Clubhouse’s Elon Moment
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
WIRED
4.1 • 572 Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2021
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Elon Musk made headlines again this week. As usual, it was something involving Mars, memes, Tesla, and ... monkey brain implants? These topics, among others, were the subject of a conversation Musk had on Clubhouse, the voice chat app that's big with Silicon Valley VC types. But Musk's appearance may have been a turning point for the app that moves it into the mainstream. After Musk's talk, Clubhouse's user base nearly doubled, going from 3 to 5 million almost overnight. It's a powerful, popular format, and one that other social media companies are eager to get muscle their way into.
This week on Gadget Lab, former cohost of the show and WIRED senior writer Arielle Pardes joins us to dish about Elon, Clubhouse, and where this kind of social platform goes from here.
Show Notes:
Read more about Elon Musk’s visit to Clubhouse. Coverage of GameStop and Robinhood is here. You can also listen to audio of Musk’s Clubhouse appearance.
Recommendations:
Arielle recommends the wine delivery service from Eater Wine Club. Lauren recommends the show Your Honor on Showtime. Mike recommends the autobiography Being Ram Dass by, well, Ram Dass.
Arielle Pardes can be found on Twitter @pardesoteric. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Lauren. |
| 0:00.6 | Mike. |
| 0:01.3 | Lauren, what's your favorite room on Clubhouse? |
| 0:03.7 | Oh, this is a tough one. I'd have to say right now it's the room where people sing lullabies to each other at night. And they talk and whispers like this. And then they toss to each other. And then the next person plays a song. And it puts you to sleep. What's yours? Well, I'm not going to sing or play you a song. And I don't really have a |
| 0:21.5 | favorite room because I'm on Android and there's no Android out for Clubhouse. But we're going to |
| 0:25.9 | talk about all of that and more on this week's show. |
| 0:36.1 | Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Colori. I'm a senior editor at Wired. |
| 0:41.7 | And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired. Today, we are joined by Wired Senior Writer, |
| 0:47.6 | Ariel Pardess. Hello, Ariel. |
| 0:49.5 | Hi, guys. Hey, Ariel. It's so great to have you back. When you used to co-host with us, we often heard |
| 0:55.8 | that people would get our voices confused. So my goal with this episode is just to talk as little |
| 1:01.1 | as possible so you all can just hear from Ariel. Absolutely, nobody is going to confuse my voice |
| 1:07.3 | with either of yours. So I think we're in the clear on that one anyway. |
| 1:16.7 | Ariel, we have you on the show this week because we are talking about Clubhouse. If our listeners are not familiar with the social network, it's been around for almost a year, and it's very popular |
| 1:21.8 | among the Silicon Valley and digital media crowd. It's also entirely audio-based. So there's no scrolling, there's no photos, people just log on the clubhouse and gather |
| 1:32.2 | together to just chat live. |
| 1:36.1 | You can be a passive listener and soak up an interesting conversation, or you can |
| 1:40.1 | participate if you want by asking a question or offering an opinion. |
| 1:43.1 | Right now, the app is invite only, so it has this air of exclusivity about it, and its popularity grows another notch |
| 1:50.3 | every time a big celebrity pops in. People like Drake, Oprah, Ashton, that's Ashton Coutcher, |
| 1:56.6 | by the way. But nothing is really rocked Clubhouse as hard as it was rocked this week |
| 2:02.5 | when Tesla CEO Elon Musk dropped in on Sunday night. He talked about Tesla. He talked about |
... |
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