Numlock Sunday: Olga Khazan on how to change your personality

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

My guest this week is The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan, who longtime subscribers to the Sunday edition might remember from our conversation about her 2020 book Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World.

Khazan is brilliant, and I am a huge fan of her work. She’s working on a book right now about the science of personality and her attempts to deliberately change her own personality, based off an article that she wrote for The Atlantic last year called “I Gave Myself Three Months to Change My Personality.”

It’s a great read, and not only are we going to get a book-length treatment on it somewhere down the line, but she’s also launched an excellent new newsletter where she dives into the topic of personality, how we understand the science of it, and how we can take deliberate steps to alter our own. We talked about her work today.

Khazan can be found at The Atlantic, and her book Weird is available everywhere and is really good.