics for skilled workers – get to join the National Day Parade just like the Olympic athletes are. That’s a youth councilor proposal. He is the reverse mentor for the minister of labor. It’s to raise the visibility of ...

Then we make policy innovations together, every month or so. Then the result of those synthetic documents become their official proposal to the premier. I run a feasibility meeting. It’s two-months for this kind of pre-meeting, and then another two months, the premier’s office responds.

In Taiwan, we say when we meet face-to-face, we build 30 percent of trust. Because Taiwan has broadband as human right, across high-definition video, maybe 20 percent of trust. Then they can see the actual policymakers. The policymaker get to see where the community really is instead of as abstract ...

As the youth councilor that directs this meeting, they get a chance to call all the relevant ministries, like of agriculture, of energy, economic affairs, and so on in Taipei and then we do a telepresence.

In any case, that was the experience we collectively had. They can have that every other week if they want. In reality, it’s more like every month or so. We travel to a local place to walk with the community, talk with the community.

Which, as a vegetarian, I eat clams because they don’t suffer.

Every youth councilor, 35 of them, can convene a local meeting to tackle a specific local issue. The last one we did was all of us went into the clam farm, just picking some clams, and to do low-density, no-underground-water-drawing, using natural seawater to do salinity regulation, zero-carbon, self-made energy ...

[laughs] Our National Youth Council is literally one minister each. They can recommend one young person to reverse mentor them. Then those people form the National Youth Council, headed by the Premier himself. Their decisions are made into policy by the Premier if it makes sense. It’s a really good ...

That’s why youth engagement is important.

Changing norms is always harder for more senior people.

That’s excellent.

The petitioner just got a scholarship from one of those banks for her work, which is great. If we don’t meet her, if we don’t arrange this cross-sectoral meeting, maybe she just go to strike on Fridays. What happens after that, we don’t know.

Their social purpose has dwindled. As long as there’s sufficient supply and new material, they’re very much willing to enter into this new realm of social purpose. What we thought as a fight, actually ends up with a very thorough design.

They said they entered the business 30 years ago when they were young as social entrepreneurs. At that time, hepatitis B is very prevalent in Taiwan. They made those plastic alternatives to the reusable utensil exactly because of community healthcare. Now, hep B is gone. Just take a pill, it’s ...

Reverting to actual straws and things like that, and just to harden them so they don’t dissolve in the midst of a bubble tea. That’s a very new innovation sector, and it’s really booming. We arrange a collaborative meeting between the petitioner as well as the people making those plastic ...

Exactly.

Original straws.

There are some plants that are naturally straws. That’s where the name came from, right?

…as well as other drinks, it’s now banned. Paper, which is the default fallback, also has its own issues, environmentally, and also it just doesn’t taste as great. People are actively looking at sugarcane and all sorts of other circular design elements from the farming process, agricultural byproducts, and make ...

For indoor drinking of our national identity drink, bubble tea…

Right.

At least you can re-use the plastic bags as garbage bags. They enter into the circulation. But the plastic straws, nobody actually donate it back…

Now, straws…

Sugarcane and there’s like seven different kind of zero or negative-carbon pipelines to make those new straws. That becomes a kind of new economic…

Also, they think less about private, benefit, right, and more about public benefit, by nature. They work really closely together and successfully. We’re now already ban, actually, indoor plastic straw use and take out plastic straw use will be banned shortly afterwards in due time.

That’s the pattern we see around Taiwan is that the 16- or 17-years-olds and the 60- or 70-years-olds, these are the two main age groups caring a lot about sustainability and organize very successfully online. First, they have more time on their hands, I’m sure.

It turns out, she’s 16 years old, and her civics teacher just showed them this platform. She thought, “Ah, I can find a thing that resonates with people.”

…for environmental justice.

Our e-petition to gradually ban plastic straws was raised two years ago by a 16-year-old girl. Our e-petition allows for pseudonyms, so at the beginning, we didn’t know who this person is. It’s just they get 5,000 signatures in no time. It must be from the environmental minister. It must ...

Which means that if we do this right, it gives us additional leverage to innovate on climate change mitigation. If we can’t even take care of our plastic, then we’re actually very limited in the leverage. Because that means the environmental, echo design, and other sectors are not closely working ...

The second thing is the plastic waste. Again, because people who are my age or younger than my age, have a habit to recycle and to sort the waste. It’s very easy to introduce this additional idea that plastic pollution to the sea, it doesn’t only affect the food chain, ...

You don’t find it in other highly developed jurisdictions near here. Here, the environmental protection, I think we’re second only to New Zealand in that kind of comparison.

They don’t require public funding. People care about it so much that the social sector just gathered the funding and crowdfund those issues themselves. That’s the general care about the environment. They have a much higher social legitimacy than economic development.

That is, I think, where we are at moment. Social accountability using distributive ledgers, using Internet of beings and other technologies to ensure a safe cradle-to-cradle delivery, the air boxes, the water boxes, the various IoT contributions we have to the word, they are all very popular subjects.

People on the west side, which is more Western, [laughs] is, I think, mainly, as you said, air and water pollution is felt by everybody. Sometimes it’s beyond our control. It’s international, right? Like the swine virus flu thing.

In Taiwan, since we’re a larger Pacific [inaudible 12:42] island, it’s not felt as acute as some of the Pacific islanders. Because we share, at least on the east side, the same Austronesian lineage and culture with fellow Pacific islanders, so people do feel empathy, and feel a kinship around ...

That is true. This one took us 10 years.

Wow.

The teacher said that this must be a gifted student. Their parents was like, “No.” [laughs] “It was not like that.” Having a real case that they can envision in 30 years, I think that really motivates a lot of our young people.

If we don’t solve things now, they bear the consequences. That student – we just had a symposium yesterday – just drew a deck of 20 pages, outlining the entire cradle-to-cradle system, and used their phones, and so on, to look up all the possible solutions, and things like that, ...

Because the child is maybe 13 or something like that, 30 years down the road, that’s when they are running the country actually.

After the new curriculum and the liberty of introducing SDG-based teaching material, it’s literally, you’re the president. There’s sea waste. There’s climate change. If you don’t design a better zero-waste, zero-carbon, zero-plastic ecosystem in this many years, like 30 years or so, this will happen. It’s your role to stop ...

For example, there were a student that feel excluded from the class because their mathematics, for example, is in the lower 10 percent and is suffering a lot of self-image or dignity issues because of the “low achievement.”

…that they have to pass something like a entry exam. I don’t know what that means.

As a junior-high dropout, I actually don’t have some experience about that, but I hear my colleagues say…

We just wrote out a new K-12 curriculum, which I helped design this month. Instead of teaching any particular disciplines, it takes a cross-disciplinary way of teaching that solves real social problems. The curriculum change is very tangible. In the previous one, which is typically East Asian, you can imagine ...