You're listening to Ted Talk Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hu. What do icons of popular culture like Beyonce, Toy Story and Nike have in common? Well, today, speaker Chloe Valderas says the answer is the key to helping heal America during these divisive times. Valerie is the founder of a group called Theory of Enchantment, which is also the name for her framework for taking on painful topics with wisdom and compassion.

In her Ted 20-20 conversation with Ted's business curator, Corey Heijne, she shares her theory and how we can use it in our daily lives to help heal our social fabric.

So conflict is often rooted in long histories, deep belief systems and strong emotions, making divisions between people difficult to mend. But building a better future means we have to figure out how to have difficult conversations and still connect, heal and move forward. This is the very issue that Chloe Balzary has been thinking about. Thank you so much for being here, Chloe. Thank you so much.

I'm going to be talking to you today about a concept I created called The Theory of Enchantment. So the Theory of Enchantment is really a social, emotional learning program that teaches individuals how to develop character, develop tools for resiliency, to meet the hardship of life head on, but more importantly, to learn how to love oneself so that one can be able to love others in the process. And the unique aspect of the Theory of Enchantment is that it uses pop culture to teach a lot of these ideas.

So I use Disney, hip hop, pop music, broadly speaking, and other really fun and cool aspects found in pop culture to teach it.

But more on that later. First, I'm going to tell you how I developed this concept called The Theory of Entrapment. So about five years ago, I moved to New York from New Orleans and I got a job at the Wall Street Journal. Now, my background is in international studies and diplomacy. And I was really always interested in this concept of teaching people how to combat conflict. This is what we study within international relations. But once I got to The Wall Street Journal, I decided to work on a thesis that tackled a topic that was slightly different, not teaching people how to combat conflict, but rather instead teaching people how to love how.

These two things are actually two totally different things. They are interrelated, but they are not the same thing. So I wanted to teach people or figure out how to teach people how to love. And in order to do this, I ask myself, well, if I want to teach people how to love, maybe I have to ask, what are people already in love with? And how can I use that as a conduit to work backwards, to get people to learn how to love?

And the biggest source of content for me that shows us what we love as a species, as a society, as pop culture. So all of a sudden in the middle of this thesis paper that I was working on, I started studying pop culture. This means that I started studying companies like Nike, companies like Disney, singer songwriters like Beyonce saying I wanted to see if there was a common denominator across all these influencers and across all these companies that really demonstrated why we gravitate toward them in the first place.

And it turns out there is a common denominator and it's very, very simple. These companies and these influencers create content where we as the audience see ourselves and our potential reflected in the content, and that's why we gravitate toward it. So, for example, Nike, Nike puts out sports apparel and attaches to it the brand just to do it. And the idea that we have in our minds is that once we put on this apparel, we will be able to accomplish and overcome any obstacle that we have to make.

Very similarly, Disney, almost every single Disney movie is a motif, is a metaphor for the human condition. It entails a human being, a flawed hero who is imperfect, who's met with some obstacle, who has to meet that obstacle head on and in doing so becomes transformed by that obstacle and emerges heroic. And finally, of course, there's Beyonce. So I don't know about you, but for me and many other women around the world, we see ourselves and our potential reflected in Beyonce's content.

So, for example, when she says things like who run the world girls, we see our potential reflected in that. So this is really the common denominator of a lot of pop culture that we gravitate towards. And I decided to call this phenomenon enchantment, and I called it entrapment, because Guy Kawasaki, the former marketing director of Apple, describes entrapment as the process by which you delight someone with a concept, an idea, a personality or a thing.

And it dawned on me that that's really what we're trying to get at. We're really trying to become enchanted by one another, to be full of wonder when we encounter one another. And this is really the stuff, the key to learning how to love ourselves and to love one another in the process. So after I wrote this thesis at The Wall Street Journal, I worked for a nonprofit for two years, lectured on it or find it in colleges across the United States and around the world, and came up with a whole system for teaching us.

Now, there are three principal. That are really the guideposts for the theory of entrapment, and it's important to understand them because I think that they will be useful in helping us heal our nation in this moment that we're dealing with racism and police brutality and really needing to advance towards social justice and social change. So the three principles are very simple and they are as follows. No. One, treat people like human beings, not like political abstractions. Number two, if you want to criticize, criticize, to uplift and empower, never to tear down, never to destroy a and number three, try to route everything you do in love and compassion.

Now, you can imagine even if we as a nation were to implement the first principle, to try to live out that practice in our everyday lives, we would come so far. But we're not doing that at the moment. At the moment, we are prejudging people and treating people not like human beings, but instead like abstractions. We're caricaturing one another. We're stereotyping and reducing one another. And in the process, we're stereotyping and reducing ourselves. So I think that if we were able to internalize and implement all three principles of the theory of entrapment, we can foster better conversations that can help heal our nation and help us move forward.

Thank you so much for that, Chloe. Let's dig in and talk about an example. So as you said, you use pop culture as a way to connect to your audience with your principles. But there's a larger message, as you said, within those references. Can you sort of share a thread with us from a movie like Malana or Kendrick Lamar lyric and link that to how we resolve conflict?

Sure, absolutely. So I teach both Kendrick Lamar and Mwana in the spirit of entrapment, teaching people the first principle, treat people like human beings, not like political abstractions. And the first question that comes to the to the forefront of that of that principle is, well, what does it actually mean to be a human being? Well, to be a human being is to be imperfect and complex and multifaceted and multidimensional. And in Kendrick Lamar song DNA, he says, I got power, poison, pain and joy inside my DNA.

And when he says that he's really articulating a capacity to be self-aware, to understand that he's capable of producing good and of producing harm, he understands that he's capable of both of these things as a human being. So I use that song in that lyrics specifically to introduce students to this concept of the complexity of the human condition. When it comes to Malana, I think that Mwana is the best contemporary Disney movie ever made. And what's brilliant about Moulana is that it's actually incredibly restored.

Malana is all about a young warrior princess who lives on this island, who's dying. And the reason why the island is dying is because it used to be ruled over by a good goddess named to Fitty. And then her heart was taken from her and then it was replaced by an evil, rageful goddess named to car. And I'm going to give it away. But I think where we're at that point right now. But the aha moment that Molana has in the end is that to fitty and a car or actually the same being.

And once the heart was removed from defeat, she descended into rage and became the cop, which again, as I said earlier, every Disney movie is a motive for the human condition. I mean, this is reflective of how we are as a species. If you remove laws, if you remove nurture from us, we tend to descend into rage. So really, that film teaches both the first principle. Remember that we are human beings and capable of love and rage, but also the third principle, the importance of learning everything we do with love and compassion so that we can restore each other and ourselves to our higher selves.

It makes so much sense to to use these examples to recognize value in ourselves and others. But how do you see it fitting in with dismantling structural and systemic issues?

So I don't think that one can really tackle systemic issues without centering the individual, without understanding that the individual has to first be able to love themselves. Right. And it takes a lot to teach a person to love themselves. It's not something that's necessarily true for a lot of people. We deal with emotional baggage. We deal with insecurities. This is true of every human being and we don't have the skill set to love ourselves. We're not going to be able to love each other if we don't have the skill set to develop a sense of inner contentment and a sense of self-worth, then what we're going to end up doing is we're going to project that insecurity onto other people and then the systemic inequality that we're seeing today will continue to exist.

So in order to change that long term fashion and in a sustainable way, we have to first renew ourselves and make sure that we're healthy and we come into the place in society. In a healthy way, it seems hard to value another person who has tried to suppress you at a larger level, how do you think about that?

So that's a great question. And I teach a lot of influential and inspiring work from individuals who have been hosted in the TED community, folks like Darrell Davis, for example, who has successfully I mean, talk about treating people who treat you badly with grace. Daryl Davis is someone whose claim to fame in addition to being a famous musician, he actually has gotten hundreds of former KKK members to leave the KKK to give up their roles in the process. And he did this simply by showing grace and empathy to these individuals and showing them where they were wrong, of course, but not treating them like they were less then and not treating them like they were abstractions, but still treating them as human beings.

And I asked them once, you know, did you not get insulted or offended when these guys were saying really insulting things to you when you were speaking to them and you said to me something I'll never forget? He said, well, actually, what I thought to myself was, what does that have to do with me? I know who I am. I know that my self-worth I understand what they're saying is absolutely absurd. So I was able to depersonalize it and not take it personally.

And as a result, it didn't bother me. And I thought to myself, yeah, well, that takes a very strong composition and a strong sense of character to be able to do that. And that's really what I'm trying to help teach. Like, how can we develop that strong sense of character so that when someone comes at us in an insulting way, we can depersonalize it and still meet them with grace and with less?

One of the things you have critiqued in the current anti-racism discussions is the idea of white fragility. You feel it can be harmful to our progress. Why do you think that? Sure.

So I think that the concept of white fragility basically breaks the first rule of the principle of the theory of entrapment. It treats white people as though they were a monolithic being or an entity. It treats white people sort of like a conglomerate instead of treating white people as people, as complex individuals or multifaceted.

And if we treat any human being or any group of people as though that were a conglomerate, we run the risk of stereotyping them, reducing them in our words and in our actions and turning them into an abstraction. And that's not going to be very helpful or sustainable for the long run. We have to treat each other like family. We have to treat each other like brothers and sisters. And only by doing that will we be able to create what Dr.

King called the beloved community and have compassion for ourselves and for each other, even as we're trying to advance reconciliation and correct some of the things that we're seeing that have been unjust in our society.

Well, speaking of community, let's take a couple of questions from our community. Sure thing. So you believe that privilege exists for individuals in different ways, but isn't society waiting privilege for some more than others and in kind of an overwhelming way?

I would say yes in general. But the way I think of privilege is actually, I think, far more multifaceted in the way we sort of discuss it in our in our common lingo. I think that at all times there are an existing number of infinite privileges that people carry with them. So, for example, a white person may not be followed in a store right where as I may be followed in a store, prejudged because of my skin color.

That's an example of what we call white privilege. But at the same time, another white person might come from a single parent family who may have experienced abuse in the family and may be treated a certain way in society as a result of that. Whereas I come from a two parent family, a healthy family, and I may be treated differently as a result of that. So there are always at all times a different number of privileges that we bring to the forefront of the social spaces that we enter.

And so the question is simply how do we treat each other equally at all times? And actually, I think more importantly, how do we treat all of us with compassion and with love despite the privileges or lack thereof that we bring into society?

OK, we're going to take one more question from the community from Judaea. I really love these principles, but I'm hoping to hear about bad actors, a.k.a. villains, if I understand this framework properly. What happens if and when people reject these principles? Yeah, that's a great question.

And I do think that when people reject these principles, they do sort of become bad actors and they do sort of become villains. One of the things that I teach in the course, which I alluded to earlier, is Disney. And one of the things we study when studying the Disney pantheon is some of the villains. So we study Ursula, for example, from The Little Mermaid and we studied.

A couple others, a lot soberer from Toy Story three, for example, and there's a common denominator amongst many of these villains, especially for Ursula in The Little Mermaid through the song Poor, Unfortunate Souls.

So funny that some poor unfortunate souls you'll discover is actually a textbook example of how people, villains tend to exploit the insecurities of folks in order to sort of get them to do their bidding. That's what the song Poor Unfortunate Souls is all about. And I think that if you don't practice these principles and if you don't understand the importance of loving yourself and loving others, you're more prone to descend into rage and to get into madness and become that bad actor and to treat people unfairly unkindly.

And as a result, that will, of course, contribute to a lot of the systemic injustice that we're seeing today.

What makes you feel hopeful right now? Well, I think that's I think we're seeing the one of the most diverse coalitions right now outside in the streets protesting for racial justice. Know, we're seeing people of all colors and from all socio economic backgrounds and even across the political spectrum. And that's something I've never seen before. That's something I've never really read of in American history.

And I hope that it keeps going. And again, I'm also really excited that it's a lot of millennials. I'm a millennial at the forefront of this movement. I'm encouraged by seeing my generation step up and really try to advance social justice.

OK, so we'll have the millennials and the Gen Xers stay at it. Chloe, Chloe, thank you so much.

Thanks so much. Hi, I'm Selena Russian, a host of a new podcast from Ted called Pingrup. Every week you'll travel to a different location around the world, get lost in a new vibe and tap into a surprising idea. Next up, Nairobi, Kenya, where you'll hear about a new movement telling stories of joy and frivolity from Africa that's been dropped from Ted Chicot, pin drop on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you listen.

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