 The Hangout on Air is live. Hello Internet and humans watching this broadcast. Welcome to another week of Small Empires Hangouts. I am actually sitting next to Stephen Greenwood in real life which is awesome. I've never actually did a Hangout with someone else next to me so that's cool. We are joined by Kirk, the man, the myth, the legend, the Kirk. As well as that, we're joined by Ted who is the founder of a company called Capital Bells. In this week's episode of Small Empires we were in Washington DC with Alexis covering Capital Bells and Ted I will let you talk about your company, sort of about yourself and what the app does. Alright, let's do it. Hey guys, I'm Ted. I'm the founder of Capital Bells and Capital Bells is essentially an app to be able to track what Congress is doing and what's happening there on Capitol Hill in real time and to know when they're voting and to have a chance to connect with Congress as a normal person like you are and I am. Right now Capital Bells is really popular with members of Congress on the Hill and with their staffers so that they know when they need to be doing what they're doing, when they need to vote and we're trying to kind of create this access point so that we have a place for constituents to be able to get their voices heard and I started this as a staffer. Can you talk a little of the process, you know, the archaic ancient process that was in place before? Yeah, wait, so explain how people on the Hill used to find out that they were taking a vote. Okay, so until like, you know, 2013, the only way that people had no one to send a vote is there's like clocks all over the Hill. Is that an actual congressional clock? Yeah, this is like one of the congressional clocks. Looks like a hotel clock. What are those five lights above it? So these lights are the bells in the form and when something's happening in Congress, like they're having a quorum call, like two of these lights will light up or they're having like a vote and five of these lights will light up and they'll make these really loud and noxious sounds and that's how people would know that there's something going on but there's all these sort of patterns so they wouldn't necessarily know what's going on, just that something's going on and then they would turn on C-Span if they were already like glued to it and figure out, oh, now I know what's going on and now I'll go find my boss and tell him what's going on so he can decide if what's going on is important enough for him to go down to the floor. And so what Capitol Bells did is it just, you know, used common sense and said, you know, hey, here's a notification on your phone. It's time to go vote now. Here's the bill. See you later. And the way you did that is pretty interesting. You tapped into the existing radio frequency that they were broadcasting on their clocks. Right, so all these clocks, they're actually wireless clocks. So at one point this whole system was this wired system that they put up like 120 years ago and so they could buzz the whole Capitol complex and at one point like 30 years ago, someone, you know, kind of got smart and was like, oh, every time we want to install a new clock in an office and you'll have a new way to notify people what's going on, we have to wire the whole thing up. Why don't we have a wireless system? So they made these radio based clocks and they left those, you know, for the last like 30 or 40 years until Capitol Bells came around. So since there's already this wireless system in place, we are just picking up that wireless signal, parsing it, sending it to the cloud so we can just send push notifications to devices whether they're on Capitol Hill or they're in California. And this is presumably legal, right? I mean, you're tapping into something that seems like it's related very much to the government. Public information, yeah. Okay, interesting. And how long did it take you to set up this entire infrastructure in the app and that kind of thing? To do initially, to figure out, you know, sort of what the, how the codes worked and how to pick them up and how to connect them to the cloud and then there was the process of building the original front end for the app itself. And I've never, I've been programming on off since the fifth grade but I've been either programming robots or modeling a heat exchanger, you know, for engineering class, you know, or AC. So I've never done something that actually had like a user interface in GUI before. So that was sort of a big learning curve just, you know, figuring out, you know, how to use Xcode's interface builder. Right. And how long has the app been live for? How long have you been, you know, how has the Hill been using this for? We've been pushing vote alerts since late April 2013. So, you know, a year and a half. And have you had any hiccups or crazy mishaps that screwed some stuff up? Oh yeah. Angry congressman. Definitely. Whenever I try to upgrade the service, something that can go wrong will go wrong. And so I had one time, well I had one time where it was out of my control but I reacted poorly where the push notification service went down. We used something called Parse, Parse.com and they process our push notifications and their service went down for like three or four hours during a voting day. They didn't have the wherewithal to tell their clients that their service went down. Oh wow. At first I was just like trying to figure out, oh shit, like why aren't my notifications getting sent because like, you know, I have like my clock here at the office, like I know what's going on and I don't see it happening on my phone. I'm like, okay, this isn't good. So like I go on to Parse and I try to like manually send a push to make up for it because I can still send like a message to all the devices even if it's not going through the automated systems. Like, okay, well no one got a vote alert. I need to make sure that people got the vote alert. So I like go and send like a manual vote alert and nothing happens. And then like three hours later Parse just decided, I guess since it wasn't working for three hours that they were just going to collect all the things that they would have sent during that time. So my users basically got a barrage of push notifications. Everybody loves that. Everybody loves their screen being taken over by some one app. Are they dependent on these, on your app now to go vote or is the system still in place? Well even if they aren't, if like a member, you know, just uses capital bells, the owner still usually falls on their scheduler to actually make sure that they get there. And you know, if they didn't get the alert because of capital bells and they didn't actually go down to the floor to vote, they would probably be more angry at the scheduler but I would still be concerned that it could result in an uninstall for me. There is definitely checks and balances in place. I mean it's a, a congressional office is a complex machine. So Alexis actually, you guys knew each other before we did this episode and Alexis, do you want to talk about the first time you found out about capital bells and why you so excited about everything? Sure. I was on the Without the Permission book tour and I'm pretty sure that's the first time. I think that was the first time and we talked afterwards and actually one of my buddies who helped me on the tour was like really you got to talk to this guy, like he's working on something cool, as Brian was saying. And I was really impressed. I was most impressed by the clever hack of taking that antiquated technology and modernizing it. And yeah, we just kind of, I don't know, stayed in touch over email and occasional phone call and it's been cool to watch it develop and really become like a company from, you know, pretty humble beginnings as a clever hack a year ago. And why do we need stuff like this in our nation's capital? Because everything else in, because every other industry has been affected positively by technology and government seems to be a bit of a laggard in this regard and there's a lot of cool stuff happening, not just in DC tech but across the country to help kind of bring tech into government. Not necessarily with its permission. Oh, plug, plug. Well, I mean, that is exactly what I was doing. They weren't about to build this on their own and they're not going to build it internally but frankly, we don't need their permission to do it. It's an arcane and very hard to get to and some people weren't using it. And there's a lot, especially in Congress, there's a lot of low hanging fruit like that. There's this stuff that we don't need their permission to share and to, you know, to share this into the powerful tools. We just need more people doing it. So Ted, do you think that connecting people, because right now all we've talked about is opening it up to Congress people and letting them know when they're voting but I think that one of the compelling parts of Capital Bells is letting the public actually weigh in on things. One thing that we didn't get to talk about is how many people are using it on a daily or a monthly or do you have any active users you have? For people who are trying to use it to contact Congress, you mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. In general. How many votes do you get on anything? Right now, the vast majority of my users are the professional users who are using it for the vote alerts. Right. And, you know, for the bills and stuff that people can vote on online, you know, are, let's see, like, what's right now, we have some votes that, you know, basically just like got voted up to the top and have stayed there because it was on the front page of Reddit, you know, so they have like 700 and 1,000 views. But, you know, the ones that aren't so popular, you know, have like 200 votes or you have ones that are like the super obscure bills that are just being voted on the floor today because they're donated to a post office. Right. So, you know, those will have, you know, votes on them. So what do you think the next step for you guys is? Like, what do you see is happening as you move? Like, because you don't want to only be a third party. You want it to, for the net to be wider, right? So like, what do you think you're going to do? So we want to first make sure that we have the congressional audience, not just that we're giving them the fruits of a useful hack, that we have them engaged and that we, you know, we sort of have this audience captured so that we can develop it for this tool for a congressional, for a constituent public interaction. So for me, my sort of idea on being able to connect the public users to Congress is sort of flipped around for the way most people do it, so you know, there are other, there's things out there like Change.org. Change.org doesn't have any congressional users. They kind of go from this idea that, well, we have millions of people, so people who are in power have to listen to us. Right. And that works for some things, like, you know, getting, you know, getting that elephant saved which is really cool, but for things like getting an elected member of Congress to pay attention, you know, it doesn't work as well. Right, unless it's a PR opportunity, they're probably not going to listen. Right. Yeah, so they kind of, it's up to their discretion whether they want to engage with it. So I want to, I'm kind of coming from this idea, well, let's get all these congressional people captured first, and now they don't have a place to go when we start, when we're sending them our messages. They have to see it, and they can't pretend they don't see it, and if we can do it in a way where it's not just, you know, loud noises coming at you. I just watched the World Star Hip Hop episode with the Anchorman toward the beginning. Oh, yeah. You know, I just don't want to be loud noises. I want these to be, you know, here are the number of votes, you know, from your district that are for this bill, that are against this bill. Here's your position. Here is your, you know, performance over time compared to those votes, and that is creating a record of accountability and representation. So okay, I've got a question for you, and this comes from the YouTube comments on the actual episode. Uh-oh, YouTube comments. Yeah, I know. Well, it's actually a pretty well articulated comment for YouTube. This guy says, wait, why would you want people to form an opinion about a bill just minutes before it's about to be voted on? Don't you want your constituents to be knowledgeable and informed well before them? It seems to me that such a system would be ripe for abuse by special interest groups who sway public opinion while denying them the opportunity to fact check the information. What's your rebuttal to that? So that's exactly why I built the website, CapitalBells.com, because A, you know, it's the professional users who are using the iPhone app to get the alerts in real time, and B, you know, you see that post office, you know, naming bill, and yeah, you might say no real fast to that because you don't think they should be wasting their time on naming post offices, but, you know, otherwise you're seeing bills as they're coming to the floor in real time, which have gone through a long legislative process, you know, months beforehand, and you need to be able to gauge on that and form a community around it and form consensus around it before it ever gets to the floor. So the CapitalBells.com website was sort of meant to, you know, fill this function of giving a place for, you know, users, the public, and official people to come in and express their opinions on the bill. But I think that we have a lot of work to do in being able to foster not just positions but conversations around those positions. You know, just because in the about week or ten days since we filmed the episode, I started using the app. But the value that I really, really appreciate and value is that like before, when you literally don't know what's going on in Congress, like you just don't care because, or at least I feel like I'm so far out of the loop that like I don't even, I'll read the headlines on newspapers and that's about it. You can see it after the fact. Yeah, after the fact, right? And you really feel, in a sense, powerless. But just like putting the process or like, show information in a form that I am familiar with which is on my smartphone, right? It really changes the game for me and it makes me so much more interested in what's happening because like it's a visual medium that I'm used to and I'm like comfortable with and I feel like I'm digesting information in a way that makes sense to me and also like I need to get care again, which is really cool. That's cool. I was actually, so I was just talking to a friend last night who, I haven't watched the episode yet, it just went up, but I think he's in there, Seamus. Did you guys get Seamus into it? Yeah, Seamus is in there. So I was hanging out with Seamus last night and we were kind of just talking about how what's, the nice thing about Capitalist is sort of like what you're saying is that it gives you this chance to check in. But sort of as that YouTube commenter was saying, you know, how it's not just about checking in right before the vote happens, you know, how do you check in through the process if there's something that you care about? And so Seamus and I were talking about how sort of the diving deeper into Capital Bells, you know, means kind of giving that real time transparency and those real time hooks to get into it from the introduction of the bill, perhaps through its life cycle in the legislative process to really be able to track and see how something is developing. If you are that person who's that involved, not everyone is that involved. Yeah, I'm pretty out of touch with the government and Congress and everything that goes on there and I honestly get my government news from the front page of Reddit because I go on that website every day of my life. And it seems like this is the transparency that this app gives could just be something standard for all Americans that live in this country because those votes are like directly affect each of us as citizens. And the issue is none of us, I mean, if you're not actively looking for it, I don't know when the hell people are voting and what the hell they're voting on. So that's part of the thing, so I'm offering this service but all those like you, you know, you're on Reddit and there's all these people on Reddit, you can't necessarily expect all those people who are on Reddit though to change their behaviors and start checking Capital Bells or some other service every day. You know, how do, the question I ask is how do I bring Capital Bells into Reddit? How do I bring these services into other communities? I think you just have to bring awareness that the app exists at all because I don't think anyone knew that this app exists. I mean, frankly I didn't, I hadn't heard of Capital Bells beforehand and I'm a pretty active Reddit user. I think yeah, just like getting the word out that the app exists to start because people on Reddit clearly, you know, are very passionately about certain topics and you know, it's like oh, so and such is being voted on today, you know, and this whole, you know, the whole thing with net neutrality and all that stuff. So I think if there's, you know, there's an angle there that you can hit saying like this will directly affect you as a citizen and it's like super transparent and easy. I think that's like a pretty easy sell there. Ted did an AMA on Reddit. It went pretty well. And Alexis actually did an AMA with Senator Wyden on the net neutrality bill and snuck a little Capital Bells link in there. I'll leave you plugging it. Alexis, I want to know your thoughts on in our lifetime, do you think we'll see a system where we can cast votes or citizens can directly from the computer or from their phones like electronic voting? Yes, electronic voting and direct democracy. Yeah. Those are two different things. The direct voting electronically and direct democracy is taking away the whole representational system. That means changing the constitution and everything. We could be voting from our phones and stuff and voting on positions. Oh, sorry, Alexis. I don't mean to interrupt. No, no, no, it's open for debate. Yeah, I don't know if I want like a whale being voted president because everyone decided that would be funny. I mean, Chris Flashew pants would have been amazing. He doesn't even wear pants. It doesn't make sense. You would think that. You would think that, Kirk. So technologically, we could do a lot more to make voting more accessible and we can implement from a security standpoint, it's non-trivial but we could create a system. I mean, hell, it depends on which government contractor is the one building the system. We saw with some of the e-voting machines without paper trails, it could be a real cluster fuck. But I think technologically that is doable within our lifetime and anything to get, I do think that getting voter rates up is good. I think California is probably the closest state we have to a direct democracy because Andy, I have to get this right, but if you get enough votes, you can basically get something on the ballot and things get a little dicey when you have that direct to democracy. Whales don't necessarily get into office but you get a bunch of things that people vote for which sounds cool but don't have the kind of macro view of actually being informantable. There is an inefficiency to the representative system that I like because I can't possibly think at that level about all the repercussions of the little things that I want that someone in this room has to think about. We hire them to be professional legislators. Yeah, I just would rather have the people who are representing us actually represent us and not have careers out of those jobs but have it as like a service like it was intended and rotate them out with more regularity and have a broad range of people representing the people. Like right now we have a lot of brokenness to it but I think it's fixing the representative system more so than replacing it with more direct. I agree. I just remember my favorite US history lesson as a kid was hearing that George Washington, he didn't have term limits, that was just after FDR, George Washington doing two terms and we already lied on it but did two terms and was like, you know what, I'm cool. This was the war hero, this was the father of the nation. He could have been a fucking king in the United States of America but instead he was like, I'm cool. You know what, that's not what we wanted to make here. That was how they thought of being the fucking president. So I can assure you that when they were thinking of Congress or any other position in government, they weren't thinking about it like just be there forever, make a career out of it. I'd like to get back to that and don't get me wrong, the founding fathers fucked up a lot of things too but that was one thing that they got really right. How do you feel about Congress overriding DC's ballot initiatives for legalizing cannabis? Oh my god. That thing that they just did in DC, that was miserable. So DC voted to legalize cannabis two to one by voters in the district. 70% of the district voted and Congress unilaterally just decided yesterday, hey, you guys shouldn't do that and we're going to ask, by congressional decree, we don't want to do this. The District of Columbia is fucking bullshit. As long as the license plate says no taxation on representation, it is absolute bullshit. It needs to go beyond the license plate though. What first step, for everybody out there watching this, what would be the first step that they can do to express their displeasure? Should I tweet about it? Let's take it one more step back. Washington DC as an entity voted to legalize marijuana, right? And then yesterday, the federal government was like, no you didn't. And so now what happens? What can the people do? That's the thing is that DC has no representation in Congress. They don't have a vote. DC doesn't matter in Congress. So the bottom line, I've talked to folks about this, if DC becomes a state, it is obviously a blue state. Right? Like demographics, it's going to be a blue state. And so I feel like there is this back channel discussion of, well, okay, we'll do that as long as you give us like, as long as there's an extra, like there's a new district in like Utah or you drop another vote in Utah or some like, it's got to be some give take BS. But like, it's crazy to me that people pay taxes in the District of Columbia and don't actually get like any representation. They're high taxes too. I used to live there. It's not like, it's not nothing. And so if they, you know, I feel like, it's such an interesting problem too because if the heart of the federal government has decriminalized or legalized this thing that is illegal federally, but like literally in its geography, it has decided it is legal, it was just going to create this amazing, wonderful situation. Mind fuck. Yeah. We just have these capital bills to change this. Yeah. So I just, I finally just for this last election updated my voter registration for DC and it may have been the worst mistake I ever made. Yeah, you just threw it away. We finally had a vote in Oregon. Yeah. It's ironic. It's so frustrating. Anyway. All right, we've got to wrap up. Okay. We've got to, we have something to shoot. Something coming for you. So there's one more in the pipeline. One more. One more thing. Very surprising. And thank you for all of the time and work you put into the episode with me. I appreciate it. Cool. Thanks for trying to get our country on the right track, Ted. Keep it up, man. Cool. Cool. Well, Ted, thanks for joining Kirk and Alexis and Steven. Good to have you guys on as always. Again, if you haven't seen the episode, look on YouTube, just type in Small Empires. You should watch every single episode from last season and this season and then watch today's. And you can find it on theverge.com also. Like, save, subscribe. All those wonderful things. Retweet, star. And hit us up on Twitter. We're all on Twitter. The hashtag is SmallEmpires. And you can watch this video, again, after we end the broadcast. It will be on our YouTube channel. And we'll be back next week for the final broadcast. And for everyone out there, have a great day and we'll see you next week. And if you're a developer, I'm hiring. Ted, where can they get at you? Headedcapitalbells.com. Awesome. All right, guys. Thanks for joining. Have a great day. Bye-bye.