Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

On social media, in recovery meetings, through name-change petitions, deconversion blogs, and political conversion manifestos, we’ve been surrounded by stories of radical personal change. But what does it really mean to shed an old skin? Whose change narratives do we celebrate—and whose do we suspect are performance, reinvention as strategy, or even grift? Emerson College Professor Benoit Denizet-Lewis’s new book You’ve Changed offers a fresh and clarifying lens on how we arrived at this bewildering cultural moment marked by fractured truths, shifting identities, and a public dizzy in a world that seems to be changing too fast and not nearly enough.  Denizet-Lewis introduces us to an unforgettable array of people in flux—including psychedelic reality benders, sexual and gender transitioners, ideological shapeshifters, seemingly reformed murderers—as well as those working to engineer change: psychologists, neuroscientists, name-change specialists, even his own father, a breath and meditation teacher who once