 In a world where workplace diversity sessions increasingly resemble Maoist struggle sessions, Chloe Valderie's Theory of Enchantment seminars seek to bring people together using popular culture to explore our common humanity and to generate empathy rather than division. The 28-year-old Valderie started a group to combat antisemitism as an undergrad at the University of New Orleans and after a fellowship at the Wall Street Journal's opinion page, she created Theory of Enchantment as an alternative to the anti-racist programs of people like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin D'Angelo. Valderie thinks that these programs often deepen the very resentments they seek to alleviate. Her program, on the other hand, employs materials as varied as Disney's Lion King, music by Kendrick Lamar, and writings from James Baldwin and Cheryl Strait. She spoke to reason about how her life experiences inform Theory of Enchantment, why the demand for her program is growing, and why she's optimistic about the future of race relations and individualism. Here is Chloe Valderie. Chloe Valderie, thanks for talking to Riza. Thank you for inviting me, Nick. I appreciate it. So, let's start with the Theory of Enchantment. Give me the capsule summary. What's the elevator pitch of a Theory of Enchantment? So, Theory of Enchantment is a startup. It's my company, and we teach anti-racism in the corporate boardroom and beyond, and we have a very specific approach to this particular practice that combines popular culture, the arts with a kind of mindfulness understanding of how to fight again in combat prejudice and bigotry. What's the landscape, say, in like corporations and offices? I mean, is racism a foot? I mean, is it like a wildfire? Is it a muted smoldering? How bad is the problem that you're kind of talking about? Yeah, this is actually a challenging question for me because on one level, it's not as if companies are being bombarded with the spirit of Jim Crow. That's not what we're talking about here. And to that point, as I'm sure you know, there's been a giant proliferation of diversity and inclusion programs over the past year and a half due to some of the events of last year. So, you would think or one would assume that because of that proliferation, there's actually not much prejudice in the workplace. There's not much bias in the workplace. But the problem is that because a lot of the trainings that exist, because a lot of the trainings that are super popular today are in some ways creating results that end up promoting prejudice, you have this byproduct effect where people are actually being inundated with a kind of approach to anti-racism that creates the likelihood of more prejudice, not less. So that's like people like Ibram Kendi or Robin D'Angelo are probably the two best known kind of mascots for this approach, where everything, every situation is actually fraught with a massive amount of unacknowledged racism. And the job of the kind of facilitators to come in, you know, and Robin D'Angelo's new book, Nice Racism, it's like to come into, you know, like NPR headquarters. I'd love to see her come in and, you know, and just be like, you know, you guys are the worst because you don't acknowledge your racist. But you're saying that's part of the problem that your program is trying to kind of work around or get passed. Yes, because it's based upon a couple of things that are problematic, a couple of ideas that are problematic. If you believe that anything and everything is white supremacy, for example, as it seems to me, especially individuals like Robin D'Angelo believe, then you are sort of ironically actually claiming that white supremacy is this all powerful, all pervasive thing, actually accepting a premise that white supremacists profess. And in doing so, you sort of perpetuate this belief or this stereotype that people of color are helpless victims and will always be helpless victims. And that creates a caricaturing of both black and white people, which actually just leads more prejudice in the workplace as opposed to getting rid of it. And then, you know, the second thing I'd say that that does is that that has a cultural effect in the long run, because people are essentially asking themselves or saying to themselves, I want to be a good person, I want to do the right thing. This is super in vogue. And this is what I'm being told makes me a good person. So it just metastasizes. And it has a more giant effect than it would otherwise, perhaps in a non-digital age. So let's say I run a corporation and I want to bring in you in order to kind of facilitate better relationships across my corporation or whatever. How do you proceed? What's the theory of enchantment look like? Yeah, so we have two offerings. So you could have us come in and do an actual day-long workshop with a cohort, just to pilot a program to see if you really, you know, sort of agree with or like our approach, or you could enroll in our self-paced program, which anyone can enroll in at any time. Those are sort of characterized differently or structured differently, but both of them are based upon the three foundational principles of the theory of enchantment, which are number one, treat people like human beings, not political abstractions, criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy, and try to root everything you do in loving compassion. So the objective of both of those sort of approaches is to get the practitioner embodying those three practices. What are the exercises that lead to that? So in our workshop, for example, when we talk about treating people like human beings, not political abstractions, we then have to unpack what it actually means to be a human being, which is quite inexhaustible actually, and quite vast, and quite vast, which is part of the beauty and the wonder of what it needs to be human. And so people in the cohort go through different practices that have to deal with vulnerability, that have to do with exploring tools like stoicism, which helps us as the species deal with things like our need for control. And the reason for this is very simple. When we talk about the concept of supremacy, supremacy is not just a racial concept. If someone cuts me off in the street, and I began to see that person as less than me, as myself as greater than or better than that person, I have entered into a supremacist superiority complex, right? And when I'm doing that, I'm basically acting out of insecurity. I'm using supremacy as a defensive mechanism because I am operating out of a sense of lack. So all the exercises and the theory of enchantment help the practitioners develop tools to deal with their insecurities because all human beings have insecurities, unless you're like the Buddha or something. They even get me started on the Buddha. To deal with those insecurities, so you'll be less likely to overcompensate for them by being led to or being attracted to supremacist ways of thinking. And again, it's not strictly racial. It's a fundamentally base human instincts that we get looped in as a defensive mechanism. One of the things I find really interesting about the materials of yours that I've looked at is the use of literature and popular culture. You use music, books, movies to start exploring these themes. Can you talk about that? Because it just seems like a really good way both to break down abstractions. You're talking about a common text, but then it also seems like the minute you start talking about a particular song and you use some hip hop stuff or a particular writing, you use a lot of stuff from James Baldwin, then it seems like you're immediately going to start fighting with each other. What are some of the specific texts you use and how does that play out? Well, yes. I love the arts. I've always been drawn to the arts. I love literature. I love dance. I love music. And the reason why we use these as tools to sort of afford people or give people the sense of an affordance of the common humanity is because even though we're living in a time where it's politically invoked to caricature people and to reduce people, the task of the arts is to actually give expression to the full range of the human condition. This is something that one learns, for example, when going to acting school and being in theater. And so we use, as you said, sources from hip hop. We use Kendrick Lamar. In our full self-paced training, we use songs by Lil Wayne, but it's a full range. So we also, there's songs in there by John Mayer. There's literature in there by John Steinbeck. There's literature by Sheryl Strayed. There's snippets of Disney films that are used as prompts for exploration and identity. What's a snippet of a Disney film, since that's probably something that a lot of people listening or watching this would know? What's a Disney snippet? Yeah, so in our module on Stoicism and teaching individuals, for example, how to assume the posture of sympathia, which is a great term that means to look up. This corresponds with an idea in The Lion King, which is embedded in the song The Circle of Life. The Circle of Life is actually an incredibly, arguably stoic text, if you will, because Simba has to learn how to mature from a young cub to an actual king. And in doing so, he has to learn certain principles which are stoic in nature, like taking a view from above, understanding the interconnectedness of all things. So this is how we sort of play with ancient wisdom, you know, that's hundreds of thousands of years old, and have that be in conversation with contemporary art and contemporary stories. I guess I would be kicked out, right, if I put forth my thesis that Scar is the real hero of The Lion King. Yes, I don't know if you remember this, but I actually, you told me this before. And I will say to you what I said then, which is that you're taking the film to literally. Okay. That explains a lot where I've gotten wrong. And Doug, if we started on Toy Story, Sid is clearly the hero of that because he is a creator. Oh, I see. But he's also destroyer. But he does what the toys do. He uses them to satisfy the task in front of him or his urges. Maybe that'll be a second edition of the story. Yeah, that'll be after everybody gets along. Then you can do that to start people getting angry at one another. How do you know that you've succeeded? Let's say you come into a company and I'm assuming a lot of these companies they're not like, you know what, we've got, in the lunchroom, we've got Black Power people, Ku Klux Klaners, and a bunch of Zionists all on each other's throat. Nobody's sitting at each other's table. It's not like that. But how do you know that you've succeeded in your intervention? Yeah, that's a great question. So for our self-paced course, there's a lot of feedback that we get. There's a lot of testimonials that we've received. But there's also a lot of people who, in the self-paced course, make comments in the comment section. So you can see what people are actually experiencing as they go through each module, which is pretty cool to witness. And in terms of the full day workshop, we give surveys out after each training for feedback. And then we incorporate the feedback that we receive into future training to create that optimal development. It's a learning process. It never ends. But we do have those systems in place to get that feedback from our participants. I was an English major in college and beyond. I would love the idea of taking time off from work to talk about Kendrick Lamar or a Disney movie or an essay or a short story about somebody like James Baldwin or John Steinbeck. I could also see a lot of people being like, what the hell is this shit? Are people open to working through humanity and connecting with people through that? Well, the truth is that some people feel like at this point, there's no choice because we are so polarized as a community, as a nation, and we are so much at each other's throats, it seems, especially on social media. So this is actually meeting a demand and really servicing a pain point that people are having in different avenues. And so there has been to date, actually, this is an interesting fact. There's been no outbound sale strategy on the part of the company in terms of getting customers. Everything has been inbound. So I think that that's really a testament to the demand and to the pain points. So you mean people are finding, you're not beating the bushes for people. They're coming to you. Exactly, exactly. Do you, when you look at some of the reports about kind of insane corporate training sessions where people are either figuratively or literally asked to wear Chinese cultural revolution chalkboard saying I am a criminal or a dunce cap, things like that, and to admit and confess that they are racist, that they are sexist, that they are homophobic, that they're bad people, where do you think that's coming from? And why do people, I guess this is an easy question, why do people search at your program rather than something that emphasizes that kind of stuff? Well, yes, that last question is easier to answer in the sense that people are looking for alternatives to programs that make them feel worthless. And this is important to point out, because of the connection between insecurity and a supremacist superiority complex, it's actually a horrible idea. If you want to fight the impulse that we human beings have to feel better than others, it's a bad idea to make people feel insecure because that is a driver of the impulse or the need to feel better than others. So people are seeking out theory of enchantment because it's not just an alternative, it's also an incredibly rich humanistic experience. And the overall goal is to really get people to come away from that experience with a sort of renewed sense of joy and wonder that they sort of have in relationship to their lives and to the lives of others, and to see themselves and others with the fullness of the complexity that we all possess. And what that does is it means that you will not see the other as a threat, you will see the other as a source of curiosity and wonder. Now in terms of why this is happening, I don't have enough time to sort of go through my theories on why I think this is happening, but I do want to say that it is not simply, and we hear this in chatter on, especially on Twitter, it is not simply a neo-Marxist sort of iteration, it is actually a product in part of something that has been deeply embedded in Western civilization for a very long time, including iterations of Calvinism, includes iterations of Gnosticism going back all the way to the Neoplatonic era. So this comes out of something that is very deeply embedded in Western culture. The invidiousness of how we talk now or that move towards empathy through the arts. The invidiousness with which we speak now, and the way in which we sort of set up the world as, you know, we are good, you are evil, we are oppressed, you are the oppressor. That comes out of the Gnostic tradition, or that framing comes out of the Gnostic tradition. It's a very old- Yeah, because that means like the Gnostics, they have the real knowledge. They have the direct knowledge and you don't, so you're over there. And it's, you know, there are different iterations of Gnosticism that haven't always manifested in this way, right? It's not to say that Gnosticism is bad per se. It's to say that there's a light side and a dark side to it. And what we're seeing today is not merely as young as Marxism. It actually predates Marx. And Marxism itself has its roots in that tradition. And how do you, you know, it seems to me that when people talk about white supremacism in American history and in American culture and as something that still exists, you know, there's no denying that the country was founded, you know, upon, wasn't founded upon, but it was founded coincident with race-based slavery that made a couple of innovations to slavery. You know, the idea that if your mother was a slave, you will always be a slave, these types of things. So, you know, reckoning with that is, you know, is a legitimate and necessary process that every generation has to go through. So it's not that, you know, America is, you know, is not perfect or anything close to that. But then, how do you account for it? Seems like at a moment when things generally are getting better, this comes up that it is, we are even worse now than we were, you know, 50 years ago or 100 years ago. Well, we are, we are sort of still going through a pandemic, right? And so, and the pandemic has unleashed, I think, not a meaning crisis, but another wave in what has been a meaning crisis that has been confronting us as a nation for a long time. And I think that when you are in a liminal space such as a pandemic where you don't have the same, you know, rituals that you may have, you may have had previously, you know, your workspace is the same as your home space. You're not having graduation ceremonies anymore. You're not connecting physically with people anymore. That's an incredible strain on your life as a human being. And that's an incredible strain on your ability to connect with people. And that breeds insecurity both in a material sense and in a sort of spiritual psychological sense. And whenever there's insecurity, there is this probability that we as a species will become more likely to get into these adversarial loads of being as a defensive mechanism to sort of grasp or hold on to something that makes us feel secure. So I think that what's happening is still the same sort of cold playing itself out within us. Yeah. And it reminds me of the way you talk about that. I mean, we have less interaction with the people we work with. So in a way, I mean, I think we probably all kind of dislike the people we work with a little bit more because you're never, you're never your best on Zoom or Slack. And then when you add in kind of racial ethnic and other kind of group identities, I'm reminded of the consistent finding that areas of the United States that have the fewest number of immigrants tend to be the most anti-immigrant. And it's when, like if you actually have immigrants and native born people interacting, like people are like, oh, this is pretty good. This is how it works. This is helping. And it seems like something similar might be at play in the contemporary workplace, as well as agendas by people who really can make a living or make a splash by exacerbating division rather than unity. Well, I think that speaks to these, perhaps the secret sauce of the theory of enchantment, which is fundamentally a relational project. It's getting people to learn how to get to know both themselves and the other. And that is critical. I think if we want to be able to successfully, overcome some of the challenges that are, if they're not overcome, can really manifest in dangerous ways of being with each other. It seems a lot of the stuff that you talk about, I mean, I find it particularly interesting because you use the arts in order to kind of connect people, which is like a great idea that is kind of obvious, but nobody's doing it. And it's like, this is what art does. But then it kind of cuts or it goes at loggerheads with stuff like cultural appropriation, right? Where in the theory of enchantment, yeah, you can't really say like, well, look, this is an Irish thing. You wouldn't possibly understand. This is a black thing. This is a female thing. Have you faced pushback on the idea that some people don't want their experience to be kind of understood or agglomerated into another person's kind of sense of reality? Not in that iteration, I'd say. In part, it's sort of, we talk about, we introduced James Baldwin early on, probably I think in the second lesson in the theory of enchantment. And the piece that we introduced is an essay that he wrote in the 1940s called Everybody's Protest Novel, where he's actually criticizing the caricaturing and the stereotype of both black and white characters and literature. So we sort of prepare the practitioner and challenge the practitioner to not think in those ways. And we use someone with authority. So it's very difficult, I think psychologically, to make a move from that position to, oh, but no one can read James Baldwin if they're not black, right? James Baldwin himself would disavow that moral posture. And of course, everybody's protest novel is one of the great literary hatchet jobs Richard Wright, who is kind of the guy who authorized him in figurative ways and brought him to broader attention. So it's a really interesting performance in that sense. One of the guys who floats around and I see you quote him or nod to him on a regular basis is a writer named Albert Murray. Can you explain to people who he is because he's a fantastic writer who is, you know, he's getting more and more kind of press, you know, even though he's gone. But who is Albert Murray and why is he important to you? Yeah, Albert Murray was a genius. He was a brilliant jazz musician and critic in the, I'll just say 20th century because my dates are off probably. But he wrote an incredible book. And it's actually on my shelf. It's called The Omni Americans or Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy. And it's really brilliant. And I'm not going to really do it justice. But I will say everyone should read it because it's truly incredible in its old to the arts and it's old to the arts, not just as sort of a thing, a vacation from work, right? People tend to think of the arts as something that is separate from serious work. But rather he sees the arts as something like serious play. And he sees this idea of play as a virtue. You can think of play as synonymous with being in the flow state. So whether you can be in the flow state, you know, if you're playing jazz, you can be in the flow state if you're working on a project deeply and intensively. And he talked about how within African American culture, there is this vibrant sort of theme of what he calls impromptu heroism culture, which is the capacity to understand the negative potential that life contains, but to also play with its possibilities. And you can see that in the in the sort of dance, jazz, musical, generally musical orientation of African American culture, but that has sort of that has meta effects in many ways. And I really love that because it speaks to the central tenet or the central feature of the arts within theory of enchantment. And it also speaks to this goal that we're trying to achieve, which is this sort of relational attitude that human beings can have with themselves and with the other, which is a sense of wonder and a sense of joy and a sense of being for the sake of being. And that is the flow state. So there's a lot of sort of dialogue that that can happen between reading that text and inspiration that people can get from it. Can you talk a bit about how you got here? You grew up in New Orleans, you went to the University of New Orleans, you've written or talked about how it was really at the college level, you were an activist, and you were particularly concerned with what you saw as rising anti semitism. And that kind of kickstarted this whole thing that became the theory of enchantment. Could you kind of unspool your, you know, I guess, what holding off field and catching the right calls all that David Copperfield crap? Yes. Well, well stated. I'll try to sum it up. So, yes, I was born in New Orleans. I was born into a religious family whose sort of religious expression contained the seeds of both dogmatism and rebellion, which is an interesting combination. So I grew up Christian, but I grew up observing mainstream Jewish festivals and holy days. So I grew up observing, you know, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. Is it a large scale? I mean, is it Jehovah's Witness or a seven day Adventist or but it's something like that? It's something like seven day Adventist. So similarly, seven day Adventist go to church on Saturday, not Sunday. That's how I grew up. Grew up in a very anti-Catholic church. Well, you know, New Orleans has a lot of Catholics. Yeah. New Orleans has a lot of Catholics. So they know what they're talking about. Yeah, it's your cultural domination. But, you know, that what that gave me was a sense of affinity for Jewish culture and therefore an allergy to anti semitism, which really culminated in 2012 when anti semitism was resurfacing in France. There are a few terror attacks against the Jewish community in France. And I thought to myself, well, this is how is this still a thing in the 21st century? So I got involved in the fight against anti semitism. I had a pro-Israel student club at the University of New Orleans. I hosted events with friends from Tulane University, where we would bring speakers and lecturers and things of that nature. But I shifted in my outlook when I stopped reading polemical books about, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and started reading literature and started reading Israeli literature, in particular, Amos Oz. And that really sort of changed my, I don't know, it changed my attitude. It changed my posture. It didn't change it overnight. It was the beginning of a change in which I was able to, the literary approach to humanity is very different from this sort of like political adversarial approach where the objective is to defeat your opponent. The literary approach is to be able to hold space for all the complexities and the nuances of the human condition. And I find it to be a much more sophisticated, more mature approach. And that orientation was deeply instrumental in the development of the theory of enchantment. So that was sort of happening near senior year in college, that shift. Also what happened, something pivotal that happened was I took a class called Anthropology of Magic, Religion and Witchcraft with this professor who I prejudged how I was prejudiced towards in my mind. I assumed because she was agnostic, and I was very dogmatic at the time, I assumed that because she was agnostic that she would know nothing and not only would know nothing about religion, but would condescend to the religious. And she had us watch a film, Jesus Camp, which portrays evangelicals who send their kids to camp, I think where they're taught to speak in tongues or what have you. It doesn't really favor the evangelical community in the positive light. The next day I go to school, there's a student, a classmate who's an atheist, and she starts railing against this community. And my agnostic professor who I have prejudged and who I've assumed will say one thing enough, one way, basically essentially starts to defend the community and is another example or models the sort of literary posturing, which is if you are not capable of wrestling with all the things that we as human beings gravitate towards, even mistakenly, even in an incorrect way, but if you're not able to grapple with the source of that, which is ultimately a need for meaning and belonging, then you really haven't you aren't you aren't really understanding the purpose of this course. And that she her saying that totally created a existential crisis in my life because I put her into this box and and the boxes were insufficient, which meant my entire sort of worldview was really crumbling and had begin to crumble at that point. So there are a lot of interesting, liminal psychologically liminal spaces that I was going through in in college, especially at the end of college. And then after that, after I graduated, I moved to New York and got a job at the Wall Street Journal, worked closely with Brett Stevens. And that is where I began to work on a thesis that was the sort of catalyst for theory of enchantment. That is where I came up with the idea of enchantment. And that is when I began to study pop culture in particular and the arts in particular as a means to sort of try to pull out this framework that would teach people how to be able to grasp their own complexity and the complexity of the other and a spirit of curiosity and wonder as opposed to that adversarial orientation. Can you explain how the Stoics or aspects of Stoicism intersect with this? Because I'm thinking of my knowledge of the Stoics and obviously the Stoics are having a moment, right? You know, thousands of years after they committed suicide. But it's that Stoics reserve that they don't show emotions, that they do their duty, they shoulder their responsibility. And somebody like Seneca talks a lot about that kind of stuff and then wrote these horrific plays that are just phenomenal, versions of Greek plays and whatnot. And then I think more to your point, there's the quote that's attributed to Marcus Aurelius, I'm not sure if he actually said it or not, but that nothing that is human is foreign to me. And that seems very much in the camp of what you're talking about. But how are you using the Stoics? How do they supplement a theory of enchantment? Yeah, we teach a few sort of Stoic principles to help people deal with, to help each other ourselves deal with our relationship with the need to be in control, right? So one of the, I think one of the Stoic, popular Stoic practices is just keep in mind what is in your control and what is not in your control, right? Because you could spend so much time, so much wasted time ruminating in your mind over things that you wish you could change or things that, you know, situations where you wish you had said something differently or done something differently or you were assuming that someone else was thinking a certain way. None of these things are in your control. And so it doesn't make sense to fixate on them. And so we use Stoicism to help people become more self-aware of when they're doing that, when they're falling into that spiral. We also, there's another principle that we teach of Stoicism, which is remember that everything is temporary, right? Everything changes, everything passes. And that's super important, especially when people are going through and experiencing a lot of hardship right now. And I think it helps to really ground people. And, you know, obviously Stoicism is not the only wisdom tradition that teaches this. This is also a teaching in the Book of Ecclesiastes and other wisdom traditions. But we find that it's very helpful because we pair them with practices where, you know, we say, name something that you had to let go of in the past year. Name something that you're still learning to let go of in the past year. So these are, again, things that give people a sense of awareness of when they're being too fixated on things that are outside of their control in the first place. Are you optimistic? Obviously, I mean, you wouldn't be doing what you're doing if you weren't optimistic about being able to change or have a positive influence on small groups of people. But when you look at, you know, a kind of larger American mosaic or American society, you know, compared to the early 2010s, you know, feelings about race and, you know, feelings about unity, feelings about, you know, is the country going in the right direction? All of those seem to be going in the wrong direction now. Are you optimistic that we can kind of work through whatever it is we're working through now and find a, you know, a better, more inclusive America where people not all, you know, both feel better about where they are, but also actually do better than where they are. Well, I think I'm optimistic because I have no other choice to be optimistic. I was just reading briefly about the collapse of the Bronze Age, which I don't know much about, but it was pretty terrible, pretty, pretty terrible. And there was a lot of meaning crises that, you know, entire cities were dealing with during that collapse, which sort of led to the collapse. And so I'm very, I'm very much challenged by what I think is possible if we don't find a way to get along with each other, to learn a way to get along with each other. But I do think it's possible, but we have to work towards that goal. We can't just, you know, hope for it in the passive sense. We have to actively work towards that goal. So I am optimistic, but I do know that there's no guarantee. One emerging fault line, which I'm reminded of every time I talk to my colleagues at reason, all of whom with one or two exceptions are younger than me, is a generational fault line. You know, millennials and Gen Z are becoming openly spiteful towards baby boomers. Nobody, nobody cares about Gen X, poor little Gen X. They're like Kurt Von Trapp in the center of music. Now, but it gets like two lines in a three hour movie. What? He doesn't get a lot more than that. But, you know, but, you know, is there a generational dimension to what's going on here? And if so, does that follow the same kind of things of, okay, let's, you know, let's use the arts to kind of, you know, understand each other better. It's, you know, it's ironic. I mean, baby boomers grew up, you know, talking about the generation gap and about how, you know, their stupid parents who had survived the depression in World War II just didn't understand what a hell they had bequeathed to their kids. And now, of course, baby boomer parents are, you know, hearing that from their kids. But, you know, does this, you know, does a theory of enchantment, what might that help to pour oil on the roiled waters of generational conflict? Well, first of all, I love these metaphors. Yeah, I mean, I think so. Part of the reason why we want to, part of the reason why we include, you know, Stoicism with the Lion King is to have that intergenerational dialogue and to give us, give people a sense of the timelessness of wisdom. And if you believe that that wisdom is timeless, then you should expect to see it across generations, to see it represented in different cultural sources across generations. And we hope that this is a way in which, you know, a person who is of the baby boomer generation, right, can understand someone who loves Kendrick Lamar and, you know, someone who loves Kendrick Lamar can understand someone who loves him. Do you love Kendrick Lamar? Is that where this is headed? Did you get that plug? Was it properly there? Yeah. What is the, you know, the next big step for you in terms of a theory of enchantment? What do you hope happens with your program and your practice? This is a great question. So one of the things that we would like to do is basically have this result in much greater distribution using the technologies that we have at our disposal. Long story short, that means that my, one of my dreams is really to be able to create an app that can successfully give people or facilitate for people the kind of experience we're wanting them to be able to experience, but like, you know, have it be in, you know, carried in their own pockets. I think that's the next frontier for us. Even as we continue to learn and gather feedback from our existing models, the ultimate goal is to be able to, it's not the ultimate goal, but one of our goals is to be able to, you know, encapsulate that in an app. And not in like, you know, an app that's adversarial, which I think for all of my love of Twitter, Twitter ends up sort of becoming that in certain ways, but a kind of app that affords a sense of, again, joy and love and wonder and relational curiosity. Hmm. I hope, well, I really hope you succeed, you know, obviously, but you also have a podcast. Can you talk a little bit about that and, you know, what you hope people get out of that? Sure. So I have a podcast that hasn't come out yet, but hopefully it will be out soon. It's going to be called The Heart Speaks. I'm going to be speaking with different academics, philosophers, artists, getting away from the sort of, although, you know, it's a mode I love, but getting away from the sort of cerebral-minded approach and more into the, again, literary sort of heart-centered approach when discussing challenges to, you know, our nation is what we hope to do and we hope that people will come away also with a little bit of more optimism and a little bit of enchantment. Do you have a favorite author? I don't have a favorite author. I do have a favorite book. So the reason I... Yeah, I think, by the way, I think that's a great answer because authors, you know, kind of, the best authors rewrite the same thing. So you might as well take the best of the best, right? Yeah, yeah. I do love East of Eden, actually. Really? The John Steinbeck novel that is probably now best remembered as one of three James Dean movies. Yeah, no one should watch the movie, actually. It's not a good movie. There was also a TV series with Jane Seymour of all people, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. Was that good? No, not really, but I'm not a fan of East of Eden. So please tell me, not particularly, you know. So what do you like about East of Eden? I mean, it's incredible. It's really the sort of... It's three generations of men learning wisdom and sort of fumbling their way into a wise way of being, which doesn't happen until like the grandson. And also like the weaving in, you know, biblical metaphors of Tim Sholl and this idea of human choice. And again, actually, I think this concept within East of Eden in particular sort of rhymes with that sense of impromptu heroism culture that Albert Murray talks about, the importance of approaching life in a way where you can be in a state of infinite play, as opposed to all of these insecurities that often hamstring us. And of course, in East of Eden, it has a lot to do with parental baggage and sort of the weight that's passed down from father to son and how to unburden yourself. Yeah. No, I was going to say, you know, the one thing that's really good about the movie, the James Dean movie is I think it's Raymond Massey plays the father and he's so brittle and like controlling and, you know, he can't move an inch because everything might shatter. And yeah, that really comes across there. And I think that's a metaphor, you know, that's a real metaphor. I think, you know, when you think about society, yeah, you know, like a lot of people are really terrified that something might change and that it's, you know, going to be a hammer against them and everything will go to pieces. Yeah. And they're paralyzed by the prospect or the threat as they see it of change because, you know, again, liminality is like, you don't know what's going to happen next, right? It's very, very ambiguous. So maybe revisit, revisit it. You know, you're selling me on it and I know it's a John Steinbeck book, so it's not going to be, you know, it won't be too long to read or anything. I don't mean, I don't mean that as a bad thing. I'm just saying he's like, you know, a very easy read. I read it in like 10 days. It was, it was, it was a real page turner. Yeah. That's cool. All right. Well, I think we're going to leave it there. Chloe Valdery, a proprietress of a theory of enchantment, a really interesting and novel way of kind of talking about anti-racism, but also just kind of inclusion and diversity in the workplace or, you know, in any kind of organizational space. Thanks for talking to Riza. Thank you, Nick.