MC: Well, I’m not going to sing or play a song for you, and I don’t really have a favorite room because I’m on Android and there’s no Android available for the Clubhouse.
LG: What?
MC: But we’ll talk about all of that and more on this week’s show.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music]
MC: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Gadget Lab. I am 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 have the company of WIRED’s senior writer, Arielle Pardes. Hello, Arielle.
Arielle Pardes: Hi guys.
LG: Hey Arielle. It is so good to have you back. When you used to be a co-host with us, we always heard that people confused our voices. So my goal with this episode is just to say as little as possible so that everyone can hear from Arielle.
MC: Absolutely no one is going to mistake my voice for yours, so I think we’re clear on that. Anyway. Arielle, we have you on the show this week because we’re talking about the Clubhouse. If our listeners are not familiar with the social network, it has been around for almost a year and is very popular with Silicon Valley and the digital media crowd. It is also entirely based on audio. So there is no scrolling, no photos. People simply connect to the Clubhouse and get together to chat live. You can be a passive listener and absorb an interesting conversation, or you can participate, if you like, by asking a question or offering an opinion. At the moment, the app is invite-only, so it has an air of exclusivity and its popularity increases one more level each time a big celebrity appears.
People like Drake, Oprah, Ashton. By the way, this is Ashton Kutcher. But nothing really rocked the Clubhouse as much as it did this week when Tesla CEO Elon Musk showed up on Sunday night. He talked about Tesla. He talked about space travel. He talked about monkey brain implants. Minds were blown up. Twitter exploded and everyone was clamoring to enter the Clubhouse at that moment. Arielle, you’ve been reporting on the Clubhouse since the app was for diapers, I think it’s fair to say. Set the stage for us. Take us back to Sunday, when Elon showed up.
AP: Ooh, boy. OK. So, when you open the Clubhouse, if you’ve never accessed the app, you choose from a variety of rooms to enter. It’s like going to a party at home and then deciding where 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 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 on Good Time. “So people started to freak out. The show started at 10:00 pm Pacific time, which is not a very busy hour at the Clubhouse. This is 1:00 am on the east coast, but when Elon joins, the room immediately fills up.
The Clubhouse limits its rooms to 5,000 listeners and, from the beginning, Shriram is like, “My phone is exploding with people trying to get in. The room is full.” Eventually, someone opened a pop-up room to broadcast the conversation and then it got full, so someone had to start a second pop-up room. People were 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 puppy barking in the background. There is no script. There was no sense in what people were going to talk about. It sounds very out of date, and although I’m sure most people in that 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 very exciting. Then the room fills up and people start asking questions.