I can only say I’m touched to meet you in person.

I have fought many fights on recording.

A story almost nobody knows, is how I got fired from teaching at Stanford. We talked about getting fired yesterday when actually I was telling about life, so I did not tell this how did I get fired from Stanford.

I was teaching at Stanford and I went for a weekend at a conference TED Global, not TED in Vancouver, but TED Global in Oxford. When I arrived, when I landed, my Stanford email was not working. I called my friend in the department. He said, "Oh." He cannot do anything about it. He talked to the department chair.

Then I used Gmail to email the department chair. He said, "You need to take down that video." I said, "What video?" Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and I, we talked after class for maybe 10 minutes. It’s a video of 10 minutes about identity, about data, of course, and so on.

I thought maybe because I don’t upload this video myself, I thought the students made a joke, they put some porn in, or...really, I said, "I’m sorry. I just landed in Oxford. I do not know what’s wrong with the video, just tell me." He said he has no time to watch the video. He was just told I need to take it down.

I skipped the first session of TED. I watched the video and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. It turned out that the university thought by having the video up of Reed Hoffman -- who was a classmate of mine at Stanford, I’ve known him since the ’80s -- and me, talking about data and identity that would cut into their revenues, that people would not pay for my class, but they would just watch the class online, and I had to take it down.

I said, "No, I’m not taking it down." Then he said, "If you don’t take it down, you will not teach here anymore." I said, "I’m not taking it down." Then, "OK, you’re not teaching anymore."

I ultimately really believe that the things we create we should be behind, and we should not be willing to get suppressed by people who don’t even have 10 minutes as department chair to get to the truth of something. I’ve never set foot in that department again.

I feel very strongly about recording things. United Airplanes wants their airplane turned around and asked me to please leave because I was taking a video.

That led to very good relationships. I knew the previous CEO. I know most of the star line CEOs because of that invent.

The notion of office hours was actually brought to me by the former United Airlines CEO, because he said, "If you come and do a workshop, great, let’s add a day where you just make one-hour time slots, and people can sign up to talk to you about whatever they want to talk about.

Long story short, for me, data, recording things is really what gets us through the truth to accountability. A lot of society, I personally think, whether it is in the US, for sure in mainland China, is better off if we had that accountability.

I got a letter from Angela Merkel thanking me for the book. I thought, "Ah, I did not expect that." When I got a call from the German Ministry of Defense, when the German version was out, asking me to go for lunch, and then making me a two-star officer to help the German military in the cyber information space, to help them understand the power of data.

I think I’ve touched more than just as chief scientist at Amazon, a billion people. These are organizations which are very important organizations.

Angela Merkel in Germany is actually one of the most powerful leaders in the world. That’s why being here, I want to know how can our mindset of transparency help the world.

I can tell you what’s in it.

Thank you. It would not happen with Olfa, not without Lisa, and not without Audrey.

It’s that Olfa happened this way, that three years ago, a student of mine at Berkeley, Andrew Hall, he had dean of NTU in the School of Engineering invite me for a lecture. I said, my currency, how I get something out of it, is to meet some students.

The day before, there were five, six students who came to Montreal. One of them was Olfa. Then Olfa actually hosted here onstage. Then Olfa wanted to, was in Silicon Valley, and asked me whether he can come on a Silicon Valley data safari I was organizing for my students.

He said, "What can I do?" I said, "You can give me massage." [laughs] For many years, Olfa has come to my hotel room at 1:00 AM, for example, ready to give me massage, but all we did was talk. [laughs]

I came to Taiwan to get the massage from Olfa. You have to come to an island south of Kaohsiung to get the massage. I said, "OK. I go to an island south of Kaohsiung." That’s where we’re going tomorrow.

To see his good heart and his dedication to Taiwanese entrepreneurs, to really see the love that Olfa has for his country, and how much he gives, like the kid last night, the physics. We care. I did not know it before yesterday, but I care that he does well, the NTU student who is thinking about dropping out.

That’s why I’m here. I told Olfa, I’m happy to spend two weeks in Taiwan to do whatever I can do to help the country from a data perspective. I tell everybody, Olfa is the boss. If he takes me somewhere, that’s why I’m here, long story, but true.

The medium is the massage. No, the message is the massage. No, the medium is the message. No. The Canadian communication theorist who I am quoting on the book at the beginning, who said the more data banks, as he called Marshall McLuhan, the more they know us, the less we exist.

I think the more databases -- I mean, he did not have this only recorder -- the more they know us, the more we exist, because we are the data we create.

Now, I am doing something with German television. It is trying to understand what the fears are that people have about recordings.

My fear, starting with myself, is illegal activities.

Drug use, in Taiwan, smoking pot, not that I do it often, but is illegal, or Singapore. I am afraid of government using data not for the people, but data against the people. I have a house in China in Shanghai.

We mentioned last night, my friend Josh Chin, who writes for the "Wall Street Journal," who is absolutely great. He wrote a piece two weeks ago how Baidu, Tencent, etc., are the ears and the eyes of the Chinese government.

I think for me, the fear I have, it’s not at all about Google, Amazon, and so on and forth. It’s some government -- as my dad was imprisoned in East Germany for many years -- which doesn’t like me for whatever reason, finding data.

Now, we assume, finding correct data about me, which out of context, can be interpreted against the law. The second fear I have is that they can manufacture data about me that have nothing to do with the real world.

There, I hope, but the hope is .1 percent. There, I hope that if we have data to contradict their data, our chance is much larger to not get put in prison.

I have two passports, US and Germany. German people are worried about companies. I am not worried about companies knowing the inside of one of them. I personally think the EU’s right to be forgotten by itself is stupid.

You also need a right to be remembered. In my book, I am putting out six rights which we as individuals, as citizens, should have towards our data. Some of them do overlap with the EU act, which was not done after I saw the new data protection...

Yeah, exactly, GDPR, coming into politics. The book was written before the GDPR came. This is May next year, the Data Protection Act.

It’s surprising, like the right to port data. That’s very, very similar. I just went to New York for a couple of days this month to speak at an event on both the impact of this for American firms or for international firms doing business.

You have an app out of Taiwan which can download from the German app store, and the German citizen is using it. What does that mean? I am personally extremely excited to see that there will be massive action for Facebook in May next year, when German people will get organized to all say, "I would like to see my data."

The law is that you have to prevent it, and provide it in a format that is understandable, that they can really make sense out of it.

It’s not a, "Here’s a dump of a few zeros and ones into a binary file." No, I need to understand Google Latitude, helps me understand my geolocation. I love that. I think that, for me, is empowering people against often what I call the industrial military complex.

What’s the worst a company can do? They can delete my account. It would suck, but I by mistake lost my YouTube channel this year. I have been through that. Not happily, but I survived it. It cost me a few weeks of my life, and nothing is back up yet, but OK.

Not much, not much of a problem, what can Amazon do? They can stop shipping things to me. OK, I’ll find other ways. What can Google do? They can stop my email, my Gmail. I’ll go find. They can even delete my entry in the database.

If you Google Andreas Weigend, nothing will come up. That would suck, but we will find ways around it. That’s why, compared to the government, where...I was going to take a hike a couple of months ago with my friend, Brad Rubenstein.

Brad, a smart, wonderful person, me, both reasonable people, our third friend, just as reasonable as us was barred entry to the United States because some immigration officer looked at his mobile, and found some gay dating app.

The sad thing is, that immigration officer thought he was doing the right thing for the country by not letting the person in, so it was only Brad and me who took the hike. We reflected on how citizenship, or the right to travel, let’s say.

How some person thinking that he is doing the right thing for the United States of America by not letting a person in based on an app that person has on their phone. This is not fantasy. That was happening.

I just told my friend, my accountant, Daniel Bao, who is an amazing person who went to Stanford together with Reid Hoffman. He used to run National Condom Week, so he is a person gets things done.

He said, "Andreas, if you give," I think it was like, "10,000 bucks to some GLBTQ organization, then good things will happen." I told him, "Yes, do that before the end of the year," because this has been a tough year in the US.

Maybe one more story about data, yesterday, we Googled Putin and Weigend, when you Google this, all the top hits are pictures of Vladimir Putin and me on November 10th last year. That was the day after the election.

I was the first US citizen who Putin congratulated to the election. I had no idea that Putin knew more than probably anybody else I knew about what had gone on. It is, for me, a fascinating world about data, about manipulation.