MC: Well, I’m not going to sing or play you a song, and I don’t really have a favorite room because I use Android and there’s no Android for Clubhouse.
LG: What?
MC: But we’re all going to talk about that and more on this week’s show.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music]
MC: Hello everyone. Welcome to 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 are joined by WIRED senior writer, Arielle Pardes. Hello, Arielle.
Arielle Pardes: Hey guys.
LG: Hey Arielle. It’s so good to have you back. When you co-hosted with us, we often heard that people would confuse our voices. So my goal with this episode is to talk as little as possible so you can all just hear from Arielle.
MC: Absolutely no one is going to confuse my voice with yours, so I think we’re clear on that. Anyway. Arielle, we’ve got you on the show this week because we’re talking 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 digital media. It is also completely audio-based. So there is no scrolling, no photos. People just log into Clubhouse and get together to chat live. You can be a passive listener and get an interesting conversation, or you can participate if you want by asking a question or giving an opinion. Right now, the app is invite-only, so it exudes a touch of exclusivity, and its popularity grows another notch with every big celebrity coming in.
People like Drake, Oprah, Ashton. That’s Ashton Kutcher, by the way. But nothing really shook Clubhouse as hard as this week when Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, dropped by on Sunday night. He was talking about Tesla. He was talking about space travel. He was talking about monkey brain implants. Thoughts had been blown away. Twitter blew up and everyone was yelling at the time to visit Clubhouse. Arielle, you’ve been reporting on Clubhouse since the app was in diapers, I think it’s fair to say. Set the tone for us. Take us back to Sunday when Elon waved through.
AP: Ooh, boy. Okay. So if you open Clubhouse and you’ve never been in the app, you can choose from several rooms to enter. It’s like going to a house party and then deciding where to spend the night. So some rooms are super casual. Some of them are more formal. Some of them are recurring gatherings that take place once a week, and on Sunday night one of those rooms was The Good Time Show, a weekly talk hosted by the technologist and venture capitalist Shriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy, entitled “Elon Musk on Good Time. ”So people started to panic. The show started at 10:00 PM Pacific Time, which is not a busy traffic hour at Clubhouse. That’s 1:00 am on the East Coast, but when Elon joins, the room immediately fills up.
Clubhouse closes its rooms to 5,000 in the audience and immediately Shriram says, “My phone rings from people trying to enter. The room is full.” Eventually someone started an overflow room to broadcast the conversation and then it filled up, so someone had to start a second overflow room. People were just ecstatic and I think part of the reason for that excitement is that Clubhouse as a medium is super intimate. So from the very beginning of the conversation, you can hear Elon’s little dog barking in the background. There is no script. There was no idea what people were going to talk about. It feels very offhand, and while I’m sure most of the people in that audience had heard interviews with Elon Musk before, this probably felt the closest thing to a phone call with Elon Musk, which is quite exciting. So the room fills up and then people start asking questions.