The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Clubhouse App & Ed Nusbaum, Clubhouse Connector

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

Clubhouse App & Ed Nusbaum, Clubhouse Connector

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to go to all the different places that we have. Of course, uh youtube.com fortunes chris voss uh goodreads.com fortunes chris voss you uh facebook.com the chris voss show and of course you can see online podcasts on the cvpn.com and uh check out the frank flaguzzi fbi interview that we did yesterday that was a fun interview to do with that gentleman uh and uh i made him laugh a couple times which is interview to do with that gentleman. And I made him laugh a couple times,

which is hard to do with really serious, brilliant FBI people. But we had some great fun on the show and talked about some really interesting, serious topics. So check out that show. Today, we're gonna be talking about the Clubhouse app. You've probably heard about this app. It's one of these apps that's just kind of hitting an incredible scale and popularity, but it's invite-only, so there's some exclusiveness to it. It's very hard to get on. You do have to have an iPhone. I believe, if I heard rightly the other Sunday, they're just a six- or nine-member team, so they're still at that small stages like Twitter was back in the early days, but they are raging in popularity and success. So you can check it out, Clubhouse app.

You have to find someone basically to invite you in if they have an invite. Every now and then I get one. And it's been pretty interesting. I've been on it for a week and a half and been learning about it and stuff. So I thought I'd welcome some different shakers and makers off the clubhouse app you saw us interview mel uh mel cole the other day the photographer actually met him on the clubhouse app and this episode is brought to you by ifi audio and their new neo id s d the neo is the new wave of digital sound listening for your desktop, music, gaming, and bleeding-edge Bluetooth, even MQA audio file decoding.

We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. And today, I've invited Ed Nussbaum to come on the show. I noticed he was a shaker and maker over there. And tell us a little bit more about Clubhouse and everything else. So welcome to the show, Ed.

How are you, sir? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me on the show. Thank you for coming. And you're there on your sunny beach in Florida, or actually in Phoenix. You're in Phoenix, right? Yes, my secret beachfront location in the middle of the desert. There you go.

Well, if you're going to have a mirage in the desert, I mean, Phoenix is the place to go. That was really weird. I went for Florida and Phoenix. Like, there's no F in either, in one of those. Anyway. All good. So how long have you been on this Clubhouse app? I was lucky enough to be uh one of the first

few hundred people on clubhouse uh was invited by uh one of a friend of one of the founders back in april and march was and they did the first little beta that kind of alpha test just kind of testing technology it was one room everyone was a speaker and when that kind of worked out there they added the support for multiple rooms a stage audience divide divide, and kind of the framework of what we now know as Clubhouse. And so they invited a bunch of other people on at that point. And I was one of the lucky few to be at the beginning of what could be the next major social network. I heard rumors there at like 500 or 600, but I'm not sure on that figure because that just, you know, it's a, it pings around, you know, the different, uh, different things. Do you know how big it is at all by chance?

Uh, they're well past a million. Uh, my guess is probably about, you know, probably my guesstimate is probably about a million and a half right now. Wow. Really quickly. Yeah. Yeah. I've been, I've been getting more invites, but I, you know, it's like one at a time and

stuff. And, and I guess you to be careful who you invite because if you invite some bad people um although although it's uh there's some interesting things going on in that app sometimes but uh it's a pretty brilliant app how would you describe the clubhouse app like what is it and what's its appeal it's one of those things that is often hard to describe until you experience it. But there's a lot of different analogies that get thrown around. And one of them is if you think of the ultimate conference, that conference that you're willing to hop on a plane, fly cross-country, take the car to or take a shuttle to the hotel, check in. And then you have those three days or four days of really great speakers.

But then the best part of a conference often is in the evenings where you're hanging out in the hallway or at a bar. And Clubhouse has all of that. And the ability to do that without having to hop on the plane or hop into a hotel and have that 24-7 people around the world. And not just your industry conference, but every industry conference going on at the same time. Plus, like a combination of ultimate college campus in the sense that there's so many opportunities to run into people on a regular basis, all in the same app, all in different settings. Everything from shows to lectures to just hangouts in the dorm or in the quad. And that ability to remove friction from everyday life and to have the opportunity to connect with people you probably wouldn't in everyday life. And to do that on an ongoing basis is kind of many times close to magic in just how the serendipity of the app.

Often it gets the right people in the right room at the right time for the right discussion on a consistent basis. It is something that's very unique because it kind of removes all the friction from the physical world to allow all that to happen and it's covet free too because it's virtual instead of uh in person like an event would be yeah the timing of it was perfect uh in that yeah a lot especially uh back in april early days the pandemic there was a lot obviously a lot of people who weren't quite sure what's going on but all of a sudden you have this this portal to a whole different world it felt kind of this magical matrix you plug you plug your airpods into your air and you're just kind of ported into this magical land of wonderful people wonderful conversations connect and connections you know i i had heard a lot of people bragging about it and i didn't have an iphone and

i'm i'm not really an iphone fan in fact i hate iphone so So I'm a real big Android fan. And so, you know, people kept bugging me. They're like, Chris, you got to get on this. Cause usually I'm early on everything. I'm early on Twitter. You know, I'm early on just about everything that comes out new to market. Usually I get invited to them. And I'm like, so how do I get on to this thing? And they go, well, you've got to have an iPhone. I'm like, I'm not doing that. And so it just got worse and worse. Like, people kept driving me up a freaking wall. Chris, you've got to get on this thing. You've got to get on this.

You're perfect for this thing. Blah, blah, blah, your big mouth and all the shit you do. You're perfect for Clubhouse. You've got to get on this. And it just, like, people, you want to invite to Clubhouse? I'm like, I don't have an iphone and after a couple weeks of that i finally bummed an iphone from one of my good vc friends and said okay um let's do this i'll get on there got me an invite and uh you know it's pretty cool and i think uh i think what like what you said i think you described it perfectly

um one person said to me you know yeah it's it, say, if you go to South by Southwest or CES, which I routinely used to do pre-COVID, and they have these event panels. And you can go see them, sit in them. Sometimes there's interaction where you can ask questions of the speakers on the stage. Sometimes it's of the speakers on the stage uh sometimes it's it's uh it's just the speakers but uh sometimes you know you go to a panel and you're like i don't like this panel or i don't like what they're talking about and i'm going down the hall to the next one you go on down the next one you either like that or don't or and you can kind of you can kind of shop around but this makes it so you don't have to walk down the hall you You don't have to be exposed to COVID and you can end up finding something

that maybe kind of fits maybe either the moment. Like sometimes there's like serious panels, like, I'm going to go learn marketing and there's other panels like, Hey, we're just sitting around. Like I make a panel sometimes just like coffee with a Chris Fong show. How's that? Yeah. I think I was, I was in the audience for one of those earlier today or yesterday. So yeah. Yeah. We've been screwing around with, Yeah, I think I was in the audience for one of those earlier today or yesterday. Yeah, yeah.

We've been screwing around with – we made a parody panel called Zillionaires. Yes. Yeah, and we had some fun with it. We're making some changes to it that I didn't like in the first day or two that kind of caught on with some of our mods. We're going to make some changes to it tonight because there were some things I didn't like. But we're formatting that, and hopefully it will become a club but basically we saw so many of these different uh rooms that were like hey we're millionaires and find out how to learn from millionaires and we're billionaires and find out how to learn from billionaires and i've created a lot of companies i i created multi-millionaire companies back when they're brick and mortar

companies when you had to have like 10 or 20 grand to open an office and you had to put phones in and all that shit um and uh so for me a lot of those things i can listen to them i can figure out who doesn't know what they're talking about who's really not a millionaire and and so so i was like you know fuck it i'm gonna make a zillionaire room and we're just gonna we're gonna make a parody of some of these rooms um and all that good stuff so we so we've been having some fun testing it and i grabbed a good friend of mine who's a comedian and so we we usually lay out a format but uh we're trying to get that room under control but that's the beauty

of it it kind of turns into a life of its own where these people are doing their thing yeah very well put and that's part of the fun of clubhouse where anyone can pop open a room at any time and have have a fun room a serious room a hangout room or whatever they want and so and it's so early everyone's experimenting and so kind of as you said as there's these serious rooms you know there's usually a parody room or another spillover room that talks about let other room and then a room talking about the room talking about other room and it keeps going and item for an item and it's fascinating how all our frictions are moved to be able to easily assemble people and have those discussions however you want them to have and however you want to go and you can just kind of

hop around you're like um you know like some rooms the title you'll see the title and and then they have this uh feature that's called clubs and i think you run or admin a few clubs um and you can create this club and so like one of the things we've applied for of course is the chris voss show club for the podcast so we'll have like a club for that and of course have that do you want to explain the club feature to everyone well the app being called clubhouse they call their groups clubs and so it's a house full of clubs and ultimately what it really comes down to is clubs are just simply a way to easily assemble people in advance for future events and rooms and rooms are where discussions happen and clubs make it easy to assemble them in

the future and clubs are used in a whole bunch of different ways. A primary way, and the way I believe they were originally envisioned to be used, is kind of a way to do an event series. So if you pop open like a weekly event, anyone interested, they can follow the club and get notifications. And then they've also,

a lot of people use them as communities, so that people can kind of hang out in a private club room and, you know, hang out with, you know, the example I usually use, I'm not quite even sure where I started, but it was a Chicago Firefighters Club. You know, the members might be the firefighters from Chicago, and they hang out in a private club room and talk to each other. But then anyone who wants to come to one of their public events to hear about what it's like to be a firefighter in Chicago can follow the club and be notified.

So that's kind of the basics of clubs. But it's, as with everything Clubhouse clubhouse is new and people are experimenting. So it's fun to see all the different uses, how people do it. It would be interesting to see how like, you know, CES might use it or South by Southwest might use it as some sort of virtual add on or, or, or, cause I know a lot of people that that go to like south by southwest you know there's always a competition for um speaking events and and uh speaking groups and stuff like that

panels um and there's only so much space they have for it especially in austin which is i wish they quit having in that town um they need to move it to vegas um but but it'd be interesting to see how they could make that work we're going to be trying to use it for Vegas. But it'd be interesting to see how they could make that work. We're going to be trying to use it for the podcast. I've hosted several different coffee with Chris Voss podcasts in the morning, and I'll just kind of talk about whoever. The networking, I've loved on it. It's great for networking because people, you know, you meet all sorts of people.

And just like my show here, I love meeting people. I love getting them on. I love talking about who they are and what what their lives are about their journey and their stories um and so you can do that with clubhouse and you just open up and then the other thing i love is the real call to action if you want to talk to me privately or get to know me privately or or uh just message me you you have to go through my Instagram or Twitter. And I love that. So they usually end up following you on those platforms. In fact, my Instagram has grown quite a bit since I got on there. Yes. Twitter and Instagram have got significantly better as the back channel to

Clubhouse. And the people you meet on Clubhouse spills over those other social networks. And this definitely is a unique experience. And in terms of conferences, I on Clubhouse, it spells over those other social networks. And this, yeah, it definitely is a unique experience. And in terms of conferences, I think Clubhouse and or something like Clubhouse is possibly the future of conferences, especially in this modern world of pandemics and such. But it has a lot of subtle things I think people miss. But during the pandemic,

I think people have realized that the video is awesome at some things and sucks at everything else. Zoom fatigue is very real. And it turns out voice is that happy medium where you get human emotion, connection, resonance, but without having to worry about how you look on camera, without having to drive or fly to somewhere. somewhere and the the genuine conversation connection that voice enables and the way the clubhouse app is structured is something very different where you can follow someone on twitter for a year and only get a bare sense of them because some people are very good at having this pithy little you know 140 characters or composing the perfect image on instagram but you really get to know someone when you're talking to them and clubhouse makes that possible in a way that really doesn't exist anywhere else.

And I'm aware of. Yeah. I've never, I like a lot of times my close friends and I will use messenger, but it's real pain in the ass to group people in messenger. It's like almost like you almost need to go to college to do it. You know, it's a myriad of buttons and combinations of formulas to get a group chat

going. And even then, you know, you only a myriad of buttons and combinations and formulas to get a group chat going. And even then, you know, you only get like, I think, what is it, a minute to do a voice thing. You can do a call. But, you know, one person said to me, the reason a lot of people like it is because of that feature where it's not Zoom. So if I'm sitting around in my pajamas, laying in bed, sometimes I'll lay in bed and go to sleep listening to some clubhouse things. Some of our big clubhouses, the last two nights, we've fallen asleep to them because they went till 5 a.m. in the morning. And, you know, so you don't have to do your hair, especially if you're a woman and your makeup. You can sit there and just listen.

And like you said, you don't have the visualness of zoom and uh sometimes i just work i'll work through the day on multiple computers in front of me uh and i'll just let it play and uh it works really good um god i think uh sunday night we we did our first Zoom. I'd been kicking around this idea for this zillionaire club and just doing a parody of what they were doing. And there are some complaints with different people about the mansplaining that was going on, the talking over women, putting them off the stage. And so we decided to do a parody of that.

And we had fun with it. And people were just killing with it. And suddenly I looked down, and there's 300 freaking people in the room. And I'm like, what the hell is going on? And it ran until 5 in the morning. I fell asleep with it on. And then we did one, I think, last night. We got about 100 people in the room.

And we tried to do, like, a different and we tried to do like a different premise, like a different joke sort of premise where we were going to do anti-motivational stuff, and it just wouldn't catch on. So we pulled the zillionaire back out, and we had all these fans for the night before, and they just went crazy for it again. And there's a few things I want to tweak. We're getting rid of the mansplaining today.

It was a funny joke at the time, but I just don't want it to continue. It's really, I just don't like it. But it's really amazing just how it can just go so hot, so fast, so quickly. And you're just like, wow. It's like you can look down. All of a sudden, there's like hundreds of people in your room, if not thousands, depending upon the size of your room. Yeah, but it comes back to what you said earlier about the conferences

where to actually physically get up from the room you're in, walk down the hallway, try to find something better, versus tap to a different room. And so the rooms that are good can quickly grow in size because it's so easy to discover kind of the trending rooms. And it's that unique ability of having that open public room where anyone can wander in and out. And when you enter the room, you're in the audience, you can listen in. And a lot of people also described as interactive podcasts because people

up on stage, the ones speaking, you can raise your hand and oftentimes hop up in a way that you can't do in everyday life or at a regular conference. So yeah, there's a whole host of things where I think going back to the earlier theme of conferences, I think this is kind of the future of conferences. It makes it so much easier and it makes it so much easier for people to flow in and out of the rooms, be it the serious rooms or the fun rooms

or the spill rooms, the hallway, all that in one app and all of it just one tap away makes it wonderful. Yeah, and you can just create whatever. I sent out a few different event panels with some comedian dudes and you

know like a lot of those guys they can't really work much right now because of covid and so for me it's just kind of comedic gold where you can sit there and have fun in fact i think last night when we started the room out we were just we were just uh uh what's the word i'm looking for we're just playing it straight but you know being funny but we were playing serious and people were like, what the hell are you talking about? And we're like, yeah, yeah. And we're just talking about low motivation and how not to be motivated. We're like the anti-motivation group of zillionaires. And, uh, and we just turned into a bit and it just developed. And it was like, it's, it's almost like turned to this thing where it was really weird. If you're a stand-up comedian, you get up and you do a bit and a routine, right?

And so we start the room out doing a bit and some routines and some little things that we kind of did a skeleton framework of. And then the room just takes it and just goes with it. And then eventually we just don't even do anything. It's like being a stand-up comedian and the audience just goes off on their own the little material you fed them and they just sit around joking about between the cells and you're just like well that was fun yeah and there was like the first uh stand-up comedy show in clubhouse a few days ago so a bunch of comedians got together and uh it was really uh really well attended room a lot of fun and as you said there's a lot of people impacted by the pandemic that can't necessarily

be in front of a big audience but now they can again which is wonderful yeah i think i think a lot of people and i think it's like you said it comes at a perfect time people need physical interaction i'm missing my friends i'm missing going to coffee in real life with my friends. I'm missing having dinner, lunch, hanging out with my friends. You know, I'm a single guy who can't afford a wife and kids. You know, I need a few million dollars to finance my first divorce. So I'm still waiting to accumulate that. Then I'll probably settle down and get married, divorce a couple of years later, and then, you you know do that three or four more times uh so you know the beautiful thing is i can go on there i can hang out i can do my networking i can talk about the show the podcast there's some plans we have for our club where we're gonna um maybe have like an after show we've been trying to figure out a broadcast into the app which

has been working well uh we can't seem to get a mic to work well with it. But evidently there's some different ways to do that. We just haven't figured out what they are. But there's lots of different options, lots of different options to talk about stuff, pre-planning. I like the scheduling that's on there. Anything else we haven't talked about with the benefits of the Clubhouse app? Well, just to kind of touch upon a few of the points you mentioned,

one of the early users of Clubhouse, who I think was one of the first people who did a pretty extensive blog post on Clubhouse, one of the lines he said in that always kind of resonated with me, like, even during a pandemic, it's hard to always cold call your friends. But if you open the Clubhouse app, the people you already know,

if they're available, they're there. And it changes the whole dynamic of connecting with people you know. And I app, you know, the people you already know, if they're available, they're there. And it's, it's, it changes the whole dynamic of connecting with people, you know, and I've got to know the people I already knew before Clubhouse way better because I'm in rooms with people that I don't know. Those are the people they don't know my friends.

And all of a sudden we're having a conversation. So I, Oh, wow. I never knew that about, you know, my friend who I've known for 10 years and the converse, the opportunity to connect with people from different industries,

walk a life. And that's also wonderful. And then the one other quick thought on what you said earlier, too, because it is voice, that there's a lot of people who can be present there a lot more than they otherwise would be. Because almost everyone's doing Clubhouse and something else. And you kind of alluded, sometimes you're working and some people use Clubhouse Room as a background coffee shop chatter as they're working. And because of that, the serendipity is off the charts because a lot of really busy people who wouldn't have time to look at a screen for other social media to read stuff can just listen in and then have the opportunity to join in. And that creates a whole new level of serendipity connection doesn't really exist elsewhere,

even in the real world, because it's very seldom where you happen to be in the coffee shop with all these amazing people who happen to be listening in on the background and then oh something the topic changes late they raise their hand jump on stage and join the conversation i love it too because i'm a face guy like a lot of people say like hey are you friends with joe bob and i'm like uh i don't know man what does joe bob look like what's his avatar look like like i'm a face guy um i'm real visual that way but i'm really bad with names and so and so uh you know i i get that like all the time people like hey you know someone especially on linkedin can you introduce me as well i'm like uh do i know him they're like yeah you're friends with him. I'm like, what's his face look like? So when I see, I pick up patterns and count things. I have a weird ADHD thing where I do that.

And so I saw your, I had seen your avatar a lot. And so when I see different patterns or people that are popular in there, and I constantly see them as movers and shakers, I can saddle up to them and be like, who's this person? This person seems like they got a lot to talk about you know i've always had a big mouth so i'm usually one of those movers and shakers uh and it's quite fun i gotta tell you that i probably should do a plug because people will be googling this on clubhouse but one of the things i've really been loving is we reviewed the pioneer raise it's a little speakerphone. It's designed for conferencing

and stuff. It's got microphones in the thing and a kind of charger plug on it. So this has been sitting around my office for a long time since we reviewed it. And I think we met with, can I talk about this on the NDA? Yeah, I think I can. We met with the CEO years ago to help launch this in Vegas at CS. And with the Pioneer, I can just set the iPhone on my desk, plug this in, and I can listen to everything that's going on in Clubhouse, and I can talk through it. But I don't have to have a mic. I don't have to hold it up to my earphones. I don't have to be wearing earphones or anything like that. It's awesome. So if you haven't got a chance to check it out pioneer rays and it's a it's a really well built speaker and microphone it's like crazy like i can sit on my desk like far away from me and it'll still pick up my voice but it doesn't pick up the surrounding

noise and shit so if you're on clubhouse, check out the Pioneer Rays if you don't want to sit there with headphones on all day, which I don't. So I'll lay on the bed and have it sitting right there by the pillow, and I can talk and listen, and I don't have to have it close to my mouth. Or, you know, sometimes the speakerphone on these shitty iPhones aren't all that great. So there's that. Can you tell I hate iPhones, Ed?

I'm picking it up. But at the same time, I think this is one of the best promotions for an iPhone ever in the history of iPhones. The Clubhouse app is actually good enough that I do know a lot of people who are buying iPhones or iPads just be able to use that one app, which is kind of extraordinary. I was going to go buy, I was going gonna go down to a pawn shop or try and find one for 100 bucks the thing is i i do have an ipad and i kind of like the ipad um i've got a samsung galaxy uh tablet here that i love more but i've always kind of liked the ipad um and but the problem was i had like an old ipad air and they cut it off after uh ios 13 they wouldn't give it ios 13 you have to have is 13 to do clubhouse so fortunately i bought an iphone from a good friend and and away we went but no i love it man it's really addicting too there's people on here that have

been that are sometimes up for two or three days have you been hearing that you know they're the people have been i haven't slept i've just been really addicted to Clubhouse. Yeah, it's a high-quality addiction in that usually it's because there's an opportunity to connect and have those conversations with people you don't ordinarily. And it seems, it starts, I've been on it now for a little over nine months, and it starts to seem normal. Of course, you're in a room with someone from New Zealand and Dubai and London and it just seems so normal to have that type of ability to have those conversations. And it's a good reminder like, yeah, maybe this is not so normal, but it's pretty wonderful.

Yeah. And the thing I love about it too is like I've been reading the book Cast just recently and they talk in the book about the indian caste system compared to nazi germany and eugenics and and how they learned that from us here in america and our problems with racism but i never heard of the indian caste system and how it worked before and suddenly i i was having the coffee with chris fosh show and i had a bunch of indian guys come in maybe it's because i was doing about 4 a.m. in the morning and I picked up, you know, them on their side of the world.

So this one guy was real talkative, really friendly guy. And he started talking about India and we started talking about politics and what's going on in the world, which is kind of interesting lately. And I asked him, I said, you know, I read this book cast and is this really, you know, that you guys have a caste, and is this really, you know, that you guys have a caste system in India and how does this work and how do you feel about it? What are the political and economic implications? And, man, he educated me on all this really cool stuff about the book I was reading.

And it was just the serendipity of that. One of my friends, Robert Scoble, you know, we've always talked for years and years and years about situations where the serendipity of small groups and conversations and meetings and things where you just never know what's going to come there. But if you open yourself up to the serendipity and the options and the potential for those things to happen, they can happen. They can happen. And so, and so just having that on this app, I mean, sometimes I can go in, I can hear some panels where, you know, you're not, you're like, I don't know if I'm going to learn anything from this guy. And the next guy comes up and boom, you learn some really cool stuff. And then some panels you go into that are just pure gold where all the panelists are really smart and brilliant. And you can pick up different tips and tricks, whether it's for marketing business, there's a lot of business help marketing help that's on there but then there's then there's

like people doing meditation like i went in one room and they're they're doing like or something you know they're doing like meditation stuff you're like wow okay so if you're in a meditation or i don't know yoga or something you can just listen the room and you don't have to get covid so it works really great. I mean, just you think about the perfect timing of this app with COVID. I mean, just it plays into it perfectly. Yeah, and I think that was what kind of helped people spend a little more time than usual there. But I think it's something that will sustain even after COVID,

just because of the value of having the opportunity to discover new people, new things, new conversations, new concepts. And not everyone likes that, but that's okay, too, because it's also a great opportunity. Kind of what we were talking about earlier about it's hard to cold call friends even during a pandemic. But if you see them on Clubhouse, you know they're up for talking. And that's pretty wonderful, too. Yeah, yeah. So there you go, guys.

That's kind of some of the fun and features of the Clubhouse app. If you've got an iPhone, I think you have to go to a special place to apply for it and you run the clubhouse you love uh you have an information site don't you want to plug that for clubhouse um yeah sure there's lots of good resources but a few quick thoughts yes it is growing by invites but anyone can go download the app, create an account, reserve the username, and then anyone already on Clubhouse can go ahead and might get a notification ping saying, hey, your friend's on the waitlist. Would you like to wave them in?

And that does not require an invite. So just an encouragement to not necessarily wait around for an invite, but go ahead and download the app and you might be able to get waved in off the waitlist. I've waved in a few different people, yeah. Yeah. And so it's interesting because Paul is one of the co-founders who always said it was never meant to be an exclusive app. The invites were simply to kind of control the growth

to make sure they were ready for more people. And it's growing so rapidly that I just kind of have that humorous picture on the back end, running around, putting out fires, adding more server capacity, and doing all those things to really help make sure the growth is supported. And the other benefits of invites or waving it off the wait list, then by definition, any new person is at least one person on Clubhouse. And so that makes it a much more enjoyable experience to have that welcome. You know, your friends, you know, as you hop on, like, hey, welcome, and kind of show you around. So just kind of throw you around so just kind

of throw that out so that to encourage your your your listeners not to wait just go to download the app and they might be able to get in a lot quicker than they might otherwise to anticipate it now i think you had a link to is it clubhouseguide.com is that your website or someone yeah that was a website that i helped out on uh Early on, there was so many questions about Clubhouse. They're trying to have a good resource to support people to, instead of having to answer everyone on once, go to clubhouseguide.com. And it has a lot of great community resources there.

And the inspiration behind that was Andrea Hernandez and Erica Batista. They stepped up in a big way. They put together the first like onboarding guide and they were it was kind of they were passing the link around by dms and it's like well why don't we just put it on a site somewhere and then other people stepped up to do a lot of great great materials there ivy uh and pillar did a great uh great uh description of how to get audio and music into clubhouse so all that's there just collection of links to resources including links to all official clubhouse uh material as well so just kind of one stop one stop shop for community generated resources and official ones as well yeah and you can apply for

a club there as well uh if you want to take and do that uh but yeah it's really cool i listened to the conversation from the uh i'm not sure who the what their titles were but some of the people from clubhouse that they do i think every sunday, I really liked doing that. I was there in the early stages of Twitter. You know, my friends, you know, actually sat down with biz back in the day and biz and, and Jack and, and Ev and you know, back when you could just sit around with them and there's like, you know, five, 10 five ten guys you know doing something that was much bigger than one um but one of the problems with twitter was it just was a clown car that crashed into success like it still is a shit show clown car like i'm still calling for jack to be to resign um and and but but and for

a while there in early twitter i i was one of the first people really got it and was doing well and there was like a group of us actually kind of running customer service for him answering those questions kind of like you you guys are doing um and helping people you know with all their problems and issues of twitter and and it was really a nightmare but they didn't have any interaction with people it was really a shit show but they didn't have any interaction with people. It was really a shit show. In fact, I ended up talking a lot with Fred Wilson behind the scenes and trying to get them to make some changes in their board meetings. But this is really cool. I like how they come out and they do like an every Sunday thing and they let people know what's going on.

They communicate with people. They answer questions to me that just makes for a more transparent parent community and, and just more interactive. Yes, indeed. And the, for the context there, the app is being updated about once a week. So every Sunday at noon Eastern, the founders do a town hall to kind of update everyone, what changed the part of week, what's upcoming. And then that has gone through a lot of evolutions. Back in April, May, and even in June, Paul and Rohan both, who were the founders, were on the app a lot. And it was really awesome to kind of get a better understanding of their product vision, the direction, their thoughts behind it,

their experience. And then for some odd reason, once they raised their huge venture round and started furiously building, they weren't on the app as much. So I and others were encouraging them to maybe, hey, step up and at least find a way so people can learn who you are, what you're doing, so we can all kind of pull in the same direction and maybe point out obstacles along the way. And to their credit, they've been doing that consistently.

And the format has changed. Early on, Tom Hall was just people raise their hand, hop up on stage. But now the rooms are a few thousand people. That gets a little bit harder. So, you know, they keep on iterating the format. And then the other big, big win, it's awesome because Paul, who's one of the co-founders, I think he says this every Wednesday night. Every Wednesday at 9 p.m. Eastern is a new member onboarding room.

And the joy in Paul's voice as he, and that's still an opportunity for new members to hop up on stage and say hi to Paul, ask questions and his genuine enthusiasm and passion of talking to new users and learning from their experience and helping them understand it is off the charts. And that, that I think is one of the really huge things that differentiates clubhouse because the opportunity to talk to your own users as you're using your own, your product and that, that, that feedback cycle and the Clubhouse team,

I think they created something fundamentally new and different and unique and valuable in the world, but they've been very open to user feedback. Users will always surprise you how they want to use the product differently from how you use it. And they've been awesome. They keep on adjusting on the fly. And so being part of that and seeing that the evolution product community and

how responsible users have been both sticking with the product vision being open user feedback it seems like something really magical is happening there yeah i really like it i really like the tone that they set and and and stuff uh you know the one of the biggest problems with twitter is it really was a clown car like ev and, they had no idea what they were. They had kind of a concept, but the users, the devs, the users, people like me, were showing them what to do, and they were highly resistant to them. Like retweets, they hated retweets. They're like, this is stupid.

We don't want to do it. And finally, they buckled the community, and that happened so many times. It just, seriously, the best definition is a clown car that crashed into success. And if it wasn't for developers and users, Twitter would never be what it is today're giving a damn to make it what they were. And, of course, one of the big problems with Twitter, and it's pretty well known these days, I knew it back in the day before it became public in books and stuff, was the infighting because there was so much infighting with those three idiots. But, hey, they're billionaires, so what can I say? Well, the good news with Clubhouse, my understanding is that the two co-founders have known each other for a long time. They both have deep experience in social networking tools.

And so they consistently make the right decision time and time again. And they seem to be very much in sync and very much, you know, what is the next thing we need to add to continue to make this better for everyone? And they've been consistently doing it now for close to 10 months. Yeah, because I think this is a good timing too twitter twitter for the most part i predicted is really going to falter once with if if you know the they keep certain people off that website because really it was almost kind of a dead man walking before uh five years ago and uh and i still i still think it'll be good for news but i think there's a lot of opportunities. In fact, I've been searching for journalists, newsmakers on Clubhouse because that's usually who I have on the show, book authors, things of that nature and everything else. So it'll be cool to see where it goes. Anything before we go out that we want to plug for Clubhouse at all? Well, just as a quick thought on kind of what you talk about, like hashtags and retweets, it's interesting to see how community members are using the tools that clubhouse provides to help build the community. And so like when rooms didn't have titles initially,

as soon as I added titles, people started doing welcome rooms and whole welcome culture developed. When they added clubs, I helped start a club called community club, which was there to help support the people who are welcoming people. So now we have like 25 admins. It's kind of doing welcome rooms around the clock. And so watching the community self-organize using the tools provided has been wonderful. Beyond that, just encourage everyone to check out clubhouseguide.com to learn a little bit more about Clubhouse, to download the app and join the fun. There you go, guys.

Check it out, Clubhouse. And like I said, go ahead and download the app. Reserve your name. That's important. That's one of the biggest things I do is I'm trying to reserve Chris Voss everywhere. And fortunately, I have it everywhere so far. But reserve your name, and then hopefully one of your friends will reach out. Anytime I see the the apps pretty

suggestive it'll come up be like hey this person signed up that's a friend of yours a friend of friend uh do you want to let them in so i'll let them in uh every now and then i get an invite or two uh it's been pretty crazy i have like they recently shut down uh there was a bunch of follow groups that were starting follow for follows and i love how they shut that down that got really out of hand with twitter early on um there's still facebook groups but i guess they how they shut that down. That got really out of hand with Twitter early on. There's still Facebook groups, but I guess they can't shut that down. But even then the Facebook groups, the quality of people you want. And the beautiful part is you can easily go in and you can see so much. I love how expansive they made the bio. Like you can put a lot of stuff in there. So you can really read about people without having to go to different sites. You can actually

determine, do I want to follow this person and do I want to do this stuff? So there you go. Anyway, Ed, thank you very much for coming on the show and spending some time with us. We certainly appreciate it. Thank you for the invite. And it's always fun to talk about Clubhouse because it's definitely something that is emerging quickly and has the potential of being the next major social network, but one that feels social in the right ways. And that's intriguing that it's finally getting to the spot where voice, which was how humans always communicate, is now becoming something that is now an app and that works really well.

Yeah. And I don't have to wear a clean shirt. And I don't have to wear a hat to hide my COVID hair. I haven't had a haircut from a hairdresser in like a year now, so it's starting to get weird. But you have to have a hat these days to cover the COVID hair. But, yeah, you don't have to dress up. You don't have to worry about, you know,

you can just be walking around the house eating some chips and stuff and doing stuff. Sometimes I cook with it on. I'll, like like just have it playing in the background like normally i'd play the news but now i'm actually learning something and all that good stuff so anyway my honest check it out uh clubhouseguide.com is a great way to learn if you get on it or learn about it if you want to learn more kind of teaches the intricacies uh i love how when you first get on your first week, they put a little party thing on your icon.

So everyone knows you're new if you're fumbling around or maybe, you know, not really getting it or understanding it. People are more willing to help you, like you say, in the community. To see the video of our interviews, go to YouTube.com, 4-Chase Chris Voss. Go to Goodreads.com, 4-Chase Chris Voss. Go to Facebook.com, TheChrisVossShow.com, force-chrisvoss, go to facebook.com, thechrisvossshow.com, see online podcasts at thecvpn.com. Thanks, Ted, for being here. Thanks, Moniz, for tuning in,

and we'll see you guys next time.