MC: Well, I’m not going to sing or play a song for you, and I do not really have a favorite room because I’m on Android and there’s no Android for Clubhouse.
LG: What?
MC: But we’re going to talk about it and more about this week’s show.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music]
MC: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I’m Michael Calore. I am a senior editor at WIRED.
LG: And I’m Lauren Goode. I am a senior writer at WIRED.
MC: Today we are joined by WIRED senior writer, Arielle Pardes. Hello, Arielle.
Arielle Pardes: Hi guys.
LG: Hey Arielle. It’s so wonderful to have you back. When you used to be our host, 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 everyone can just hear about Arielle.
MC: Absolutely no one will confuse my voice with any of you, so I think we are clear about that. Anyway. Arielle, we have you on the program 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 the crowd of Silicon Valley and the digital media. It is also completely based on sound. So there can be no browsing, there are no photos. People just sign up at Clubhouse and get together to just chat live. You can be a passive listener and have an interesting conversation, or you can participate if you want, by asking a question or giving an opinion. Right now, the app is just inviting, so it has this exclusivity, and its popularity is growing once again every time a big celebrity comes in.
People like Drake, Oprah, Ashton. This is by the way Ashton Kutcher. But nothing really rocked Clubhouse as hard as this week when Tesla CEO Elon Musk pulled in on Sunday night. He talked about Tesla. He talked about space travel. He talked about monkey brain implants. Mind is blown. Twitter blew up and everyone was climbing to Clubhouse at that moment. Arielle, you’ve been reporting on Clubhouse since the app went viral, I think that’s fair to say. Set up the scene for us. Take us back to Sunday when Elon swung through.
AP: Ooh, son. Well. If you’ve never been to the app, choose between different rooms to enter when opening your Clubhouse. It’s like going to a house party and then deciding where you want to spend the night. So some rooms are very comfortable. Some of them are more formal. Some of them are recurring meetings that take place once a week, and Sunday night was The Good Time Show, one of the rooms, which hosts a weekly talk by technologist and venture capitalist Shriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy, and the title was’ Elon Musk about Good Time. “So people started freaking out. The show started at 22:00 in Pacific time, which is not a high hour in the clubhouse. It’s 01:00 on the East Coast, but when Elon joins, the room immediately fills up.
Clubhouse covers his rooms to 5,000 listeners and Shriram is like from the start like, ‘My phone blows up from people trying to get in. The room is full. ‘ Eventually someone started an overflow room to broadcast the conversation, and then the one filled up, so that someone had to start a second overflow room. People were just in ecstasy and I think part of the reason for the excitement is that clubhouse as a medium is super intimate. So from the beginning of the conversation you can hear Elon’s little puppy barking in the background. There is no text. There was no idea what people were going to talk about. It feels very extemporaneous, and while I’m sure most people in the audience have heard interviews with Elon Musk before, it probably feels the closest thing to the phone with Elon Musk, which is quite exciting. So the room gets full and then people start asking questions.