Does Your Personality Stink? There's Hope!

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2025

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week I interview journalist and author Olga Khazan about her new book on personality change, Me, But Better.

We talk about the Big Five traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion/introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—and how they play out in ordinary life rather than in personality quizzes. Olga explains what research actually shows about how much you can change, how anxiety and depression tie into neuroticism, and why introversion can quietly turn into isolation. We also discuss everyone's favorite personality expert, Carl Jung, the politics of "openness," what's happened to our social lives since the pandemic, and how the culture of "self-care" has blurred into hiding from the world.

Other threads include:
• The science behind gradual, behavioral change instead of "life hacks"
• How "fake it till you make it" can work without faking yourself entirely
• Gender differences in agreeableness and the social cost of being direct
• Why liberals often score higher on neuroticism—and what that might really mean
• The relationship between personality, motherhood, and the urge to optimize everything

Guest Bio:
Olga Khazan is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author, previously, of Weird. She is a two-time recipient of journalism fellowships from the International Reporting Project and the winner of the 2017 National Headliner Award for Magazine Online Writing.

Transcript

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0:00.0	There is a downside to being too open.
0:02.6	It's not like the more, the better.
0:05.8	Yeah.
0:06.3	So when you're open to too many new things, it's sort of like you can start to cross the line into delusions and psychosis.
0:15.9	So a lot of people who are extremely high in openness, you start to see kind of a personality that,
0:21.3	um, her mentality that doesn't really make sense anymore.
0:24.9	Welcome to the unspeak easy podcast, the podcast that used to be called the unspeakable.
0:36.5	It's now the unspeak easy. I am still your host, Megan Dowm. If you are like many people, you may have tried to improve your health, your appearance, any number of bad habits. But have you ever tried to improve your personality? My guest, Olga Hussein, who writes for The Atlantic, spent a year
0:56.6	doing just that in an attempt to be less anxious and neurotic. She decided to say yes to a bunch of
1:04.1	new experiences, testing the theory that acting as if, in her case, acting relaxed and happy,
1:10.6	can eventually make you that way.
1:12.6	Did it work?
1:13.6	She discusses that in her book,
1:15.6	Me But Better, The Science and Promise of Personality Change.
1:19.6	It is a very funny book, as well as being a deeply reported one.
1:23.6	This conversation is also quite funny, and I found it quite informative. So whether you
1:29.2	love your personality, hate it, or just think it might need tweaking in a few places,
1:34.5	I think you will appreciate this interview. I had a lot of fun. So here is Olga,
1:38.8	who's on. Olga who's on? Welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
1:50.4	I'm excited to have this conversation about your book. I have to say it was a lot of fun to read and very informative.
1:58.8	And, you know, it struck me while I was reading at that, we're
2:02.4	surrounded by invocations to improve our health, our appearance, like our productivity,
	...

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