How To Make Social Media GOOD For You with Isa Watson Aww Shift

In today’s episode, our guest is Isa Watson. She is an entrepreneur, author, skydiver, and classical pianist. She is the co-founder and CEO of Squad, the fun way to build a world of your closest friends--away from social media. Named top 100 MIT Alumni in Tech in 2021, Isa is a physical scientist turned social scientist, building the next generation's social connection tool.
[3:50] Why should I listen to you? 
You should listen to me because I have a great smile. 
[4:38] Do you mind walking me through your human experiences as we progress through your book?
I don't know many, and I didn’t grow up on social media in the same way that a lot of kids today did. I came from a big Caribbean family. I grew up in North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My dad was a computer engineer who migrated to the US, and his mentality was if you can’t build it, then you shouldn’t be using it. From the time I was seven, my dad would buy me the parts of a computer to build them, and that morphed into me loving building things with my hands. I worked in the research labs at UNC Chapel Hill for a chemistry professor starting at 14 years old. I became one of the youngest published chemists in the world at 19 years old. I fell into Wall Street after, but I pivoted to finance via my MBA at MIT. I also started a tech company called SQUAD, and our thesis is that the future of social media is deeper. 
[9:05] How can someone relate to the emotions you felt in those moments when you realized that you were a different person online? 
It's interesting because it wasn’t just that I liked who I was online; I was a much broader person with broader interests. What happens with the feedback mechanism is that you get feedback online from the people who engage with you. You allow them to narrow the mental model of who you are as a person, and that can be an incongruence. I’m human; I've evolved, and I am not the same person that I was five years ago. But there is some kind of permanence on the internet sometimes that makes people expect that, and for me, it became jarring. I got off all social media for two years because it was something I had to resolve. 
[10:50] What do you see about people who try to be someone they are not online?  
Another thing that we do is confuse our online friends with our real friends. We assume that the person that is liking our content all the time and consistently gassing us in our DMs is one of our friends when they are not. One of my friends told me that she doesn’t interact with any of her friends on social media, and I think about that too. I rarely interact with my friends on social media, so I don't think it’s a necessity in the way that a lot of people think.  
[13:05] What is the name of your social media company or brand? What is the thesis, and what do you see this thing becoming in time? 
With Squad, we say that we are the easiest and most fun way to talk to your close friends every day. You can only have up to 12 people in your squad, which reinforces the idea of staying connected. We released a new version, a new take on the phone experience. A lot of our users describe Squad as a corner of their phone where they can go to disarm and just be with the people they want to be with. But the whole idea is that you get a lot more joy from being consistent with a handful of people as opposed to trying to broadcast to a ton of people you’ll never laugh in the same room with. 
[17:48] Where did you get the idea from in your internal conversations about creating another solution that the rest of the world could have access to? 
After my dad died, I realized that I was in a kind of friendship deficit, and it was because I had underinvested in those relationships. I also think that friendships are active and not passive investments. One of the things I did was rejigger my core friend group, and I started to invest in the handful of people who were bringing me joy, and I felt the most aligned when I di