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Dr. Erica Solomon, tell me about your vision.

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My vision in the world is pretty simple, which is I put humanity at the center of everything,

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including business.

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So my vision is to create a more human-centric world.

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Can you tell me more about that?

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Yeah, so this is really based on my experience, my background.

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Well, for one, I worked in the corporate world as the chief marketing officer for Instagram

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on the business side, and I was at Spotify and YouTube before that.

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And I saw a lot of what I was doing leading to unintended human consequences, consequences

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that were not the best for humanity.

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And then, as part of my journey, I had a real lightning bolt moment in my life that turned

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my world upside down, honestly, and got me thinking on a completely different path.

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And emerging from that path, I realized that my life to that point had been kind of this

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pursuit, kind of a thoughtless pursuit of more, more, more.

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And I started to make a more intentional pursuit of better, better, better.

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And I started to do that for myself.

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And then I realized that's the outcomes that I wanted to see the world for is stop accumulating

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more stuff and start turning our attention towards better outcomes.

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So that's what drove me here.

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That's amazing.

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What was that challenge you saw against humanity?

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And what was a light bulb that triggered that you are here today?

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Yeah, I mean, you know, I'd say my lightning bolt moment is more extreme and tragic than

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most people's.

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So I'll be very, very honest about it.

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And I speak very openly about it.

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But I had moved here after almost five years of being a co-founder of a team at YouTube.

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I moved out to New York for a bit of a dream job.

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I was the head of the Spotify brand, merging my love of music.

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I was a DJ and brand building.

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But it was about six months into that job when I was coming back from a work trip when

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I learned that my father had been murdered and a criminal investigation was opened on

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his death.

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And that shifted my perspective to the things that are really important in life.

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I think before I was pursuing what I now have come to understand the collective illusion

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of the accumulation of more we're told is what's going to make us happy.

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We're told accumulate more stuff, more things, more titles, more promotions, more jobs, and

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that maybe you'll finally be fulfilled.

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But I realized that that wasn't enough for me and that I needed to really make that shift

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towards more, you know, away from more to what better looks like for me.

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And it wasn't until I really had that reckoning that I was able to make that shift in a way

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that felt like I was getting away from causing harm in the world to doing good in the world.

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Thank you for sharing that with me.

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I know it can be hard.

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I would not wish that on anyone in my family.

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And yeah, I want to dive deeper though into what lessons that you learned that got you

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here today.

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So how did you get started into all this?

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Yeah, I mean, you know, it starts off, you know, we all come from, you know, the place

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that we come from in life.

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And you know, I'd say I had a lot of grit and resilience along my journey.

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My mom did not graduate high school and my father was kind of a low grade drug dealer

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for a living.

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And so I didn't start off in the greatest foot in life.

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And so for me, a lot of my path, even being the first person to go to college, and then

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certainly the first person to go to college and do a PhD program, it was just totally

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out of character.

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But it was driven by a real scarcity mindset that there wasn't enough in the world.

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And you know, to some extent, that's what drove my path along the corporate ladder.

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And so, you know, the pursuit, you know, I was told many times, especially at places

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like Instagram, that what matters is how many users we have, and how much money we can drive

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for advertisers.

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And at the same time, we had all kinds of data showing what kind of damage we might

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have been incurring on the epidemic of loneliness among boys and men, body dysmorphia issues

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among teenagers.

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But still, it was the pursuit of nothing but ROI, productivity, efficiency, and metrics

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that drove everything.

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And it wasn't until I really had a reckoning with what I was going through that I realized

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that those metrics are not nearly as important as fostering the real purpose of work, human

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connection, doubling down on the things that make us uniquely human in life.

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And so what I've really learned is that, you know, in my own personal life, the biggest

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lesson is that you can pursue the why of what you're doing, you know, the why you're doing

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something, you can pursue the what of what you're doing.

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But if you're doing those whys or the whats with the wrong people, it doesn't matter.

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You can solve the world's biggest problems.

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But if you're doing it with a bunch of jerks, it's not very fun.

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So you've got to, the biggest lesson I've learned is that you have to start with who.

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Not with why or what.

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You start with who you're working with.

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And you can solve any problem in the world if you're doing it with the right people.

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Wow, you resonate with me so much here.

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I agree with what you just said wholeheartedly.

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My, one of my best friends and co-worker, Jackson, he taught me that lesson.

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And I've taken that with me throughout.

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You got to focus on who first.

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And then the why comes.

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The why will come.

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That's right.

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And so many people do the opposite, right?

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They, especially, you know, young people when you're young, you want to do this thing that's

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maybe going to change the world in some way or work for a place that has this big reputation.

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But you don't consider who you might be doing that work with.

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And that makes all the difference, doesn't it?

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It does.

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It totally does.

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Wow, that's amazing.

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You probably are the first person who has actually been a part of Instagram and YouTube

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and other organizations and has come to talk about the negative side of things that's going

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on in that part.

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There's a lot of people I know who don't like to talk about all those things.

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And they know, and a lot of people do know what's going on.

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The suicide rates are up, the mental illness has gone off to charts since social media

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came into our lives.

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There's a lot of good that has happened, but there's a lot of bad that has happened as

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well.

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You talked about the humanity side of things.

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What were those aspects that make us human that you were referring to?

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You know, it's such an increasingly complicated question with the rise of generative AI and

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what we're seeing in terms of really advanced chat bots and things that go beyond chat bots.

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But the one thing that I always think about is that AI, as much as it can mimic the human

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experience, it can't have the human experience of subjectivity and the way that we experience

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the world.

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And so it's impossible for a machine of any kind to truly have real empathy and compassion.

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It can mimic empathy and compassion, but without the shared lived experience of connection

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on a more biological level, it's impossible for a machine to truly understand what it

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means to put yourself in someone else's shoes and to maybe feel what they feel so much that

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you act upon it in some positive way.

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So I used to say it's maybe things like creativity, but I think machines are pretty good at creativity.

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The thing that I think we're going to be moving towards is I've been involved for the last

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almost two decades in the information age, the age of data, but I think we're going to

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be seeing a real shift from the information age to the storytelling age because what it

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takes to tell compelling stories is to have subjective human experience that allows you

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to tell those stories.

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Tell me more about that.

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That is very intriguing to me.

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I've never heard that before.

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This is the first time someone has said something.

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So tell me more about that.

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Where did that come from?

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Yeah, I mean, you know, it comes from a couple places.

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One, you know, I'm working on a book right now, and this book is about literally what

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it means to reclaim our human agency in a robotic world.

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My whole company is called the human OS or the human operating system.

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This idea that just like a piece of technology that has all of these systems and processes

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running into the background, we as human beings, when we have too many tabs open, we have too

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much mental malware, we're prone to crashing so much that burnout is now an epidemic, according

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to the World Health Organization.

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And the only thing that's really driving a lot of that are the stories that we tell that

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are rooted in this idea of the collective illusion, the idea that what we pursue is

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not what we want as human beings, but what we think other people want.

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So there's all of this research that shows that we personally want all of the things

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that we know on our deathbed or matter to us, the connections, family, meaningful work,

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like we've made a difference to other human beings in this world.

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But when we're asked, what do we think other people like, it's always fame, fortune and

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power.

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So what do we see people pursuing in the world?

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Is the story of what we're told.

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And so almost everything we do is based off of this told fairy tale about what really

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matters to us.

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But when we get down to it, all we are as human beings, especially as adults, our collections

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of the stories we tell about who we are, where we come from and where we're going in this

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world.

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And no machine is ever going to be able to tell that story for us.

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Wow.

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That's very, very well put.

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Thank you.

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So where are you going with your vision of the company and everything that you're building?

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So I mean, the biggest thing, right, is I've been I had my last corporate role as a chief

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marketing officer, and I left that at the end of 2018.

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And in the beginning of 2019, after some real soul searching and some real depth into building

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and rebooting my own operating system, I said, this is what I want to do for other people.

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My timing was amazing, right, because it was 2019.

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And then what happened one year later, March of 2020, we all were hit with another major

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lightning bolt when the pandemic struck.

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And everybody's work and work and personal lives were upended by something that we couldn't

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have foreseen.

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And where I've really come out on the other side is realizing that the work that I do

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is more powerfully told through the stories that I tell.

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So I'm taking this vision and putting it into a book.

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I'm trying to be on many stages as possible to tell people to reconnect with their humanity.

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And I'm trying to really be, for lack of a better word, an evangelist for human-centric

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outcomes in business and in life.

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And I often feel quite alone in that journey because we're in the year of efficiency and

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productivity.

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And here I am saying that although those things matter, if we don't shift some of the spotlight

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to the better human outcomes, we're going to end up in a worse place with AI than we

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did with social media.

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So I really feel like I'm on a mission with this vision to get more people on board with

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the personal agency that we each have to control our lives rather than being controlled by

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the technology that we're using.

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That's amazing.

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And I'll tell you, you're not alone.

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There's a few people I know that can probably help you through this path.

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And I'd love to make those introductions for you.

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Let's go on the other side of this equation.

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I know you mentioned human-centric goals.

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If you get to the depth of what problem are you trying to solve with your business model?

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If you get to the core, if you can describe in layman terms for people who don't speak

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PhD levels and other levels of education, what would you say that is?

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Yeah, it's a really good question.

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And I think about this all the time, which is how to make this really, really clear.

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I think it goes like this, which is everybody understands.

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First of all, the biggest myth around anything that we're feeling right now, whether it's

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burnout or crashing or just exhaustion from the world, we're always told it's your fault.

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It's all your fault.

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But everybody knows that it's often the systems that we're working in.

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So the way that I often think about it right is you take the old idea of the canary in

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the coal mine.

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And so there's a canary in a coal mine and the canary starts to get a little sick because

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of the conditions that the canary is living in.

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And do you blame the canary for getting sick or do you blame the coal mine for the problem?

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And it's in a very similar way is we tend to understand that it's the coal mine that's

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creating this problem.

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But the reality is that we cannot shift or change the coal mine overnight.

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All we can do is understand the agency that we have to change the path of our own lives.

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And so the biggest thing that I'm trying to do with my work is for people to understand

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how to make sense of the world that they're in, make choices that align to their values

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and their beliefs and correspond those to actions, and then make changes that future

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proof themselves for the futures that they want to live.

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So that's the outcomes that I'm always looking to drive is where are you right now in the

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world and how do you make sense of it?

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What do you really believe and how does that manifest into the actions that you take?

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And then where are you on the adoption curve of change versus where do you want to be on

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the adoption curve of change?

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Thank you for being here today.

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I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.

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I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.

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This is going to get more and more fun.

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We'll have more and more engagement as well.

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We'll invite people to participate in the show.

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And thank you for giving us your time and attention.

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Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.