Susan Cain: The glorious complexity of being human

VPM | By Katie Monteleone, Manoush Zomorodi, Katie Simon and Rachel Faulkner White

Published September 9, 2022 at 1:44 PM EDT

Updated June 1, 2023

Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour Episode We Contain Multitudes.

Words like introvert and extrovert help us make sense of the world, but one label can’t sum up a person. Susan Cain explores how we can embrace the nuances that give our lives meaning and beauty.

About Susan Cain

Susan Cain is a New York Times bestselling author. Her most recent book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, discusses the power of a bittersweet, even melancholic, outlook on life, and why for so long our culture has been unable to see its potential value.

She is also the author of Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverted Kids, and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can’t Stop Talking. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Her 2012 TED Talk, “The power of introverts,” it one of the most popular of all time at 30 million views.

Cain lives in New York with her family.

This segment of the TED Radio Hour was produced by Katie Monteleone and edited by Katie Simon and Rachel Faulkner. You can follow us on Facebook @TEDRadioHour and email us at [email protected].

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Katie Monteleone

Katie Monteleone is a producer for TED Radio Hour. She started out as an intern for the show in January 2019. After her internship, Monteleone began producing for Life Kit before returning to the TED Radio Hour team in October 2019 as a full-time producer.

For TED Radio Hour, she's produced sound-rich segments on a wide variety of subjects including TikTok star Alexis Nikole Nelson's adventures as a forager, archaeologist Alyssa Loorya's exploration of a 300-year-old farmhouse in Brooklyn and the 5,000 mile journey of a giant puppet named Amal.

Monteleone graduated from Colby College in 2018 where she studied theater and creative writing. In her free time, she loves to cook vegetarian food, listen to Broadway musical soundtracks and hang out with her dog Maple.

See stories by Katie Monteleone