Clubhouse. It's the hottest new social media app out there. But what is it exactly? How do you use it? And should you sign up? I got you covered. [MUSIC] Lately there have been a ton of social media startups all hoping you'll get sick of the Twitter's and the Facebook's of the world. And join their app instead. But there's one that is gaining some pretty decent traction, Clubhouse. I'll walk you through the app in a minute but the key thing that separates it from other social media apps is it's audio only. It's sort of like, if podcast and convention panels could happen anywhere, anytime And you could participate in them. Currently you can only get into clubhouse with an invite to the app, but a lot of really high profile names are already on the service. Elon Musk, Chris Rock, Oprah Winfrey Mark Cuban. I mean from Tech to comedy and everything in between. There are a lot of big names on clubhouse. There is, also one very small but important caveat. Aside from the whole invite thing, which is it's iPhone only for right now yes clubhouse is only available on IOS, sorry Android users. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But clubhouse said in a blog post that they were excited to start working on the Android version of its app about a month ago. So you might be waiting a while. Okay, let's take a look at the app and how it works. Signing up is pretty easy. But once you get to the end of sign up, you're able to choose a bunch of interests and based on those interests. Clubhouse we'll follow some people for you and also give you some recommendations as to what rooms you might want to join. So this is the main clubhouse screen for looking at it. At the very top here we've got a few different icons. The first one here is the little envelope with the star on it. That's your invites. I have a quite. Giving clubhouse access to my contact list. I don't plan on doing that just yet. I wanna see if I wanna stick around here before I start inviting my friends to the app. And then of course we have the calendar. So if you tap on the calendar. You can see there are a whole bunch of different rooms and different schedules. Here's what's happening today. There's just a ton of people using the app right now you can see all these different rooms and all these different topics which are pretty cool. It's really neat that you're able to sort of Find like minded people who want to talk about and hear about the same stuff that you do. So we've got that. And then of course, you've got your notifications. You can see who's followed you how long ago they followed you. If you tap on their names, you can check out Their profile. Our dear colleague Hayes hasn't quite filled out his bio yet but that's okay. We don't we don't hold that against him. But my friend mod has she's got a full bio. She got a few thousand followers. You can see she's really interested in clubhouse. She's a member of a bunch of different clubs, right there at the bottom of the screen. Okay, so we've seen our activity. Of course, if you tap on your picture, that's your profile information, don't need to go through any of that you know what your profiles and your account info look like. But right here at the top of your main clubhouse screen, you've got sort of At a glance calendar, and you could see at 5 o'clock today there's gonna be a few different things happening that club house thinks I might be interested in, one of them is about the EA and Glu mobile purchase, who will get bought next? Well that seems interesting so if I tap on that, I can see Who's in that chat, who's gonna be part of that discussion. And I can also do a lot of different things like share it, tweet it, copy the link to put it on other social platforms or add it to my calendar. I've already tapped on the little bell, the notification bell, because I wanna be notified. so it says, you'll get notified when the conversation begins, sounds good. All right. So once you've looked at your at a glance, you can get into the real meat of clubhouse and that is rooms that are doing live things right this second so we can see right now, the most Most popular room or one of the most popular rooms is what's clubhouse explaining it to the Wall Street Journal's Joanna stern. I love Joanna stern. I think she's awesome. So I'm going to tap on that and I want to I want to hear this discussion for sure. Clubhouse will let you know that if you share recordings without the speaker's permission, it can get you suspended from the app. So we're not going to play in the audio from this clubhouse discussion, but you'll get the idea here so you can see there are. Four different people who are speakers in this room. So there's Joanna, Alexis, Matthew, and Perez. Now, if you're able to speak, you'll see a muted microphone next to your name, which means you're part of, The conversation. Now, underneath those people, you can see all of the people who are followed by the speakers. So anybody hosting these chats, you can see who they follow, just in case there's somebody there who might be of interest to you, somebody where you might go, Wow, I've never heard of that person, but they follow somebody I like so maybe I wanna hear what they have to say. And then of course, you've got everybody else that's others in the room. Now, there are a few different options here. Obviously, if you tap on this plus sign, you can add somebody to a room so you can say, hey, I think this is really worth your time. You should listen to this. You can search through your friends list. I'm going to add Is I think he really needs to be in this room. I think he needs to understand what clubhouse is a little bit better. I'm going to do that and now I've added him into the room or at least At least I've pinged him and let him know I think he should be in the room and if he has time he can join. Now if I have a question, I can tap on this hand button which is a raise your hand. Now I should say, raising your hand is not for the faint of heart. Now this is important, if you raise your hand And the speakers decide that you have a good question or they want to allow you to speak. They will move you into the speaker category, even if you're just a lowly, others in In the room, and you will have to verbally state your question, just like you would at a q&a panel at Comic Con, or CES or anything like that. You're not going to get to be shy here. You have to be outspoken. You have to be ready to state that question get involved in the conversation. Otherwise, you can leave the raise your hand button alone and you can just listen to the conversation which is just as valuable if you're interested in what's happening. Now of course there's also this little piece of paper at the top To the screen, and it says, Hey, we're still opening up but anyone can join with an invite from an existing user clubhouse we'll be expanding that feature. Obviously as more and more invites go out, and at some point they'll open it up to everybody. So I've listened a little bit. I think this is really interesting stuff, but maybe I'm done. Maybe we've got something else going on that I need to get to. All I have to do is hit the peace out sign, which is leave quietly and we're right back to our main page. So now you know how to listen to conversations and join rooms What about making your own room? Well, it's as easy as tapping on start a room. So you get three privacy options. You can make it open to everybody on the earth. You can make it social which is for people you follow, or you can make it closed and you specifically will choose out of the list of contacts you have in clubhouse. Who is allowed to join this room. So it's really cool. They make it really easy to sort of keep your privacy level comfortable, whether you want to talk to everybody on the earth, or you want to just keep it to one or two friends, maybe you just want to have a private conversation with somebody that's up to you. You can do that in clubhouse. So once you do that, you can add a topic and it can be as silly or as serious as you want it to be. I am going to sit here and say, debate me, [BLANK_AUDIO] Cereal is soup. I'm gonna set my topic. And I mean, it's a really serious topic, you guys. And then I can choose the people that I want to come participate in my conversation. So I'm gonna pick Iyaz and maybe I'll pick a couple of other people to come. Hang out in our room. Let's pick Sharon, some of my co workers and say let's go. And so what will happen here is now I am part of the conversation I am hosting this conversation. You can see the little gray circle around my picture is flashing, which means I'm talking so it can hear me. And then of course you have some other options. You can open up your room if you decide hey, This conversation is really kicking off, I want to open it up to more people, you can totally do that. You can say, hey, let it be everyone, let it be anyone. A moderator follows, you can sort of slightly expand who Who gets access and of course, you can always check who has raised their hand, which is really cool. You can add somebody you can ping them into the room, and you can mute yourself right there with the microphone button. Which is really cool. So if you want to close your room, just leave, leave your own room. leave quietly. And that's it. Yeah, and the room, and voila, that's what clubhouse is. That's what it's all about. Should you use it? I think it's a really cool way to connect with and actually speak directly to it. Influencers, people you wouldn't normally have access to like a list celebrities. And it's a really personal way of communicating because you're actually talking, you're having a conversation. You're not just tweeting at them or posting on their Facebook page. So this is a really interesting and kind of, oddly intimate way of connecting with All kinds of people that you wouldn't normally connect with. I think it's really fun to there's been a lot of really hilarious rooms I've been a part of that have had a bunch of comedians talking about their craft, how they write jokes, how they perform jokes, and they're just Inherently funny. So, there's a lot of different ways you can use clubhouse. Unfortunately again for Android users, I'm so sorry. Hopefully, that app is coming soon. I know that Facebook is reportedly working on a. Feature that is very clubhouse like so hopefully clubhouse gets its act together and sort of speeds up that development process but hopefully you enjoyed this explainer video. If you did, please give it a big thumbs up and drop your thoughts About cereal as soup down in the comments. And of course if you wanna watch another explainer video about a different app that Elon Musk is crazy about, you can check this one out right here it's about signal and subscribe for all of the best news reviews and information from your, Find pals here at CNET. Until next time, be good humans.