Clubhouse: Pivot to audio

Hey, David Pearce here. Before we get into the show, I have one huge favor to ask. We just launched a bunch of new channels for version history. We are now versionhistory podcast on YouTube, on TikTok, and on Instagram. Those are the places we're going to be posting clips. We're posting full episodes on the YouTube channel. Please go follow those channels. Launching new things on the Internet is hard and we are very grateful for all of your help with that. Let's get into the show. I hate to do this to you, but go back with me to mid 2020. We're all cooped up. We're all watching too much television. We're all getting really into making sourdough. And out of nowhere comes an app that promises a new audio only social network. And everybody, everybody wants in from the Virgin Vox Media. This is Virgin History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pearce and today on the show, we are talking about the brief and wild rise of Clubhouse. This episode is brought to you by Focus Features. On March 27, Focus Features invites you to be a part of the most explosive movie of this year's Sundance and South by Southwest film festivals. The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocalyptimist is being called supremely entertaining and the most urgent movie of our time. The AI doc or How I became an Apocalyptimist, rated PG13. Only in theaters March 27. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate. C. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than non sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. Let's talk Clubhouse. Joining me today in the studio, Ashley Carman. Hi, Ashley.

0:00

Hi.

2:09

You now work at Bloomberg, but you were at the Verge during, like, the. The true height of Clubhouse.

2:10

I was.

2:16

You covered it, like, aggressively.

2:16

Yeah, I mean, I was a little late to the party, I would say.

2:19

Were you on Clubhouse?

2:22

I was on Clubhouse.

2:23

Like how on Clubhouse were you?

2:24

For journalistic purposes, I was very on Clubhouse.

2:27

Okay. Also here, Casey Newton of platformer and hard fork fame. Kasey, how are you?

2:29

Hey, David. Ashley.

2:35

Great to be back with you, Kasey. You, I feel like, would have tried very hard circa 2020 to be a Clubhouse influencer. True or false?

2:37

I mean, I don't know that I would have put it in those terms, but I did. I did host rooms and I did have some notable guests show up. So I would say that.

2:45

Okay, good then as the clubhouse easiest of the three of us, right up top here. Will you just describe for people who didn't experience it what Clubhouse was just very quickly?

2:54

Sure. Clubhouse was like, what if a conference call was a social network? Is like, basically how I would put it. You would open up the app and there would be rooms you could join and people would be talking about all manner of things. You could start your own room, anyone could join. And for a inexplicable window in 2021, this was the hottest social network in America.

3:03

And by the way, I should say Clubhouse does still exist. The app is still around, you can still go use it. It's just that it's moment ended pretty abruptly in 2021.

3:33

Yeah, I was gonna say, in the grand scheme of time, I feel like Clubhouse had basically a year and a half of life.

3:42

That's about right.

3:49

And then that was that.

3:50

But anyway, let's get into the story. So the beginning of this story starts in like 2018, 2019, with these two guys, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, who were both entrepreneurs. My favorite fact of this was that Paul sold an app called Highlight, which let people share their locations with strangers to Pinterest, which is like the most mid 2010s sentence I can possibly say out loud about a tech person. Was Highlight cool? I have no memory of Highlight, so

3:52

Highlight was not cool. But Paul Davison is an interesting character. Like, we all here have interviewed countless entrepreneurs over the years in Silicon Valley. I would say for me, Paul. Paul Davison stands out as one who is like a visionary in the literal sense of the word. Like, the man was always having visions and was very good in telling stories that could sweep up, like, small groups of users and investors. And so when Highlight was getting ready to relaunch, I went into his office and sat down with him and he explained his vision for a social network where you would just be able to see. See what anyone around you was doing. It even included their state of motion. So it would, like, tell you if they were like on a bike or like in a car. And Paul was able to describe all of this in a way that sounded like, not something most people would do, but maybe would become more plausible over time. And I think a lot of that spirit made it into Clubhouse, where, like, this was Just not a person who would take the conventional wisdom for an answer. He was always trying to see around a corner for, like, what would be some crazy new way that people would share their lives.

4:20

Yeah, but there's this important thing about Highlight, which is the reason I bring it up, is that Paul was obsessed with this idea of sort of spontaneously helping people run into each other, which is a key feature of Clubhouse and is, like, a big reason that that app turned out the way that it did and kind of went wrong, is that that's what Paul was trying to do. So we're going to come back to that. But Rohan Seth is a Google engineer. He had also made a company. They made apps. It was like, these are two Silicon Valley dudes. And in 2019, they built an app called Talk show, which I had completely forgotten about. And Talk show was just a podcasting app. And in the course of building a podcast app, their big idea was that podcasts felt too formal. And what they wanted was something that felt a little more spontaneous and interactive, and they wanted to give people a way to just jump in. Very. Like old school call in radio. Right. So they decide they want to change. They want to do something more interactive. Uh, they launch an app called Clubhouse in. Wait for it. April of 2020.

5:30

I will say, I distinctly remember the date when the Vox Media offices shut down. March 11th. So there you go.

6:28

Yeah, we'd all, at this point, been home for a month. Uh, it was. It was rough times. Um, I don't want to spend too much time dwelling on all of our feelings about the early pandemic more than we need to. Um, but it. It is like this moment and what's going on at this time is very important both for how people use Clubhouse and literally what was on Clubhouse. Like, if you guys remember, a huge part of the early Clubhouse experience was about COVID in all kinds of problematic ways. Um, but so they. They launched this app, and I just first want to show you. Do either of you remember. Here's a fun trivia question. Clubhouse was famous for having people as its app icons. Yes. Do either of you remember who the first one was? Was?

6:35

Wasn't it, like, a musician?

7:16

I do not know the first one.

7:19

It was ready for this? Yeah. Bill Murray. And if you were to say, David, why is it Bill Murray? I don't know, and I don't have a good answer for you. Uh, but this is. This is. If you're watching, you can see that's Bill Murray, the app icon. Sure. Um, and also, you can see this, there's an early screenshot of the app here. This is a tweet from Paul Davison showing the early stuff. And the, the original idea of this app, which I had totally forgotten, was that it was just one room. You opened Clubhouse and it was just the people on Clubhouse, there were no, there was no concept of rooms. There was no group anything. You just opened it up and whoever was there was all in this one space talking to each other.

7:20

Which is the kind of basic idea of Twitter as well, we should say.

8:01

Sure. But this was, this was very much by design, sort of tiny. And I think the idea of like, what does this look like when there are a million people in this room? Had maybe not occurred to them yet.

8:04

But.

8:16

But I think this idea of like, you, you open it up and whoever is here, you're suddenly just sort of in a conversation with was the immediate idea. And they really wanted it to be about their friends. So they started by inviting some of their friends and then they told their friends to invite their friends. Like, it was a. It was like an old school party line for phones, which, like, Casey, you're in your 70s. You know what party lines are, right?

8:16

Oh, I love the party line. Back in the 1940s, during World War II, it was sort of how we kept busy while we were nibbling on our rations. But, you know, you're bringing something up that's really important, David, which is that, to me, a big part of the Clubhouse story early on was how present the founders were at all times. Like, like the founders were always on Clubhouse, and at the time this was perceived as really novel. Like there would wind up being lengthy blog posts written, like how creative the founders had been in welcoming people onto the app and like hosting these regular office hours where they would explain how phone calls worked. So, yeah, that was kind of a big part of the story.

8:39

Totally.

9:17

Well, and the invite only nature was it baked this VC San Francisco tech DNA into the app from the start.

9:17

Totally. And, and, and right. Like you go from, you know, you're talking to Paul and Rohan and they're like, they invite their friends. Their friends are tech people and their tech people's friends are tech people. So it just immediately becomes this like, very particular kind of group that is, I think all of us have experienced, very prone to fomo, very interested in exciting new technologies, and of course all of them are going to follow themselves to this app. I don't think they meant this as like a brilliant growth hacking system, but it really worked to their favor. I said, I Don't want to talk a lot about what we were all going through during the early days of COVID but let's briefly talk about what we were all doing during the early days of COVID because I just. I think that the headspace of this moment, particularly around communication, is really important.

9:28

Right.

10:11

Like, this was the moment Zoom was ascendant, because all of a sudden, everybody's like, well, how am I supposed to keep doing, like, my life and my job? And so Clubhouse, in that sense, comes along at absolutely the perfect time. And also a thing I had also sort of memory hold about. My 2020 experience was like, I didn't get a haircut for nine months. So, like, there are real upsides to having something that is audio only in this space too, right? It's easier. You don't have to worry about it. We all wore sweatpants for a year. Like, it wasn't a big deal to. You could just be on audio. And there was something, I think, appealing about that even as we were turning to video for so many other things. So almost immediately, this app starts to, like, take off in Silicon Valley. And I mean, take off in sort of the weirdest possible way. Like, it only had a few thousand users, but was already getting, like, glossy New York Times stories about it. Like, it was a thing way before it was actually popular, which was just super interesting. And one of the things that was super clear from the very beginning, and in retrospect, one of the strangest things about it was that it was the venture capitalists who were the coolest people in the room in Clubhouse, like Marc Andreessen in particular, who had just written that huge, like, it's time to build essay. Do you guys remember? Like, Marc Andreessen was sort of in the zeitgeist in an unusual usual way for a venture capitalist at that moment, he was all over clubhouse. A16Z ends up investing a bunch of money in Clubhouse. Clubhouse had two employees, Paul and Rohan, and raised $10 million at $100 million valuation, like, 15 minutes after launching with almost no users. It's only on iOS, it's still on Invite, but, like, it was one of those things that everybody who tried it sort of immediately goes, oh, this is something.

10:12

Yeah. This also just foreshadows so much of what is to come in our society.

11:55

What do you mean?

12:01

In the sense that you said, like, Andreessen and VCs generally all of a sudden had the microphone and were omnipresent in our lives in a way that maybe, unless you were a tech reporter, you weren't paying attention probably to what VCs were saying about things on a normal day. But I would say now, obviously, the presidential election, with Trump and tech entrepreneurs and CEOs and VCs being directly involved in politics, what they say on what is now X matters in a way. Maybe it didn't always beyond, again, kind of the tech sphere. And I think that this Clubhouse moment kind of gave them the juice where they were like, wait a second.

12:02

I think that's right. I think you could. This may not be exactly true, but I think you can point a lot of the sort of go direct vibes from VCs who are like, forget the media. Forget, you know, going through all of these intermediaries. We don't need anybody to tell our story. We're going to do it ourselves. I think you can actually point a lot of that at Clubhouse.

12:47

In my mind, it really sowed the seeds even at the very beginning of Clubhouse's demise, in terms of its relevance, at least, because fairly rapidly, Andreessen Horowitz would just kind of start to exert this bear hug around the app, where all of a sudden it was like its partners were the most, like, recommended follows inside the app. And every time you open it, it seemed like they were holding, like, all of their partner meetings on Clubhouse. And so it just kind of started to feel like state media for Andreessen Horowitz in particular. And you're right, David. Like, there was a moment where that was, like, very novel and exciting, but I would say the novelty wore up pretty fast there.

13:07

Yes. And I think the. The strangeness of the state media ness of it is. Is a big piece of this, right? Because there was also Clubhouse had a suggested user list that would show up when you joined. And a lot of it was the most popular people. And the most popular people were the people who had been there the longest, which were largely A16Z investors. They also had invested in the company. So everybody had an incentive to sort of keep reinforcing this thing where, like, Mark Andreessen is the loudest person on the network. And, and it's. It's useful to say to lots of people watching and listening to this who don't spend that much time caring about what VCs do in a. In a teeny, tiny corner of the world. These people are, honest to God, celebrities. And, and like, the all in podcast is very successful. You can feel about that however you would like. I feel most bad.

13:46

I feel great about it.

14:31

Casey loves it. Uh, but this was like, it it was this sort of self reinforcing group of people, I think, who really liked having this big a mouthpiece, like they, they were given the microphone, like you said, in a very real way. Another thing I thought was really interesting is almost immediately people start trying to figure out how to make money. Literally when it's like a few thousand people on the app. This is sort of at the moment where vine has come and gone because it couldn't figure out how to monetize the, the creator economy in a big way is like hugely on the rise. TikTok is really taking off. There is this sense of like, how do I turn this into a business? And so companies like crazy early in the lifestyle of Clubhouse start hiring Clubhouse specific people. People are creating sponsored shows. There's like host red ads on Clubhouse in the early days. It's nuts. So the, the app pretty quickly goes from being this one open space to like you said at the very beginning, Kasey, this idea of rooms, which you can essentially just qualify as like group chats, right. That you, you would open up the app and it would give you a list of places you might go to listen to people talk. It's not that different from like TV channels.

14:32

Well, yeah, it had a theme to each room. So you knew what you were walking into. You chose that room based on your interest sometimes.

15:41

In theory, sure. You often what you were walking into was much worse than you anticipated.

15:48

Perhaps.

15:53

Yeah.

15:53

In theory. You saw a title.

15:54

Yeah, that's. That is definitely true. Yeah. And Clubhouse immediately saw all of this and was like, okay, well we want to, we want to, you know, pour fuel on the fire here. So they start talking about how they're going to do ticket sales, they're going to allow people to pay to subscribe, they're. They're going to do tips. Like they immediately embrace this switch to essentially, we want to be a media platform.

15:56

And I think that speaks to the fact that so many of the earliest adopters were die hard Twitter users. And Clubhouse just seemed like such a natural extension of Twitter. Right. Like in the same way that you go on Twitter to perform your funny little sentences, people were going onto Clubhouse to, you know, perform over phone calls. And so I think there was just kind of like a one to one connection that all of those early users, founders and investors were making between the two platforms. So I think it actually would have been really strange if they'd stayed in that friend zone for much longer.

16:16

Yeah. And I do think there were some mechanics to the way the Clubhouse worked that I think were actually really clever. Going back and reading some of the early stories about the things they had done was really smart.

16:47

They had.

16:58

This is all very normal now, but Clubhouse, like, invented a lot of this where you could have a big room full of people, but then there was kind of a virtual stage, and the people who were moderating the thing could invite people up on the stage, kick them off the stage. So you could either have a sort of free for all room where everybody could talk, or you could have something that was as heavily moderated as you wanted it to be. The interface was really nice even back then. Like, it was a really nicely made apple from the beginning, which I think went a long way towards making people actually want to use it. There was a lot of this sense of, like, who might just suddenly appear in those early days, right where. And again, this is, like, not a list of people everybody cares about, but like, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz just like, randomly showed up and hung out. And to a certain set of tech people who were home largely alone, working all day, this was powerful.

17:00

Wait, can I tell my story about this?

17:48

Yeah, please.

17:50

Yeah. So in. In 2021, I have a friend, Maren Nelson, and, you know, it's like, middle of. We're like 11 months into quarantine, nothing to do. And she was like, let's just like, get on Clubhouse and like, do a little something. And. And so we invited our friend Eric Newcomer, another great reporter. He had recently written a piece about Andreessen Horowitz's, like, media strategy. And so we just opened up a Clubhouse room, started talking about it, and. And within a few minutes, there were a thousand people in the room. Andreessen showed up. Margaret Wenmacher, who was like, the head of comms there, A couple other Andreessen folks showed up. Like, 12 tech journalists showed up. And for like an hour, we just kind. And we wound up, like, you know, inviting like, Margit and a couple of other Andreessen people up on stage. And I wrote in my newsletter afterwards, if I had tried to schedule a phone call with four Andreessen Horowitz partners and 12 tech reporters so that we could just talk about it. It would' taken years, like, years to get these people on the phone, but in that moment, everyone would just kind of show up. And I wrote at the time, like, by the standards of Pandemic Life, like, I find this exhilarating. Like, I. Like I really did, you know, was, you know, much diminished from the social life we used to have. But there was something Incredible to me about the fact that you could just kind of conjure all of those people in a room.

17:51

Yeah. And. And it felt magical for that reason to a lot of people for. For a long time that. That just people would show up. And for a while, there were, I think every A list celebrity you can think of went on Clubhouse once is kind of my. My experience with it. I mean, there's big names like Lindsay Lohan was there, MC Hammer, Jared Leto, Ashton Kutcher, Kevin Hart, Oprah, John Mayer, Drake, Justin Bieber. All these people, like, were on Clubhouse. Some. Right. Enough that it was like, not only am I going to come here and hang out with my friends and do this thing, but there's a possibility that Justin Bieber is going to show up because what else is he doing? Because it's the pandemic. Like, this is a part of the whole. Whole appeal. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about Peak Clubhouse. So good, so good, so good.

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That's why you rack. To realize the future America needs. We understand what's needed from us to face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this. All right, we're back. So we're still in 2020. Clubhouse is ascending. It's growing. People are getting invites. I think I got an invite, like, fall of 2020, and I remember it being very exciting that I got an invite. Also, there was a period of time where invites were going for, like, hundreds of dollars on ebay. It was like, you really can't underestimate the extent to which this was briefly a huge, exclusive club that a lot of people really, really, really wanted to be in. I went back and was looking at some of the things people were doing on Clubhouse, and there was a bunch of cool stuff. And Ashley, I want you to explain one that I remember you covered, which is Shoot yout Shot rooms.

20:26

Oh, do you remember these? Yes. And it became controversial at one point as well. So from what I remember, the Shoot yout Shot Room was kind of like an attempt at dating through Clubhouse. So the idea was you had the virtual stage. You could bring people up and they're shooting their shot with someone, they're kind of pitching themselves. Right. And I believe this started with black users on the platform. And then it became a very popular format because this was also a feature of Clubhouse was like the IP on Clubhouse was the Room and how you structure the room. And so you could have a format that is great and someone could use that and apply it to a different audience. And so NYU kids started doing the Shoot yout Shot Room, if I remember correctly. And it took off more. There was a lot of allegations around appropriation, but generally the Shoot yout Shot Room was just this idea that you could meet people, virtually shoot your shot, try to date them, and maybe you would have a new relationship exiting Clubhouse.

21:20

It really. Yeah, the idea of like basically having to recite your hinge profile to a bunch of strangers in a social media room is just horrifying. But that is what it was. And those things were very popular and people loved them. But you're right, the Room was the thing. And there were tons of people setting up these like daily or weekly get togethers that people would play music, people would, you know, talk about a certain topic. There were a lot of watch parties for things, but that was the curated thing was the Room. And people were setting these up and tending to them and building real audiences. And there was a sense that like, if you can make one of these rooms into an ongoing show, for lack of a better word, you've built something very powerful.

22:23

Yeah. And I do think like up until this point we've sort of talked about Clubhouse as this place where tech minded folks got together, which is true. And some of the biggest names, even though there were cultural forces for sure that rolled through, originally it was mostly these like tech founder types. But honestly, where Clubhouse was interesting is you had these emerging behaviors and honestly, truly creative people coming up with ways to innovate within the app. I remember there was like a Lion King rendition that happened in the app and there was this whole behavior called I think pull to Refresh, where you could change your profile picture so someone would be doing, I don't know, the Voice of Mufasa. You could pull to refresh and all of a sudden it's a different scene from the movie as their profile picture. So the idea was kind of like to make this as enhanced as you could as an experience.

23:02

I'm glad you brought up the Lion King. I was going to get to this later, but I. I sincerely believe the coolest thing that ever happened on Clubhouse was this performance of the Lion King. And we pulled a clip of it, and I just want to play it for you. It's just. You can see 12 icons on the screen, and it's just the people sitting in their house with earpods or whatever singing this into their microphones, says Brett Goldstein.

23:52

Is there, like, from Ted Lasso, maybe

24:30

this got, like, news coverage. Like, it's important to me to remember this was like, a big cultural event that happened when it happened.

24:32

Yeah. I really do feel like for anyone who is watching this, that was young or just somehow went through the pandemic without ever hearing about any of these things. Like, this makes us seem insane. Watching that back. I'm like, oh, my God.

24:39

We all kind of were.

24:52

I think, yeah, you really need to keep that in mind.

24:54

We have a forever answer to what was the worst way to experience the Lion King.

24:57

But listen, experiencing the Lion King is better than not experiencing the Lion King.

25:03

You know what I mean?

25:06

I'll take it.

25:07

Okay. On a smaller scale, I will say, like, within the constraints of audio, you had people plugging in soundboards, doing sound effects. I mean, there were ways in which people were just having fun in a medium that wasn't just people talking about, like, politics and tech. And I at least can appreciate that.

25:08

And you're right that that was the coolest part of the Clubhouse experience, was people actually inventing new kinds of storytelling and new kinds of media. I mean, and you mentioned that, like, as with basically every social network ever, the black community was way ahead in all of this. And so much of what happened on Clubhouse started with black influencers and black creators making new kinds of things for people. So this thing keeps growing. It hit the App Store in September of 2020, but you still needed an invite to get in. And this is kind of when Clubhouse starts to really take off. And as all of this is happening like absolute clockwork, this is what happens with social networks. There is. There are more people and there is more content, and so there are more problems. And the Clubhouse experience starts to turn for a lot of people kind of right around this point. You covered this a bunch, actually. That Clubhouse basically didn't have any moderation tools at all, actually. And, like, to some extent couldn't because of the way the whole platform was architected. But, like, this became a pretty big problem pretty fast for Clubhouse.

25:24

Well, again, you have to put it in the context of Pandemic, which was at this time, there was a lot of conversation about misinformation, specifically as it relates to vaccines and advice that was being given around just taking care of yourself. If you had Covid, there was just a lot of stuff flying around. And so people were highly sensitive to what was being said in these rooms. And, yeah, like, so at that time, you had a lot of the platforms. I mean, famously, Spotify dealt with this around its podcaster, Joe Rogan. I mean, these generated big news stories at the time, these types of storylines. And Clubhouse, to your point, really didn't have a strategy around moderation. And also, people could just go on there and say whatever the hell they want. And on top of that, you could pretend to be someone else saying that thing.

26:32

Right.

27:19

So, yeah, no, there was no verification.

27:20

Kasey, this feels like just a speedrun of everything you've covered about every other social platform ever.

27:22

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of amazing to think about, like, if Clubhouse got really successful today, like, no one would write any of those stories because it would just, like, still be better than whatever was happening on X, you know, but, like, in 2021, there was an expectation that you would apply some basic level of moderation to what was happening. And so the fact that, for example, there were a bunch of rooms on Clubhouse where people were just having, like, virtual sex continuously for, like, 24 hours a day, you know, was. Was a concern to some folks. And the founders, in sort of the traditional Silicon Valley style style, were like, well, who. Who could have ever guessed that we would have scaled? And this is a really hard problem, you know, but we take it really seriously.

27:26

Yeah, this is a really hard problem is I. I'm. I am confident a sentence that got said out loud on one of these town halls that. That Paul and Rohan had every week. One thing Clubhouse did have was a block tool. You could just. You could just block somebody, and then they couldn't come into any room that

28:06

you were part of.

28:21

Um, that became an interesting thing. I don't know if either of you remember this. There was a brief data privacy thing where it came out that Clubhouse might have been routing user data through servers in China that people freaked out about. And all of this just adds up to, like, all accounts are that these. This was a very small company. Again, like, two people for a long time, earnestly trying to do a good job and keep up and just got it. This whole thing just got away from them in a bunch of different directions. I think the product at this point is becoming something different from what they had intended at the beginning. The community has become much bigger, much faster than I think anybody could have predicted at the beginning. And. And you get the sense that it's like, they're like, okay, our options here are just sort of let this happen or really try and wrap our arms around it and fix it. And I think in. In kind of the beginning of 2021, that is what they tried to do. They raised another $100 million, valued at a billion dollars. This is like one of the fastest billion dollar rises of a company I can remember.

28:22

But before AI, it was actually considered something of an achievement to be valued at a billion dollars.

29:26

That's the funniest part about this. When I was rereading some of these stories, I'm like, oh, that's nothing.

29:31

Yeah. Now somebody would have. They would. They would be like, you can talk about AI and everybody would just throw $11 billion at them. They would have been bought by OpenAI while we're recording this podcast. But so the January of 2021, this thing is still taking off. It had gotten reportedly 4 million downloads just in the month of January of 2021. So the thing that starts to happen at this exact moment is that every other company that makes a product decides, we're gonna make Clubhouse.

29:36

All of.

30:04

All of them simultaneously are like, well, we can do a Clubhouse in our app. Twitter, I think, was. Was probably the first to really do it. It starts building spaces at the end of 2020. And then, let's see, Facebook is building a Clubhouse competitor. It had just finished. I just went through and made a list of, like, the copying that Facebook did during COVID and it's fabulous. They had just finished copying TikTok with reels. They had done Rooms because Zoom was taking off.

30:05

Well.

30:33

So, yeah. So, you know, around this time, I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, and there was a huge audio focus. Like, he wanted to create an audio product for basically every different length of audio that existed. And the degree to, like, the. Or rather the speed with which they abandoned that entire project, like, still astonishes me whenever I think about it, because he was so excited about it. And it felt. It feels like that enthusiasm, like, barely lasted for six months, which, again, is totally wrapped up in the story of Clubhouse.

30:33

Yes. So in addition to Facebook, Mark Cuban announces he's making an app called Fireside. Spotify starts working on an app called Green Rooms that I remember well, they acquired Locker Room. You're right. There was Locker Room, which was. It was like Clubhouse for sports.

31:02

Yeah.

31:16

And then Spotify bought it and was like, we're gonna do green rooms.

31:17

Yeah. Which they kept as a separate app but then eventually integrated into there.

31:20

I remember thinking that was a really good idea and was totally gonna work. And I was like, if anybody is gonna win at this space, it's gonna be Spotify, was my theory.

31:24

It made sense in the way of cultural conversation. Like to your point about Bieber and Drake, if you could just have Bieber and Drake in Spotify where and you could integrate playing the music legally in the room, that makes sense.

31:31

Once Twitter added Spaces, it became entirely obvious that Clubhouse was just a missing feature of Twitter.

31:45

Yes.

31:53

Like, there were very. There was basically no one on Clubhouse who didn't have a Twitter account that they cared about way more than they cared about their Clubhouse account. And so once you could go live, I did this myself, I could go live on Twitter, reach all of my followers. I have many more followers on Twitter than I did on Clubhouse. And so there was no point on going on Clubhouse anymore when you could just kind of do it on Twitter. And so I actually spent a lot of time on Twitter Spaces over the next year. And yeah. So I really do think, as you say, David, was the beginning of Clubhouse's demise.

31:53

I think that's right. I think if you were to say what killed Clubhouse, I think Twitter Space is probably the closest thing there is to a correct answer. The obvious correct answer is we all went outside. Again, what killed Clubhouse is the obvious

32:24

answer is MRNA vaccines.

32:36

That's exactly right. But I think technically the. The only one of these that you could say was the long term winner is Twitter Spaces, which is sort of fascinating. I just have two more Clubhouse moments that I think are worth talking about, and both of them happened in the same place, which is a room called Good Time, which was. Which was hosted by a couple, Sriram and Aarti Krishnan, who longtime tech people kind of knew everybody in this space and over the course of just a few days had like sort of clubhouses. Two moments in. In the tech world that it. It like most exploded. The first one was when Elon Musk just sort of showed up out of nowhere to grill Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood. And. And again, you have to remember what's going on at this moment. This is like peak meme stock trading, peak Wall street bets. Everybody is losing their mind about everything. And Robinhood had like very famously gone down and. And had had like huge outage issues at like, very important market moments. And there were A lot of people with conspiracy theories about what Robinhood was doing. So there's this thing going on where, like, everybody is very attuned to this platform, Robinhood, and obviously, Elon Musk is sort of massively ascending as a character on the Internet, and he shows up and just starts talking. And this was like, there was a time where the maximum number of people you could have on clubhouse was 5,000 people. And this broke that list or this broke that barrier. There were overflow rooms for this, where it was people playing the recording of this into another. Like, again, you're absolutely right that all of this just makes us sound deranged. And we kind of were, but it was. It was a moment nevertheless. And let me just play you a clip that I have from this.

32:38

Vlad the stock impaler. Hey, guys, thanks for. Thanks for inviting me up, I should say. I just randomly downloaded Clubhouse a couple of days ago just to see what it was all about. So this is my first time literally using the app. All right, well, spill the beans, man. What happened last week?

34:23

Why do you stop?

34:41

Why can people buy GameStop shares?

34:43

The people demand an answer, and they

34:46

want to know the details and the truth. Did you sell your clients down the river, or do you have no choice? Yeah, so. So I wrote about this at the time, highlighting the novelty of the world's richest man, who was, like, a deeply problematic character, but was, like, nowhere near the Elon that we have today grilling in public the CEO of this other public company. Like, there wasn't actually another place in the media where anything like this was happening. And so this. What, to me, like. Like, editorially, this was the peak of Clubhouse for me, was this particular moment.

34:48

It was. It was a really fascinating moment. And it was, I think, one of the few times Clubhouse really sort of broke containment and became a really big story, because, again, like, the. The Wall street bets phenomenon was everywhere. Elon Musk was probably at that time, even the biggest character in the tech industry. And this was like, this just blew up just in such a strange way.

35:24

I mean, it's exciting to watch that even now, to me. But I also am like, that tech. The tech still exists. So there is a world in which that could still happen today. You know, there is still a world in which Elon could go on spaces or whatever they call it now and have someone else come in and him. Ask, grill him with questions. But it just doesn't happen.

35:45

No.

36:05

And it's. It's like. It's kind of. I don't know. I Just feel like it could still be a thing we wanted it to be, but it's not. It was just that one moment in time where it was, like, happening.

36:05

Yeah, it's really true. And I do wonder how much of it is just that there was nothing else to do. Like, truly everyone, we all invented weird ways to spend our time because we had to. But let me just hit you with the one other moment, which is a few days later, Mark Zuckerberg, again, a list celebrity in this world, shows up and talks VR. In the good time room, we have the one and only Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. Mark, welcome to the show. Hey, I used to be the headliner here.

36:15

I would say Boz is the headliner, and I know Mark can only stay a few minutes. So, Mark, up here you have three

36:53

people, Boz, Fiji, and Mark and Jason that you worked with for over 10 years.

37:00

What is your favorite, most surprising thing

37:05

about working with each one of them?

37:09

Wow, what a killer question from Sriram.

37:11

I just want to say there's something so awkward about that interaction that is so correct to what most of Clubhouse felt like.

37:14

Yeah, it was just like tech people licking each other's faces.

37:22

One other thing I want to talk about is, Ashley, you went to what I believe you called a mansion party.

37:25

Oh, yeah.

37:30

On Clubhouse. Can you. Can you describe what a mansion party was on Clubhouse?

37:31

So shout out to all the impressionists out there, AKA people who do impressions of other people, because this really was also their moment. This is their opportunity in the sun. This was a party where someone essentially wanted to make it like a house party where celebrities would attend. And so you would walk in or enter the room virtually. And we would hear certain celebrities. I think Howard Stern was in there, some other folks. And it was ultimately just impressionists doing impressions of these celebrities and kind of putting on a show for people at this mansion party, quote, unquote. This is another one of those times where it was, like, just inventive from a creator standpoint and also just total lunacy.

37:34

Clubhouse launches on Android. It launches dms, basically trying to be more of a messaging app. Like, you can tell pretty quickly. Clubhouse is like, okay, our. Our main thing is becoming a feature of everything else. We need to start to try to get some of those features, too. To keep people in our app, they announced a feature called Wave, where you could basically go poke a friend to come join you in a room, which is just like, ugly growth hacking in a way that I don't like. It rolled out the ability to Record and replay conversations, which is kind of the moment where it was like, maybe we're just going to be a podcast app. They started trying to really help creators monetize. This is like they're, they're again doing all the things you should do as you're trying to really expand. And at the same time they are rapidly dying. And, and the, the moment is just over at this point. Like by the time you get to mid-2021, sort of generously a year since this thing has really started, it's already starting to slow way down.

38:18

Which again, let me just say I got my like, final vaccine in like May or maybe early June of 2021. Right. And like, and, and, and I sort of like tried to wait my turn and let all the seniors get vaccinated first. Right. So it's like, it's truly just people got vaccinated and they stopped opening the app.

39:17

Yep. So the app more or less goes away. We all kind of stop thinking about

39:32

it for a while.

39:36

The, the coverage there, there's like an 18 month gap where no one covered Clubhouse, which is very funny. I spent a lot of time looking for what was Clubhouse up to in 2022 and no one knows.

39:37

Yeah, there's a real dearth of coverage, truly.

39:48

And then in 2023, they did this pivot to being something more like what I think they were trying to do at the beginning, which is more of a messaging app for friends to talk to each other. I think this idea of being a public broadcasting platform was not at all. The plan became the thing, and so became the plan. And then once that faded, they're like, okay, let's go try to build the thing we actually wanted to build. I've only ever talked to Paul once, and I talked to him in 2023 around this relaunch that they were doing. They also laid off a bunch of their staff at this time. Like full sort of reset of the company. And the thing he told me was basically, I compared it to dating apps. The way he was explaining what he wanted. This, like, how do we connect people with each other in ways that feel sort of useful, but also serendipitous? And his big idea was, I think this. I'll just read you a quote. He said, I think a similar thing is going to happen with friendship. And so with Clubhouse, the way we think about it is when you get into a room and talk with people, a group of people that you really vibe with, you can have conversations, a fantastic experience. It's your friends and their Friends, a means to an end. It gives you a deeper connection. Like that. That was the thing. And that is so completely the opposite of where Clubhouse was going when it was at its peak, which is like a one to many broadcasting. Like, it was radio, right? If it was ever going to work, it was going to be radio. And then they're like, we want to go back to being a messaging app.

39:50

Audio. Always struggled to travel online. Voice grams or audiograms like those never, ever worked. I do want to say I went to a party towards the end of the Clubhouse era, where it was all power Clubhouse users.

41:14

Like, in the world.

41:27

In the world. I went to, like, a real party in a apartment in the city, New York, and it was all power Clubhouse users who had met each other in the app, and they kind of tried to make the clubhouse real in person. So they brought in a masseuse, and they were serving really nice hors d'. Oeuvres. And I want to just say, like, the people who, on the creative side of things who are in Clubhouse are actually very cool people. Like, I met some really, really awesome creative types who maybe we don't stay in super close touch, but, like, the people who I had met through that app are awesome. Like, they were event planners, they were chefs. They were just creative types who loved to network and were stuck in their house. And then when the doors were open and they could go out, they all hung out with each other and are still friends to this day. So, like, there were actually very worthwhile people in that app. And it was an. It was a good time.

41:27

Also, it's just so perfect, the idea that the Clubhouse era would end with a party where there's a masseuse. It's like, congratulations, you made it through the pandemic. Pandemic. You can now have the one thing you've been missing this whole time, which is human touch from a stranger. Congratulations.

42:16

I reread my story about this, and they also raffled off a date with the physical therapist for the Knicks at this party.

42:30

Huh?

42:38

Did you shoot your shot?

42:39

I was apparently on the massage table according to my own story, so.

42:41

Perfect. I love that. That is the right way for the Clubhouse story to end. Yeah, I love that. All right, we're going to take one more break, and then we're going to come back. We're going to do the version history questions. We'll be right back. Score more with the college branded Venmo debit card and earn up to 5% cash. Back with Venmo stash. Got paid back. With the Venmo debit card, you can instantly access your balance and spend on what you want, like game day, snacks, gear, tickets and more. The more you do, the more cash back you can earn. Plus, there's no monthly fee or minimum balance. Sign up now@venmo.com CollegeCard the Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank. NA Select Schools available. Venmo stash terms and exclusions apply at venmo me stashterms max $100 cash back per month. All right, we're back. So in every episode, we ask the same eight questions about a product to just try and determine its legacy. So for Clubhouse, let's start with the time matrix, which as everyone understands because it's a concept that makes absolute perfect sense, and I don't understand what anybody's problem is. The idea of the time matrix is it's. It's idea and time. It's the right idea, the wrong idea, the right time or the wrong time. And we have the four quadrants, and I actually have a feeling we're all going to agree, but actually, I want you go to first. Where. Which quadrant do you think this belongs in?

42:46

It was the right idea at the right time, very obviously.

44:16

Kasey, what do you think? We'll come back.

44:18

Yes, it was. It was definitely the right idea at the right time.

44:21

So it was the right idea at the right time, but then we all went outside and it died. Right. Like, I think. I think the way I have been thinking about this, and the reason this one's hard for me is, is there. Is there a version of Clubhouse that would have worked a lot better if it had not come along when it did, or is it actually that it got more life than it would have otherwise because it came along when it did. Right. Like, it's basically. Is the pandemic the best thing or the worst thing that ever happened to Clubhouse? Is kind of the question.

44:24

The pandemic is definitely the best thing that ever happened to it. We never would have talked about it had there not been a pandemic, I think.

44:52

So that means, by the way, that you're fully out on the thesis that social audio ever could have been a thing.

44:58

No. Okay, so here's where I will complicate it. I think that had Twitter continued to exist as an independent company with competent product people and a good ce, you could have found some durable home for social audio. I think inevitably, Twitter spaces would have added a video product. You know, maybe it eventually kind of starts to lean More into the twitch zone.

45:03

Yeah. And I mean, I guess it's just a question of. Do you think. Do you think if you introduce video to the audio product, which would have to happen for a 260, then that. Then audio is the wrong idea.

45:30

Oh, wow, that complicates everything. Are we. I think it's now. I think it's wrong idea, wrong time. Yeah.

45:42

Now I'm kind of like, wrong idea, wrong.

45:46

I think it's wrong idea, wrong time.

45:47

Because I. I do think audio. I cover audio for a living. Audio is super important. Honestly, most people when they're live streaming, like watching a live stream or watching. Watching a video podcast, it's on in the background. Yeah. They are listening to the audio. So like, audio is super important, but you just need the video too at this point for.

45:48

To go viral and you need the. You need the existing platform with the existing network.

46:09

Yeah.

46:13

It's wrong idea, wrong time. It is. You're right. Kasey, are you okay with this? I don't care, but are you okay with this?

46:13

No, I'm not. I. No, I stand by everything I said. You've talked yourself into madness.

46:19

No. Like if in 2021, TikTok is right idea, right time. Clubhouse. Wrong idea, wrong time. Sorry, Clubhouse. All right, question number two. Was this peak anything? I have several I'd like to offer you.

46:24

Please.

46:38

This was, this was peak Covid technology for sure. I think there was a lot of stuff that got accelerated that was kind of happening anyway. But in the, like the, in the. The. The thing that most neatly followed the arc of our experience of the pandemic, clearly clubhouse peak of it. It was truly peak Covid technology. Was this peak Celebrity venture capitalists. You don't think so?

46:38

No. They're in the government.

47:03

Yeah.

47:06

Yeah.

47:07

That's unfortunate.

47:07

David Sachs is running a full blown like AI conference. Like. Yeah. No.

47:08

So this is like the bottom of the mountain.

47:14

This is the beginning, right? Yeah.

47:16

Okay. It's like the first base camp on Everest, not the top of Everest. Okay. Was this peak weird new social network idea, fomo. Like everybody wanting to be on the thing that was the cool place to be. Was this the most that has ever been?

47:18

I feel like Sora.

47:34

This followed like a very predictable pattern. Like, like we used to see these little pop up social networks all the time, you know, like Peach and Ello. And like they would follow this kind of similar dynamic where they were interesting for, you know, two weeks, a month, six months, whatever it was, and then they fall off the face of the earth and I mean, Clubhouse was, like, very standard in that way.

47:36

That's fair. Question number three. If you could travel back in time to 2019 and build clubhouse yourself with the fullness of knowledge that we have now, could you have changed anything to make the product more successful? I think there's one obvious answer here, which is embrace video. But then video maybe just runs you into TikTok quickly and it falls apart.

47:57

Yeah, I think. I think maybe that, like, it could have been smart to try to take a run at Twitch faster than they did.

48:21

I mean, the other route they could have taken would have been leaning into On Demand faster.

48:30

I was going to ask you about this. Should they have done podcasts and maybe

48:35

editing tools or something, basically becoming more of a tool rather than being the social network?

48:37

Try to, like, earnestly be TikTok for

48:42

podcasts, and that could have maybe worked in some world.

48:44

Yeah. That is, I think, ironically, it's like, that is, if they had just kept building talk show, maybe that's where it lands. And it lands very differently. But I kind of think. I cannot think of a way that I could have made that moment for Clubhouse at least any bigger.

48:46

No.

49:01

Question number four, will the youth ever make it cool again? Is there a retro, cool, nostalgia future for Clubhouse? You're shaking your head now, Ashley. No, I kind of think so too. Kasey. Are the youths gonna make it cool? You're our Gen Z correspondent here.

49:01

Yeah, I mean, you know, as a recent college graduate, I have to say none of my friends are on this app, so it's just really hard for me to imagine.

49:15

Is there a lot of looks maxing happening on Clubhouse these days?

49:23

The looks maxing, you know, I mean, maybe if we can get clavicular on there to get frame mogged, we'd have something, but that's going to be a heavy lift.

49:25

Yeah, that's fair. Frame logging and audio, I don't think quite hits the same. All right. Yeah, I think that one's pretty easy. Question number five. What feature of this platform should every current version have? What would you lift out of Clubhouse and stick into all of the other social media platforms that exist? My answer, just while you guys think is I think the Stages concept continues to be a very cool one. And like, Twitter Spaces did a reasonably good job of just ruthlessly copying this, and it kind of worked. But this idea of, like, I can host a room and I can make it open to everybody so we can talk, but then I can control who's talking and I can just sort of run this space like my own little mini conference. I actually think it's very cool and lots of folks have implemented something along those lines. But I think Club, the best version of Clubhouse, was still better at that than I think anything we've seen since then.

49:33

I think. I think Discord's version of it is really good and I think that's one way where Clubhouse kind of endures. I think it's hard to build a product around at a time when there's not a global pandemic. But.

50:21

But stay tuned, gang.

50:37

There'll be another one. But I do think this idea of like, like capitalizing on serendipity is like really big and does tend to lead to the most fun that people have on social networks. You know, like, there's a. There's something in like a duet on TikTok, right. That comes out of this similar spirit of. I wasn't. I didn't even know I was going to see this TikTok, but now I did and I have an idea and I'm going to add to it. Clubhouse's version of that was just sort of like, I want to connect instantly with someone and now I can, and I can actually share that with the entire world. There is something that is kind of cool and fun around that idea. I think it's tremendously hard to build a product around, but, like, if I were a designer of a social network, I would be looking for ways to kind of capture a similar spirit of, if you're here, anything could happen.

50:38

Ashley, any. Any other thoughts?

51:31

I have thoughts, but I don't think

51:33

they're more mansion parties.

51:34

I like it's not a feature, so it's a little different. But I like that the people who thrived on Clubhouse were different than people who thrive anywhere else. Like, I haven't seen these same creators who are popular. They're popular on other platforms and I still follow them on other platforms. So I like that it was just a different type of person who thrived there. And it's interesting to me they haven't found another natural fit for them on the Internet necessarily. And I also like this idea that it's kind of like meet your heroes. Like you kind of are stress testing these people in real time. Anybody. It could be actually famous people or just regular normies who you're like, wait a second, what do you actually think? And they have to answer it on the fly. I kind of like that you're seeing what's really going on behind the people you see online.

51:38

Yeah, there is. I've always Wondered if that's a feature of it being audio only, too, is that there's just something about it that feels less intense.

52:22

Right.

52:30

Like, the minute you set up a camera, the vibe changes. It just does 100%. And I think there is something, too, like, I just opened an app and put my AirPods in that feels lower stakes in a way that is actually really powerful.

52:30

Exactly. Like, people can take advantage of that and, like, manipulate the situation, but there is something to. I feel like we're getting a little bit more of an accessible version of someone and. And actually who they are.

52:43

Yeah. And also to your point, the idea of being able to sort of quickly put all of those people in one place that doesn't really exist anywhere else. Like, there are not a lot of tools to bring 20 TikTokers into a thing to do together. That's actually like, a very hard thing to coordinate and do. And the idea that you could just have 20 creators just hop into a room together and do something that we really don't have, that's a. That's a really good one. I like that a lot. All right, now we have three more questions. These are the version History hall of Fame questions. A product has to clear all three of these hurdles in order to make it into the version History hall of Fame. I would say I have a strong guess about where Clubhouse lands at the end of these three questions, but let's do it anyway. Hall of Fame question number one. Did this product do something truly new? Was Clubhouse a truly new thing?

52:53

You would remember more than me, Casey.

53:43

I mean, I don't think there was. There probably had been something similar, but there was definitely nothing this fully realized and definitely nothing this popular and also, like, nothing has ever really followed it since. So, yeah, I. I do think of Clubhouse as being something singular.

53:46

I think it was both the product itself and just sort of the way it grew, especially in those first few months, I think was new. All right. Thing number two, Was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? You can get into the hall of Fame by being terrible, but only if you are terrible in a truly special way. And I will just lay my own cards on the table here, and I think the answer to this one is no. I think Clubhouse was interesting and cool, and its story is great. But I think the. I think the story is better than the product, and I don't think it was either remarkably good or remarkably bad.

54:07

I agree with that. I think it was like. It was such a product of its. It's like the time. Time produced Clubhouse. Clubhouse did not produce the time. You know what I mean? It was. It was an artifact of the moment, but did not shape the moment, really.

54:44

Yeah, I think it was the best version of this type of interaction, like audio, social audio in product. But the fact that it didn't have that staying power, I would say, is probably unremarkable.

55:02

Okay, all right, good. Then. Then I think. I think we're in agreement. And then hall of Fame question number three. Did clubhouse have a lasting impact? And I want to. I want to define impact in, like, the. The highest bar kind of way. Like, did it. Did it capital M matter?

55:15

Well, I feel like we've talked about a little bit of how this sort of laid the groundwork for VCs and other tech folks to really kind of seize their voice and find opportunities at the highest levels of government, for example. So in that way, like, I don't think you don't need the Clubhouse context necessarily to understand how that came to be, but I do think having that context is useful to understand this moment.

55:31

I think that's right. My only pushback to that would be. I think that was happening anyway. I think there's a chance Club has accelerated a lot of that, but there's so much other stuff. Like, just as the money gets bigger and the political influence gets bigger and people are being, like, radicalized about the information sources during the pandemic. Like, I think Clubhouse is really the first instantiation of the thing in a lot of ways, but I would bet it was coming. Casey, what do you think?

55:58

I like Ashley's answer. I think that that probably is the best case that you could make that it mattered was that it was an accelerant for this, like, VC influencer moment, which turned into a VC government moment. I think that Twitter was much more important to that story than Clubhouse was, but, like, Clubhouse was important to it for a moment. In the grand scheme of things, though, I don't think I can get all the way to Clubhouse. Capital M mattered, I would say. I'll just say quickly. It did low. It did, like, lowercase M matter for me, because Clubhouse gave rise to Twitter spaces. I spent, like, almost a year doing a live Twitter spaces show with my friend Kara Swisher. She was an op ed columnist at the New York Times at the time, and she just, you know, thought it would be fun to have me on. And so we did this for a while. And that was actually one of the reasons why I was able to, like, go do a show at the New York Times was because, like, the people at the times that heard me, like, doing the show with Kara, and so now I got to do a show at the time. So it, like, mattered for me in that way. I don't know. Like, honestly, maybe, like, none of my life would have happened now if it had not been for that Clubhouse moment. But did it matter to most people?

56:22

Probably not, no. I think that I like that story. And I think in a funny way, the fact that most of that story for you is about Twitter spaces is very telling, right? Like, it is. It is. It's such a time honored social network story that somebody comes along with a really interesting product idea and then somebody takes that product idea and does a slightly worse version of it and drops it on a much bigger network and wins.

57:32

If both Kasey and I can attribute parts of our career to Clubhouse, does it matter?

57:53

I mean, no. But I'm happy for all of us. You know what I mean? So I think. I think Clubhouse rightly does not get into the version history hall of Fame, but I do think if you were to take in the sort of, like, timeline of technology, I think Clubhouse actually gets mentioned in the story. Do you know what I mean? Like, it was such a specific thing at a specific moment for a specific group of people. That is like the number of people I've even heard from as we were talking about doing this show of people, like, oh, my God, Clubhouse. I remember that brief moment. Like, I. Casey, you mentioned sort of the sense memory of Clubhouse. Like, I have that too. We had just moved across the country from California back to Virginia to be closer to family, and I literally remember, like, the room I was sitting in with my feet up on my desk, sitting in a clubhouse room when Elon Musk was there. It's like, what a bizarre thing to have that detailed of a memory about. But it is. It was such a moment in time. And frankly, I'm glad to not have to think about it ever again after we stopped making this episode.

58:00

I do think this should be the last time any of us ever think about Clubhouse. I think that'd be a nice legacy.

59:05

Yeah, Clubhouse is still around. To all of you who are in Clubhouse, you know, we salute you and we will not be joining you at any time in the near future.

59:10

You should just say what it is now because I'm not going to look. So just tell me what it is today.

59:18

Do you want to do this? I'm going to open up Clubhouse right now.

59:22

I went on it last night for you guys, too.

59:25

We're going to end this show in the Clubhouse app. So this is what Clubhouse looks like on a mid February Thursday afternoon as I'm scrolling through it on my phone. Why are all these dating phases not working out? Epstein Files Lex W. Testifies Prince Andrew Atlanta vs. The Rack Lunch break with Wack. This is perfect. Clubhouse remains Clubhouse, just with many fewer people. Don't give up. Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. The War of Destiny. Exclamation point, exclamation point. Clubhouse still around, still doing things. All right, we should get out of here. As always, if you want to ask us questions or have feelings, if there's stuff that we missed, if there's other things that happened on Clubhouse that were awesome that we're forgetting about, I would love to hear about them. If you want to support all of this that we're doing, you can go find Ashley Bloomberg, you can find Casey at Platformer, and you can subscribe to the Verge. That's the best thing. Verge.com subscribe it's how we get to do all of this. Thank you so much. This has been delayed.

59:27

I'm off to therapy, but thanks for having me. David.

1:00:27

Version History is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino, and Alex Perkins. Our Editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Heffren and Joe Nebras. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. You can follow the dedicated Version History podcast feed for all of our episodes as soon as they arrive, and you can watch full episodes on our new YouTube channel at version History Podcast. And to support everything we do and get access to this and all of our other podcasts ad free, become a paid subscriber to the Verge. Thanks.

1:00:34