S4 - Ep. - 7 Plural Capital Allocation With Audrey Tang

Transcript

welcome to the green pillow. network podcast if you're just joining us we're building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and we publish a season of about 10 episodes every couple months this season is lean mean Capital allocation machines Capital allocation is the process of deciding how to spend or invest Financial Resources with crypto we can do better Capital allocation we can do it on chain which means more scalable and precise Capital allocation it also means that we can remove intermediaries from Capital location we can p digitally native systems for allocating Capital to people to fund what matters in their communities so how can we build cryptoeconomic systems that precisely allocate Capital at scale what

are the coolest experiments these are the themes of green pill season 4 lean mean Capital allocation machines one special thing we're doing this season is allowing you to collect this episode all episodes this season are going to be available on chain go to pods. mediascreen pill to collect thank you to JT nickel how . eth Simons sd. eath zerox luucas sky. eth james. eth and MMA on chain. eth for being our top collectors this season all right today we have a conversation between SEL rean and Audrey Tang SEL is an organizer of the green pill. Network and also works on getcoin at Grants laab so a lot of the things that you hear about happening in the green pill Network are sel's work and SEL flew all the way out to Taiwan

to interview Audrey Tang who is a Taiwanese politician and a free software programmer who who has served as the first minister of digital Affairs in Taiwan since August 2020 she's been described as one of the 10 greatest Taiwanese Computing personalities and is a community leader of the hasal and pearl communities and a core member of gov zero in Taiwan this is sort of an experimental episode for us uh first off I want to introduce you to Sall and really sing the Praises of sage all who has been behind the scenes on a lot of green pill stuff over the last year uh you should get to know who she is her hosting this episode is a is a feature not a bug I'm really excited to give her the Limelight and uh give her this this

opportunity to host a green pill episode so first uh I'm going to introduce you to uh SEL and then we are going to cut over to Audrey hey SEL how's it going hi gin um going good how about you pretty good you want to start us off with a quick intro of yourself yeah sure um so I'm SEL and I um I I'm an organizer of green Bill Network and now I you know dedicate a lot of my time um to my full-time role at gitcoin I work with gitcoin gr lab where we you know I pretty much take care of the operations um you know running gg20 and running rounds with

other ecosystems so that's pretty much what I do yep and uh this episode that we are recording right now is about your interview with Audrey Tang who is quite a hero to many in the plurality community in the crypto community in the digital uh governance Community what was it like to meet Audrey I think it was a dream that I never saw I didn't know that know uh this will ever happen and Audrey is like she's a living genius I still remember like the night before the interview I just couldn't sleep and because you know like what do you ask a genius right it was a 1hour conversation and every I think every second of that conversation the only thing that I was

thinking like genius genius genius like the work that Audrey is doing it's incredible I have never met somebody like that just to give you some insight and for the audience you know what they can look forward to in the conversation we have talked about a range of things so we definitely start with you know um Audrey's background and how she actually got interested in the intersection of tech and governance and then we talk about all the work that Audrey is doing um you know in type which is around how you know basically one of the most important things that they're solving for is how do you actually you know look at the opinions of people at scale right like how do you get the general

sentiment of people so that you know they're working on the tools for that especially using AI you know how do you train the language models how do you scale it a lot of those things then Audrey is experimenting with um funding mechanism they were actually you know when I spoke to Audrey at that time she mentioned that there was actually a qf round happening at that time so she talks about that uh how they actually do a lot of um you know these rounds without really using you know if I can say jargons or you know uh the words that you know we use in the crypto world but they actually do a lot of it without really using those Jun right so they were already in the middle of a qf round planning and you know do these experiments you

know I just want to interject uh in the crypto world we running rpgfinal Affairs in the Taiwanese government that's running qf and retr pgf rounds exactly that's how the intersection of this crypto World intersects with the real world of nation states in in governments which I think is incredible incredible yes exactly and this very cool concept that she told me about which I would love to you know share here is that they have something called reverse m ship which essentially means that somebody who is younger than you who is you know uh in this space they basically are your mentors and they you know share with you the experiments that are happening and the new things that they as government should try and experiment with right so her Menor is at

that time when we spoke was Mash Bean who is one of the green pill chapter's member also right and through Mash Bean she actually is you know uh experimenting a lot of things so which is pretty cool and the last segment of the podcast is also super interesting because that is where we discuss Audrey's favorite music like what does she do with you know in her free time how does she like to spend time with her family like those kind of things because I think I just couldn't hold myself you know asking those questions like even somebody this genius you want to know more about them it's nice to know the person behind the the title and um well uh the thing that I want to call out for the audience is that SEL you you flew all the way to Taiwan to have this

conversation with one of the most prolific promoters of free software and digital democracy out there and and one of the things that that I want the audience to to to think before they listen to this episode because this is a new episode you're going to be hosting it instead of me I I I was not able to make it to tan is like you you keep saying she's a genius and and and I think that we we agree that she's she's at the Forefront of this movement and what we're trying to do with the green pill podcast is democratize those conversations and put them into the earbuds of people all across the world so all you to do is listen to your podcast player and get access to one of the most amazing prolific thinkers in this space and um that that that's why I

wanted to to air this episode even though it's a little bit experimental because Audrey is such an amazing person and you know and the other thing that I want the audience to know is that you've been helping me behind the scenes with green pill for about a year a year and a half at this point and uh you helped turn green pill into uh into green pill. Network and helped launch all the local chapters so it's a little bit of an introduction to the audience to uh you and the work that you've been doing at green pill as well you want to say anything about green pill. Network or any anything about that Journey yeah um you know like one of the reasons I actually got this opportunity is because green pill Network exists right so how important it is for people to realize that the opportunity you know

green pill network has so if you are not a part of chapter yet make sure you join green pill Network and you become a part of it because everything that is happening in the space even in my conversation with Audy I realized like this is exactly you know what we want to do at green pill Network we want to do with different chapters not just in typ B right that's also Audrey's Vision right so I think there is a great opportunity there and I always think the work is just getting started right so there is a long way and the more people we have in this journey I think the farther we will go and uh yeah it would be fun so it's just getting thought dude great well why don't I hand it over to you to uh introduce this episode with Audrey to the audience and then we'll

cut over to AUD yeah like I mentioned um Audrey is you know the digital minister of Taiwan and she has played such a crucial role in you know bringing Ai and working with the open source community at typ this podcast episode covers her background in Tech and governance and you know how she actually um started experimenting with AI and what she has done with open source Community there and how she plans to um sort of integrate and experiment with different mechanisms that are getting built in the web3 space um the funding mechanisms that are getting built because they're already doing that and she also talks about the opportunity for people if they want to become a

Taiwanese or you know Taiwan resident uh by the way every 10 minutes you will keep you know you will hear me saying that oh I would love to learn Mandarin and just be here and work with you which is like you know me just you know I think a fan girl moment but yeah and she talks about that you know how that is possible so all these things so it's like a you know when a movie is released you see like a Blockbuster movie I think this is like a full par paged episode which you know a lot a lot is covered in this episode and I hope that people enjoy this all right well let's cut over to Audrey now thanks AEL hello I'm Audrey St Minister how did you become interested at the intersection of tech and govern I

joined the Taiwan cabinet in 2016 after working for 2 years I with the cabinet minister the main idea has always been to increase the bandwidth of communication internet democracy worked with each other to make what we call digital democracy I am so inspired by the work that taian is doing would you like to be a I would love the work that is happening here is just baffles whole Space of Open Source and that the # free the future I want the kind of future that is more codetermined by people in the future than I me so we'll start with how about you introduce yourself and your background

in Tech and government sure hello I'm Audrey Tong taiwan's digital minister in Taiwan Sure Way means both digital and plural so I'm also the minister for plurality and I joined the Taiwan cabinet in 2016 after working for two years with a cabinet minister as a reverse Mentor e r making and in my previous uh jobs for entering uh this line of work uh I worked with the open source Community a lot founded a few companies worked with the Apple Siri team I think the main idea has always been to increase the bandwidth of communication across sectors so even though I am in the public sector now I'm

still working with the government not for the government yeah love it how did you become interested at the intersection of tech and government is it like because of your background like how did this Interest come from well when I was born u in 1981 uh the year of the personal computers Taiwan was not a democracy we were still under the martial law the martial law only lifted in 87 88 just when the internet started and we had our first presidential election in 96 which is the year of the world iweb and yes so for Taiwan it's not just me internet and democracy are not two things they literally arrived roughly right on the same same year so

internet democracy worked with each other to make what we call digital democracy wow that is essentially you know my next question like could you explain the concept of digital democracy and its significance in dialogue certainly so if you analyze the current representative democracy you will quickly see that the bit rate is very low so if you vote across for presidential candidates every four years then that's what two bits uploaded per person to collective decision making every four years so not only small bandwidth very high latency any errors any problems it takes Years or or at

least a quarter right to correct that but on internet as we know internet governance has been from the very beginning multi-stakeholder anyone with the email address can join the internet conversations and if there's a new ation that works provably better it gets adopted not four years later but maybe four minutes four days at most so it works on much shorter latency and across the internet people instead of just voting they can join mailing list forums chat rooms and so on so the bandwidth is much higher and now as we regularly use video conference and so on especially after the pandemic when people uh can

actually immerse right with people they have never met face to face the bandwidth has increased almost to the point that it's close to face Toof face conversation yeah I love it I come from India and India is a democracy I would love for you to share like how can you know we also adopt digital democracy or move towards it so that we also move fast like we are doing it but I think there's so much to learn so what in your experience you think has helped or maybe some obstacles we can talk about that has come and way you dealt with it that you think you know other democracies can also learn from certainly so digital democracy we just talk about is using

digital technology to enhance the bandwidth of democratic processes so for example uh in Taiwan before a regulation is introduced it is announced for usually 60 days uh on a platform no matter which Ministry it comes from on the same platform everyone can start a e petition after collecting 5,000 signatures you can steer a minister in a different way the minister has to prove that they have responded Point by point to the people's petitions and on the same website there's a visualization of the budget of each Ministry and you can comment and ask questions on each and every item and there's also collaborative meetings where people

across Ministries go to where people are and meets them face to face and sometime also live stream across Ross the internet so I think the point of increase in the bandwidth is not that we abolish election or abolish legislation that's not what I mean uh what I mean is before a uh draft bill or regulation is even proposed to the legislature make sure that everybody understand it in their own terms with their own language with the experts in their local community not just the expert that happens to be in the capital city and so on so it is also to connect and Empower people closest to the pain yeah this is I love it do you want to share like an

initiative or an example where you know there was an we have gotten more civic participation and what what was difficult because I can imagine the number of people and the different opinions they might have or viewpoints they might have right so how to navigate that and actually arrive at you know conclusion or consensus yeah this is a great question back in 2015 for example Uber was everywhere in the world right and it connected previously drivers that did not have a professional driver's license didn't drive taxi for a living they just go to work or something and connect them with other people who

want to WR share their cars and uh charging them for it and in doing so they created alternative uh to taxi however there are many problem problems with the roll out of this model in many jurisdictions because exactly as you said everybody has a different opinion existing tax unions have a different opinion the consumers sometimes feel that there's no insurance in this new form of driving and so on they have a opinion the ministry of Taxation have a opinion too and economy and everything right so back at the days we hear a lot of very polarized conversations on whether this is the future of sharing economy or this is just an extractive gig economy and so one and uh I think it

is the nature of the current representative democracy that only the most polarized issues Get Air Time on mainstream media and also on social media and social media polarize it even more so that people who actually agree on most of the Practical points and up focusing their energy and the one or thing or two things that people don't agree with right uh and so this kind ofl iation is also enhanced by digital Technologies so we just said that digital is good for democracy but it's also good for destroying democracy right so back in 2015 instead of debating those polarized points on Facebook or other platforms we built our own

platform the vaan platform and invited people to deliberate not debate on the Polish technology and what polce does nowadays people can experience it like community netw it's very similar people can't type their own opinions not a existing set of surveys other people get to like or unlike their surveys ideas but not replying to them and just by taking away the reply button there's no way for the polarization to grow right if you don't like this uh you can Prov something better that uh gets other people support and even more importantly just like Community Nots Pol is highlights the ones that are bridg making meaning that people who initially

were polarized or converge when they see this breakthrough statement so for example there was a statement that said search pricing responding to demand by increasing the price of the Uber drives is good but undercutting existing meters is bad uh and so instead of just you know making the flexible pricing a abstract concept this is a very practical operationalized uh statement that brings the two camps together and so we collected the top 10 or so statements that brings people together and ask taxi drivers unions Uber and so on to the same table live streamed to respond their commitments to the share set of principles so more so than pretty

much any other Asian country Taiwan not just legalized Uber but also fostered the local co-ops and unions and so on into also Uber like associations and so it's a kind of multi-stakeholder co-creation from conflict so not afraid of conflict turning conflict into co-creation is the goal of digital democracy wow is this platform can this be used by anybody else like any okay yeah this is entirely open source so uh as I mentioned the polce algorithm not just gets adopted by many countries you can check it out on the Polish website but it also inspired follow algorithms including Community notes uh in x.com

okay amazing I love it actually yeah that was so my next question was essentially I think which we have covered Are there specific projects that demonstrate the potential of you know that have used open source principles for the benefit of society yes so in addition to polus we're now also working along with the collective intelligence project open a anthropic and frence creative Commerce a new generation of the same idea as polus but now with language modeles so before language models polce essentially relied on crowd moderation but it doesn't scale as well if you have 20,000 different statements

because nobody can read through 20,000 statements uh and the great thing about language model is that it can synthesize very well so on polus if you see three or four different clusters instead of reading through the top statements we can just ask the language model to synthesize the EV avatar from each cluster wow it's like exective summary that talks back to you so we work with talk to the city and many other uh projects in synthesizing this deliberative experience so that even with tens of thousands of people all chiming in uh to any person they just interact with two or three avatars uh

and they can have a real in-depth conversation in which each statement is backed by a specific statements or even a specific point in a video uh that goes back to the original source so it's not hallucination or confabulation this is just a way to synthesize argumented deliberation wow yeah this I think this will make it scalable right exactly and we already use it to align uh taiwan's own language model the tit the trustworthy dialog engine is aligned by taking the input of online poers conversations and so on and which co- created what's called a constitutional document for constitutional AI so that this current generation of smaller

language models can use this set of constitutional principles co-created to align that is to say to calibrate a even stronger more powerful version of the AI model so this is called super alignment and this allows us to Simply co-create a document that can then be passed on from smaller models to larger to even larger models so that they keep responding to people's Collective wish wow uh I'm curious how like how do you get time to read so much and you know so much like despite having such a busy schedule yeah I think I do want to use all these Technologies in my flow of

work so that I have a practical understanding not just a abstract understanding for example uh this laptop which I got around March uh this year has 96 gab of RAM and RAM it is a Mac so it's the same uh and I've been using local open source uh or at least open weight language models to write my email replies ever since then oh right so in uh doing so I first ensure that it's fine tuned on my own laptop so it works in airplane mode my email draft doesn't go anywhere else but it also let me understand the ongoing progress of the quen models qu finetuning and things

like that and so I firmly believe in the handson uh imperative it there is no way for us to predict uh where the technology uh will lead without immersing ourself in the technology 100% this makes me wonder like you have such a good hold over like what's happening and you know on you on top of it but how do we because if we have to actually you know bring a change and make it scalable we also need to have other people or other stakeholders maybe other Ministries you know understand it the way we understand it right so how does that happen because that can happen right especially in a democracy right where one department or maybe one you

know stakeholder understands it but how do we make sure like others are also moving along because then only it will be able to actually right have and or like be definitely that's a great question so for example last August just a couple weeks before the ministry uh started uh our website went online and in the same hour pretty much all other website and other Ministries was under attack following speaker Pelosi's visit to Taiwan so this huge amount of Dos uh denal of service attacks 23 times more than the previous Peak so a lot of volume just to take those Ministries website down but our website wasn't down

uh for even just a second actually I publicly say so and so we got a lot of free testing and in part thanks to this message that says everybody can help us to back up our website you just install the brace browser or a ipfs node and you pin ipns mode go. ew and suddenly our website is backed up in your computer so by enlisting the web three communities instead of uh telling other ministers that oh ipfs decentralized technology whatever just lets them see it in action like uh their websites because there's no way for other people to back it up was down for a few hours but us we kept

afloat so after that event many Ministries ask us uh what is the trick because their vendors their system integrators say that it's impossible to back their website up to IB because it was designed differently it is not a static snapshot right and so then we uh open- sourced the entire technological stack of our website so that other Ministries can simply tell their vendors to copy and build from this idea and basically do most of the rendering in JavaScript in client and so on so that they can also publish over static page including ipfs but also ordinary and so basically the idea is to show instead of tell and once we show we

also open up as public code our implementation so with zero budget burden they can also incorporate it in their own systems yeah I love it that is one of the things that I've also learned from Kevin who I work with right like show over tell like that is such a huge impact I think yeah I believe like if more and more people like you are at this position for youngsters like us us it becomes even more fascinating to work with the government to work for the country otherwise what happens is we sort of like run away a little bit because it's old ways traditional methods and those kind of things I think this is big shift like I can feel that

Curiosity and excitement in you know talking to you and understanding how things can be changed and you know how we can actually do like change at system level and this Canen happen when we have leaders like you so I just want to say thank you so much for thank you you know doing what you do thank you the community for doing all the research in a sense just a conduit through which those research enters production yes great so okay so moving on what is gov zero could you give like an overview of gov zero and how it has impacted the Civic engagement yeah I joined the gzero movement uh around the end of 2012 when it first started the

initial idea was really simple it is taking a governmental website that people find difficult to understand which always is something that you OV thatw and change your o to a zero okay so instead of join that go v.w uh you'll type join. gz vtw which looks almost the same and get into this kind of Shadow government a fork version of the governments and the idea of forking in open stores is essential because a fork of the governmental website is not denying the value the original one brings it is just steering it to a slightly different direction that is more participatory and transparent so

the initial one was budget the g0 v.w uh and the team who worked on it was motivated by a YouTube advertisement at time the administration pushed out this says you know the budget impossible to understand let's just do it without understanding it which was the the first administration's YouTube advertisement to be flaged as scam and taken down basely right and people really don't like the message right because if the budget the PDF print outs are difficult to understand it's not the people's problem it's the government's problem and so gzero visualized the budget into very easy to understand boxes and uh circles and so on interactive ones and as I mentioned you can click into each

one and uh type A Q&A and so so this entire system is now back at join the it's merged back another thing about forking is that some Forks are soft Forks right they are forked with the intention of being merged back right and that describe many gzero projects they are creative reimagination of governmental websites and processes but always with a hope that because it's open source if it work really well then it's like research where again the government is like the deployments they get merged back the next quarter right wow amazing I'm just you know there's one question that is coming to my mind

which we discussed I think two questions back like there are so there's so much happening in terms of making it easy for people to understand budgets and everything right but do you think it might be difficult to get people interested in it despite making it easy because sometimes what I have observed is like on an individual level if it is not really affecting us people don't really care right how do we get people to care about it because we can simplify it this is a great great question very interesting question on the joint platform we observed people who spend the most time on it are around 17 years old and 70 years old and so I mean I I guess both of them have more time on their hands but also

but also they care more about the Next Generation compared to the you know people in the middle the people in the middle have duties responsibilities that they have to uh immediately take care of but people who are 17 and 70 they think longer term they think on longer Horizons right right so they are natural allies and we get e petitions for example the one about banning the plastic straws a few years back uh from our signature baa bub takeouts right uh and so this kind of petitions doesn't come from nowhere it comes from our basic education and the basic education because of our new curricula we

deemphasized Road memorization literacy and so on in fact we change all occurrence of literacy into competence so instead of consuming something we want to co-create some competences when you're a producer right so actually that petition was a Civics CL has assignment from the teacher to high school students saying find something that you feel wrong and start a petition about it so it's like starting social movements as part of your school workor yes right so instead of taking Friday off to strike your Friday is do additions right so by creating the mechanism to uh encourage participation before they even turn 18

it actually prepares the society to look at the future voices and with the help of people who are around 70 years old to amplify it on the internet and so on it very quickly got 5,000 signatures and we met and had a multi-stakeholder meeting and so on and so the point I'm making is that it is not for the government to ask people to care there are already people caring about such topics it was just that maybe they're too young maybe they don't have a constituency for a legislator to represent it and so on but if we uh create mechanism so they can form Ally uh with people who they have never met in real life then they

actually assemble together into new form of associations so as to kind of decentralize uh the autonomy of organizations wow I can talk to you for the whole day but do so my next meeting is more than an hour away so so we can talk more so um I am so already so interested in talking like talking to you about the book that is plurality you WR plurality Donnet so before getting a little bit into book what is plurality sure so plurality means technology to Foster collaboration across diversity so there are two

Dimensions one is about building deeper and deeper connections there are technologies that as we mentioned increase the bandwidth of communication when I was young when we're in different countries we can only really type in real time or write long emails or whatever but now we can just put on some VMR and send each other our codec avatars and feel that we're in the same room right so there are uh deeper collaborations uh that's one line of Technology there's another line of technology that extends the organizational capabilities of people for example if we just meet people in the same rooming around 100 150 people we cannot keep track of each other

anymore when there's more than that number dbar number uh we cease to operate in a concrete personto person level we move to a hierarchical level and this is not because we're slaves of bureaucracy or whatever this is just a wet wear restri of our brains our minds but as I mentioned if you make use of synthetic avatars of augmented deliberation you can break through that barrier and have uh meaningful conversations with tens of thousands of people uh to compress their common ideas but not losing the Nuance right so if you have participated in consultations in the old batt old days by the time it

reaches the cabinet ministers yes it's just five A4 Pages yes and all the nuances were lost the local people may already have a very good solution but with more parameters like all these sectors need to coordinate in very specific way but once it's compressed to executive summary because of lossy compression that is lost right right but now with language models and so on we can actually keep the nuance and I can just type questions or say oh now I have a concrete situation how would the original tens of thousands of people's Avatar de with this cing back to their original Communications and so in this way it scales not just listening but

also conversation so we have Technologies for scaling and we have Technologies for deeper connections and instead of having them like being opposite of each other which is sometime portrayed we think of them as two Dimensions so plurality is to both increase collaboration and also increase diversity so it is the general direction of developing technologies that doesn't reduce people to just you know dollars or whatever transactional things as we scale right because there are many ways to uh scale things if you conflate everything into just a dollar value uh and it is also not developing virtual

reality that ends up becoming solo reality was just me and and my imaginations which is reducing diversity right so so deeper but also more diverse yeah I love it but again like my mind is just you know going back to one of the questions that we discussed which sort of relates to this you know for increasing diversity like how do we get you know one of the things you said like we need more local people to be involved not just experts right and the more groups we reach that increases diversity but how do we get them to understand like how do we get them to understand it right so because experts can understand a lot of things but how do we

disseminate the information in a way which is understood by the that particular local group yeah um I really believe that we should bring technology to where people are instead of asking people to understand technology right if again this is like those budget PDF files if if we cannot make our budgets understandable by the people that's on us that's not on the people um and so I think one of the main ideas that we've worked with is to Simply ask the people in the local issues and so one and what they want the government the ministers and so one uh

to to learn to respond to we even have a system called reverse mentorship that asks people around Taiwan younger than 35 like people who are in kind of on the very cusp of social Innovation and invite them into the cabinet so each Minister can appoint uh one or two reverse mentors uh to to Mentor them uh in a way of the future so to speak and they these young reverse mentors form their own youth advisory Council that can summon the ministers and so on to the places they think that the minister should understand uh so I think it is those reverse mentors I used to be one but now I'm very old I'm 41 now

42 so I have my own reverse Mentor uh that's mesh being by the way Min yeah to to lead away and so I think by flipping the idea of mentorship we can flip the original thinking of we need to uh pedagogically teach the people the way of Technology no it's not like that it is the people and especially young people who have worked deeply with a locality with a community to ask the policy makers the cabinet ministers and so one to adapt the technology they're developing to the people's needs yes can I be a RSE mentor of course would you like to be a tanese I would love to I was you know I

am so inspired by the work that Taiwan is doing and especially you I was wondering that how about I come here next year enroll myself in National Taiwan University to learn Mandarin okay and I work with you awesome and because I feel the work that is happening here is just baffles me it's so incredible and when I you know work in a different setting in web 3 also like in different you know I think there's a lot like there is still Gap that world needs to know what is happening here and we need to sort of like do so much more because you are so open to try and experiment

yeah so definitely um vitalik Glen Wild and many friends there are holders of the Taiwan gold cart and in fact we never defined gold card to uh to only the elites right the best universities the ones with the highest paying jobs no anyone who can prove they have contributed to the internet common uh for a years uh whether it's blogging or communication or open source documentation doesn't matter as long as there's a way to verify that you have contributed for eight years you get a gold card you become our resident yeah yes yeah but I'm young so I've not contri for 80 years but really yes I'm 26 so so when when did you first

encountered open source with three Community thank you for asking it's not that old like I'm comparatively very new so it's been two 3 years years when I actually like sort of started knowing what this is happening and I was frustrated with my job and I was like so fed up of the old methods and everything that you know they were using and then I got introduced to this whole Space of Open Source and web3 and that's how I started okay and well I mean I can still look at your contribution because a ministerial recommendation can actually substitute for eight years of experience yeah so maybe we should talk after the

interview yes by the way because we are talking about plurality Donnet I want to share that we are starting a book club for plurality Donnet yes and Glenn has been also very kind and he said like he will try to join some sessions so we are around 15 people who will be meeting bi-weekly And discussing the concepts of the book so okay that's awesome yes yeah I think we really try something new this time because when Glenn asked me to co-write a book I said the only requirement is to relinquish the copyright and publish as we write uh because we know that this field progresses so quickly so if we do it the traditional way the entire book may be

outdated by the time it's published it's only by working in the open and with book clubs everywhere can we keep updated on what's actually happening in the field yeah that is that is amazing because it it's so fast like you know you wake up and things change exactly so yeah I just wanted to share so anybody who is watching this if you're interested in joining the book club you can drop a comment in this Channel or reach out to me at SEL rans and initiating the book club great okay so many questions I have in my mind right now um yeah so essentially like because we're talking about the book what like can you share any personal experience or

Insight it actually inspired you to write this book like sure yeah yeah I think the motivation for me um is that by the time that I share with the world what we did during the pandemic uh without a single day of uh lockdown so people can always travel between cities during the whole three years thanks to very Innovative use of collaborative technology or how we counter the kind of threats of information manipulation again without administrative takedowns and so on I usually conclude with my poem which is the my job description the one that I pinned on my Twitter right uh which ends with the line whenever we

hear the singularity is near let's always remember the plurality is here uh and usually by that point people become very inspired and ask me okay how exactly do we make sure that plurality is here and can apply to our society because without such a book it feels a little bit like Taiwan exceptionalism it feels a little bit like you know taian is some something else entirely right uh but it is not like that back in 2014 the administration had the public trust level of maybe %. so we also had a time where there's like absolutely no trust in the Democratic uh institution uh we also had deep divides uh between the

peoples we have actually more than 20 national languages 16 or more indigenous Nations that's a part of Taiwan that was not very well known uh to the world so I think the point here is that Taiwan evolved this plurality uh Direction not because we're so exceptional but because we made some good choices in specific points in history and those choices any jurisdiction can make those two yeah right so I think turning something poetic and inspiring into something that's more like a handbook something practical it is the original motivation wow it seems like you need to have the right intent and then you know you can do it

love it yeah so before you know leaving the book topic just last question on the book uh what do you see as the most significant challenges facing pluralistic Societies in digital space and what are the some potential Solutions yeah definitely I think it is um technos solutionism right so if instead of what we just talked about which is adapting Technologies and aligning it to societal needs and continuously aligning these two together um there is a strong tendency uh in some technological communities uh to Simply say you know let's just solve a problem right let's solve

democracy let's solve this or that which by which they actually mean let's through n effect or whatever build something that is so widespread and adopted that the old system simply goes away uh the old institutions we can ignore them and just solve everything with the new institutions Frankly Speaking there were some uh people like that in crial communities too right like all the coordination failors all the issues with old finance and so on let's just build entirely new systems and take over the world and so the old problems just go away after a few years of course we now see that's probably not the case because they really is no reason for everyday

people to switch to aiming system if the legitimacy is more or less the same uh even though it may be more convenient more secure and so on you know in Aria has um taken the upper hands in most of the societies so instead of getting frustrated and say you know societal inmersion whatever right no let's just say however we can adapt those Technologies and put it in the hands of these people so instead of solving their problems empowering them so they can solve their problems right and so instead of the technologist becoming a savior right we actually become just

kind of bootloaders right who bootstrap conditions on top of which people can work together and so I think this Viewpoint is now gaining ground but in the past few years we did see a lot of um technos Solutions I love it wow I wonder like you know I know you do public office hours right so I read your conversation with I think ethereum Foundation where you mentioned how you want to do more qf rounds so do you want to talk about what interests you and what do you think about that and do you plan to do something like that in that yeah we're in the middle of a qf round right now we work with the three leading crowdfunding

Enterprises in Taiwan uh and we essentially asked the society for ideas that uh further the ESG uh goals the sdg goals using communication Technologies so the only thing we ask is that it needs to be uh portable that is to say for example there's a idea that says instead of bringing sign language interpreters to each person in need how about let's just use high bandwidth and some machine learning to connect together so that everybody can have access not just to sign interpretes but also real time captions and so on right so this idea in itself doesn't immediately have a product Market fit um

it does need a lot of governmental funding but from the government side it is actually much more cost effective than hiring individual uh sign language interpreters right because these interpreters still have a job but now they can serve much more people and spend more time interpreting instead of travel from this client to the other right so it it improves everybody's wellbeing and so for things like this we just asked them to write up their proposal uh as the crowfunding and the each crowfunding site agreed uh to publish the the tally of the square root of each individual contribution so that the ones that have the highest sum of the square root uh gets the highest

award uh from the government so this is a new middleway between the committee voting from the small committee and the simple matching funding where a large social Enterprise can just dominate the the matching funding uh it is somewhere in the middle so we're currently in the first round as a Ministry for this kind of experiments wow yeah because I feel like I was you know wondering even when I was talking to Kevin gitcoin like they are you know actually building the tech where anybody can experiment with different funding mechanisms qf is one and then there is retroactive uh funding

which is which I I'm really fond of because it just you know rewards people and uh who have contributed in a meaningful way but my only fear is like I just hope that anything that is getting built is useful to people even outside that bubble right so that is why I feel like what should we do to use the tech like that which can enable these mechanisms here yeah this is very intriguing I think just as we work with the leading established crowfunding sites not running our own qfont but running it with the three cese

Enterprises that already have experienced connecting the impact investors the social entrepreneurs and so on together uh we also think retro funding uh doesn't exist in a bubble or in a vacuum but we need to connect it with a existing ecosystem around what's usually called pay for results or pay for success or social impact Bond many names but there are existing communities again connecting impact investors and the uh public sector based on idea of measurable outcomes uh and so instead of saying you know retr funding is mostly digital or mostly web3 or mostly uh new innovation we simply say actually it is

just a way uh to streamline the process of what existing pay for result Arrangement is trying to do so again not as a savior or a solution provider but rather as someone who empowers the bootstrapping of such uh processes so you can scale better while working as deeply as before with the existing communities yeah amazing yeah would love to like we are already doing like a live round which is happening so we spin up a live round in funding the commons event that happened recently where contributors of GV zero Dow zero and Fab da they've applied and we had the small matching pool which was raised by the organizers around $3,000 and people have talked about their contribution in these

organizations and yeah so we're doing that yeah I think this kind of Life demos is really key because individually those ideas hyper certificate retro funding quadratic funding and so on they look good as a formula but it's very difficult for people to think uh in concrete terms like how should we coordinate who will I Lobby does Lobby even work right in such mechanisms so I think the the key here is be like a Sandbox that is to say with a very kind of gentle and humble matching fund level not immediately throwing billions of

dollars into it and and Frankly Speaking let it fail let it fail in interesting ways because it's open source when it fails to keep those parts right and then you can Rec combine to make it better I love the fact that you know you said that like fail fast fail fast that is so important because it can't be perfect and it just gives you so much learnings that you know this is how it needs to be done and this is why people couldn't understand it sometimes we think that for example we did an experiment like we work with like I work with green pill Network right so we have local chapters we have green pill India green pill Taiwan we have green pill you know China so we did this experiment where we integrated hypers Sears on the software that gitcoin has built and when people

had their grants displayed each application had hypers searchs displayed you know our hypothesis was that when people come to donate they will look at the hypers searchs and they will decide whether they want to support or not to our surprise nobody looked at it like people for example green pill Japan is raising funds and they asked their members to vote for them they came they voted for them and they went like they did not look at the hypers search so a lot of times we assume right so there has to be different ways maybe people didn't understand how to actually interpret that hypers right so there are different things but I think it's super important to fail fast and you know do it like a pilot round or like live demos so that it helps us and people

understand what is happen break us news things yes amazing so a lot of serious questions now we will move to a very interesting section which is let's know Minister Audrey of course okay so it's you can choose to answer like two three lines or expand but it's fun question okay so what inspired you to start coding at such a young age yeah I was inspired by lack of computers right I read about programming I had no personal computer at home so I took took a A4 paper and wrote q w r t y on it the keyboard and every morning I would wake up I was 8 years old would wake up type CLS enter and use the Eraser to erase

the pencil that was printed on the screen right so I I programmed without a computer for quite a while uh and then after a few weeks I think my parents finally fed up with me and got me a personal computer so from the very beginning I think of computers as uh extension of my mind instead of playing computer games I spend most of my time just looking at computer games and rerro them uh from scratch uh and even before I had access uh to you know more powerful computers and so on I would simulate uh what they how they would act uh on piece of paper or on you know smaller computers so I think the the point I want to make is that

computational thinking doesn't even need a powerful computer it is just a way to work with the problem that doesn't fit our brains uh you can decompose it you can turn them into functional modular components and so on and at at some point you will see that there's no problem too large if you can decompose it logically and just work on the one's part that you feel like working on because other people are working on other parts so we can just coordinate together I love you said that I always thought computer as the extension of my brain like that's such a genius thing to say yes love it okay so what is your favorite tech tool like one Tech Tool

you can't live without oh that's definitely my eye gloss right this is I think the a pinnacle of assistive technology which always put the Dignity of the person and I love the fact that it doesn't push advertisement uh to my R it is very transparent yes and I can fix it myself or bring it to the people down the street to fix it without signing a andda or paying 3 million licensing fees and so I think all technology should be like my yes wow love it what is the recent Tech Innovation that has excited you the most I think uh just today right I read on nature that the Deep Mind team have successfully introduced a new novel

program that tackled mathematics combinatorial uh problems Spa uh use language models as a part of evolutionary uh algorithm so in evolutionary programming uh you rely on essentially rolling the dice right to introduce mutations uh to programs so it solves problems better but instead of just rolling a dice they're now randomly sampling language models so it moves through the search space much much faster and so this is one good step toward a extension of the planning part of our mind not just the recital part of our mind but can basically move the

researchers human researchers from a point of they have to both think and operationalize the research to just strategizing about the research yeah wow this makes me want to ask what are your sources of information like what do you consume like you said you read this on nature right so what are the different sources that you sort of go to for reading latest it is it is very random I of course subscribe to some substacks I read x.com feed I recently reactivated my last wrong account and so and so for right Hacker News I read it and so on so I think it's not what I browse I as zeld scroll my devices I insist on using a stylus so

that it's almost always intentional so I don't do Doom scrolling any sort of scrolling I wake up I think of a keyword I want to explore today and I search for it across different uh media and platforms and so and if I go on social media which I don't often everybody know in Taiwan that my Facebook feed is empty with just a a inspiring quote and this is called Facebook feed Eradicator so basically I don't let AI take off take over my mind yeah and I always begin with a intention either from a stylus or typing a keyword or things like that wow do you have any hobbies

that people would be surprised to know about I'm sorry do you have any hobbies that people would be surprised to know about well I I love hugging trolls troll hugging is my hobby I would just sometime uh search uh for people talking about me or the policy that I'm doing uh and if they write you know 100 very angry words like toxic words and so on but even just three words in those 100 words I can creatively interpret it as constructive I would just engage with that person wow just on those three words uh and so not only this turns people who were adversarial into good

friends but also it's say a example that really it doesn't matter what toxic or trollish or whatever things you say uh you can always it's just like you know wearing a eyeglass you can always uh post filter the the incoming input so it only engage you in a positive way yeah wow yeah one book that has significantly influenced your thinking uh a book plurality but that's a cheap answer um so I think one of the books that I spent spend the most time on uh is the Ministry of Education dictionary my first project that I led in of zero

movement is koct the Ministry of Education dictionary in which we not only increase digitalization like mobile browsing and things like that across the M dictionaries but also crowdsourced typo spotting Corrections fixing uni code whatever right so to modernize a very old d AR into something that is digital with the help of tens of thousands of people so this is one of my first uh engagement with the crowdsourcing world uh and the same methodology has then been applied uh to indigenous language dictionaries and many other dictionary so I think this is quite symbolic really because dictionary

is one of the most top- down things ever right either by a prestigious University or a government or things like that but Urban dictionaries Wiki dictionaries and the mo dictionary proved that the locally sourced Community Source dictionary doesn't need to compete uh with the official one actually it can build upon the official one and our contributions were actually merged back by the Ministry of Education and I was then invited to join the curriculum committee for basic education so this is actually my first position in the government so it holds a special place in my heart wow love it who has been your greatest role model or Mentor in

your career well that's kind of difficult to choose but I think Larry wall of Pearl and patch and RN Fame probably has the most influence on how I worked with people especially across the internet um lar always emphasized the importance of plurality in in fact you know uh like you know talking about singularities near the one and don't forget about plurality I first heard that from L wall and and I turned that into a poem but original idea of using the idea of plurality to overcome the threat of Singularity that came from there okay

amazing great okay I'm almost towards the end so two three more questions paint me a picture of the world you want to live in sure so I think a future where there's always more freedom to Future Generations is the kind of future that I want to live in I don't want the future to be a more constrained space just because the current generation feels what's best for the world if we optimize for a local Optimum uh then we actually foreclose and deny possibilities for future generation

gener ation to to do better so it's always our hashtag to say hasht free the future so I think this is a very meta answer to your question like I want the kind of future that is more co-determined by people in the future that might wow what do you want to be different in the world in next six months I think in the next six months we need to pay very close attention um whether people see AI as something assistive that is to say augmenting how people coordinate or something that is authoritarian that is to say dictating how people should behave because we are

at a cusp of a gentic AI now as I mentioned the nature paper as one small step forward from a machine that can actually uh open up the possibilities to move toward very agentic AI uh but a very agentic AI that prescribes certain interactions also forecloses possibilities for people to interact together if they have to be mediated through that agentic AI that makes essential decisions not with us but for us right so I think the most important thing in the next six months is democratic alignment and by that I mean a continuous aligning like co-

domestication between the humanity and assistive AIS that we produce if there's no feedback loop if it is just the humanity setting the initial conditions in the agentic a evolving by itself to a point where uh they cease to align with what a next Generations of human thinking is then we risk uh just foreclosing history at one point in history and then everything else after that is just a local Optima right okay second last question what type of music do you like any kind of music right so sometimes I would just just randomly

play a music track with that said um I tend to listen to music that looks a entire day so for a entire day uh I would just listen to one kind of music or even just one song but the next day I would wake up and intentionally switch to something different so as to Mark a clear beginning nice nice okay last question share can you share glimpse of your typical day what does your day look like oh sure so today right I woke up I went to the National Science and Technology advisory meeting and then I'm doing this interview and then I'm having a conversation with my staff to prepare for the live streamed uh response uh to

my staff's wishes because every month we do a a live stream where I basically have a virtual town hall with all the ministry and administration's people and the agenda is directly set on a discourse for internally uh by our staff and again they can get 30 petitions collections signatures and so on and they can essentially force me to to be accountable right a certain meta and so on so I think this internal democracy is often overlooked when Democratic innovators want to reinvent or reform democracy normally they think about local community elections Municipal

elections all way to the National but actually on large organizations uh governance this is a very low hanging fruits because every leader in a large organization wants to listen a scale was actually happening and they want to engage with the collective intelligence of the staff as just that again limited by 150 people by limits um there's no way for me to arrange one-on-one conversations with each and every uh staff member so collective intelligence tools is my priority in my Ministry and I dedicate the rest of my day to prepare uh to the answer of the collective intelligence wow I'm curious what do you

do on a Sunday on Sunday I go back to my family so my family is in V uh and so both of my grandma are still around uh and my parents and so on and so I spend time with the family amazing awesome thank you so much do you want to say something to the audience yeah sure yeah so um if you have uh contributed to open source uh open culture for eight years uh please do apply for a Taiwan gold cart uh it is a three-year residency with health benefits bring your family and so on and if you live in a jurisdiction in which dual citizenship is permitted on the fifth year you can also get a Taiwan

passport without giving up your original one so being also Taiwanese is a important Direction uh to connect to the world and if you're young and have not contributed for eight years yet uh since kindergarten or something um just let me know uh your contributions and maybe we can work something out and live and prosper all right we just heard from SEL Reen and Audrey Tang I am excited about this episode because of sel's first guest co-hosting of a green pill episode and I'm excited about Audrey for all the reasons what a leader what a leader at the frontier of capital allocation doing qf and rpgfinal and also at the frontier of digital democracy in a world that

sorely needs an upgrade to our democracies to become digital in my opinion thanks for listening to the green pill. network podcast again we are featuring the people who build a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world if you value our work you can collect this episode go to pods. medgreen pill to find episodes and start collecting and while you're here please remember to subscribe rate and review it really helps people find the green pill Network all right I'll see you on the next one peace and love [Music]