Pod Insights EconTalk The Power of Introverts (with Susan Cain) About this episode Introverts are underrated. So says Susan Cain in her conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about her book, Quiet. She explains why introversion isn't the same thing as shyness and she speaks of the many benefits of solitude and silent contemplation. They also discuss why modern schools and workplaces' obsession with extroversion is problematic, and the reasons for the shift from a culture of character to our current culture of personality. Cain concludes by sharing how the book has changed her own life and helped other introverts navigate a world that can't seem to stop talking.
Transcript 10,432 words · 2 speakers
0:02 Speaker 00 Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected] . We'd love to hear from you. Today is January 13, 2026, and my guest is author Susan Cain. This is Susan's second
0:43 Speaker 00 appearance on Econ Talk. She was last here in October of 2024 discussing her book, Bittersweet. Our topic for today is her 2012 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. Susan, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:01 Speaker 01 Thank you so much, Russ. It's great to be here. I'm a huge fan.
1:05 Speaker 00 I think I'm the last person to read this book. Everyone I know has read it. It made a big splash when it came out. And as I joked with you before we started, I've read it more recently than you have, which gives me a certain advantage, but I'm sure you remember a little bit about it. How did you come to write the book?
1:26 Speaker 01 Well, I had been living this topic all my life because I am an introvert in an extroverted world, and this is something I'd been thinking about since I was four years old. You know, I didn't have a vocabulary for talking about it or thinking about it when I was a kid, but I think that every introverted kid is hyper-aware of how their preferences of how they like to spend their time and how many people they like to spend their time with is completely different from what is mandated for them by social norms.
2:03 Speaker 01 So I'd been thinking about it all my life, but I think it was really when I started. You know, I was a corporate lawyer for about a decade before I became a writer, and...
2:21 Speaker 01 During that time, I again started to think in a new way about how so much of the way that people showed up as lawyers was dictated by whether they're more introverted or extroverted, and yet there was no language for talking about that. We would talk about gender, we would talk about nationality, we would talk about all different things, but no one would ever talk about this most fundamental of personality types that some psychologists call the north and south of human temperament. And, you know, in the last 10 years, it's become pretty commonplace to talk about it, but at that point, the words introvert and extrovert were almost never used.
3:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, it was, in that sense, it was, I think, not just an interesting book, a book people learned a lot from, but I think an important book. One of the themes of the book, which, and I don't know what I am, I think I'm a little bit of both, maybe we'll talk about that later.
3:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:21 Speaker 00 But one of the themes of the book is that introversion is seen as a character flaw, and that extroversion is the ideal. And I think that's true. I think that is the cultural, those are the cultural norms. But before we get into that, let's try to talk with some definitions about how you would define an introvert versus an extrovert.
3:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, and so this is a question that we could spend the whole hour on if we wanted to.
3:54 Speaker 00 And we might, because I think it's very confusing to many people. So go ahead.
3:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's so much to say here. I'll give you first the kind of pop culture definition, which I actually like, and was the definition that first spoke to me when I heard it, back when I was in, I guess, my 20s. And that is the question of where do you get your energy from? So do you feel more energetic when you're kind of out and about, out in the world, interacting with a lot of people? Or do you feel more energetic when you're alone or in a quieter setting? And I often say to people with this one, you know, imagine that you're
4:37 Speaker 01 At a party that you're truly enjoying with company who you truly love. And then think about how you feel after you've been there for about an hour and a half or two hours. So if you're an extrovert, it's as if the internal battery that you have has been charged up by this experience. And so now you're full of energy and you're looking for more. And if you're an introvert, no matter how socially skilled you might be, and no matter how much you love all those people at the party, your battery has been drained by this experience. And so now you're kind of wishing that you could just press the button and be immediately whisked home.
5:17 Speaker 01 And that idea of the internal battery that we all have, I think is an incredibly useful metaphor, but also important to understand that it is just a metaphor for what's happening neurobiologically. And there's a lot we can get into with that, but just to give you kind of one, one kind of crack at it. In general, you could say that introverts have nervous systems that react more to all different kinds of stimulation. So we tend to think about the stimulation of that party or the stimulation of going to a big meeting at work. But there's also just the, the day to day stimulation.
5:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, it could be like bright lights for some people. It could be a lot of noise from a construction site. It could be anything. And introverts have nervous systems that tend to react, respond more to that stimulation. So that for, for us introverts, we are at our best, most creative, feel in our best state of equilibrium when things are a little more mellow around us. And for extroverts who have nervous systems that react less to stimulation, the sweet spot there is when there's more happening. Because if you find yourself in an understimulating environment, you start to feel kind of listless and unhappy and checked out.
6:44 Speaker 01 And I think it's really useful to understand these personality types through this lens because. It's just very helpful in thinking, okay, what do I need and how do I need to structure my day so that I make sure I'm in my sweet spot for as much of the time as possible? So what activities leave me feeling understimulated? And I know I should call my best friend, who always makes me laugh at that moment. When do I feel overstimulated? So I know I need to take a solo walk around the block. And if you think about it in those terms, I think you also feel more entitled, for lack of a better word.
7:24 Speaker 01 It's not the word I want, but better able to make the adjustments that you need so that you're showing up as your best self.
7:35 Speaker 00 I think there's a simpler point to make that it's true of many, many aspects of the personality and our nature, but for me, one of the powerful parts of your book and the public conversation that I observed with that before I read your book and before we had this conversation, and this sounds so trite, but it's quite deep. And it's that other people are not just like me. That is very hard for human beings to understand. And when I see someone who's not like me, of course, my first thought is, one, is that there's something wrong with them. Two, I just need to explain to them, this is the wrong way to be.
8:19 Speaker 00 You need to, you know, don't be so sensitive to that noise. Why are you sensitive to it? Just forget about it. Don't think about it. And the idea that we have some fundamental differences along those lines is kind of shocking. There was that movie with George Clooney, I think it was called, I want to say it was called Up in the Air, where he was this corporate guy who ran around and fired people.
8:46 Speaker 00 And he fired people the way he wanted to be fired. Chick, chock, get it over with. I don't want to hear all that fake emotion. You feel bad for me and just you're fired. Go clean out your office. You have half an hour. And I think there are people like that. They don't want any empathy. In fact, they dislike it and they view it as fake because for them, if they were delivering the message, they'd have to fake it. Cause not particularly empathetic people, baby. Uh, the idea that there are people who want that message to be delivered in a different way than they would like to receive it is a shocking realization. And I don't think it's obvious to most people. And it's this distinction of stimulus versus, and also where you get your energy.
9:33 Speaker 00 People are different and you know, you talk about a couple in the book, uh, one who's extroverted, one who's introverted and they, you know, one of them wants to throw a dinner party once a week and the other one, they're very much doesn't want to be it in that setting. It's like, well, what's wrong with you? Why would, why would you not enjoy a, it's a perfectly reasonable thought, but it shows a lack of understanding of the human condition.
9:57 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I don't know what it is about us humans that I think it makes it easier for us to understand our differences and be empathetic to someone who's different from us. If we, if we know why it is, you know, especially if we know that it's biologically rooted, there's something about that that makes it easier for us to process it. But even just giving a name to it makes it easier. And that, that is something I see with couples all the time. And in fact, I will say for my husband and me, cause my husband's much more extroverted than I am.
10:31 Speaker 01 We had had for years, just this ongoing, I don't know if the right word is squabble, but you know, when we're driving in the car, long distances, he would always turn the radio dial louder to make the music louder and I would always turn it back down. And it was years into my researching this book and we were talking about the book all the time before we realized that this was just, we were just being classic, you know, overstimulation, understimulation. And we still, we still squabble over the radio dial, but there's something about understanding it that makes the whole thing depersonalized. You know, it's no, there's nothing fraught about it at that point. It's, it's just purely where do we compromise it out?
11:14 Speaker 00 So I really like the title of the book. Was that hard to choose? Do you remember that? Because when I asked you how you came to write the book, you immediately started talking about introverts and extroverts as if people would know. Well, the book's called Quiet. Obviously, it's about introverts versus extroverts, but you could have called it introverts versus extroverts, or outgoing and something else, but you didn't.
11:39 Speaker 01 Oh, so are you asking about the title or the subtitle?
11:42 Speaker 00 The title. Well, either one.
11:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, okay. And I'll tell you why I asked that question. So the title,
11:51 Speaker 01 I thought the word quiet was just right because, first of all, it expresses the poetic sense of being more introverted. The sense of quiet, the sense of still waters run deep, I felt all were captured in that word. But it also captures the pejorative that many introverts hear all their lives. Introverted kids, from the time they're very young, are told by their teachers, Sally is too quiet and must learn to speak up in class. That word quiet is used in that context all the time. So that was why I chose that title. And for the subtitle,
12:35 Speaker 01 which is The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, I owe the credit for that to my glorious agent, Richard Pine, who came up with it when we sent out the book proposal to prospective editors, and it stuck.
12:51 Speaker 00 And that's, when you said you were going to start with the socially, the pop culture definition of introvert versus extrovert, I actually think that the one you gave, which is where you get your energy from, is actually a subtle, sophisticated version. I think if you asked most people, they would say introverts are, excuse me, extroverts are outgoing.
13:16 Speaker 00 And introverts are shy. That's the difference. And that's why shyness, which can be quite charming, but is often considered a handicap in the business world. Or that's why a teacher might want to socialize a student to be more verbal or more active. And obviously, we make snap judgments about people based on what they say and how they say it. And quiet people have a little bit of a disadvantage in many, many settings. You write about visiting the Harvard Business School and quiet people being uneasy and worried that their careers will be hampered by the fact that they aren't this charismatic Tony Robbins figure, someone you also discuss in the book,
14:01 Speaker 00 having attended one of his seminars. So just talk about that in general, just this talking part and why, how that interacts with these definitions.
14:11 Speaker 01 Well, it's funny that you mention the term shyness because you may have seen me scribbling something down a minute ago. And the word I wrote was shyness because I wanted to make sure to talk about that. Because introversion and shyness are not the same thing, but they're both really important to understand. So introversion is about this preference for quieter, less stimulating environments and modes of interaction. Shyness is much more about the fear of social judgment. So it happens in situations where you feel like you could be socially evaluated. And it's different for different people. So one person might feel shy when they have to give a speech.
14:56 Speaker 01 For someone else, it might be a job interview or going on a date, or it could be some combination of all those things. But in general, shy people, they're more sensitive to being socially evaluated. And they're also more likely to read in negative evaluation into a neutral facial expression because of that sensitivity. So I say... So first of all, in my book and in my work, I'm talking both about introverted people and shy people.
15:36 Speaker 01 People, although you could be introverted without being shy, and you could be shy without being introverted. The classic case is Barbra Streisand, who is a very larger-than-life, extroverted personality. But she stopped performing for, I think it was decades, because of her stage fright. So I say the following thing. As a constitutionally shy person, which is, there isn't that much to recommend shyness itself. It's not a pleasant experience, pretty much ever. However, it goes along with a whole constellation of personality traits that we do value. And I think that's important to understand.
16:18 Speaker 01 So shyness and conscientiousness are extremely well-linked. And the reason has to do with so much of the way human beings come to acquire a conscience in the first place. From a very young age, they start to understand when they've done something right or wrong. And shy children are, just feel those kinds of, that kind of feedback all the more intensely. And so they tend to develop a very strong conscience. Yeah, a strong conscience. Shyness is complicated, though, and it's also important to understand. I mean, there's lots of situations
16:59 Speaker 01 where you could start out as shy in situation X, but you learn over time how to handle situation X, and the shyness mostly melts away. So it's not as much of a fixed state in, speaking situationally. But most people who, let's say, were shy as children, will tell you that they still retain a kind of core of that sensation that stays with them through their lives.
17:33 Speaker 00 Let's talk about solitude and contemplation, which is also embodied in the title, the word "quiet." Having the ability to be alone and to be contemplative, I think are superpowers. They're particularly out of fashion in today's world, of course, with the ubiquitousness of the cellphone and social media. Part of your book is, I would call it, a lawyer's brief. It's an attempt to make the case for the pluses of introversion, not just that
18:15 Speaker 00 it's okay, but rather that it's sometimes quite powerful. So talk about the role of solitude in general and the ability to work on one's own.
18:26 Speaker 01 Well, who was it who said, Ernest Hemingway, I can't remember who it was, who talked about the biggest problem being someone who can't be in a room by themselves. You know, the core of a loving self, of a self that can love itself and love the people around them, is the ability to be comfortable with oneself, which generally starts in a room by yourself. Can you be comfortable with that kind of solitude? Yeah. And I worry a lot that, especially nowadays, kids are not trained in this core art, which I think is part of why we've seen the explosion over the past decades of practices like yoga
19:11 Speaker 01 and meditation. I think these were a response to the lack of solitude in our lives that everybody craves. Extroverts crave it also. We all need it. And I think we see this also in all our religious traditions. You know, you almost always see the moment of profound revelation for many of our religious figures, whether it's Moses, or Jesus, or Muhammad, Buddha.
19:39 Speaker 01 They go off, they go off into the wilderness, they go off into solitude, and that is the place where they have the revelation that they then bring back to the community. So there's always a kind of dynamic between going off into solitude and then being together with whoever your community is. But that peace, that solitary peace is incredibly important. And this is partly because we're such social beings, we're constructed to be socially porous. So when there are other people around us, we're kind of incapable of knowing what we truly think and what are the ideas that are truly
20:24 Speaker 01 original to us. So for example, the designer Philippe Stark said that during the time of his year when he would be most creative, he would go off by himself for several months. And during that time, he wouldn't even pick up a magazine, wouldn't turn on the TV, wouldn't do anything because he knew that to take in inputs from other people would be to weaken his own sense of originality. So solitude is just an incredibly important piece of knowing ourselves and being creative.
20:57 Speaker 00 And you talk about the obsession in the modern workplace and it's emphasized in our educational system of collaboration, of working groups, the importance of working groups. And of course, for an introvert, that can be unpleasant, alien, and unproductive. And you're critical of it in general. I think about, I think the power of solitude in doing great work is crucial. The idea that I would, and sometimes it's helpful to brainstorm or share an idea, a one-on-one conversation can be very powerful. But the
21:38 Speaker 00 idea of all great ideas coming out of teams, say, is implausible to me. But it is something of a modern...
21:51 Speaker 00 Idle, it seems to be something that the workplace and schools really push. What do you think of that?
21:58 Speaker 01 Oh, I think it's absolutely maddening. So, as you say, introverts know how ridiculous it is just by virtue of their own experience. But then you start to look at the research literature on brainstorming, which finds in study after study that people produce more ideas and better ideas when they're on their own. Which is not to say that there isn't a role for people coming together to share those ideas, of course there is. But we very much need a kind of dynamic between the solitary process and the coming together process.
22:38 Speaker 01 So the best ideas are really where you have that kind of dynamic and people can go off by themselves before they come together to share those ideas. One example of that, at Amazon, apparently, is Jeff Bezos or Bezos? I always forget how to say his name.
22:57 Speaker 00 I don't know.
22:58 Speaker 01 Okay, however we say his name. He apparently begins every meeting at Amazon by having the person who has called the meeting first write a long memo, I think like a three-page, single-spaced memo outlining that which is going to be talked about at the meeting. And then everybody sits there in silence for the first half an hour, reading this memo and thinking about it quietly before they start talking. And the idea is that you get thoughts that are a lot less half-baked when you go through that kind of a process. And yet, as you say, in the modern world, that's incredibly unusual.
23:40 Speaker 01 And one of the things I was most struck by when I was researching the book, I decided that I would start visiting schools. And this was before I had had kids myself, so I hadn't been in a school in a really long time at that point. And...
23:58 Speaker 01 I didn't even know what I was looking for. I just kind of was popping in to just see what the experience was of introverted and extroverted kids. But I was shocked to see how much education had changed during the years since I had been a student, which is to say, I remember going to school as involving a lot of solitary effort, where you would sit and think deeply and write a paper, do your math, or whatever. But nowadays, so much of school life, it's done in groups.
24:28 Speaker 00 It's a pep rally.
24:29 Speaker 01 It's a pep rally. And all the desks are smooshed together. Even when they're doing math, it's a big group project. You're not allowed to ask the teacher a question until you've asked your peers the question. And some of that just strikes me as kind of a waste of time.
24:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, that Amazon practice is kind of shocking. I wonder if that's true for every meeting. A half an hour is a very long time. I would want to reserve that for certain kinds of topics. But it is a very, it's a fascinating question of one's own productivity. I want to tie it into something you write about that I think is really important. I was talking to someone about your book. Turns out, I'm not the last person not to have read it. He hasn't read it either. There were two of us.
25:22 Speaker 00 And he said, well, you know, I'm not an introvert because, he said, I like to socialize. And I said, in what kind of settings? He goes, well, I don't like a big crowded event where people are holding court and showing off. You know, I like to socialize with one other person. And I thought, you're an introvert.
25:46 Speaker 01 Exactly.
25:47 Speaker 00 So you say, and the way you write it, the book is, there's a temptation to call extroverts pro-social and introverts antisocial. And I have to reference my father, who, until I read your book, I always thought of him as an extrovert. He was not an extrovert at all. He often had a public persona of playing a clown, a jester, a person who amused people. And he was a very charming man. But he would always tell me when I was growing up that what he liked to do... When they would have people over for dinner,
26:30 Speaker 00 and I think he sometimes actually did this, was excuse himself and go upstairs and read a book because he'd had enough. And I always took that to be a form of not liking people. But that's not what it was. He did like people. He didn't like them in large, loud doses. And I think that's a very important difference I learned from your book. The way you say it in the book is you say, it's not that one's pro-social and one's antisocial, it's that they're differently social. So, explain.
27:01 Speaker 01 Well, I think you just explained it beautifully.
27:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, people do.
27:09 Speaker 01 I've had the same experience that you just recounted of somebody assuming that they're not an introvert because they actually like people.
27:20 Speaker 01 And yeah, it has much more to do with a different form of socializing. And it comes back to what we were saying at the beginning about introverts preferring situations that are less over-stimulating. So therefore, you would usually rather go have a glass of wine with a close friend as opposed to being in a loud party full of strangers where not only is it loud, but you're also decoding lots of social signals all at once, which is in and of itself an over-stimulating thing to do. So that's a really important one for understanding oneself and the people around you because, you know, especially for parents or whoever it is, you can look at a child who doesn't
28:05 Speaker 01 love to hang out with a big group of kids after school and think, oh, my gosh, there's something wrong with this child. They don't like the other kids in their school, or the other kids don't like them. And that might be a complete misreading of what's happening.
28:22 Speaker 01 I'm actually thinking here of a friend of mine who I interviewed for the book, who she herself is a really, really strong extrovert, hyper extroverted person. And she had a more introverted daughter. And her daughter had lots of friends at school, was very happy. But after school, when the moms would come to pick up, her daughter would be off by herself shooting baskets at the basketball court while all the other girls were in a big gaggle together. And my friend for a while was really distraught about this. She thought there was something deeply wrong.
29:04 Speaker 01 And it was only once she understood about introversion, extroversion, and started having frank and open discussions with her daughter about what her daughter was actually feeling. That was when she realized it was okay. But she said until then, doing pickup was incredibly painful for her. So it was only once she understood the interior experience, what her daughter was feeling and not feeling, that her mom had been kind of misattributing to her, that she started feeling okay.
29:34 Speaker 00 And I'm curious what you think about intimacy. So a group of, I always think about a beer ad. There's a group of guys in a bar, they're watching a sports game together, there's five or six of them. It's not three or four, it's a crowd. And everybody's loud, the place is loud. It could be, maybe beer is only marketed to extroverts. But that kind of scene is, I'll pick up your cudgel for a minute. There's something superficial about it. It can be great fun, and people might insult each other across the table because they're
30:19 Speaker 00 rooting for different teams, or make jokes about their personality traits that they've been making fun of for the last 10 years as old friends. And ribbing each other would be the verb. And contrast that, so the friend I was talking about doesn't like that, I don't think. What he likes is a one-on-one conversation, right? And a one-on-one conversation...
30:45 Speaker 00 You can banter and there can be chit chat and there can be ribbing. But in general, it has a potential for intimacy, for going deeper, for forming a more profound connection with the other person that you can't have in a group, almost by definition. And I want to just see how the categories we've been talking about overlay those two differences, if at all. So the big group, some people are comfortable, they're not because they like the banter and the noise and the stimulus, but because they don't like intimacy. It is threatening to them.
31:28 Speaker 00 It is frightening. It's not, it's sort of the opposite of being shy, right? These are people who are, you see them in this setting in the sports bar and they're loud and interacting and there's nothing shy about them. But perhaps they are afraid of intimacy. And the flip side of that are the two people talking in the corner booth, not watching the game, and having a different kind of connection. Is that an introvert extrovert thing? What is, what does, does intimacy and that kind of human connection that comes from that, part of this distinction?
32:13 Speaker 01 You know, that's a tricky one. I don't know that that's introversion extroversion per se. And I'm glad you're asking the question to give me the chance to make the broader point that while on the one hand, I do believe introversion extroversion are the north and south of human temperament, you know, that they're incredibly profound in terms of how they shape the way we show up in the world. That's true on the one hand. And on the other hand, we're human beings and we're incredibly complicated. And so we can't reduce everything to these two, albeit gigantic and profound categories. So having said that.
32:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think the way in which we seek intimacy is its own category. And for introverts who are looking for the less stimulating form of socializing, that is going to have a way of honing their skill at a more intimate style of socializing. So they're probably going to get better at it over time, but I don't know that it comes from the seeking of intimacy per se, if you see what I'm saying.
33:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, I don't know. I just, I'd never thought about it. I, I, I've mentioned it before on the program, you know, in the course of my life, it's embarrassing. I'm 71 years old. I've had only a handful of conversations that, in the middle of them and afterwards, were exhilarating because of a connection I made. And I'm not talking about with friends and loved ones, or my wife, or children, or, you know, I'm not talking my kids, my, my parents. I'm talking about an encounter with someone I'm not close to. It could be a total stranger. It could be somebody who, who
34:06 Speaker 00 makes a confession unexpectedly and is desperate to make a connection, either because they're under duress, or, um, trauma of some kind, the aftermath of trauma. And those encounters are unforgettable for me. I don't know whether, there was a time in my life I would have run away from it. I would have said, "Too much. I, I can't handle this." Um, you know, be the, the same thing would be true, you know, going to, visiting someone in the hospital, or going to a funeral. When I was younger, I found them very difficult. They were too, I ran away from them. Uh, maybe this is just aging.
34:46 Speaker 00 And now I find them very powerful. I, they, they force me to confront things I want to confront, rather than things I want to run away from. And I, I, I agree with you. I don't think this is a introversion, extroversion thing, but there might be something there.
35:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, and you know, there's also, of course, a huge gender component. I have two boys, two teenage boys, and you know, I always joke with them about how the way they socialize with their friends is just so completely different from the way I socialize with my friends, you know, that they and their friends, they hang out together all the time, but they know so little about details of each other's lives that to me would be like, of course you would know that. And my older son has a girlfriend and I often joke with them that I have to get all the social drama from his girlfriend, like she'll come over and I'll know more about what's going on after seven minutes of sitting down and chatting with her than I had heard all year.
35:48 Speaker 00 Yeah.
35:49 Speaker 01 Many different factors.
35:51 Speaker 00 Living in Jerusalem, we get a lot of visitors. People are passing through, making a trip, often old friends, we haven't seen maybe in a year, but it might be, haven't seen in five years or 10 years. And my wife will, I'll come back from a coffee with one of these folks and my wife will say, well, what's happening with their kids? And I'll say, I have no idea.
36:14 Speaker 01 Exactly.
36:15 Speaker 00 We didn't talk about that. And usually that's maybe the first thing that she would talk about if it was the woman equivalent of that meeting. And that's just, I mean, that's just a fascinating thing, that difference. But I don't think it has anything to do with introversion and extroversion, but there is a, there is a difference between men and women on this, I think.
36:43 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, absolutely.
36:46 Speaker 00 So you said people are complicated. Obviously, there are people at the extremes of these personality traits. Do you have any feel for what proportion of us are just a mix or more, you know, just? Not identifiably one or the other?
37:03 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. And I wondered about that because you said you weren't sure kind of where you fit in. So there's a term that psychologists have coined called ambivert, which is for people who really feel they're kind of in the middle of this whole thing. And I don't know, I haven't seen really good data on how many people are ambiverts, especially because the word can be so messy. So some people feel they're kind of almost always a mix. Some people will call themselves an ambivert because they're very introverted in situation A, but very extroverted in situation B. And I'm not sure that's actually true ambiversion as opposed to
37:45 Speaker 01 maybe an introvert who's like super engaged when they get into situation B because it's their favorite topic or something like that. So I don't have good data, but I will say plenty, a lot of people will raise their hands when you give them that option of being an ambivert.
38:01 Speaker 00 This question of where you get your energy, outside of that, and obviously there are introverts can handle, some introverts can easily handle a social gathering, but maybe not two in a row on lunch and dinner. And extroverts can can go off with a close friend and talk quietly in a corner. Do we have an easy way to self diagnose ourselves other than that? If I wanted to think about this for my own person, you know, I said, I don't know which I am
38:44 Speaker 00 because I've never taken a Myers-Briggs personality test, which is purports to try to identify these things, among others, a few other traits. How do I, how would I, how should I think about this?
38:57 Speaker 01 Well, I gave you at the beginning the rubric of how do you feel when you're at that party with the people who you truly like? And I think that's a good question to ask yourself. But another question you can ask is, if you imagine that you have a weekend or a week where you truly have no social or professional obligations of any kind, how would you choose to spend that time? How many people would be in the picture? How loud or quiet a scene would it be? That question is very helpful for people, because especially for introverts who have all their lives been training themselves to operate in a more extroverted way, to
39:42 Speaker 01 the point where they sometimes lose touch with what their true preferences are. But if you suddenly imagine total freedom, how do you feel that freedom? That can be very telling.
39:54 Speaker 00 But isn't part of that just, you know, what else I've been doing lately? So, and you're asking me, by the way, by myself, not with my wife, say, for example, right? What's the ideal vacation if I'm off alone? Or am I taking my wife with me?
40:09 Speaker 01 Oh, I mean, you have to kind of adapt this question to your own life, I would say. But yeah, I mean, if you would choose to be mostly in the company of your wife, let's say, as opposed to, hey, let's go and have all our friends over for dinner. Let's go take a big group vacation. Those choices that you instinctively make can tell you a lot about what your preferences are. And I do take your point that a lot of it has to do with, well, what were you just overloaded on the week before? And what are you just doing as a reaction to that overload? So you can extend it out. Imagine that you've
40:50 Speaker 01 got a year. Imagine that you're about to retire. How do you want to fill that time for real?
40:58 Speaker 00 There's a really interesting part in the beginning of your book, which is just fascinating to me, about the evolution of self-help books in America.
41:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:13 Speaker 00 And I don't remember if you mentioned it or not, but Benjamin Franklin was probably the first, one of the earlier self-help people. There was a couple before him who were religious folks, I think. But Benjamin Franklin was, in his writings, tried to tell people the road to virtue and how to be a better person, sometimes how to be a more productive person, but also how to be a good person. And that got replaced, I think you say it comes in the 1920s, with books that emphasized how to give yourself a better personality, which
41:53 Speaker 00 is an insane transition to start with, because on the surface, they're not just different, they're almost orthogonal or opposite. You go from, how do I serve my fellow human beings or my deity, if you're a religious person, to how do I make myself really fantastic? And it's kind of a shocking thing, and I don't think, I'm going to put a footnote to this in a minute, but I'll let you elaborate on it. So I think that's a really fascinating insight. It's still here. All right, we haven't changed. We're not a lot of books about how to be virtuous.
42:38 Speaker 01 It's true. And when I came across that research, to me, the most shocking part was that it had ever been different. I found that fascinating. So you're talking about research by a guy named Warren Sussman, and he literally, like, he compared the self-help books of the 19th century with those of the 20th century. And counted the words and counted the
43:06 Speaker 01 the attributes that they were trying to teach the reader. Yeah, in the in the 19th century, the books were trying to teach the reader how to have integrity, how to have character, how to be resolute. And then, all of a sudden, in the 20th century, it changed to how can you be magnetic? How can you be charismatic? How can you be dominant? And cultural historians attribute this shift. It's not just the self-help books. It's an entire culture that shifted from one, what they call the culture of character in the 19th century, to the culture of personality in the 20th century. And this happened because
43:50 Speaker 01 in the 19th century and before that, we had lived in small, more tribal communities alongside people we had known all our lives. And people would come to know who you really were and could they rely on you? You know, were you a stand-up person?
44:08 Speaker 01 But then, all of a sudden, in the 20th century, people start leaving those small communities. They're moving out to the city. They now have to make their living not through agriculture, but through sales effectively. And so it starts becoming really important. How do you show up at a job interview? Do you seem very likable? Are you charismatic? Can you make that sale? And around that same time was when we had the growth of cinema. So at the very same time that people are showing up thinking, okay, how do I do my best at a job interview? On the weekends, they're going and seeing larger-than-life images of movie stars who are emblems of being likable and charismatic.
44:53 Speaker 01 So everything became focused on that. And as you say, we were pretty much still living in that world today. When Quiet first came out, which was 2012, I had been thinking briefly that the age of tech was giving us a bit of a reprieve from that because it seemed as if You could go online and it was a place where you could interact with people without having to be quite so presentational. But that was before everything became video.
45:27 Speaker 00 Yeah.
45:28 Speaker 01 And I would say now with the age of video and social media and all the rest, we're right back with the culture of personality on steroids.
45:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think, I don't know if I wrote this as my own note or whether I got it from your book, but this idea that you're a brand and you have to always be selling. And your success in life comes from convincing other people to buy what you have, whether it's your talents in a job or your skills, attractiveness as a romantic partner. And that is the dominant culture of our world. It's certainly the dominant culture of most MBA programs. You pick on Harvard, but that's easy in its day. And I suspect it hasn't changed much.
46:17 Speaker 00 You know, it's one of the funny things about living in a culture as a non-native speaker. So when Israelis speak to me in English, I'm getting a very warped impression of their personalities often because their English is something like my Hebrew. It's halting sometimes, or it's, they're very quiet because they don't want to expose the fact that their English is not very good. And then I see them interacting with another Israeli and I think, oh my gosh, who is this person? This is a totally different human being. And this idea that you should have a particular kind of, I'll use outgoing,
47:01 Speaker 00 extroverted personality to make a good first impression and then succeed is very, I think, very much in our culture and hasn't changed much. I'm not sure it will change.
47:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, I think that's right. And at the same time, you know, one of the things that I do in the book is show or give examples and show all the different people who contribute so much to the culture, not despite having quiet personalities, but really because of those quiet personalities. And I think that's really important to understand, that there is a channel for using your talents and your predilections as a quiet person, and really making them sing. And, you know, I was just talking about technology. You look at the world of technology, so many of the people who have become leaders in tech
47:58 Speaker 01 are people who were just kids who loved technology, became, gained incredible expertise at it, then build networks through shared passions with other people who had the same expertise, and they eventually like grow up into leadership positions through that kind of a process. And you see that in every field.
48:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, something interesting for me about performing. You talk about a Harvard psych professor who's a brilliant performer onstage as a teacher, a lecturer, I would call it, but also is an introvert, it turns out. And he's performing, not just in the sense that he's entertaining his students, but he's putting on a personality that isn't his preferred, whatever you want to call it, his essence.
48:53 Speaker 00 And I just, you know, as you point out in the book, introverts can up their energy level in a social setting, even what makes them uncomfortable. You write very eloquently about your own ability to overcome your fear of public speaking and being an effective presenter. But it's just interesting to me how much emphasis people put on
49:15 Speaker 00 Charisma in those settings. And yet, how misleading he can be. Just to pick an example, and it's a bit of an unfair one. But, you know, Steve Jobs is a brilliant performer, was a brilliant performer. And his, his Apple presentations were spectacular. Tim Cook is not a brilliant performer. Tim Cook, his successor, is, I assume, something of an introvert. And, you know, you can debate. And people make lots of silly claims about Apple's performance since then, whether it's good or bad. I'm not going to weigh in on that because it's not relevant for what we're talking about.
49:56 Speaker 00 But what I think is relevant is that when you see Tim Cook on stage, you just assume he's not going to be a good CEO because he's not this flamboyant superstar. And it is easy to overvalue and overrate those charismatic folks. And I say that as someone who likes to perform as a speaker. I love to be, I'm not a quiet, calm speaker. In fact, you know, people who come see me in a public talk will say, you know, who's that guy? You know, the host of Econ Talk, he's so, he's quiet. And I tell them I have to, I have to put my quiet hat on when I'm the host because I have that other side and I try to not use it.
50:41 Speaker 00 I do occasionally, but in general, I don't. Anyway, it's a fascinating question of how leadership is often correlated, perhaps mistakenly, with charisma.
50:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, people have that assumption. In fact, as you were saying this, I was thinking of a friend of mine who is in private equity. And one of the things he has to do is go and evaluate early-stage companies. And the CEOs are making presentations. And he says he's always amazed by the extent to which his colleagues will be swayed by somebody who's a razzle-dazzle presenter. You know, they're an amazing presenter, they just assume that the company is great. And he tries to really, he said, this is actually the same person who told me to go to Harvard Business School, which he called the spiritual capital of extroversion.
51:38 Speaker 01 And he felt that going to HBS helped him disaggregate being a great presenter from actually having the solid fundamentals. So I do think that's an important thing. But I would also say that at the same time that we absolutely have a bias that the person who's a great presenter will have an edge as a CEO. We do have many examples of CEOs like the Tim Cook who don't fit that model. And data showing that those CEOs will deliver results that are as good as or better than in some cases, those of a more extroverted CEO. So I do want to emphasize there is another channel there.
52:23 Speaker 01 I do think that as human beings, again, because we're such social creatures, we are unconsciously picking up on signals, thousands of different signals from the people around us in ways that we're not even aware of. And so we're not only picking up on the signals of charisma and presentation style, we're also picking up on signals of is this person trustworthy? Does this person know what they're doing? And therefore, the leader who is trustworthy and knows what they're doing and has a more introverted style, they have a channel to walk that can be incredibly successful.
53:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, I don't want to downplay the importance of, say, communication. I think leadership often involves communication and communicating in ways that are entertaining or eloquent matter. It's not irrelevant. But when I, the thing I often think about in leadership as important is decision making. And decision making is not about snap judgments. It's about quiet judgments. It's about contemplation. And, you know, I often, I'm sure it drives my colleagues crazy, but I'll often say, I'm going to sleep on that. And of course, some of our best thinking takes place while we're asleep. Our brain does things that...
53:49 Speaker 00 That we don't control, as you point out. And I don't always make the same decision in the morning, but I often do. That it was my snap judgment, but I feel much better about it, having slept on it. And I don't know if that's a little, you know, a little taste of intro, a little way of getting a taste of introversion. I do want to just add.
54:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, can I just add to that? That, yeah, you know, that insight that you just made is making me think of an interview I did with General Stanley McChrystal, who defines himself as an introvert. And he talks about, partly because of being an introvert, when it was time to make decisions, important decisions in the field. He said, despite there being a culture of needing to make those decisions incredibly quickly, he would always try to go off by himself to think about what he really thought was right. And only then would he have the courage of his convictions to come back and act on that decision. And that's a very introverted way of doing things.
54:55 Speaker 00 You don't have to go overnight, of course. You can go away for five minutes. You could just say, let me chew on that, come back in five minutes and tell me why I'm wrong. I'm happy to hear why I'm wrong. In fact, I desperately want to hear why I'm wrong, because if I make a mistake, I don't, I'd rather not. I'd rather avoid that. So it's a very interesting, it's a very interesting question. So this book came out in 2012. There were some subsidiary pieces, books that came out. We're not, we're not going to talk about them, but there's, there are a lot of practical things in this book about how to cope with your introversion, or how to overcome some
55:39 Speaker 00 of the challenges that arise when you are a, when you're swimming against the cultural stream, as many introverts do. But I'm curious how this book changed your life, because I'm sure it did. It was, it did make a very large splash. I'm sure writing it. Helped you think about yourself in many ways, but I'm also curious about the last 13, 14 now years of having written a book like this. People must tell you things that the book did for them. They must sometimes argue with you, whether they disagree. Talk about that whole experience.
56:20 Speaker 01 Oh, my gosh, yeah. It's been quite the journey.
56:26 Speaker 01 You know, there's so much to say. I guess the first thing that happened, you know, the great irony is I wrote this book at the same time I gave a TED Talk about it that went very viral. And as a result, I ever since have been asked to come and speak all over the world at companies and schools and organizations about how to harness the talents of the introverted half of the population. And so this is a huge irony because as you alluded to, I used to be incredibly afraid of public speaking. And when I gave that TED Talk, it was by far the hardest thing I have ever done or
57:06 Speaker 01 will ever do in my life because at the time I was still completely terrified of the stage. But I did learn over time and maybe we can talk separately about how to overcome any fear because I now know and it's really doable. But I, so I did overcome that. So I have spent the last 13 years traveling the world and speaking. So that alone has been kind of crazy, never what I would, what I would have imagined for myself. Incredibly gratifying to see how many companies and organizations are receptive to these ideas and actually eager to implement them because why wouldn't you be if you have half
57:47 Speaker 01 your workforce who you're probably wasting to some degree their talents and energies? Why wouldn't you want to try to fix that? So that's incredibly cool. The other thing that you also alluded to that is amazing is I now attend a lot of conferences, right? As a speaker or just to see what's going on.
58:12 Speaker 01 And especially when I attend a conference and I've given a talk at the beginning of it about introversion, I will then walk around the whole rest of the conference, I never have to deal with small talk again because everybody comes up to me and tells me their stories. And a lot of times, those stories have to do with introversion, but not always. I think there's just something about if you're out there on stage talking about any topic that has to do with psychology or about being vulnerable, other people will then feel safe to come and tell you what's going on for them. And that's just incredibly
58:57 Speaker 01 moving and gratifying to be able to connect with people on that kind of a level instantly without having to wade through any small talk first. We're just like right in the deep stuff right away.
59:09 Speaker 00 So I was, I'll let you give your pointers, but I'll tell a story first about my own issues on this. I remember, I think I've told my audience that when I was in seventh grade, I was in Midsummer Night's Dream. I played Bottom and Pyramidist, same character, which was easy for me. I had no, it was easy. And then in eighth grade, I was Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. I sang, I had memorized a zillion lines. I was never nervous. And I thought, well, this is a great thing. I'm never have to worry about this. And then somewhere in high school, I think it was the 10th grade, I had to recite a poem. The
59:50 Speaker 00 poem was "O Lac" by, I think, Lemaertine, if I remember correctly. And I got up there and feeling very confident. And as I'm standing there, I realized that my legs are shaking violently.
1:00:05 Speaker 00 And I have this, I have two impulses at the same time, neither which work at the same time. One is to look down and see whether anybody else could see them, which is a bad thing because it calls attention to the problem. But the second thing was to say to my legs, "Stop." Obviously, if your legs are shaking, you should just stop shaking them. It's not helpful, but I couldn't stop them. And that made me afraid of public speaking for some, for some time. It doesn't scare me anymore. I somehow got over it. And the, you know, the standard argument which you reference in your book is to imagine the
1:00:46 Speaker 00 audience in its underwear, which does not help at all for me, never has. But I'm, so tell us some of the things that helped you.
1:00:55 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. Well, the key, and this applies to any fear, not just the fear of public speaking, is the miracle of desensitization, which means that you can desensitize yourself to something you're afraid of by exposing yourself to it in very small, manageable doses. So you can't start off by giving a TED Talk. You want to start off like exactly the opposite. I went to a seminar for people with public speaking anxiety. And on the first day, all we had, I think I wrote about this in the book, all we had to do was stand up and say our name, and then sit back down, and we were finished. And that was the victory
1:01:36 Speaker 01 for the day. And then you'd come back the next week, and the exercise would just be ever so slightly more challenging. You know, like, stand up and answer some questions about where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? Really easy stuff. Sit back down, you're finished. And you do that little by little by little, and you're basically retraining your brain. If you're afraid of public speaking, or snakes, or anything, what's happening is you're, the amygdala in your brain is responding as if this event is just as threatening as a saber-toothed tiger. And when you have these small, repeated experiences again and again, you're, you're teaching your brain that it's not actually
1:02:18 Speaker 01 a saber-toothed tiger, and it's actually something pretty manageable. So the butterflies don't go away 100%, but like, they can go away up to 97, 98%, which is pretty good.
1:02:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, I would never want them to-
1:02:34 Speaker 01 It's almost miraculous.
1:02:36 Speaker 00 I wouldn't want them to go well to 100. I'm still nervous before any Econ Talk interview, your guest number 1,030-something. I don't know what the count is lately, but I have a modest amount of anxiety before every episode, even though I have a large amount of data that says it's going to be okay. It's not a rational, can't talk yourself out of it is the, I think, the interesting, the interesting point. Just like you can't stop, tell your knees to quit shaking.
1:03:08 Speaker 01 Right. And that's interesting. Do you ever, like, does the anxiety ever outweigh the pleasure of doing it?
1:03:16 Speaker 00 With Econ Talk?
1:03:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, or other similar things.
1:03:22 Speaker 00 No. You know, sometimes, I always, I always enjoy it. And it's interesting that that's not enough to help me not worry about it. I actually kind of think it's probably okay to worry about it. You know, I've told the story in here before of Bill Russell, the Boston Celtics, maybe the greatest basketball player of all time. He's, you know, somewhat forgotten now, but he was an extraordinary performer. And supposedly, he threw up before every game. Maybe it's only every playoff game, but you know, he had nothing to be worried about. So, but I think for him, if you had told him, "I've got a trick for you," that you won't have that level of anxiety, he would say, "I don't want to know that trick
1:04:07 Speaker 00 because I need that to pump myself up." So I think I'd be worried if I went to give a speech and I didn't have some unease. You know, sometimes the unease is about the content. It's not about the, the performance.
1:04:25 Speaker 01 Just the fact of being looked at?
1:04:26 Speaker 00 No, it's not. I'm saying it's not that.
1:04:29 Speaker 01 Right, no, I understand.
1:04:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's small. That's, I don't mind that at all. It's that, what if they don't think I'm smart? What if they think I'm an idiot? What if they don't understand what I'm talking about? And afterwards, they come up to me and say, "What was that?" That's what they, I think that's the anxiety. But it's all tied together, of course, and it's, you know. Like as you.
1:04:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it has and it has to be at the right levels. Like the the level of anxiety I used to experience was not performance enhancing. It was detracting.
1:04:58 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:04:58 Speaker 01 And so like, if you're listening to this, you know, excuse me, which category you're in.
1:05:03 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:05:03 Speaker 01 So if you're in the in the place where it's detracting, I would say like, sign up for your local Toastmasters. Because wherever you are in the world, there is a local Toastmasters near you. And they're full of people who
1:05:19 Speaker 01 usually start out kind of terrified of public speaking, and that's why they're there. So it's a place where you can practice, where the stakes are really low. Doesn't matter if you screw up.
1:05:30 Speaker 01 And people will be supportive.
1:05:33 Speaker 00 There are many things in the book. Let's close with this. There's many things in the book that
1:05:39 Speaker 00 you, I would call them suggestions, advice, things to help people cope with their personality that they've been pretty much given.
1:05:48 Speaker 00 Do you think this changes over time? But either because of life experiences or working at it? So are is your, do you feel that that your personality is relatively fixed? And what we're talking about here are just ways of coping with it? Or do you think you've actually molded yourself in a way that is that's a little different than, say, you were before you wrote the book? Or even 12 years ago, 13 years ago?
1:06:19 Speaker 01 No, I think that for most people, your underlying preferences and traits stay the same, more or less. But we all have so many new experiences all the time and acquire new skills, which is what we were just talking about a minute ago. If we're talking about public speaking, that's acquiring a new skill. And it's that's a new skill that changes your life in profound ways. But I don't feel that my underlying self is different or my underlying preferences. Like, it's still the case for me that, excuse me, my favorite day is one where I'm hanging out with my family, maybe a close friend or two.
1:07:04 Speaker 01 I'm in a cafe with my laptop. I'm playing tennis. You know, it's a pretty, it's a pretty quiet day.
1:07:12 Speaker 01 And I believe that will always be my favorite day, even though I can go out and make speeches on the next Tuesday.
1:07:20 Speaker 00 My guest today has been Susan Cain. Her book is Quiet. Susan, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.
1:07:26 Speaker 01 Thank you so much for having me, Russ. Always.
1:07:36 Speaker 00 This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to econTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.
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