Then in elections, I think we still use paper ballot, we still don’t have long-distance voting, there’s no tallying machines. It’s out proven technology, much smaller attack surface for people who want to rig an election. On the other hand, we practice there also radical transparency.

Because of that, our new systems all have what we call as “purple teaming,” meaning a red team attacking all the time, but also sharing with our blue team, to make sure that they understand from the perspective of attackers, so they can do the threat hunting by themselves and ...

In any case, they get rewarded like national heroes, which they are. Because of this, it’s now a pretty popular career choice for people studying computer science to become a white-hat hackers, and they get very well paid and high social status, so they don’t go to the dark side, ...

Also, when they win like the second place in the annual DEFCON CTF, which is like the world cup of cybersecurity white-hat hackers – they still lost to the US team, we’re trying to change that next year.

It’s a guaranteed way to not only have our white-hat hackers, that’s people that crack systems and then say something about it, instead of profiting themselves, they are very well paid now, they are very respected, and they meet with the president and digital minister all the time.

The cybersecurity threat is real, and we allocate five percent to seven percent of all government projects regardless of whether they’re IT related or not on cybersecurity. If people are building a proving ground for self-driving vehicles, five percent goes to cybersecurity. If people are building a new house registration ...

Sure, sure.

We stand ready to help.

As my name card says: Taiwan Can Help.

Exactly.

Later on I would learn that the foreign service has their own academy, and I didn’t even talk with any foreign service people during that training camp, and that will be remedied only after Joseph Wu become the foreign minister.

Foreign Service has its own training academy. When I was invited to train the civil service, they invited everybody rank 12 or higher, there was exactly 300 people of such a rank. I taught in three workshops with 100 each of them to figure out a communication strategy around the ...

Well @MOFA_Taiwan has a really successful Twitter account. If MOFA can do it, all other ministry can do it. [laughs]

I think the cabinet at that time understood very much the importance, but the public servants at that still need some time to adapt to a much faster news cycle.

Yes, I think so. Mayor Han was his student in graduate school.

During the transition from KMT to DPP.

Chang San-cheng.

I’m really nonpartisan. I worked with the public service during Premier Mao Chi-Kuo and later Premier Chang San-cheng, who is now part of Mayor Han’s presidential campaign, the main brain behind Han now.

Yeah, KMT tried to do something like that at the end of 2014, that was when Premier Mao Chi-Kuo was made Premier, and was the idea of radical transparency, open data, crowdsourcing, whatever as the national direction. Essentially, learning from the occupiers, that’s how we end up being reverse mentors.

63, 64?

Yes, and the entire population, because broadband is a human right. Our digital adoption rate doesn’t start to trail off until I think 75 years old, so it’s a large swath of population.

Yeah, she’s going online, not only online, but on all the other channels as well.

Of changing her interaction style. More livestreaming, being more of a YouTuber, being in partnership with YouTubers, and take a very multimodal approach of visiting crowdfunding platforms and the Spotify-like start-ups in Taiwan, and so on.

Yeah, around twice as popular, according to the latest polls.

Changed her communication style.

It’s green, right? It solves a climate change problem, it’s electric vehicle for scooters, so we then scale that up and scale it out to the likes of our nearby East Asian countries.

That’s how we get our unicorns, like Gogoro, and so on. Not because that it’s necessarily sells to Taiwanese market, but because of the supply chain and the research, it’s the best integrated in Taiwan.

Right, and then you realize the great AI algorithm that you did with your friends, that unlike in the good old days of pure software, would require a robotic body for embodiment, and Taiwan is the best place for that, literally, so they just set up their centers here..

It’s not a brain drain if it’s two-way, and then we just call it talent circulation.

We’re less worried about PRC part of it. We are more worried about the general picture of brain drain, and so we are introducing measures of them coming back from the Silicon Valley, which is one of the most popular targets and then when they come back to Taiwan and ...

When the opportunity presents itself, language is not a real barrier for people who decide to move overseas. Even overseas, they can still find places where they can just learn English, or French, or any other language alongside their studies. It’s not a natural choice to go to the PRC, ...

I think that’s because it is natural, because Taiwanese people are known for a very good mobility among the opportunities.

It’s like how maybe people are fans of Freddy Lim, but not necessarily of NPP – by the way, Freddy recently quit the NPP. Anyway, my point is that if the affinity is to a person and a style that they have on communication, they it may not carry over ...

Also genuinely, because she’s very much interested in sharing, on KKBox, which is like Spotify, the music that she listened to when she was writing doctoral dissertation, awhichnd really builds emotional bond with people. One of them is “Imagine” from John Lennon. [laughs] In any case, this means that people ...

I think people find an affinity to the post-regional-election Dr. Tsai, because she took on a much more interactive role, a much closer distance to the young people, strategically, during her campaign for a second term.

That’s an interesting question. First of all, I don’t believe in political parties, I’m just this independent conservative anarchist.

It used to be that they can draw things about Winnie the Pooh, and now they cannot. I think they’re aware of that. Then people even younger than that, was born under the new censorship environment, may find it natural.

Many people are aware now that running VPN is punished, and that what used to be a harmless, I don’t know, homosexual comics that they share on bulletin boards, is now very dangerous material to be in possession of. They also understand that it has been severely limited.

Yeah. Then they still remember a time that the Internet censorship wasn’t that bad.

If they were older than teenagers, like 20 years old?

People get tired of the same conspiracy narrative, especially when it turns out to be not happening. Hong Kong really amplified this resistance in people’s minds, as well.

I would argue that they have limited and indeed diminishing returns by now. People do get inoculated, even organically, even without all those clarifications.

Well, they of course fund people who could sow discord. There was a Foreign Policy article about it in June, by Paul Huang.

…where?

That’s right.

It’s kind of like startup incubators in the form of university. It’s to further their work prospects. Polls show that people who lived in Taiwan for 18 years and then visiting Beijing or Shanghai and so on actually reinforce their commitment to democracy.

They run startup incubators and attract young people to various coastal cities to start entrepreneurship. Polls show that some people may come there and do entrepreneurship, but it doesn’t change their antiauthoritarian tendencies.

The Taiwan islands are pacific islands with long Austronesian traditions that goes all the way to the Māori. For young people, the nationhood is being shaped by a much more vocal indigenous population, as well as a much more multicultural society.