Yeah, likewise.

Do you mind if I take a screen grab, just to remember the setting?

Unless Jan doesn’t have an intervention…my last question is, do you really dream in JavaScript?

Yeah, exactly. Did you come out to your parents long before that?

I know we have to wrap up. Just two more questions. You came out as trans in a blog post in 2005, the one you talked about earlier.

We were wondering, what was the more difficult, or maybe not difficult, thing to get used to for someone from such a different generation: Was it that their grandchild came out as trans or non binary, or that their grandchild is suddenly a government minister?

You described how when one of your grandparents – I assume you were talking about one of your grandfathers – was using video calls at over a hundred years old.

Fair enough.

So a lot of light-heartedness and humor and casually dealing with potentially frustrating things. What does frustrate you? When code doesn’t work?

This type of thing pops up every once in a while – this type of controversy and discussion where a famous figure will do such an alleged misstep? Is that something that frustrates you when it happens?

Something else that just went viral is the actor John Cena. The American actor John Cena caused an outrage in China, after he had said in an interview that Taiwan was a country. He then posted this video where he, in Mandarin, was basically apologizing profusely and saying, “I’ve made ...

One overarching thing that we’ve been talking about is that your vision of digital democracy is all about connecting people, connecting communities. If you think of the international scale, though, of Taiwan, for example, in the UN – or not in the UN – and its multi laterals: the WTO, ...

OK. What would you do?

Any system.

I’ll definitely check that out. Please no diplomatic answers: If you could hack into any system in the world and have the guarantee that no one would ever find out, what would that be?

Coding-themed t shirts. You always see these hacking t shirts that people like to wear.

You obviously have attended many, many hackathons and there’s such a thing as Presidential Hackathons these days. Something that programmers and coders liked a lot is programming-themed t shirts. Quick question, what’s the stupidest caption you’ve ever seen on a programming t shirt, and the cleverest?

You did start singing the modem sound earlier.

Where are your books? Your background is very bare.

It seems somehow isolating, in a way, because it’s… It’s an isolating technology, to an extent. Everybody’s in their screen.

It’s not necessarily an amplifier of democratic… of democracy.

Is Facebook an anti social medium?

Military attack.

Are you worried that because Taiwan is now on the top of that list, that a war could be coming?

It was about a China-friendly trade act that people wanted to protest against. Now, fast forward to 2021, a lot of people obviously are, again, looking at the China Taiwan relations. China has dismantled democracy in Hong Kong in the past three years.

The Sunflower movement was such a defining movement for many young people who may not have been so involved politically before and then became very politically involved…

After you left school and became an entrepreneur and became a professional coder, you went to work also for Apple and worked, for example, on Siri. I was wondering, does the original anarchist, almost libertarian ethos of the hacking community… isn’t that in opposition, somewhat, to going to join a ...

That’s quite a lot of political wisdom for a five year old. [laughs]

Your parents were political journalists who before the liberalization had to censor themselves. And your father did work on Tiananmen, and was actually there in 1989. How did they explain to you as a child the limited political freedoms that you grew up in, that you all were living in ...

I just mentioned martial law, which was lifted in the late ‘80s. So you would have been about six years old…

60.4 percent in 2021, up from 37.4 in 2018, before same sex marriage was instituted in Taiwan. How do you explain why Taiwan, a relatively young democracy with a martial-law past, is seeing such social progressivism?

Speaking about LGBTQ plus issues in Taiwan. On Sunday, there was a new government survey that was released that showed the Taiwanese people’s acceptance of same-sex marriage…

So it was definitely a worldwide journey. I wanted to ask also about your, kind of, socialization on the Internet. Was the role the Internet played as a refuge for you growing up as a teenager – did that have something to do also with your situation of maybe figuring ...

Can you name some cities that you went to?

When you say you definitely felt at home first on the Internet. So growing up on the Internet, were there things in your Internet social life that were hard to translate to real life?

When hearing you talk about your introduction to coding and the Internet, and what you told your principal when you wanted to drop out – it sounds like the first place you really felt at home was the World Wide Web?

Oh OK, so it was a very Christian school then. I wanted to ask you, you said you switched kindergarten and schools many, many times. You’ve also talked about being bullied in primary school. Was that the reason why you switched schools so many times?

Do you remember one line in German, one sentence?

What’s the first thing you ever hacked?

So you started very early. Edward Snowden describes that the first thing he ever hacked was bedtime. On his sixth birthday, he changed the clocks in his parents’ house so that he would be allowed to stay up longer.

We would love to speak a little bit about your personal background and how that blended into your political background. As far as we know, as an eight year old child, you started to teach yourself how to code using pen and paper. Was there the moment of epiphany that ...

OK. So when you first started the job as Digital Minister a few years back, do you remember what the literal first thing was on your first day in office that you did?

You were 35 when you became a minister in Taiwan, the youngest ever cabinet member in Taiwan. Isn’t it in a way quite risky for a government to give a miistry to someone who calls themselves an anarchist?

You’ve often famously referred to yourself as a conservative anarchist.

Nevertheless, I mean, in that moment a government member is a rock star. Was there something strange to that?

Exactly. Where you are on the screen from another city, live. They sample your voice, your speaking voice as well as your singing voice, and 90,000 people are cheering you on. I mean, you are… In that situation, the Digital Minister is literally a rock star.

You gave us a very humble answer, you know: “Am I in the limelight?” We saw this video where you were part of the stage show by the extreme metal band Chthonic.

Can we talk a little bit about your political background and your political career? Heads of state aside, you are probably the most prominent Asian or East Asian politician worldwide. How do you feel about being in the limelight like that?

You said you’ve always been working from home. Is that where we’re catching you right now as well?

So that’s your job: to make sure that people on the 陽明山 (Yang Ming Mountain) can watch Netflix.