In 2020 and 2021, the social media world seemed to be on the verge of complete change. A new app called TikTok was ascendant, bringing a whole new kind of vertical video to phones everywhere. And another app — not as popular, but growing fast, and already hugely influential among the tech set — looked like it might have an entirely new social idea on its hands. It was called Clubhouse, and it was a huge bet that audio might be the future. It was the next big thing, until it wasn’t.

On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the early days of Clubhouse, and how a simple audio group chat app turned into a booming entertainment and creator platform. Platformer’s Casey Newton and Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman join David Pierce to talk about how the app worked, why tech folks gravitated to it so much, and ultimately the ways in which timing was the best and worst thing that ever happened to Clubhouse. What would the app have been without a global pandemic, and months of lockdown that left people scrambling for any kind of connection? We’ll never know. But it would have been different.