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

Hi, everyone. I'm Nicola 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. Thank you so much, Nikolai. It is such a pleasure to be here with you. Susan, I'd love to start with AI because the world is changing. Is it changing the relationship between introverts and extroverts? It's very interesting with these technologies in general. I often feel that they're 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. And then somehow they end up often becoming, additional platforms for self presentation because that's so prevalent in our culture. So I I actually, with AI, I'm adopting a bit of a wait and see attitude. Yeah. There is a new expression, which I hear, which is the kind of the high agency people, the people who kinda really leverage the technology to make them even louder. And I'm just wondering whether that's one of those things, you know, which amplifies the extroverts even more. What do you think? 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. And 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, like, really, really, really committed. And so, 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 amplified and powerful. Mhmm. So who do you think are going to be more robot proof in the future? I don't know that that that it's gonna be introverts or extroverts or 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. And so we take in information from the people around us without …