Acclaimed journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis joins Kelly to talk about his new book “You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation.” 

This book looks at all different kinds of change stories – most of which don’t fit neatly into a box. 

“I’m trying to be open-minded and at the same time, you know, for political identity changers, for example, I wish they would be a little bit more introspective. Most political identity changers, unlike other identity changers, tend to say, ‘I actually didn’t change.’ So, most people who change their identity are like, ‘I changed, you need to believe me, I need your buy-in.’ Political identity changers tend to say, ‘I didn’t change at all. I’m a bastion of intellectual consistency. Everyone else around me changed.’ When, in reality, there’s often emotional stuff going on under there, people in their tribe or group are mad at them. There are interpersonal relationships that are often underneath this as we’re trying to project how we’re changing.” 

I think it’s fair to say that you’re not sure people really can change their core personality. 

“In recent years, there’s been a lot of books about how you can change your personality, right? For everyone out there, it’s an interesting question. And I’m not convinced we can actually change our personalities all that much. I think we can tweak around the edges and I think we can have powerful experiences. I talked to many people who do have those experiences – whether it’s psychedelics or just walking in the forest. We can have powerful complicated mystical experiences that shift our perspective and that open us up and in some ways if we think that’s personality. But even people who claim these big transformative experiences – people who know them – will often say yeah, their core personality is still kind of the same.” 

I was probably most moved by the chapter about prisoners who are trying to get paroled. 

“So, some of these prisoners can be in groups and therapy all day long if you choose to. And some of these men did, and they were essentially spending a decade working on themselves in, in deep and profound ways. Some of these men were absolutely transformed. For others, it was a little less clear. And then others didn’t even try. But how we project and interpret whether someone has changed or not, it’s going to be based on body language. It’s going to be based on the way I talk. It’s going to be based on the way you see yourself in me at all or whether I’m part of your group. And the guys themselves were like, ‘Yeah, I mean, I did the work, but I only changed because my family believed I could. Because my mom visited me in 1980 and I looked across the table and I saw her and everything shifted after that moment.’ They were talking about changes much more communal than I think we like to. You know, that is a life-or-death situation, but we can extend that outward to what I like to call the parole board of the internet where all of us are needing to, if we do something bad, convince other people that we’re sincere, that we’ve transformed, that we’ve changed. And I’m fascinated by the ways that we choose to judge those transformations. And a lot of times it really doesn’t make sense. Like we’re much more forgiving of people who are like us, who are part of our political group than we are of other people. We’re parsing apologies in a really interesting way. We’re criticizing the timing. All of this is fair game, but it was something I found really interesting and wanted to explore in the book.” 

Photo Credit: James Emmerman.