The Power of Introverts (with Susan Cain)

- Welcome to Econ Talk Conversations for the Curious,

“part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.”

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalom College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links down the information related to today's conversation.

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- Today's January 13th, 2026 and my guest is author Susan Kane.

This is Susan's second appearance

on econtalk. She was last here in October of 2024 discussing her book "Bitter Sweet." 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 econtalk. - Thank you so much, Russ. It's great to be here in the huge fan.

“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?

Well, I had been living this topic all my life because I am an introvert in an extroverted world. And this is something I had been thinking about since I was four years old. 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. So I'd been thinking about it all my life, but I think it was really when I was a corporate lawyer for about a decade,

before I became a writer. And 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 in the last 10 years,

it's become pretty commonplace to talk about it. But at that point, the words introverted and extrovert were almost never used. - Yeah, it was, in that sense, I was, I think, an interesting book,

people learned a lot from, but I think it's 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 about,

maybe we'll talk about that later. - Yeah. - 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. - Yeah, so this is a question that we could spend the whole hour on if we wanted to.

“- And we might, because I think it's very confusing”

to many people when you go ahead. - 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 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, imagine that you're 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.

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.

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 without, but just to give you kind of 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 that the day-to-day stimulation, 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 and respond more to that stimulation so that 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 check out.

“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?

And 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.

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. - And I think there's a simple point to make that it's true of many, many aspects of the personality

and our nature, but for me, one of the power, the one of the powerful parts of your book and the public conversation that I observed with that before I read your book before we had this conversation.

And it sounds so tight, 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 by first thought is one

is that there's something wrong with them. - Two, I just need to explain them. This is the wrong way to be.

“You need to, 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. And he fired people the way he wanted to be fired. Check, check, get it over with.

Well, I don't want to hear all that fake emotion. You feel bad for me and just your 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, the 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. 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, people are different.

And you talk about a couple in the book, one of who's extroverted, one is introverted, and one of who 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? Well, why would you not enjoy a, it's a perfectly reasonable thought, but it shows a lack of understanding of the human condition?

- Yeah, and I don't know what it is about us humans that I think it makes it easier for us

to someone who's different from us. 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 is something I see with couples all the time. And in fact, I will say, for my husband it makes, my husband's much more extroverted than I am. We had had for years just this ongoing, I don't know if they were to squabble,

but when we're driving in the car along 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,

over stimulation, under stimulation. And we still squabble over the radio dial, but there's something about understanding it that makes the whole thing depersonalized. It's no, there's nothing fraud about it at that point.

It's just purely where do we compromise it out? - So I really like the title of the book.

“Was that hard to choose to remember that?”

Because when I asked you how you can't write the book, you immediately start 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 in something else, but you didn't. - Oh, so are you asking about the title or the subtitle? - The title. - Okay, one.

- Yeah, okay, and I'll tell you why I asked that question. So the title, 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 or 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, 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's stuck.

- And you know, when you said you were gonna start

with the social, the pop culture definition of introverts is extrovert. I actually think that the one you gave, which is where your energy from, is actually a subtle sophisticated version.

I think if you ask most people, they would say introverts are, excuse me, extroverts are outgoing and introverts are shy. That's the difference.

“And that's why it's shyness, which is can be quite charming,”

but it's often considered a handicap in the business world because 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 why 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 they're clear so we hand-bred by the fact that they aren't

this charismatic Tony Robbins figure, someone you also discussed in the book having attended one of his seminars. So just talk about that in general, just this talking part of how they interact

with these definitions. - Well, it's funny that you mentioned the term shyness 'cause you may have seen me scribbling something down in a minute ago and the word I wrote was shyness 'cause 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 for someone else that might be a job interview or going on a date or it could be some combination

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 first of all, in my book and in my work,

I'm talking both about introverted people and shy people, although you could be introverted without being shy and you could be shy without being introverted to the classic cases, Barbara 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 for 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.”

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, strong conscience. shyness is complicated though and it's also important

to understand, I mean, there's lots of situations 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 a situation 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. - Let's talk about solitude and contemplation,

which is also embodied in the title 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 cell phone

and social media. Part of your book is that I would call it a lawyer's brief. It's an attempt to make the case for the pluses of interversion, not just that 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. - Well, who, as he said, so 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. 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 and meditation. I think these were a response to the lack of solitude in our lives that everybody craves. Extraverts crave it also, we all need it. And I think we see this also in all our religious traditions,

you almost always see that the moment of profound revelation

for many of our religious figures, whether it's Moses or Jesus or Muhammad, Buddha, 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 that solitary peace is incredibly important.

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 original to us. So for example, the designer of 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. - And you talk about the obsession and the modern workplace and it's emphasized in our educational system of collaboration, of working groups,

the importance of working groups. So to course for an introvert, that can be unpleasant, alien and unproductive

and your critical of it in general.

“I think about, I think the power of the solitude”

and doing great work is crucial, the idea that I would, sometimes it's helped with a brain storm or share an idea, a one-on-one conversation can be very powerful, but the idea of all great ideas coming out of teams, say, is implausible to me.

But it is something of a modern idol. It seems to be something that the workplace in schools really push. What do you think of that? - No, 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. 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,

so Jeff Bezos or Bezos, I always forget how to say his name.

Okay, however we say his name, he apparently begins every meeting at Amazon by having the person who's called the meeting first right along memo, I think, like a three-page single-space memo,

outlining that which is gonna 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 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 kids myself. So I hadn't been in a school in a really long time at that point and 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 year since I had been a student,

“which is to say, I remember going to school”

was involving a lot of solitary effort where you would sit and think deeply and write a paper to your math or whatever. But now it is so much of school life, it's done in groups, you know, that really. It's apparently, all the desks are smushed 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. Yeah, that Amazon practice is kind of shocking.

I wonder if that's true for every meeting. 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

I want to tie it into something you're right about that I think

“it's really important. I was talking to someone about your book”

turns out I'm not the last person, not to have read it. He has read it to me, there were two of us. 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, because well, I don't like a big

crowded event where people are holding court and showing off, you know, I like socialize with one other person. I thought during introvert, hey, faculty. So you say in the way you write it, the book is there's a temptation to call extrovert's pro social and introverts anti-social.

And I have to, you know, reference my father who, you know, until I read

your book, I never, I always thought of him as an extrovert.

He was not an extrovert at all. He often had a a public persona of playing a clown, a gesture, 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.

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, um, uh, 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, I do a very important”

difference, uh, I learned from your book. The way you say it in the book, as you say, they're, it's not that they're one's pro social or one's anti-social. It's that they're differently social. So, explain. Well, I think you just explained it beautifully. Yeah, people do, I, I've had the same experience that you just

recounted of somebody assuming that they're not an introvert because they actually like people. 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, uh, decoding lots of social signals all at once, which is in and of itself

“and 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, you can look at a child who doesn't 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. I'm actually thinking here of a friend of mine who I interviewed for the book who

she herself is a really, really strong, hyper-extraverted 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, basketball court, well, 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 and it was only once she understood about introversion, extraversion 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 pick-up 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 mis attributing to her that she

started feeling okay. I'm curious what you think about intimacy. So a group of, I always think about

a beer red. 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 extraverts, but that kind of scene is, if I'll pick

and people might insult each other across the table because they're 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, you know, the verb and could trust 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, you can banter and there can be 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. 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 there,

“not because they like the banter and the noise and the stimulus, but because they don't like”

intimacy. It is threatening to them. It is, it's 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 extra

thing? What does intimacy and that kind of human connection that comes from that part of this distinction? 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 is the north and south of human temperament, 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. 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. Yeah, I don't know. I just

I never thought about it. I've mentioned before in 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 I were exhilarating because of a connection I made and I thought 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 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 makes a confession unexpectedly and

is desperate to make a connection either because they're under direct or 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 that too much, I can't handle this. You know, it would 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 two, I ran away from them. Maybe this is just aging. And now,

I find them very powerful. I, they, they forced me to confront things. I wanted to confront

rather than things I want to run away from. And I agree with you. I don't think this is an interversion extroversion thing, but there might be something there. Yeah. And, you know, there's also, of course, the heat gender component. I have two boys,

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, 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 than I had heard all year. So yeah, let me do different factors. Living in Jerusalem, we get a lot of visitors. People are passing through making a trip. I often old friends. We would have seen maybe a year, but it might be a haven't seen in five years, or 10 years. And my wife will, I'll come back from our 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."

Exactly. 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

“interversion and extroversion. But there is a difference from any women on this, I think.”

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So you said people were complicated. Obviously, there are people with extremes of these personality traits. Do you have any feel for what proportion of us are just a mix or more comp? You know, just not identifiably one of the other? 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, a called Ambevirt, 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 Ambevirt, 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

Ambevirt because they're very introverted in situation A, but very extroverted in situation B. And I'm not sure that's actually true. Ambevirt as opposed to maybe an introvert who's like super engaged when they get into situation B because if they're 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 Ambevirt. This question of where you get your energy.

Outside of that, and obviously their introverts can handle some genres can easily handle a social gathering, but maybe not too in a row on lunch and dinner. And and extroverts 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 because I've

never taken a Myers Briggs personality test, which is purport to try to identify these things

“among others a few other traits. How do I, how would I trust should I think about this?”

Well, I gave you at the beginning of 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 the point where they sometimes lose touch with what their two preferences are.

“But if you suddenly imagine total freedom, how do you feel that freedom that can be very telling?”

But is it part of that just, you know, it also I've been doing lately, so and you're asking me, by the way, for 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?

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 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 got a year. Imagine that you're about to retire. How do you

want to fill that time for real? There's a really interesting part of the beginning of your book which is as fascinating to me about the evolution of self-help books in America. Yeah, and

I don't remember if you mentioned it or not, but you know, Benjamin Franklin was probably the first

“one of the earlier self-help. 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 had to be a more productive person, but also had to be a good person. And that got replaced. I think he says comes in the 1920s with books that emphasized how to give yourself a better personality, which is an insane transition to start with. Because on the surface, they're not just different. They're almost orthogonal or opposite, right? You go from how do I

serve my fellow human beings or my deity if you're religious person too? How do I make myself really fantastic? It's kind of a shocking thing, and I don't think I'm going to put a foot into this

“event about letting you elaborate on it. So I think that's a really fascinating insight.”

It's still here. We haven't changed. We're not a lot of books about how to be virtuous. 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 Susman, and he literally, he sat and he compared the self-help books of the 19th century with those of the 20th century and counted the words and counted the attributes that they were trying to

teach the reader. 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 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, where you stand up person. 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 in around that same time was when we had the growth of cinema. So at the very same time that people were showing up thinking, 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. So everything became focused on that. And as you say, we're 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

quite so presentational. But that was before everything became video. 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. Yeah, I think I don't know if I wrote this as my own note or whether

“I got it for your book, but this idea that you're your 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. You know, it's one of the funny things about living in a culture as a non-native speaker. So when Israeli 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 god, who is this person? This is a totally different human being.

“And this idea that you should have a particular kind of out, I'll use outgoing, 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. Not sure will change. 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 are people who

were just kids who love technology, became gained incredible expertise at it,

then build networks through shared passions with other people at the same expertise. And they eventually grow up into leadership positions through that kind of a process. And you see that in every field. Yeah, something interesting for me about performing. You talk about a Harvard psych professor who's a brilliant performer on stage, just a teacher, a lecturer, I would call it, but also has it introverted 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 is in his preferred, where do we want to call it? His essence. And I just, you know, as you point out the book, introverts can up their energy level and a social setting, it makes them uncomfortable. You write up very eloquently about your own ability to overcome your fear of public speaking and being an effector presenter. It's just interesting to me how much emphasis people put on charisma in those

settings. And yet how misleading, you know, I just expect an example. It's a bit of an unfair one, but, you know, Steve Jobs is a brilliant performer. Was a brilliant performer in his his Apple presentations, respect,acular. Tim Cook is not a brilliant performer. Tim Cook is his successor. 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 it on that because it's not relevant for what we're talking about.

“But what I think is relevant is that when you see Tim Cook on stage, he's just assuming 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 to someone who likes to perform as a speaker.

public talk will say, you know, who's that guy? You know, the host of eCount Talk is so 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 probably do not use it. 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. Yeah, I mean, people have that assumption. In fact, as you're 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 razzled asshole, presenter. You know, they're an amazing presenter. They just assume that the company is great. And he tries to really, he's only, he said, this is actually the same person who told me to go to Harvard Business School, which he called this spiritual capital of extroversion. 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 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 more extroverted CEO. So I do want to emphasize there. There is another channel there. 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 interpreted style, they have a channel to walk that can be incredibly successful.

Yeah, I don't want to downplay the importance of psych communication. I think leadership often involves communication and communicating in ways that are entertaining or eloquent matter,

“it's not irrelevant. But when I think I often think about in leadership as important is”

decision-making and decision-making is not about snap judgments. It's about quiet judgments. This is about contemplation and, you know, I often, I'm sure it drives my colleagues crazy, but I often say, I'm going to sleep on that and, of course, over our best thinking takes place while we're asleep. Our brain does things 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 inter or a little way of getting a taste of interversion. I do want to just add, can I just add to that? That insight that you just made is making me think of an interview I did with General Stanley McCrystal 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. You don't have to go overnight. Of course, you go away for five minutes. You could just say, let me chew on that. Come back in five minutes to 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 him a steak,

I don't, I rather not. I'd rather avoid that. So it's a very interesting, it's a very interesting

and we're not, we're actually talking about them, but there's, there were a lot of practical things

“in this book about how to cope with your introversion or how to overcome some of the challenges”

that arise when you are a, we're just moving 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 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 with they disagree.

Talk about that whole experience. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's been quite the journey. You know, there's so much to say. I guess the first thing that happened, 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, 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 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. So I did overcome that. So I've spent the last 13 years

traveling the world and speaking. So that alone has been kind of crazy. Never what I would

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 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,

as a speaker, or just to see what's going on. 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 moving and gratifying to be able to connect with people on that kind of a level instantly without having to weed through any small talk first. We're just like right in the deep stuff right away. So I would let you give your pointers tell story first about my own issues on this. I remember

I think I've told my audience that when I was in 7th grade, I was in mid-Summer night stream. I played a bottom and pyramids same character, which was easy for me. I had no, it was easy. And then in 8th grade, I was Henry Higgins and my Fair Lady. I sang, I memorized the Zillion lines,

I was never nervous. And I thought, this is a great thing. I never have to worry about this.

“And then somewhere in the high school, I think it was the 10th grade. I had to recite a poem.”

The poem was O-Lock, L-A-C by I think Lemmer Teen, Farmer Correctly. And I got up there and feeling very confident. And as I'm standing there, I realized that my legs are shaking violently. And I have this, I have two impulses at the same time, neither rich 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,

It is not helpful, but it couldn't stop them. And that made me afraid of a public speaking for some time. It doesn't scare me anymore. I somehow got over it. And the standard argument which you referenced in your book is to imagine the 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.

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 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 do you grow up, where do 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 and your brain is responding as if this event is just as threatening as a saber-tooth tiger. And when you have these small repeated experiences again and again, you're teaching your brain that it's not actually a saber-tooth tiger and it's actually something pretty manageable. So the butterflies don't go away 100%, but they can go away up to 97, 88%,

which is pretty good. Yeah, it's almost miraculous. I would want them to go away out to 100. I'm still nervous before any come talk interview, your guest number 1,000 and 30 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. It is the, I think, the interesting point,”

just like you can't stop telling your knees just to quit shaking. Great. And that's interesting to you ever, like, just the anxiety ever outweigh the pleasure of doing it with the countau? Yeah, or other similar things.

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, someone forgot now, but he was an extraordinary performer. And supposedly, he threw up for 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 anxiety. He would say, I don't want to know that trick 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 performance. And just the fact of being looked at, you know, it's not, I'm saying it's not that.

But I know I understand. Yeah, that's small. That's, I don't mind that at all. It's that what if they don't take um, smart? What if they take um an idiot? What if they don't understand what I'm talking

“about? And after they come up to be and say, what was that? That's what the anxiety, I think that's”

saying anxiety, but it's all tied together, of course. And it's, you know, like, as you would have. And it has, and it has to be at the right levels. Like the level of anxiety, I used to experience was not performance enhancing. It was detracting. Yeah. And so, like, if you're listening to this, you know, excuse me, which category you're in. Yeah. So, um, if you're in the, in the place where it's detracting, I would take like sign up for your local toast masters, because wherever

you are in the world, there is a local toast masters near you. And there are full of people who usually start out kind of terrified of public speaking. And that's why they're there.

screw up. And people will be supportive. There are many things in the book. Let's close with this.

“There's many things in the book that you, our column suggestions, advice, things help people cope”

with their personality that they've been pretty much given. Do you think this changes over time

but either because of life experiences or working at it. So, or is your, do you feel that

the 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 altered 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? Um, you know, I think that for most people you're underlying preferences and”

traits stay the same 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 for talking about public speaking. That's acquiring a new skill and 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. I'm in a cafe with my laptop and playing tennis. You know, it's a pretty,

“it's a pretty quiet day and that I believe that will always be my favorite day, even though”

I can go out and make speeches on the next Tuesday. I guess that has been Susan Kane, her book is quiet. This is thanks for being part of eComptock. Thank you so much for having me

rest always. This is eComptock, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more eComptock,

go to eComptock.org where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for eComptock is Rich Guayette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.