MC: Well, I’m not going to sing you or sing you a song and I don’t really have a favorite room because I’m on Android and there’s no Android for Clubhouse.
LG: What the?
MC: But we’ll talk about all of this and more in this week’s show.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music]
MC: Hello everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. This is Michael Calore. I’m a senior editor at WIRED.
LG: And I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED.
MC: Today we are joined by WIRED senior writer Arielle Pardes. Hi, Arielle.
Arielle Pardes: Hello guys.
LG: Hey Arielle. It’s so great to be back. When you used to host with us, we often heard that people would confuse our voices. So my goal with this episode is just to talk as little as possible so that you can all hear only from Arielle.
MC: Absolutely no one will confuse my voice with any of you, so I think we are clear on this. Anyway. Arielle, we have you on the show this week because we’re talking about Clubhouse. If our listeners are not familiar with the social network, it has been around for almost a year and is very popular among Silicon Valley and the digital media crowd. It is also entirely audio based. So there is no scrolling, no photos. People connect to the Clubhouse and gather together to chat live. You can be a passive listener and have an interesting conversation or participate, if you wish, by asking a question or giving your opinion. At this time, the application is invited, so it has this air of exclusivity, and its popularity grows with a note every time a great celebrity appears.
People like Drake, Oprah, Ashton. By the way, this is Ashton Kutcher. But nothing shook Clubhouse as hard as it did this week when Tesla CEO Elon Musk stepped in on Sunday night. He talked about Tesla. He talked about space travel. He talked about monkey brain implants. The minds were blown away. Twitter exploded and everyone asked to enter the Clubhouse at that moment. Arielle, you’ve been reporting on Clubhouse since the app was in diapers, I think it’s fair to say. Set the stage for us. Take us back to Sunday, when Elon passed.
AP: Ooh, boy. Good. So when you open the Clubhouse, if you’ve never been to the app, choose from a variety of rooms to enter. It’s like going to a house party and then deciding where you want to spend the night. So some of the rooms are very casual. Some of them are more formal. Some of them are recurring meetings that take place once a week, and on Sunday night, one of these rooms was The Good Time Show, which is a weekly conversation hosted by technologist and venture capitalist Shriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy, and the title was “Elon Musk at Good Time. “So people started to get scared. The show started at 22:00, Pacific time, which is not a busy hour in the Clubhouse. It’s 1:00 in the morning on the east coast, but when Elon joins, the room it fills up immediately.
Clubhouse covers its rooms to 5,000 listeners and right from the start, Shriram says, “My phone is blowing from people trying to get in. The room is full. ” Eventually, someone started a discharge chamber to stream the conversation, and then it filled up, so someone had to start a second overflow chamber. People were just ecstatic and I think part of the reason for this emotion is that Clubhouse as a medium is super intimate. So right from the start of the conversation, you can hear Elon’s little dog barking in the background. There is no script. He didn’t feel what people were going to talk about. It feels very untimely, and while I’m sure most people in that audience have heard interviews with Elon Musk before, this has probably felt like the closest thing to being on the phone with Elon Musk, which is pretty exciting. So the room fills up and then people start asking questions.