Susan Cain: Why Introverts Make Great Leaders, Staying Human in the AI Age and the Bittersweet Life

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:01)
Hi, everyone. I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Wealth Fund. And today, I'm in really good company with Susan Cain. Now, Susan is the author who gave the world of introverts a voice because her book Quiet spent eight years on the bestseller list, and her TED Talk has been watched by millions and millions of people.
She changed how millions of us think about personality, leadership and creativity, and Susan, warm welcome.

**Susan Cain** (0:27)
Thank you so much, Nicolai. It is such a pleasure to be here with you.

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:32)
Susan, I'd love to start with AI because the world is changing. Is it changing the relationship between introverts and extroverts?

**Susan Cain** (0:40)
It's very interesting with these technologies in general.
I often feel that they often at the beginning offer more promise for introverts to have multiple ways of communicating beyond the conventional ones of being always in person, always on, always activated. Then somehow they end up often becoming additional platforms for self-presentation because that's so prevalent in our culture. Actually with AI, I'm adopting a bit of a wait and see attitude.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:14)
Yeah. There is a new expression we share here, which is the high agency people, the people who really leverage the technology to make them even louder. I'm just wondering whether that's one of those things which amplifies the extroverts even more. What do you think?

**Susan Cain** (1:32)
Well, not necessarily. I mean, from the dawn of the Internet, there's actually been this kind of concept of the, people call it sometimes the online extrovert, the in-person, I'm sorry, yeah, online extrovert, in-person introvert.
Introverts are just as high agency as extroverts in terms of having goals that they're excited about, projects that they want to accomplish and being, having high agency in the service of those goals that they care about. And in fact, I would say what is singular about introverts or what distinguishes them is that they tend to focus on one or two or three goals in their lives. They tend to focus on people in their lives that they really care about. If they're committed to a given company or to leading a company, they're really, really, really committed. And so, they're high agency in that sense. And in that sense, being able to mobilize AI towards those highly directed goals can be incredibly amplifying and powerful.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:39)
So who do you think are going to be more robot proof in the future?

**Susan Cain** (2:45)
I don't know that it's going to be introverts or extroverts are more robot proof. What I would say is that the most robot proof people are going to be the ones who care very deeply about maintaining human authenticity.
We as human beings, we are evolutionarily designed to pick up a thousand unconscious cues from the people around us. So we take in information from the people around us without even quite knowing that this is what we're doing, which is how we can often tell that somebody is speaking the truth versus telling us a lie. You know, you just get some kind of a sixth sense about that. So when we talk about introverts and extroverts, I don't know that there's a difference there. However, there's this category of person that I talk about a lot in my work. It's a category called the highly sensitive person, and it describes about 15 to 20% of the population. Many of these people are introverts, although some of them, a few of them are extroverts, who just like a lot of alone time. But anyway, highly sensitive people by their nature, react more to everything in their environments, both the positive and the negative. So they see a beautiful sunset or a beautiful spreadsheet or whatever it is, and they're very excited about it, and it's incredibly meaningful to them.
By the same token, when there's, let's say, a conflict or an upset in their personal life, they might feel that more acutely as well. Highly sensitive people care a lot about authenticity. Before authenticity was ever a word that people were using hundreds of times per day, this is the way highly sensitive people live and breathe. So for that category of people, I believe there's going to be a huge advantage if that's even the right word in the age of AI, because they are the ones who are going to be resistant to letting the machines take over their self-expression and their leadership and their means of connecting with people. And as we all know, that's going to be the big commodity in the next decade is actually being oneself and connecting human to human.