Elon Musk made headlines again this week. As usual, it was something involving Mars, memes, Tesla, and ... monkey brain implants? These topics, among others, were the subject of a conversation Musk had on Clubhouse, the voice chat app that's big with Silicon Valley VC types. But Musk's appearance may have been a turning point for the app that moves it into the mainstream. After Musk's talk, Clubhouse's user base nearly doubled, going from 3 to 5 million almost overnight. It's a powerful, popular format, and one that other social media companies are eager to get muscle their way into.
This week on Gadget Lab, former cohost of the show and WIRED senior writer Arielle Pardes joins us to dish about Elon, Clubhouse, and where this kind of social platform goes from here.
Read more about Elon Musk’s visit to Clubhouse. Coverage of GameStop and Robinhood is here. You can also listen to audio of Musk’s Clubhouse appearance.
Arielle recommends the wine delivery service from Eater Wine Club. Lauren recommends the show Your Honor on Showtime. Mike recommends the autobiography Being Ram Dass by, well, Ram Dass.
Arielle Pardes can be found on Twitter @pardesoteric. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
MC: Lauren, what's your favorite room on Clubhouse?
LG: Oh, this is a tough one. I'd have to say right now it's the room where people sing lullabies to each other at night and they talk in whispers, like this and then they talk to each other and then the next person plays a song and it puts you to sleep. What's yours?
MC: Well, I'm not going to sing or play you a song, and I don't really have a favorite room because I'm on Android and there is no Android out for Clubhouse.
LG: What?
MC: But we're going to talk about all of that and more on this week's show.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music]
MC: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.
LG: And I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
MC: Today we are joined by WIRED senior writer, Arielle Pardes. Hello, Arielle.
Arielle Pardes: Hi, guys.
LG: Hey Arielle. It's so great to have you back. When you used to co-host with us, we often heard that people would get our voices confused. So my goal with this episode is just to talk as little as possible so you all can just hear from Arielle.
MC: Absolutely nobody is going to confuse my voice with either of yours, so I think we're in the clear on that one. Anyway. Arielle, we have you on the show this week because we are talking about Clubhouse. If our listeners are not familiar with the social network, it's been around for almost a year and it's very popular among the Silicon Valley and digital media crowd. It's also entirely audio based. So there's no scrolling, there's no photos. People just log on to Clubhouse and gather together to just chat live. You can be a passive listener and soak up an interesting conversation, or you can participate if you want, by asking a question or offering an opinion. Right now, the app is invite only so it has this air of exclusivity about it, and its popularity grows another notch every time a big celebrity pops in.
People like Drake, Oprah, Ashton. That's Ashton Kutcher, by the way. But nothing has really rocked Clubhouse as hard as it was rocked this week when Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, dropped in on Sunday night. He talked about Tesla. He talked about space travel. He talked about monkey brain implants. Minds were blown. Twitter blew up and everybody was clamoring to get on Clubhouse at that moment. Arielle, you have been reporting on Clubhouse since the app was in diapers, I think it's fair to say. Set the scene for us. Take us back to Sunday when Elon swung through.
AP: Ooh, boy. Okay. So when you open Clubhouse, if you've never been on the app, you choose between a variety of rooms to enter. It's kind of like getting to a house party and then deciding where you want to spend the night. So some of the rooms are super casual. Some of them are more formal. Some of them are recurring meetings that happen once a week, and on Sunday night, one of those rooms was The Good Time Show, which is a weekly conversation hosted by the technologist and venture capitalist Shriram Krishnan and Aarthi Ramamurthy, and the title was "Elon Musk on Good Time." So people started freaking out. The show started at 10:00 PM Pacific time, which is not a high traffic hour on Clubhouse. That's 1:00 a.m. on the East coast, but when Elon joins, the room just immediately fills up.
Clubhouse caps its rooms at 5,000 listeners and right from the get-go, Shriram is like, "My phone is blowing up from people trying to get in. The room is full." Eventually someone started an overflow room to broadcast the conversation and then that one filled up, so someone had to start a second overflow room. People were just ecstatic and I think part of the reason for that excitement is that Clubhouse as a medium is super intimate. So from the very beginning of the conversation, you can hear Elon's tiny dog barking in the background. There's no script. There was no sense of what people are going to talk about. It feels very extemporaneous, and although I'm sure most people in that audience had had heard interviews with Elon Musk before, this probably felt like the closest thing to being on the phone with Elon Musk, which is pretty exciting. So the room fills up and then people start asking questions.
LG: I tuned in for a little bit in one of the overflow rooms, but give us a recap. What were some of the highlights of the conversation?
AP: Oh, the conversation really was wide ranging. Some questions were, "When will we get to Mars?" Five and a half years, Elon says. "Why does human consciousness matter?" "What will it be like when we can download our consciousness and upload it back into a robot corpus?" "Which will come first, a self-sustaining city on Mars or World War Three?" "How should we think about aliens?" I mean, it was really really a wild conversation. Then towards the end, Elon takes this opportunity to invite someone up to the stage, which is one of the features of Clubhouse. Most people do not have speaking privileges in a large Clubhouse room like this one.
So you have to be invited to talk in a room and Elon says, at one point, "Can we bring Vlad up to the stage?" Of course he means Vlad Tenev, who's the CEO of Robinhood. So Vlad starts talking and Elon's like, "Spill the beans. What happened with Robinhood?" and Vlad, who's never used Clubhouse before, starts talking like he's on a formal panel at a conference. He's like, "For those of you who don't know, my name is Vlad Tenev. I'm the CEO of Robinhood and Robinhood is ..." and then everyone's like, "We know! Shut up. Tell us what happened." Then Elon starts grilling him about what happened with GameStop and Robinhood. I mean, I think for anyone who was there for that hour, or maybe listened to a recording later, it feels similar to a lot of the news coverage of Elon Musk and Elon's companies and Robinhood and the whole fiasco. But the candor in that room was wild.
LG: How would you describe this kind of event if people are looking for sort of a preexisting media comparison, right? The idea is that this conversation was led mostly by technologists. People like Shriram and Arthie, and we know Marc Andreessen was part of the room and they're asking other technologists questions. When we do interviews as journalists, we're conducting them as journalists and then people love their podcasts, right? S let's use the Tim Ferriss podcast as an example. He asks really insightful questions, but he tends to come at it from an angle of human interest and fascination. So what kind of vibe do you get from an app like Clubhouse when you have this super high profile person like Elon Musk being interviewed by other people within the same industry? Or when you have the Robinhood CEO, who's the center of a lot of controversy right now, being interviewed by fellow technologists?
AP: Yeah. I think the intent is for these conversations to feel like a fireside chat at a conference where you're getting high profile people in conversation with each other, and there's a sort of formality to it, but it's still a cool conversation to listen into. But in reality, a lot of these conversations on Clubhouse, this one included, end up feeling like you're just hanging out with billionaires in their living room. It's like you've stumbled onto the summer camps in Sun Valley or those private dinners at Sheryl Sandberg's house where this is actually how these people talk to each other when they're in a room that's intimate. That's kind of rare, to hear a high profile person ask Elon Musk if he believes in aliens and then get a serious answer back, he doesn't, is cool and special.
MC: So this was definitely a moment for Clubhouse. Anybody who had not heard of the app before last Sunday has almost certainly heard of it now because of Elon. What kind of jump in popularity has the app seen?
AP: Clubhouse has been growing pretty steadily since it launched last year. Just before you Elon house, it was reported that it had 3 million users. Now it says that it has 5 million users and is growing, so that's almost doubling after one very high profile room.
LG: If you had to make a guess as to how big Clubhouse could potentially get what, give us your prognostication. Is that a word? Did I just make up a word?
AP: Yeah, my prognostication is that the sky's the limit for Clubhouse, but if it's going to reach the status that I think a lot of people expect that it could, it's going to have to figure out some important things along the way. So this is still a very nascent social media platform, and it's still figuring out not only its identity and its purpose, but also its logistics. How does it deal with moderation? How does it deal with rooms that are so popular that they inspire multiple overflow rooms? How does it deal with privacy? How does it deal with harassment? How does it deal with people recording its conversations and publishing them elsewhere?
So those are all questions that I think will play a role in Clubhouse's growth, not to mention the fact that in the year that Clubhouse has been around, the audio social space has really gotten crowded. So not only will it have to figure out these questions for itself, but it will have to figure them out in context with a bunch of other apps that are trying to do the same thing and are all clamoring for a piece of this social media future.
LG: Right, and many of us are sitting home at night these days connected to wifi networks and we're just having a fairly smooth experience on apps like this. But what happens if we start moving around a little bit more again, traveling again, going back into the office, that sort of thing, in a post pandemic world? You brought up a great point about recordings and I'm wondering, what's Clubhouse's thinking around posterity right now. Does the Elon interview live anywhere at the moment where people can go back and re-listen or are we just relying on recaps from people?
AP: Yeah. So this is actually an interesting moment in Clubhouse's history. For the year that it's been around, Clubhouse has been pretty strict about the ephemerality of the app. So if a conversation happens on Clubhouse, you have to be there in the room to listen to it. You can't rely on recordings. You can't scroll back in your feed and reread a transcript because those don't exist. That's, I think, really led to the popularity of the app. People want to spend time there just in case something interesting happens. Because if you're not there, then you're not going to be a part of it. But with this conversation with Elon, there are recordings of it all over the internet. I mean, you can listen to the whole thing on YouTube if you want, and that feels like a real departure from how the app has been used in the past.
Clubhouse has pretty strict rules about recording. You can get kicked off the app if you record something without someone's permission. But in this case, all of the speakers in the room had agreed that recording was okay and for that reason, it's been able to live on as this piece of audio documentation. That kind of raises interesting questions about what Clubhouse is for. Is it really a place where people are just hanging out and having spontaneous conversations? Or is it more of a democratized podcast platform? Is this a place where people are recording audio that's intended to live in sort of podcast form somewhere else? Or is it a place where people come to have candid conversations that they know they can trust people to keep in the room? So those are interesting questions, but yeah, if you're interested in hearing the Elon interview, it's all over the internet and you can find it in many places with a simple search.
MC: One of the places you can find it is in the show notes, we'll link to it, even though it may disappear right after we link to it. Well look, we have to take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll have more about Clubhouse and Elon house and the competitors with Arielle Pardes.
[Break]
MC: So, Arielle, you mentioned that Clubhouse is probably not going to be alone for very long in the audio-only social network space. Some competitors are popping up. What can you tell us about them?
AP: Right. So Clubhouse is not the first audio social network and it certainly won't be the last and in the past year, we've seen this space just really, really grow. So there are sort of legacy brands like Discord, which already had millions and millions of users and a really popular base among gamers. Discord, last year, decided to rebrand as an audio platform for everyone. So similar to Clubhouse, they're trying to be a space where you come and you hang out and you talk to people. Twitter also launched its own version of Clubhouse called Audio Spaces, which I will say has an identical design. It has not quite taken off the way Clubhouse has, but they are certainly going after a similar group of users.
Then there are all kinds of smaller audio upstarts. There's Wave, there's Riffer, there's Spoon. These are sort of trying to break off more specific pieces of the audio pie. So a podcast you have with your friends or a place that you hang out and play music with strangers on the internet, or all these different possibilities that become possible when you are looking at audio rather than text.
MC: I'm sure that's where all the action is. It's on Spoon.
LG: So what's interesting about Clubhouse is there are elements of the app's user interface that do suggest it's kind of this open experience. You described it as going to a house party and then deciding which room to go into. I tend to think of it as you're walking through the main corridor of a tech conference, and then you just open the double doors and go into one of the sessions and you can just take a seat and start listening. But at the same time, the way the app is run also suggests it's not really a totally open space, right? It's still invite only and there are just certain mechanisms that feel a little bit exclusionary. So I'm wondering, I guess, two things. One, do you envision Clubhouse truly becoming a fully open app at some point, and the second is that do you think that competitors could do a better job of making an app that feels more inclusive?
AP: Well, I do think it will be more open in the sense that in the very near future, I don't think you'll need an invite to log onto Clubhouse. But I think what you're referring to, Lauren, is the nature of Clubhouse is very different than an app like Twitter or like Facebook, platforms that have long compared themselves to the public square. I mean, Twitter says its mission is to support the world's conversations. I don't get the sense that Clubhouse aspires to do that. The experience is very much designed to be like entering a space that's already occupied by someone else. So there are varying levels of interaction and varying levels of access, but none of them are entirely open. I think that's actually on purpose. In most rooms in Clubhouse, you need an invitation to have speaking privileges, which is a very different experience than I think what many of us have experienced on Twitter, where you're talking to someone and then some random person intersects with their thoughts or their insults or whatever.
It's like, "Get out of my thread." So I actually think the exclusion can be an asset if it's wielded in the right way. There's something really nice about being a speaker in a Clubhouse room and knowing that you just have the floor, that people are going to listen to you. No one can interrupt you unless you call on them. So I think that can be an asset and is probably part of why certain groups of people have found Clubhouse really energizing and exciting. It's a space where you can have a conversation about black characters in anime and know that a white guy isn't going to interrupt you unless you allow him. So that's cool. But it obviously has a dark side as well, which is that you can wield inclusion and exclusion to the detriment or to the advantage of your users.
I do think that that happens on Clubhouse as well. One of the critiques of early Clubhouse was that it felt like a lot of rich people in venture capital who were having conversations, circle jerks, if you will, amongst themselves to the inclusion of anyone else. I think that is starting to change, but you're absolutely right, Lauren, that this is one of the remaining questions. Is this going to be an open public social network or is it going to be more closed and private? And where is the boundary within that makes Clubhouse feel like a space that people want to hang out?
LG: Right, and we should note that it's come to our attention that some journalists, myself included, have been blocked from The Good Time room, the room where Elon spoke earlier this week on certain nights. So I have been able to tune into The Good Time conversations. Other times, I simply can't get into the room. Some journalists have compared notes and we think that the common denominator is that one of the Valley's most powerful venture capitalists has actually sort of gone through and made sure that journalists can't tune in when he is one of the speakers. So blocking is a part of the app. To your point, there is something that's protective about that. There are probably some people who don't want to be harassed on this platform. They want to use it as a space to have a conversation with people in their social networks.
But in this case, it's a very powerful person who, to the best of my knowledge, I've never met, never interviewed. But I'm blocked across the social networks and who's going through and blocking journalists. Talk a little bit about this.
AP: Yeah. So Clubhouse introduced the blocking feature in October, along with some other moderation tools. These were sort of long asked for tools to help make the experience safer and better for users who are dealing with things like harassment. I think what you're referring to is that there are a select few users who have used these blocking tools differently maybe than they're intended. I'm not sure why, or to what end certain important people in VC might be blocking journalists. I will say that I ... I mean, I don't think this is exclusive to Clubhouse is the thing that I would say. I'm blocked by Marc Andreessen on Twitter and I have no idea why. What did I ever do to him? But I mean, I think that just is an extension of social behavior by certain people in general.
LG: Right. It's its own club to be blocked by Marc Andreessen at this point.
AP: Yeah. I'm very proud to be in it.
MC: He blocked you because you wrote about Clubhouse.
LG: Right.
AP: Maybe. I mean, I love Clubhouse though. But I think the more important thing about blocking is that it represents one small step that Clubhouse is taking toward making its rooms feel safer, giving its users a little bit more control and helping to prevent some of the issues that it faced last summer where people were in conversations that felt deeply harassing. So I think if the net effect of that is that some of us get blocked by Marc Andreessen, I can live with that.
LG: Right. And as we learned from the Elon experience, we're still able to hear some of the more high profile or important conversations that are happening on this platform.
AP: Yeah.
MC: You know, as you said, eventually, it's going to open up. It's iOS only right now, but there's hopefully at some point going to be an Android version of the app. They're also going to drop the invite only system so that anybody can just sign up and join. So when the hoi polloi flood in and all of a sudden their active users goes from 5 million to 150 million, I just wonder if the culture that they have very carefully cultivated is going to be able to survive. Because it is a very insider-y ... it's a club. It's very clubby. It's very cliquey. It's like an insider-y piece of social media. Right? You have people who are sort of their own little stars on Clubhouse. Then, like you said, you have these recurring shows. Are those going to be able to maintain the same flavor once it's open to everybody?
AP: Yeah. I would argue that the hoi polloi is already there. I mean, if you have 5 million people using your app, not all of those people are going to be celebrities or billionaires or highly connected people in the tech industry. So my experience over the last year is that the app has already changed tremendously. It used to be a lot of tech people, VCs, founders, kind of talking about products and the biz. Now it's much, much more diverse. There's been this huge influx of folks from the music industry. I would actually say that's not the dominant conversation on Clubhouses, is music. There are tons of creatives. Meek Mill goes on a lot now, so that's cool. But I think we're going to continue seeing these new communities emerge. I mean, I've been in amazing Clubhouse conversations from chefs who have been laid off this last year, who are talking about how they're dealing with home cooking, knowing that their restaurants are closed.
I've been an amazing rooms with amateur astrologists who are doing virtual readings over Clubhouse. I think it's incredibly diverse already.
MC: That's great.
AP: Yeah. Yeah. I think it is good. The question is, can that remain? So for me, the concern is not that the hoi polloi will somehow ruin the exclusive nature of Clubhouse. It's rather that the diversity and the vibrance will fade after people get bored of the app. So I think the big challenge right now is to find creators and influencers, if you will, who can bring people back to the app for all kinds of different reasons. So Clubhouse is a place where you can hang out with Elon Musk. Sure. But is it also a place where you can hear the next up and coming singer or get to know a comedian before they do their Netflix special? Or is it a place where you can get cooking advice from some of the best chefs in America? What are the reasons that people are going to come back to Clubhouse? Because they find people that they like listening to and talking to on the app. And that has to extend beyond tech because there aren't enough people in the world who care about venture capital for that to be the thing that sustains Clubhouse.
MC: Well, that's great to hear. Hopefully it's just going to become something that's not special anymore and it's just going to become part of our lives.
AP: Yeah. I think that would be Clubhouse's wish as well. I mean, it's a wish that comes with a lot of concern. I think Twitter is a great parallel of an app that was created to just help people have conversations, and what's the worst that could happen. Twitter has risen to this truly astronomical sphere of influence, where you get all kinds of conversations and they're diverse and it's people who are important and famous and people who are nobody. It's a place where so much is happening and that's amazing, but it also means that a world leader can use it as their megaphone in ways that maybe we'd rather not see. So Clubhouse will have to reckon with that if it gets popular enough, but for now, it's small.
One thing I wanted to point out is this app has seen really astronomical success in the past year. It just raised its series B in January. So it's now valued at $1 billion. To put that in context, people really bulked when Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars in 2012, but by then Instagram already had 30 million users. It was an app that was going places. Clubhouse is much, much earlier in its journey and has much fewer people. So it's still really trying to figure out what it wants to become while also knowing that it has these expectations that it's going to be the next biggest thing in social media.
MC: Well, thanks Elon.
LG: I was just going to say, I can't count the days that I wake up in the morning and think, "You know what I really want? Another social media app to take over my life." Can we have a second Twitter please? The first one just is not enough. It's not enough volatility for me.
MC: It's not enough talking.
LG: Yeah.
MC: All right. Well, I'll tell you what. We have to end it here. Let's take a break, and when we come back, we're going to finish out with recommendations.
All right, Arielle, I know this is your favorite part of the show. So tell us, what is your recommendation?
AP: I recommend the Eater Wine Club. This is a box of wine that gets delivered to your door every month and it's curated by someone that Eater, the food website, thinks is cool and know stuff about wine. I've been getting them since the very first one, which was last fall and all of the wines have been just really interesting and delicious and cool. The first box was curated by a woman named Swan Graze, who is the beverage director at Olmsted, and she did a box that was all Greek wines, which is just really different. You don't get the chance to drink Greek wine that often in the United States. The box came with this sweet little card where she wrote about her first trip to Greece and dreaming about traveling in a year when traveling wasn't possible and getting to do that through food and wine when you can't do it on your own feet.
So it's a really cool subscription. It's also nice to know that I'm always going to have a bottle of wine on hand that I'm happy to bring to a picnic or crack open on a Monday night. I also just have to respect Eater's hustle to diversify their revenue since we all know that journalism is in crisis, and if I can help that just a little bit by drinking wine, I am very happy to do that. So it's four bottles for $110 or two bottles for $70 and it's delivered every month and it's awesome.
LG: This is a great recommendation.
MC: Supporting journalism with booze.
AP: Yes. Yes.
MC: Lauren, what is your recommendation?
LG: My recommendation is not quite as fun as Arielle's and I admit it's a little bit uncreative because it's just been a tiring couple of weeks and at night I'm mostly just sitting on the couch and trying to figure out what to watch to take my mind off things. I did end up watching Your Honor on Showtime. It's a show starring Bryan Cranston. It's pretty dark. He plays a judge in New Orleans who is trying to get his son, shall we say, out of a pickle. That's really underplaying it, the severity of the plot line. But it's a pretty intense show and the thing about it is that I'm all caught up at this point and the next couple of episodes aren't airing until this Sunday night and then the subsequent Sunday night. I haven't experienced a show like this in a really, really long time and I actually thought that the new episode was going to come out on Sunday, January 31st.
So stayed up till 10:00 p.m. Pacific time on Sunday, January 31st and was closing and opening the Showtime app and closing and opening it and being like, "Where's the new episode?" I was so disappointed when I went on the internet and was like, "Oh, it's not until February 7th." It was just like, Wow, we really are ... The Netflix-ification of our society is just ... it's fully taken over. We're so used to watching everything we want when we want it. So now it's just ... I have to wait. I have to wait for the next episode.
MC: I'm telling you, I am totally looking forward to this show, but I am waiting until the whole thing is done so I can just watch it all at once.
LG: So you can binge it. Yep.
MC: Yeah.
AP: Lauren, did you know that on Sunday night at 10 o'clock you could have been listening to Elon Musk on Clubhouse instead?
LG: Well, that's what I did. Then Your Honor wasn't available in the Showtime app. So then I opened up Clubhouse and then I couldn't get into the room because there so many people in it and also I'm blocked by Marc Andreessen, so then aI went to the overflow room and then I listened for 20 minutes until I heard Elon Musk talking about monkey brains. Then I was like, "What am I doing with my life?" Then I went to bed.
AP: Wow.
LG: Yeah.
AP: I recommend an existential crisis.
LG: By the way, these problems, in the scale of a global pandemic, are not problems. But man, what a bizarre world we live in. Mike, what's your recommendation?
MC: Oh, boy. All right, everybody calm down. Bring your attention to your third eye center. I'm going to recommend a book. It is a memoir written by Ram Dass and it is called Being Ram Dass. Ram Dass is a spiritual dude. He was a spiritual dude. He died about a year and a month ago and he left behind this memoir and it is a look back at his life. Ram Dass's life is wild. He was born Richard Alpert. He was a psychologist. He was at Harvard in the 1960s. He got involved with Timothy Leary and the psilocybin experiment. He was one of the key people who popularized the use of psychedelics in the 1960s. He left that scene behind. He went to India. He lived as an ascetic in India for a number of years. He met a guru. He became this popularizer of Indian and Eastern philosophies in the United States.
He went on speaking tours throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He wrote a bunch of books. He wrote a book that you've probably heard of called Be Here Now, which is a lot of people's first introduction to Eastern religion and just the idea of sort of psychedelic consciousness, is probably the best way to put it. Sort of seeing yourself as one with the universe. That concept that we all sort of take for granted now was not very well known until Ram Dass And a lot of people like him started telling this story. Now, his life story is really just amazing. Not only do you hear about all that stuff, but you hear about his struggles with his own homosexuality in coming out and also the end of his life, because he had a long protracted period of illness at the end of his life, and he has some very interesting views on death.
I haven't finished the book, but I've jumped around because I was really curious to see what he had to say about his own impending death. It is just beautiful writing, a really amazing book an incredible book cover. I know that in the digital era, we don't get to say that a lot, but the book cover is really just amazing. So I can highly recommend this. It is the Ram Dass autobiography. It's called Being Ram Dass, and that's Dass with two S's. So just go to ramdass.org and you can find out more about it.
LG: That sounds amazing. I also really appreciate how you brought us back to a Zen place.
AP: Yeah. That is wonderful. Mike, I can't wait to read this. I have some friends who are pretty into Ram Dass and one of the highlights of 2020 for me was going to a outdoor park hike birthday party in which my friend insisted everyone sit in a circle six feet apart and to listen to a Ram Dass lecture and then do a 15 minute meditation together. It was so special and really helped me feel present in a year that felt otherwise a very chaotic and bad.
MC: That's great. Yeah, and he has ... I forget the name of the foundation. Well, there's the foundation, but there's a bunch of foundations that have grown up around his work, and one of them puts out Ram Dass Here and Now the podcast series, which is just a collection of his lectures. So every week you get a new half hour of him talking. His speaking voice is great because he has this sort of Boston accent and he's talking about all these concepts of Buddhism and Hinduism and he's doing it in this Boston accent. It's really just great. I listen to him when I run.
AP: Wow. Love that.
LG: Do you find yourself going to a Zen place when you run?
MC: Yeah. It's the whole reason I do it. Well, I mean, that and it makes you feel good. All right. Well, thanks, everybody, for the laughs. I really needed that, and thank you all for listening. That is our show. Thank you, Arielle for joining us.
AP: Thanks for having me.
MC: Anytime. Absolutely anytime. You can drop in like Elon and just blow this up.
AP: Wow. I'm honored.
LG: We're going to get at least 5,000 more listeners this week because Arielle joined us.
MC: And just wait for our series B, which is coming up in a couple of weeks. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter. Just check the show notes. This show is produced by Boone Ashworth and his lovely cat Gandalf. Thanks everybody for listening. We will be back next week. Goodbye.
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