Verifying Constituents and Political Advocacy with Aidan and Liam McCarty of ePluribus | Episode 296

the net neutrality public comment period that the FCC had a couple years ago, they received 21.7 million messages over the span of this public comment period. And independent research by Pew and other organizations showed that 94% of those messages were fake or duplicate. So it's just insane when you think about the level of fraud that's going on.

Hello, this is The Great Battlefield Podcast. I'm Nathaniel G. Perlman. A great political battle is being fought right now between progressives and the forces of reaction on the other side. This show is about the political entrepreneurs and other progressive leaders who are finding new or improved ways to fight. Aidan and Liam McCarty are two brothers who are the co-founders of ePluribus, a nonpartisan enterprise working on political advocacy and civic identification. Starting in college, Aidan and Liam have been working to bring their passion for technology and government and politics together. I was interested to hear their story about how they started ePluribus, what they're focusing on currently, how the notion of a civic ID cropped up, and how they're attempting to drive widespread adoption of their address verification into the civic technology space, and where they're attempting to take the ePluribus platform more generally. We had a thoughtful conversation, another in my series of interviews with new political or civic entrepreneurs. So with that as background, a quick word from our sponsor, then my interview with Aidan and Liam of ePluribus.

This episode is brought to you by Graphicacy. Graphicacy is an analytic design firm that can help you advance the mission of your organization using your own real data and information. They are 21st century visual communicators who create interactive graphics, motion graphics, and data visualizations. You can find Graphicacy at graphicacy.com. That is G-R-A-P-H-I-C-A-C-Y.com. With Graphicacy's help, you can visualize a better world.

Okay, McCarty brothers, could you each introduce yourselves and give me quick biographies?

Absolutely. My name's Aidan McCarty. I studied biochemistry at Stanford and also ran a social entrepreneurship incubator on campus called Sensa Labs, where we helped students that were running companies trying to do good for the world expand their vision and their reach and grow into larger organizations. So I've been interested in politics and entrepreneurship and using entrepreneurship to make an impact on the world for a very long time and have now founded Eploribus a couple years back with my brother Liam.

And my name's Aidan McCarty. I studied physics at Stanford. I wrote a book when I was a freshman called Data and Power. All about the interplay of big data technologies in private companies and government and the privacy consequences of that. That got me interested in technology and government more broadly, and I ended up working in a variety of roles related to that. So I did internet governance research at the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford. I did research into government data for a project Steve Ballmer was running. And that led me to found E Pluribus with Aidan.

How far out of college are you guys? You both talk like you have a long history.

Not far at all. I graduated last year, last June, and Aidan is technically a stop-out, as they call it.

What's a stop-out?

A stop-out means you're taking a leave of absence from school. So you're technically not a dropout yet because you can go back and reintegrate, but I'm not done with school yet. So I would be a rising senior if I went back now, but I'm out of school working full-time on E Pluribus at the moment.

Wow. Yeah. The way you were talking, I thought maybe young 30s. So I appreciate that you guys have done a lot in a, in a short amount of time. What is the founding story for E Pluribus? What, what are you trying to do?

We actually founded this back in 2016 in the middle of the presidential election with all of the craziness associated with that. So you might remember, obviously political polarization was kind of at an at an all-time high. Congress was at a standstill. And what we noticed is that ourselves and a lot of our friends and family were really frustrated that they didn't know how to reach out and how to make a real impact on politics. We saw a lot of people reaching out on Facebook, on Twitter, sometimes writing these very detailed messages to their friends and followers that weren't actually reaching the decision maker and weren't actually making a real impact on anyone's decision-making. And so we decided we had to do something about it. And we were actually in a hotel room up in Half Moon Bay and just kind of started throwing ideas back and forth. You know, we kind of started with this crazy idea to wiki-edit legislation. You know, could you pool together ideas in that way? And gradually over time, from talking to a lot of people, going to Capitol Hill, talking to legislators, talking to their staff, and understanding the problem from as many different vantage points as possible. We decided that actually the solution was around engagement and engaging using a verified identity so that your representatives actually know that you're a real person, not a Russian, not a troll, not a lobbyist. And so that's what ultimately has led us to build E Pluribus and the solution we have today. It was a long iterative process starting from that seed of inspiration.

Yeah, and to add to that, we have a unique mix of experiences. We grew up in the Midwest. We're from Wisconsin originally, from a small town. And when we left for college, we found ourselves in a very different world. It's politically very different at Stanford than it is in Wisconsin, which is a swing state, which has a very wide range of views. And we spent some time in Washington, DC, where it's a completely different world. Typically kind of behind on the tech side, but full of civil servants and people interested in advocacy and politics, which is definitely not the case in much of Silicon Valley. So we had this unusual mix of experiences in all parts of the country, and that inspired us to build something that is technological but also tries to reach out to Capitol Hill and the rest of the country where we're from. To build something that everyone can use, that everyone can benefit from. So we're very keen on creating an organization that is not just a Silicon Valley tech company, that is not just a political advocacy tool, but that integrates both of those worlds to provide helpful functionality to everyone.

So I'm not clear on what it is that you've built. Try to help me understand that.

So what we've built is a Chrome extension, so a browser extension, uh, that kind of lays user interface on top of the web as you're browsing. That allows you to send official messages to your representatives at all levels, so local, federal, and state, from Facebook, Twitter, and major news sites. So I think we support about the top 15 right now, so things like CNN and Fox, you can send messages from any article. And so the idea there was to break that bubble of social media I was talking about a bit earlier, where people are writing sometimes very detailed and comprehensive messages to their friends and followers, but it's not reaching the representative, and to allow them to continue writing those messages just like they are today and also send it officially to their rep. Another thing that we've built is a mobile app for iOS and Android. So if you go on the App Store right now today, you can download the ePluribus app. So anywhere you are, whether you're walking past a pothole in your local community or you're sitting down and watching CNN and frustrated with what's going on in the news, you can reach out to your rep through directly from there and make sure that the problem gets addressed. Really what we're trying to do is make it as seamless as possible to contact your rep. Now, the other component of that that I referenced earlier is identity. So we're also trying to ensure that you can reach out not only very easily, but very impactfully. So when we talk to reps and their staff, one core issue that they have processing messages is it's very difficult to know who it's actually coming from. So oftentimes when they're receiving messages, they can't differentiate whether it's from a paid lobbyist or it's from an actual constituent of theirs, or maybe it's from some bot in North Dakota sending messages over to a rep in Wisconsin. And so they can't tell the difference between those, which means that real people with real concerns are being drowned out. So that's another aspect of our platform that we're building out right now, and we should be releasing that functionality very soon.

Why don't you talk a little bit about how you are verifying people's identities?

We are focused on constituent verification, which is the most relevant kind of verification for ePluribus, and we do that by mailing things in traditional USPS mail. The reason we do that is that it's extremely difficult to spoof that at scale, and it's backed by the law, so tampering with mail is a felony, and so it's extremely difficult for anyone who's trying to influence the political system to tamper with that process. So you request to verify your identity, you'll receive something in the mail, and by scanning that, you verify that you actually live where you say you live. And that enables us to tell your representatives, this is someone in your district, this is a constituent of yours, you should listen to them and not all of the other messages that could be coming from anywhere. And to put a point on how important this is, I think there's some awareness of this problem. There's definitely awareness at this point of the broader issue of, say, election meddling. But this problem of fake messages and lack of identity verification in communications is a huge problem, not just for representatives, but government agencies as well. So one example that we often talk about is the net neutrality public comment period that the FCC had a couple years ago. They received 21.7 million messages over the span of this public comment period. And independent research by Pew and other organizations showed that 94% of those messages were fake or duplicate. So it's just insane when you think about the level of fraud that's going on. The reason that exists is because it's so easy to create fake messages, fake social media accounts, whatever it may be. So we think that this is really an endemic problem to all civic applications, and we wanna make sure that anyone sending a message on our platform at least has the option to verify themselves to stand out from the bots.

[Speaker:AIDAN MCCARTHY] So I buy that if there was sort of a universal adoption or a close to universal adoption of some kind of identity verification like the one you're proposing, that would be helpful. If only a small number of people adopt it, then it doesn't really seem like it helps that much because whoever the recipient is is going to face that problem still with the 90% or whatever it is of messages coming unverified, right? How do you turn this into a widely used thing? What's your plan for that?

Our plan for that is essentially to provide this as a service to all civic tech applications in the longer term. For example, we were at a conference recently with a lot of these civic tech organizations building tools related to ours. So it might be everything from micro-campaign contributions to bill summaries, et cetera. They all have the same problem. They all want to verify their users as constituents because they know that that helps their users have more impact, that reps will listen more, et cetera. But it's prohibitively difficult and expensive for one organization to do it. This identity verification that we're building out is actually a separate platform that will serve ePluribus, but also a wide range of other services. And so the whole point is to create that infrastructure so that we can achieve what you're talking about. Widespread adoption. So even in the short term, if you have only 10% of messages using this, it's still a big advantage because then the representative receiving them can say, okay, we can prioritize these, for example, or we at least know that these are real constituents and they've gone through a rigorous verification process. But we've also seen that every other service that's doing anything related to civics needs the same thing, and so we're essentially building the plumbing, the infrastructure that'll enable that.

When I've done verification online for a variety of financial or other applications, they have typically connected me to some kind of big data and asked questions like, are you associated with this vehicle or this address? I'm sure you've seen these other things and they have a lot lower bar in terms of time of turnaround and ease for the user. Have you considered multiple options for verification, or what's the real rationale for the way that you're doing it?

There's a couple of key things there. One is that the verification that matters in our particular case is address, right? We want to be able to know for sure whether somebody is a constituent of a, of a given district. And how you do that is you take the address and then you match it to the district. It turns out out that while there are other ways to try to verify address, none of them are very robust. So you can try to do it based off of phone records or, you know, some sort of large database like you're talking about, but that's not going to get a very large percentage of people, and it's not all that accurate and often quite outdated. So in terms of doing robust address verification, it's actually pretty well established that mailing people something is the way to go. So even if you have to verify your address for something as high-tech as, say, Facebook right now, they'll mail you a code that you then have to type into their platform to make that happen. The other component that I wanted to address here is that we are laser-focused in terms of our identity component on putting the information actually in control of the end user. So the identity app that Liam was talking about that we're building out actually has no database. So everything that we are giving the user in terms of a verification is stored locally on their device. So once they verify their address, that address at a station is stored on the device and they can share it with with other Civic tech.

Does that mean that they will, if they lose that device, that they have to go through the verification again?

We're providing backup options that will avoid the vast majority of those cases. So you can back up, for example, if you have an iPhone to iCloud, and then if you change phones or if you lose your phone, you can easily receive that verification again without having to do anything. That's of course an encrypted backup, so there's no security concern with that. If you want to delete the credential, for example, if you say, well, I've moved now and I no longer want this, you can delete it and it will be gone forever because that's the whole point. You control it, you can do with it what you want. So if you want to verify a new address, then yes, you would reverify.

What's the business model around this identity part of what you're doing?

The business model is based on the basic economics of verification. You can think of it as a commission model, but to give you a sense of why this is an interesting business, right now verification is not a shared resource. So if you are, for example, a financial institution or any service that needs to verify the identity of a user, you pay for that verification independently. So if I go sign up for one service, they pay for some third party to verify my identity. And if I go sign up for 5 more, they all pay independently. And that's because there's no peer-to-peer exchange of that information. If you create such a peer-to-peer exchange, the cost of the verification is orders of magnitude less because now the same verification can be used by tens or hundreds of different services. So the idea is that we're reducing that inefficiency in the market that currently exists by saying this is a verification that now everyone can use. In the example of civic tech, the problem right now is that although every civic tech application wants to verify a user as a constituent, it's very expensive and difficult for them to do so independently. If you can provide the same verification to all of those different services, it's all of a sudden dramatically cheaper.

I assume that you've done some work sort of socializing this concept among some of the vendors and other civic tech platforms that are out there. Do you have the sense that you're going to have good adoption, people to sort of lead the way on that?

Yes, definitely. So we're actually already in the coming weeks announcing our first partnership with a civic tech company called DailyClout. Where essentially they provide bill summaries of legislation at the federal and state level and allow people to vote on that legislation and provide data back to the legislators. And so it's a really another exciting innovation around bringing people and their legislators closer together. And so that's gonna be one of the primary applications of this new technology that we're building. And we actually also went to the Unrig Summit in Nashville. Well, Liam went to the Unrig Summit in Nashville and explained this concept to lots of other civic tech companies that were there. And universally, people really responded to the idea of having a verified address and verifying people as constituents and using that as a shared resource among many different companies because it's just something that every company in that industry needs. And so, you know, you were mentioning, you know, KBA and banking previously for, you know, know your customer requirements. And similarly, in civic tech, verifying somebody as a constituent is sort of fundamental to providing quality services to the end user.

We've seen increasing interest in identity after the 2016 election. I think people really woke up to the idea that meddling in our political system is a serious problem because information warfare or whatever you want to call it is extremely easy. It's not hard to create fake online accounts. It's not hard to spoof identity on the internet. We've seen a lot of interest in the last couple years in trying to provide better identity verification, particularly in things that relate to civics or government because it's just such an enormous problem.

It seems to me that some of the main vendors that have really a lot of adoption that are somewhat identity-like are like the Act Blues or NGP VANS that are processing tons of contributions, or the other advocacy type applications like Phone to Action or Capital Advantage that are sending lots of communications to elected representatives. Have you approached any of those and gotten any feedback yet?

We haven't approached them specifically because I think many of them are more tangentially related to identity. It sort of depends on the case, but I think there are some interesting opportunities in trying to use some of the existing infrastructure that you're referencing. So if it's a contribution, there's at least some level of identity verification with that. It doesn't necessarily mean constituent verification, unfortunately. For example, a lot of people's billing address may not correspond to their living address. Ours certainly don't, for example. But it does provide certainly a level of verification against automated accounts. So I think leveraging those platforms as a kind of initial identity verification could be very interesting. And one of the things that I saw at the summit in Nashville was that there's all these people working on different civic applications. In some ways, you, you want to just smash them all together and make a super platform that does all of it. I've been in conversation with a lot of these different organizations to try to figure out how we can collaborate, how we can combine the things that we're building, because at the end of the day, we're all trying to solve the same problems. And I think there's lots of opportunities to meld the different functionalities that we have.

So let's say I have a, I don't know, like a voter registration app, that's a civic piece of civic tech, and I want to hook into your verification. What does that arrangement look like? How would I approach you and negotiate something? How does that work?

There's a number of possible options. So right away, in terms of accessing our address verification, you could just form a partnership with us, and as soon as you want somebody to go through that address verification process, You can have them click a link natively within your app, which will have them download ours, input their address, they'll receive something in the mail, verify, and it automatically shares it back with yours. We're very privacy conscious, so making sure that the user is constantly affirming that they're accepting our privacy policy, your privacy policy, good with the information sharing, everything like that. The other option for something like a voter verification application is we're also accepting other attestations of information. So for example, if you wanted to not only access our address verification, but also wanted to be able to provide the verifications you're already doing in-house of the voters to other applications, you can also allow your users to store that information locally within our identity app and then share it over with other civic tech apps. So the idea with that is you're allowing people to, again, take control over their personal information and build up their own kind of civic profile, which that they can then share with all of these different applications they're signing up for, rather than having to do it independently with each one and having all of these varying levels of verification.

You were saying that there's no database behind yours, but am I understanding that there's sort of an optional database? Behind your identity that enables you to share this, or how does that work?

So the beautiful thing about the system that we've developed is that we literally store zero personal data, none at all. It's all on your device and only on that device. And that's really core to what we're trying to do because, for example, we could in the longer term provide the same functionality as something like Login with Google or Login with Facebook. But in a completely different way where there's no massive database of all of our information that can be hacked, that can leak, etc. You input the data originally, which is used to do whatever verification you're looking for, like address verification, and then all of it is deleted forever. And when you receive the credential that says, I actually live at this address, it lives only on your device.

A lot of companies are excited about building up a database and the value that's created for the company in having it. How did you balance out that calculation and make this the call to do it this way?

Yeah, it's always a balance. The companies can still request data. So if I, the user, have the Identity app and I have credentials and data stored in that app, I can choose what I want to share. So I can say, sure, you can have my email and my name, but I'm not going to give you my address. Or sure, you can have these data points, but not these other ones. So it's really up to the companies. Sometimes, absolutely, you're right, the value of the data is very interesting to them and they want to use that data, in which case they can ask for it, just as something that's using Login with Facebook would ask for certain data points from you when you use that tool. But a lot of other companies right now are really worried about the liability of storing all that personal information. And a lot of them are forced to store it because the existing infrastructure doesn't give them any other option. So what we're trying to do is provide a system that doesn't force them to do that. So they can store as little as they want or as much as they want, depending on what they're concerned about. So in the cases where they want to reduce their liability or where they just care a lot about user privacy, which more and more companies seem to be waking up to, They're able to do that, whereas unfortunately with the existing tools, they really can't.

If you're successful in the sort of civic tech world with this model, do you think there are lessons and applications outside of that, and what do you have in mind?

Very much so. So many different companies have been interested in the kind of self-sovereign identity model, which is very much what we're pursuing. You know, the idea that you should have complete control over your personal information and how it's shared. Those companies are are broadly going into other verticals and other industries, largely banking and finance, like you were referencing earlier, doing kind of KYC and AML verifications for banks and fintech applications. The reason that we're starting with civic tech is we think it's actually a perfect initial use case of this technology in the sense that government and civic technology is oftentimes much more kind of privacy conscious. First of all, and second of all, you can do something like address verification in-house without having to rely on some sort of third-party issuer like Trulioo, for example. We very much see this as something that can apply broadly in many different verticals. And we're actually already starting to explore working with governments, for example, to provide things like EIDs or digital passports so that you can go through TSA more easily. And so governments, and specifically the US government, is very interested in this exact technology for a wide range of use cases. And then it can also be applied in things as broad-reaching as insurance, medical data, and banking as well. But, you know, we're trying to start with a very narrow vertical and provide a very clear value prop to all of the players in that vertical.

What is this called?

It's called UnumID. So, you know, you can get ePluribus, the civic engagement component, and then you can get UnumID to finish it off.

Is there anything else I should know about the identity piece of this or people listening should know?

I think the main thing we want to communicate is that it is the polar opposite of existing identity tools. So when people think of online identity, they typically think of login with Google, login with Facebook, things like that. This is in some sense the anti-login with Google and Facebook. Because truly we store nothing at all. That's the whole point. That's why we're building it, is to enable these sorts of better identity authentication services without any of the myriad problems that come along with giant central databases of information. And also that in the long term, this is extremely exciting, even just for convenience. If you imagine what it would be like in the future to use identity services like this, you would input your information once and you'd never have to do it again. You don't have to remember 50 different passwords. You don't have to fill out forms constantly online, which we all do today. It's a much better approach to online identity where you can enter it once. If you ever, say, change your address, you change it once and then you can update across all of the different services that use your address. Instead of trying to get all of those different services to update it independently. What we try to communicate to people is that this is really exciting technology. It has some obvious applications in civics and government that we're extremely excited about, but it's also just a technology that's in the pipeline that I think everyone should be extremely excited about and ready to see out in the world.

I assume you're doing this on a sort of a nonpartisan basis.

Exactly. Yes. All of the tools that we're building are intended to be used by anyone in the country. And this very much ties back to what Liam was talking about earlier in terms of us growing up in the Midwest, coming out to school at Stanford, you know, spending some time over at DC, talking to politicians and staffers and a whole lot of other people along the way, and being exposed to that wide variety of political views, you know, on the right, on the left, in the middle. What we've realized is really the spirit of the company is e pluribus. It's out of many. We believe that the country is at its best when there's ongoing discourse and debate between the different sides. And we're trying to enable everybody to reach out more effectively and to start those conversations more easily. And so really the spirit of it is nonpartisan for everybody from the coast to the coast and everywhere in between.

If you could wave a wand and have some adopter really go for this right out of the gate, who would it be?

We think one perfect adopter of this would be ResistBot, of course, founded by Eric Ries. And, you know, it's a perfect application because it doesn't have its own app that you can install and download. And so it's not so much of a barrier to download an identity app and verify yourself. And the other reason is, you know, they have a lot of adoption. It's a very streamlined process, but they don't have any sort of identity verification component. And that's been a very common critique of that platform, that despite all of the messages and all of the users and all of the good that they've done, that's just one kind of core component that's missing. And we'd love to help them bring that to their users.

Can we kind of migrate back to sort of the non-identity work that you're doing and Could you describe that a little bit more?

The easiest way to think about ePluribus is it's a suite of tools that let you contact your representatives at all levels of government. So we have a Chrome extension, we have a mobile app, and we have an embeddable widget, we call it, which other sites can put on their site to allow people to send messages directly from the page. So the Chrome extension overlays interfaces onto Facebook, Twitter, and news sites so that you can send official messages to your reps without leaving the page and feeling like you're just using the site as it normally is. So for example, on Facebook, if you have the Pluribus Chrome extension, you'll see a dropdown of your representatives in the post area so that every time you post, you can choose, I want to send this to my representative. You certainly don't have to, but if you're writing a post about a political opinion, you can tell not just your friends, but also send that to your representatives so that it does some good. Same on Twitter.

There've been many, many different takes on sending information to representatives. What I haven't really seen is messages to different parts of the government. Like if you want a pothole fixed, you could go to your city councilman, but you could also go to whatever department in the city deals with that and it might be a better more direct way to do it. Have you thought about that?

Absolutely, yes. That's definitely something that we've been very interested in integrating for a long time. It's a bit more challenging in the sense that there's not very good tools or APIs or anything like that.

Where are you getting your information on representatives?

We're using a variety of things, but it's, it's sort of an amalgam of a lot of the open source databases like Google Civic Information API and Contact Congress lists on GitHub and our own internal lists of things that we see wrong with those databases. Unfortunately, not all of them allow for community updating. It's an amalgam of a lot of, a lot of them, but the idea is we try to cover as many reps as possible at the federal, state, and local level. And we have pretty complete coverage, I think.

Is there a worry that if you're building tools for connecting that, that you're kind of competing with other people who might use your identity tools?

We don't view it that way at all. We think the civic tech space especially is best when the tech is synergistic. You know, a lot of these problems are extremely difficult problems being solved by people with limited resources and trying to do it the best they can. What we've noticed is that It's best when those different groups can partner and work together to solve those issues. It's not really a matter of which platform do people choose to adopt to message their representative, because we're very happy with them using any platform to message their rep. We want to have UnumID as essentially the backbone for all of those communications. So, you know, whether you're using Phone to Action or using Resistbot or using Pluribus or using Countable or any variety of those applications, we want you to be able to reach out with a verified identity. So we certainly want people to use ePluribus, and we think that would be fantastic, and we think it's an awesome platform. But our business model is not contingent on people using ePluribus to message their representatives, and we certainly don't view ourselves as directly competitive with those other services in the way that you might imagine.

Yeah, and to be clear, the reason we built UnumID You know, the reason we're creating it is because we saw this need. We, with E Pluribus, wanted to verify users as constituents because we knew that it was really important. And then as we were doing that, we realized, oh wow, all of these other organizations want the same thing and no one's providing it. So that's why we built it.

How have you gone about building the company from the standpoint of organizing it, funding it, and where are you along that road?

Like I said, we founded it back in 2016 during the presidential election when we were still in school and worked on it part-time for almost 2 years and finally got funding this fall from a group of angel investors back home in Wisconsin, and then also a group of Stanford professors out here in California. And so, you know, it was a long road of just kind of working part-time, doing a lot of customer discovery, talking to as many people as we possibly could. About what their needs were and where they fit in the ecosystem and how we could build something that was valuable for all of the different sides. Ultimately, like I said, we raised funding this fall and then we've hired a developer and we've been off to the races since then.

So is it now you two plus a developer or are there others?

It's just the three of us at the moment.

What are you finding to be the biggest challenge?

The biggest challenge is probably the size of the ecosystems. So identity, for example, is a massive problem. It exists in almost every online interaction, and so it's difficult to know where to start, who needs it most, where did the incentives align earliest. So that's definitely one challenge. I think another challenge is anything civic-related is thorny because it involves so many different people with so many different needs. So it's very easy, for example, to get people interested with very partisan messaging or very issue-specific messaging, which is not really what we started the company to do. We started it to try to facilitate political engagement, to try to get people more interested, to get them reaching out in ways that are more constructive than just commenting to their friends and followers on social media, for example. That's not an easy thing to do. It's, in some sense, a behavior change problem. I think all of us wish that we were more engaged, more informed. I know I certainly do. So I think that's a challenge for any civic effort is to figure out where is an opportunity to really make an improvement? What is a tool that will actually help people versus something that sounds like a good idea but isn't? We, in the process of developing this, went through all kinds of ideas that didn't turn out to be viable. We had everything from wiki editing legislation and proposing it to Congress to annotating bills to better accessing political information, et cetera. All of these things have value, but they're also very hard to get people to use. And so we started from a point of being naive, frankly, which I think is helpful in any entrepreneurial endeavor. Starting out as very naive and learning over time, okay, well, this is helpful, but this isn't.

Clearly, if one of you has kind of put Stanford on hold and the other of you is putting your life into this, and I can hear in how you talk about it, there's a lot of excitement and a lot of passion around this general mission. Where's that coming from?

I mean, I think it's just all of it. We've been interested in politics for a very long time, growing up in a swing state, coming out to Stanford and and running into people with very different ideological views than, you know, we were exposed to in Wisconsin. And really, this is just such a passion project of ours. You know, we wouldn't have been working on it for 2 years through all the ups and downs without that. And just trying to provide some way for people to have more of an impact in the political system, to, you know, reach out to their representatives and feel like they're actually connected and actually making an impact. And then, When you layer on this identity component that we're talking about, it just becomes even more exciting. You know, the concept that not only are you reaching out and making an impact with your reps as a verified person, but you're also able to now store that information locally and use it with all of these other civic tech applications and becoming more engaged and more informed citizen. It's all for us around building a more secure, engaged, and unified democracy. And we think that all of the things we're doing right now are the first steps towards that end goal. And so I think it's just that passion around creating a society that works better for all of us from the very top to the very bottom that keeps us going every day.

So let's think about this though from the point of view of the politician. So let's say you are a member of Congress and I don't know, your district's what, 800,000 people? Give or take, and currently you are bombarded by email and Twitter and regular mail to the tune of way more than you can possibly read and respond to in a personal way. And now let's say you're facilitating a way for a much higher percentage of a district to communicate, not not on its face a bad thing, obviously a good thing. How can a representative at that level with that big of a constituency cope with this amount of messaging?

Our dream from the beginning was an end-to-end system that would provide the reps with functionality as well. And we hope that someday that will become possible. There's a lot of reasons that it's very challenging working within government, giving them new software is difficult. But we spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill trying to understand the staffers' perspective, because ultimately it's the staffers who get these messages and read them and report to the representative. And so we spoke to legislative correspondents who are the main people who actually read the messages, and we saw the software systems that they're using, and we saw their process and what they go through. And so We try to develop a deep understanding of their needs. And you're absolutely right, they get bombarded by all kinds of things. One of the biggest problems is that they just don't know where it comes from. We met other people in the private sector who run companies that do nothing but flood those inboxes with advocacy messages, and they've become extremely sophisticated. So it's no longer just a form message that thousands of people click to send. It's now using AI to generate messages automatically that all look different, even though they're from the same person behind the scenes. So part of our focus on identity is to indirectly help these staffers and offices process the messages by saying, "Okay, well, these are verified. These are from real people who went through a rigorous process to do this. And so we can pay more attention to these, or at least we can have more assurance with with these. In the longer term, whether it's us or other civic tech entrepreneurs, we would love for the staffers to have better software tools to process the messages on their end. You know, it was funny to go to these offices because the legislative correspondents are our age. They're all just out of college. Sometimes they're college students interning for the summer, and they're frustrated with the legacy systems in place. In Congress, for example. So we think that in the longer term, they need better tools too. We would love to provide it. It's not something that we're building right now, but hopefully what we're doing on the identity side in particular can at least help facilitate that.

I've been calling this, what you're doing, sort of political entrepreneurship. What have you guys learned about starting a company in this space?

I think there's such a broad range of stakeholders to consider. In politics in particular, there's this large challenge around everybody has their own perspective on what the system should look like, what views people should have, what things people should be pushing for. It's very difficult, especially as a nonpartisan company trying to enter that space, to find people on both sides of the aisle that are excited and willing to support the initiative. So, you know, we're incredibly committed to remaining nonpartisan and helping both sides of the aisle communicate more effectively. And I think that's been a large challenge for us in this space, and from talking to other people and other players, a large challenge for them as well.

What else would you guys like to talk about?

The main thing we want to get across to everybody that's listening in is how passionate we are about this problem space and about bringing a better way to reach out to representatives to everybody in the country. And so we'd love if people would go to our website and download the Chrome extension, download our app, try it out. We love hearing feedback from people. We're constantly taking that into account and trying to iterate and make the product better. So definitely we'd love people to try it out and and give us feedback on what we can do better.

I've been in, in the world of political technology starting a tad earlier than you, but I'm very curious about how you see the world, that world from your vantage point right now.

One thing we've noticed is that there is a disconnect on both sides. So there's a disconnect on the government side in the sense that large parts of government are clearly behind on technology. Not all of it. I think people do underestimate that there are big parts of government that are often leading technological advances. That's often related to defense or science research, whatever it may be. But certainly many parts of government are lagging on technology, and I think most people recognize that. What people, at least in Silicon Valley, often don't recognize enough, in our opinion, is that tech is behind on politics. Tech is behind on government. People aren't thinking enough about these problems, and they aren't aware of the political realities that go into them. One of the fascinating things about political technology or civic technology, whatever you want to call it, is that everything goes into it. This is not just about technology. It's not just about government. It's about really all parts of society. There are stakeholders across every conceivable part of society. And so building any successful tool, any successful organization in that space requires integrating all of those different perspectives. So we're constantly trying to look at every angle of the problem. And I think what we're most excited about is that everyone else we've come across who's working on this seems to be doing the same, that there's a lot of spirit of collaboration. And a recognition that at the end of the day, this is not just a business, it's not just a cool piece of software, it's about trying to solve some of the core underlying problems. So what I'm most excited about really is to see how all of us working on these problems can collaborate and over time make an amalgam of services that can really solve real problems rather than be isolated. I think it's different than many industries in that respect.

I once heard in high school, I believe, that the phrase "good enough for government work" used to be a positive thing. You know, it used to say that the work you were doing is really fantastic and, you know, good enough to be in the government. And I'm not sure if that's actually something that's true, but it's something that resonated with me that I've kind of kept in the back of my mind as I've been going through this entire process. So I actually helped to run a class at Stanford called Hacking for Defense, which I think is a name that scares a lot of people. When they think of kind of black hat hacking. But this class is all about bringing innovation and entrepreneurship specifically into the Defense Department, but also into the government as a whole. And one thing that I've really gained an appreciation for from that class and talking to people who are sponsors there is just how technologically advanced many parts of the government are and many parts of politics are. And I think oftentimes people fail to recognize that these legacy systems that legislators use, for example, to process messages that are coming into them, are not representative of the government as a whole, but are really only representative of a very small sample. And similarly, in things like reaching out to your representatives, for a long time, and even now today, a lot of people reach out to their reps through contact forms on their websites. By writing in letters, handwritten letters to the reps, or even just a phone call. There's a lot of fantastic entrepreneurs and really brilliant technologists that are starting to disrupt those old ways of doing things and bringing these newer technologies that are already in use in other places in the government and even other places within civic tech to those problems. So to us, I think there are certain parts of civics and government that definitely lag far behind. And I think those are the parts that people often think of. You know, when you think of government, a lot of people think about the long line at the DMV and trying to get to the kiosk to get your problem solved. And they don't think about the incredible technologies that the CIA is using to do some investigative work in a foreign country and stop a terrorist attack. Where we see this ultimately going in civic tech and in government is towards data privacy. More so than towards data centralization. You know, one really interesting thing that I think we've realized through this process is we thought at the beginning, at the outset, that access to information was a huge problem, especially political information and interoperability between that information. And it turns out that, you know, interoperability definitely is a problem, but access is not so much. You know, there's massive datasets of pretty much whatever you could possibly want to know about the US government and also about people as citizens. And I think what we view is happening in the longer term is kind of bringing all of these various siloed datasets to a single source. So in the case of the individual and the citizen, you know, bringing that to an app that they control locally on their device so it's not hackable in all of these databases and kind of doing similar things at the government level, you know, whether it's, you know, storing it on some sort of blockchain architecture or, you know, just storing it in some sort of more secure single database rather than having these, these different siloed ones. And so I think that's one trend that we're definitely seeing and, and we're trying to be a part of, obviously, with UnimyD.

Well, it's been enjoyable and informative to talk to you two. Anything else you want to say?

No, thank you so much for having us, Nathaniel. It's been fantastic chatting with you as well.

That was Aidan and Liam McCarty of E-Pluribus. They're at epluribus.io. I'll be following with interest whether the UnimID gets wide adoption and how E-Pluribus does into the future. This is Nathaniel G. Perlman with the Great Battlefield Podcast. You can find us at resistance-dashboard.com or by searching for Great Battlefield in places where podcasts are found.