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.

In this episode we discuss:

• How Helen defines “the great feminization” and why she thinks it explains contemporary “wokeness”

• What changes when institutions tip female—journalism, academia, law, nonprofits

• HR-ification, hostile-environment law, and why managers vs. judges should handle culture

• Agreeableness as a social virtue—and a professional liability in truth-seeking fields

• Innovation, risk tolerance, and the gendered vibes around tech, nuclear power, and exploration

• Whether “women in STEM” initiatives help, hurt, or just rebrand office politics

About the guest:
Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative and author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. Her new Compact essay is “The Great Feminization.”

Novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner returns to discuss his exceptionally timely new novel Amputation—a strange, exuberant, and ultra meta work set against a topic I’ve talked about a lot this year, the January LA wildfires. Bruce, an L.A. native and prominent literary figure in the city, explains how the book came together in less than two months, why he resists “political novels” even when writing inside a political moment, and how language (not legacy) keeps him making art.

We also talk about real-life figures who appear as characters (Stephen Colbert, Mayor Karen Bass, Debra Winger, and a Timothée Chalamet student double, among others), the surrealism of driving through miles of leveled neighborhoods, and the deranged comic-tragic chorus of the Nextdoor app. Bruce also reflects on being an L.A. “outsider who outsided his way inside,” why the book is opera, not noir, and what it means to keep walking the “narrow, burning road to the palace.”

Guest Bio:

Bruce Wagner is the author of fifteen novels, including the “cell phone” trilogy, The Marvel Universe, The Met Gala and Tales of Saints and Seekers, Roar: American Master, and now Amputation. A longtime Hollywood insider/outsider, he has written for film and television and is currently published by Arcade.