MC: Well, I’m not going to sing or play any songs for you, and I don’t really have a favorite room because I’m on Android and there’s no Android release for Clubhouse.
LG: What?
MC: But we’ll talk about all of that and more in this week’s program.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music]
MC: Hello everybody. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I’m Michael Calore. I am a senior editor of WIRED.
LG: And I’m Lauren Goode. I am a senior WIRED writer.
MC: Today we are accompanied by the senior writer WIRED, Arielle Pardes. Hi, Arielle.
Arielle Pardes: Hello guys.
LG: Hey Arielle. It’s great to be back. When you used to live with us, we often felt people confuse our voices. So my goal with this episode is to talk as little as possible so you can all hear Arielle.
MC: Absolutely no one will confuse my voice with any of yours, so I think we are clear. Anyways. Arielle, we’re showing you this week because we’re talking Clubhouse. If our listeners are unfamiliar with the social network, it has been around for almost a year and is very popular among Silicon Valley and digital media. It is also completely audio based. So no scrolling, no photos. People just log in to the Clubhouse and get together to chat live. You can be a passive listener and take an interesting conversation, or you can participate if you want, by asking a question or offering an opinion. Right now, the app is just an invitation, so it has that air of exclusivity and its popularity grows another level every time a big celebrity shows up.
People like Drake, Oprah, Ashton. This is Ashton Kutcher, by the way. But nothing has shaken Clubhouse as hard as it has shaken this week when Tesla CEO Elon Musk walked in on Sunday night. He talked about Tesla. He talked about space travel. He talked about monkey brain implants. Minds blew. Twitter exploded and everyone was clamoring to enter the Clubhouse at that moment. Arielle, you’ve been reporting Clubhouse since the app was in diapers, I think it’s fair to say. We set the scene. Come back to us on Sunday when Elon passed by.
AP: Ooh, we. Well. So when you open Clubhouse, if you’ve never been to the app, choose from several rooms to enter. It’s like getting to a party at home and then deciding where you want to spend the night. Therefore, some of the rooms are super casual. Some of them are more formal. Some of them are recurring meetings that take place once a week and on Sunday nights, one of these rooms was The Good Time Show, which is a weekly conversation organized by technologist and venture capitalist Shriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy, and the title was “Elon Musk a Good Time.” So people started freaking out. The show began at 10pm Pacific time, which is not a busy hour at the Clubhouse. It’s 1:00 in the morning on the east coast, but when Elon joins in, the room fills up immediately.
Clubhouse limits its rooms to 5,000 listeners, and from the first moment, Shriram says, “My phone is jumping out of people trying to get in. The room is full.” Eventually, someone started an overflow room to broadcast the conversation and then it was filled, so someone had to start a second overflow room. People were just ecstatic and I think part of the reason for this excitement is that the Clubhouse as a medium is super intimate. So, from the beginning of the conversation, you can hear Elon’s little dog barking in the background. There is no script. I had no idea what people were going to talk about. It feels very untimely, and while I’m sure most of this audience had heard interviews with Elon Musk before, it probably felt like the closest thing to being on the phone with Elon Musk, which is pretty exciting. So the room fills up and people start asking questions.