Episode Details

What do we actually mean when we say we believe people can change?

The controversy surrounding the canceled John Galliano exhibition at the Met sent me down a rabbit hole—not because I think Galliano is owed a museum retrospective, and certainly not because addiction erases the harm someone causes.

It doesn’t.

But after years working in psychiatry and addiction—and after eight years of sobriety myself—I can't listen to this conversation without noticing what seems to be missing from it: addiction, impairment, recovery, accountability, rehabilitation, and the possibility of genuine human change.

Galliano's antisemitic and racist remarks were horrific. He faced enormous consequences for them. But his collapse also happened during a period of severe alcohol and polysubstance dependence, blackouts, grief, chronic sleep deprivation, extraordinary professional pressure, and profound deterioration.

Context is not acquittal.

Understanding why someone behaved terribly is not the same thing as saying the behavior was acceptable.

So in this episode, I'm asking the harder questions.

What actually happens to judgment, memory, inhibition, and executive functioning during severe addiction and blackouts? Is the old idea that "drunk words are sober thoughts" even neurologically accurate? How much should impairment matter when we're talking about responsibility?

And then there's Dior and LVMH.

Galliano was reportedly producing an extraordinary number of collections while his addiction and mental health deteriorated. So where does individual responsibility end and institutional responsibility begin? What happens when someone's pathology is incredibly profitable—right up until it becomes publicly unacceptable?

But the question I keep coming back to is even bigger:

If someone's deterioration counts as evidence that they changed for the worse, shouldn't years of sustained behavioral change at least count as evidence that they may have changed for the better?

Galliano has now spent years sober, acknowledged the harm he caused, educated himself, expressed remorse, and publicly accepted that atonement does not entitle him to institutional celebration.

That doesn't mean anyone owes him forgiveness. It doesn't mean the Met owed him an exhibition. And it doesn't erase what happened.

But if nothing a person does after their worst moment can ever meaningfully alter how we understand them, then what exactly do we mean when we tell people to get help, take responsibility, recover, make amends, and change?

Because recovery cannot simply be a lifetime probation sentence in which the sickest version of you remains the only version of you society considers real.

This episode gets into John Galliano, the Met controversy, addiction and the brain, blackouts, Dior and LVMH, institutional responsibility, accountability without absolution, forgiveness, rehabilitation, and what redemption might actually look like.

And ultimately, this isn't really an episode about whether John Galliano is a good person or a bad person.

It's about something much more uncomfortable:

Do we actually believe human beings are capable of change?

Because if we believe people can deteriorate, intellectual consistency requires us to leave room for the possibility that they can recover, too.