Dr. Erica Solomon, tell me about your vision.
My vision in the world is pretty simple, which is I put humanity at the center of everything,
including business.
So my vision is to create a more human-centric world.
Can you tell me more about that?
Yeah, so this is really based on my experience, my background.
Well, for one, I worked in the corporate world as the chief marketing officer for Instagram
on the business side, and I was at Spotify and YouTube before that.
And I saw a lot of what I was doing leading to unintended human consequences, consequences
that were not the best for humanity.
And then, as part of my journey, I had a real lightning bolt moment in my life that turned
my world upside down, honestly, and got me thinking on a completely different path.
And emerging from that path, I realized that my life to that point had been kind of this
pursuit, kind of a thoughtless pursuit of more, more, more.
And I started to make a more intentional pursuit of better, better, better.
And I started to do that for myself.
And then I realized that's the outcomes that I wanted to see the world for is stop accumulating
more stuff and start turning our attention towards better outcomes.
So that's what drove me here.
That's amazing.
What was that challenge you saw against humanity?
And what was a light bulb that triggered that you are here today?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'd say my lightning bolt moment is more extreme and tragic than
most people's.
So I'll be very, very honest about it.
And I speak very openly about it.
But I had moved here after almost five years of being a co-founder of a team at YouTube.
I moved out to New York for a bit of a dream job.
I was the head of the Spotify brand, merging my love of music.
I was a DJ and brand building.
But it was about six months into that job when I was coming back from a work trip when
I learned that my father had been murdered and a criminal investigation was opened on
his death.
And that shifted my perspective to the things that are really important in life.
I think before I was pursuing what I now have come to understand the collective illusion
of the accumulation of more we're told is what's going to make us happy.
We're told accumulate more stuff, more things, more titles, more promotions, more jobs, and
that maybe you'll finally be fulfilled.
But I realized that that wasn't enough for me and that I needed to really make that shift
towards more, you know, away from more to what better looks like for me.
And it wasn't until I really had that reckoning that I was able to make that shift in a way
that felt like I was getting away from causing harm in the world to doing good in the world.
Thank you for sharing that with me.
I know it can be hard.
I would not wish that on anyone in my family.
And yeah, I want to dive deeper though into what lessons that you learned that got you
here today.
So how did you get started into all this?
Yeah, I mean, you know, it starts off, you know, we all come from, you know, the place
that we come from in life.
And you know, I'd say I had a lot of grit and resilience along my journey.
My mom did not graduate high school and my father was kind of a low grade drug dealer
for a living.
And so I didn't start off in the greatest foot in life.
And so for me, a lot of my path, even being the first person to go to college, and then
certainly the first person to go to college and do a PhD program, it was just totally
out of character.
But it was driven by a real scarcity mindset that there wasn't enough in the world.
And you know, to some extent, that's what drove my path along the corporate ladder.
And so, you know, the pursuit, you know, I was told many times, especially at places
like Instagram, that what matters is how many users we have, and how much money we can drive
for advertisers.
And at the same time, we had all kinds of data showing what kind of damage we might
have been incurring on the epidemic of loneliness among boys and men, body dysmorphia issues
among teenagers.
But still, it was the pursuit of nothing but ROI, productivity, efficiency, and metrics
that drove everything.
And it wasn't until I really had a reckoning with what I was going through that I realized
that those metrics are not nearly as important as fostering the real purpose of work, human
connection, doubling down on the things that make us uniquely human in life.
And so what I've really learned is that, you know, in my own personal life, the biggest
lesson is that you can pursue the why of what you're doing, you know, the why you're doing
something, you can pursue the what of what you're doing.
But if you're doing those whys or the whats with the wrong people, it doesn't matter.
You can solve the world's biggest problems.
But if you're doing it with a bunch of jerks, it's not very fun.
So you've got to, the biggest lesson I've learned is that you have to start with who.
Not with why or what.
You start with who you're working with.
And you can solve any problem in the world if you're doing it with the right people.
Wow, you resonate with me so much here.
I agree with what you just said wholeheartedly.
My, one of my best friends and co-worker, Jackson, he taught me that lesson.
And I've taken that with me throughout.
You got to focus on who first.
And then the why comes.
The why will come.
That's right.
And so many people do the opposite, right?
They, especially, you know, young people when you're young, you want to do this thing that's
maybe going to change the world in some way or work for a place that has this big reputation.
But you don't consider who you might be doing that work with.
And that makes all the difference, doesn't it?
It does.
It totally does.
Wow, that's amazing.
You probably are the first person who has actually been a part of Instagram and YouTube
and other organizations and has come to talk about the negative side of things that's going
on in that part.
There's a lot of people I know who don't like to talk about all those things.
And they know, and a lot of people do know what's going on.
The suicide rates are up, the mental illness has gone off to charts since social media
came into our lives.
There's a lot of good that has happened, but there's a lot of bad that has happened as
well.
You talked about the humanity side of things.
What were those aspects that make us human that you were referring to?
You know, it's such an increasingly complicated question with the rise of generative AI and
what we're seeing in terms of really advanced chat bots and things that go beyond chat bots.
But the one thing that I always think about is that AI, as much as it can mimic the human
experience, it can't have the human experience of subjectivity and the way that we experience
the world.
And so it's impossible for a machine of any kind to truly have real empathy and compassion.
It can mimic empathy and compassion, but without the shared lived experience of connection
on a more biological level, it's impossible for a machine to truly understand what it
means to put yourself in someone else's shoes and to maybe feel what they feel so much that
you act upon it in some positive way.
So I used to say it's maybe things like creativity, but I think machines are pretty good at creativity.
The thing that I think we're going to be moving towards is I've been involved for the last
almost two decades in the information age, the age of data, but I think we're going to
be seeing a real shift from the information age to the storytelling age because what it
takes to tell compelling stories is to have subjective human experience that allows you
to tell those stories.
Tell me more about that.
That is very intriguing to me.
I've never heard that before.
This is the first time someone has said something.
So tell me more about that.
Where did that come from?
Yeah, I mean, you know, it comes from a couple places.
One, you know, I'm working on a book right now, and this book is about literally what
it means to reclaim our human agency in a robotic world.
My whole company is called the human OS or the human operating system.
This idea that just like a piece of technology that has all of these systems and processes
running into the background, we as human beings, when we have too many tabs open, we have too
much mental malware, we're prone to crashing so much that burnout is now an epidemic, according
to the World Health Organization.
And the only thing that's really driving a lot of that are the stories that we tell that
are rooted in this idea of the collective illusion, the idea that what we pursue is
not what we want as human beings, but what we think other people want.
So there's all of this research that shows that we personally want all of the things
that we know on our deathbed or matter to us, the connections, family, meaningful work,
like we've made a difference to other human beings in this world.
But when we're asked, what do we think other people like, it's always fame, fortune and
power.
So what do we see people pursuing in the world?
Is the story of what we're told.
And so almost everything we do is based off of this told fairy tale about what really
matters to us.
But when we get down to it, all we are as human beings, especially as adults, our collections
of the stories we tell about who we are, where we come from and where we're going in this
world.
And no machine is ever going to be able to tell that story for us.
Wow.
That's very, very well put.
Thank you.
So where are you going with your vision of the company and everything that you're building?
So I mean, the biggest thing, right, is I've been I had my last corporate role as a chief
marketing officer, and I left that at the end of 2018.
And in the beginning of 2019, after some real soul searching and some real depth into building
and rebooting my own operating system, I said, this is what I want to do for other people.
My timing was amazing, right, because it was 2019.
And then what happened one year later, March of 2020, we all were hit with another major
lightning bolt when the pandemic struck.
And everybody's work and work and personal lives were upended by something that we couldn't
have foreseen.
And where I've really come out on the other side is realizing that the work that I do
is more powerfully told through the stories that I tell.
So I'm taking this vision and putting it into a book.
I'm trying to be on many stages as possible to tell people to reconnect with their humanity.
And I'm trying to really be, for lack of a better word, an evangelist for human-centric
outcomes in business and in life.
And I often feel quite alone in that journey because we're in the year of efficiency and
productivity.
And here I am saying that although those things matter, if we don't shift some of the spotlight
to the better human outcomes, we're going to end up in a worse place with AI than we
did with social media.
So I really feel like I'm on a mission with this vision to get more people on board with
the personal agency that we each have to control our lives rather than being controlled by
the technology that we're using.
That's amazing.
And I'll tell you, you're not alone.
There's a few people I know that can probably help you through this path.
And I'd love to make those introductions for you.
Let's go on the other side of this equation.
I know you mentioned human-centric goals.
If you get to the depth of what problem are you trying to solve with your business model?
If you get to the core, if you can describe in layman terms for people who don't speak
PhD levels and other levels of education, what would you say that is?
Yeah, it's a really good question.
And I think about this all the time, which is how to make this really, really clear.
I think it goes like this, which is everybody understands.
First of all, the biggest myth around anything that we're feeling right now, whether it's
burnout or crashing or just exhaustion from the world, we're always told it's your fault.
It's all your fault.
But everybody knows that it's often the systems that we're working in.
So the way that I often think about it right is you take the old idea of the canary in
the coal mine.
And so there's a canary in a coal mine and the canary starts to get a little sick because
of the conditions that the canary is living in.
And do you blame the canary for getting sick or do you blame the coal mine for the problem?
And it's in a very similar way is we tend to understand that it's the coal mine that's
creating this problem.
But the reality is that we cannot shift or change the coal mine overnight.
All we can do is understand the agency that we have to change the path of our own lives.
And so the biggest thing that I'm trying to do with my work is for people to understand
how to make sense of the world that they're in, make choices that align to their values
and their beliefs and correspond those to actions, and then make changes that future
proof themselves for the futures that they want to live.
So that's the outcomes that I'm always looking to drive is where are you right now in the
world and how do you make sense of it?
What do you really believe and how does that manifest into the actions that you take?
And then where are you on the adoption curve of change versus where do you want to be on
the adoption curve of change?
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.