Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. The cliche about disinformation is you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. What that formulation ignores though is that the facts that we regard as true, the opinions we hold as core beliefs are built on top of the stories we tell ourselves.

Stories are the way we humans make sense of the world we observe and always have been. And every group is entitled to its own stories. Actually, groups are defined by their stories. My guest today, Brian Wienyski, has made it his life’s work to understand the stories we tell ourselves. He’s the executive director of Harmony Labs, a nonprofit that maps how stories and media influence the ways Americans see the world, whether those stories are told on TikTok or the BBC or streaming media or movies or whatever.

In this episode, Brian and Eric talk about what his findings reveal about polarization, about how entertainment and news feed on each other and what strategies might actually help bridge divides.

 

Transcript 

 

Eric Schurenberg (00:49.122)
Brian, welcome to In Reality.

Brian Waniewski (00:51.133)
Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Eric Schurenberg (00:53.144)
So tell us what Harmony Labs is, how it’s different from other public opinion research organizations like the more familiar ones like Pew or Ipsos.

Brian Waniewski (01:02.727)
Yeah, so Harmony Labs grew out of a moment around 2008 where social media was just starting to become a really big thing. Everyone was starting to use it. It was starting to generate a lot of data.

And the founder of Harmony Labs got interested in how social media might interact with people’s ideas about the world and how we organize to solve problems, how we govern ourselves. And he thought that the data that social media was producing might be instrumental in helping us do all of those things. And so he started Harmony Labs as a new kind of research institution that could take advantage of the data that different kinds of media were starting to generate to better understand how media and people were interacting with each other in order to support solutions for some of the toughest issues that we’re facing.

Eric Schurenberg (01:50.614)
One of the things that is unique about the Harmony Labs approach is its focus on narrative as an indicator of how people are thinking rather than kind of, other characteristics or how they answer theoretical questions about their beliefs. What’s so special about narratives?

Brian Waniewski (02:10.803)
Well, so when you think about how people make sense of the world, people make sense of the world through stories. We tell ourselves stories about who we are. We tell ourselves stories about where we came from, who our family is, what we think is important. And so the unit of meaning for a human being is really a story. And stories are what make media go. Stories are the stuff that flows through the pipes of media. And so in everything we do, understanding stories is really

primary. So like when we talk about people’s values, that those are really stories people tell themselves about what they want and what’s important. And so when we communicate with each other through stories, we’re saying something really important about ourselves, what we think about the world, what’s possible.

And so rather than ask people survey questions, we do that too. But rather than ask people survey questions primarily, we look at the choices they’re making for themselves about the stories they want to engage with. And then we make inferences from those stories about what they think and what’s important to them.

Eric Schurenberg (03:16.398)
It seems to me that there is a shift in public opinion thinking and other sort of more commercial uses like brand identity to stories rather than kind of other freestanding characteristics. I have a question though about Harmony Labs. well, in the universe of opinion research firms, there are many that are

for-profit commercial and they do a lot of market research. Why was it important to set up Harmony Labs as a non-profit?

Brian Waniewski (03:53.541)
yes, it was important to set up Harmony Labs as a nonprofit. I think first of all, because we had an interest in serving the public good, right?

We thought it was important that the public better understand how media was affecting their lives and their choices so that we could make better design decisions as a society about how we make the systems that underlie those media. So that’s the real sort of purpose-driven or mission-driven reason. There’s a more kind of logistical reason too. So most of the data that Harmony Labs uses in its work comes from commercial organizations like Nielsen’s and Comscore’s.

And they donate their data to us mostly so that we can do research that wouldn’t otherwise be done and inform the public in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t be informed. And so it would be a hard sell, I think, to ask these companies to donate some of their most important business resources to another company. So nonprofit is easier.

Eric Schurenberg (04:35.0)
Mm.

Eric Schurenberg (04:50.114)
Yes. OK, that makes a lot of sense. Let’s circle back to that question once we’ve gone through some of the other stories, I guess, if you will, about how Harmony Labs works. Because I have a suspicion that there is a risk to that pipeline of information in the current environment. But let’s talk about sort of the more fundamental pillars of the work that you’ve done.

so far. And one of those things is definitely the identification of four audiences defined not by traditional demographics or political orientation, but by the narratives that most appeal to them. So what are those audience who makes them up? What does it tell us about those people that other more conventional organizing statistics don’t tell us?

Brian Waniewski (05:48.881)
Yeah, I’ll start with a kind of an origin story for those audiences. So we were doing work back in 2020 with the Gates Foundation to understand narratives around economic mobility and poverty in the US. And so we started with wanting to understand story patterns, which we call narratives. And we did that work and we shared it with the group that we were working with of grantees who were working in different sort of direct service capacities trying to solve the problem of poverty.

And they were like, this is really interesting and we want to use this work to support whatever strategies we’re trying to drive our interventions with. But, you know, the unit of our interventions are going to be people. We’re going to tell stories to people. And so in order to do that, we need a better sense of who those people are. So we’re like, okay, so you need to know more about audiences so you can think about how you want to tell stories to them. And so then we said about.

putting together an audience segmentation to solve that problem. And we had someone on our team named Ricky Conray who’d been doing audience segmentation for about 20 years, lots of different capacities, commercial, political communications, et cetera. And so she’d done the sort of standard six to eight audience segments that would be used in a commercial segmentation, for instance. And she thought about whether that had worked so well in the past.

Eric Schurenberg (07:14.062)
Hmm.

Brian Waniewski (07:14.29)
and thought maybe we should do something different here. And so we ended up doing a segmentation that is really simple. It’s four quadrants set on an axis. On the x-axis, we have a sort of tendency to care more about communities. And on the other side of that, caring more about individuals. And on the y-axis, we have at the bottom a tendency to want to preserve and protect what we have. And then up at the top to experience new things.

So it’s really simple. In each of the boxes, we have an audience. On the top left, we have an audience called people power, sort of communitarian, universalist values. On the top right, we have an audience called, you say so, really individualist, sensation seeking type of audience, tends to skew younger. Bottom left, we have an audience called tough cookies, which tends to be really oriented towards their faith and serving their community, doing charitable work.

Eric Schurenberg (07:59.502)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Waniewski (08:11.92)
And bottom, these are all generalizations, right? These are reductions of people who are complex into groups of people so we can do mass communications. On the bottom right, we have an audience called Don’t Try It On Me, which tends to be very achievement focused, very leadership focused, is traditionally the base of conservative political organization in the US. So these four quadrants constitute our audience framework, which is designed to help people think about how to make media specifically for people who aren’t

Eric Schurenberg (08:32.749)
Thank you.

Eric Schurenberg (08:36.344)
Thank

Brian Waniewski (08:42.01)
like them who don’t share their values. So when we organize these audiences by values, we found it gave us a much better predictive model for learning about the media choices people make. On contrast, when we organize people by demography or age, race, whatever, it just doesn’t give us a very good sense of how people actually organize inside of media. So if we’re looking at white women who live in the suburbs,

Eric Schurenberg (08:44.974)
Thank

Brian Waniewski (09:11.91)
That doesn’t tell us very much. That gives us a geography, gives us an age, but there’s a lot of ideological values, media choice diversity inside of that that we miss when we use those kinds of categories.

Eric Schurenberg (09:13.483)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (09:26.06)
That’s interesting. And so you could have white women in suburbs in the don’t tread on me lower right quadrant as well as in the upper left people power.

Brian Waniewski (09:35.504)
All the quadrants, yep, absolutely.

Eric Schurenberg (09:39.028)
what is it that sorts people into these categories? mean, the, the, the, kinds of media they consume and their values and everything. I guess I’m asking an even more kind of, epistemological, if you will question about it. So where do those values come from? Is it genetic, upbringing, something else?

Brian Waniewski (09:54.182)
technical question. epistemological, okay.

Brian Waniewski (10:05.638)
That’s a big question. I don’t know if I can answer that. mean, you think about values, they’re really just goals, goals that people have for their lives. What’s important to them? So you can imagine someone having a value on buying nice cars, for instance. You could also have someone with a value on being a great leader. There can be really big values. It could be really small values. It can be values that stay with you for a whole life, values that are situational.

Eric Schurenberg (10:24.003)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (10:31.192)
Mm.

Brian Waniewski (10:31.442)
The system of values that we use to define this audience segmentation come from a researcher named Sholom Schwartz. They underlie the World Values Survey and many other survey instruments. They’ve been used for decades. They’ve been validated to work in, I think, over 60 different cultures worldwide. So they have a lot of research under them. We’ve had good experience, and many other people have, too, replicating them.

So there’s a good body of research under them that has made them attractive for us to use.

Eric Schurenberg (11:05.101)
Okay, all right. Shalom Schwartz’s original research and value outline. Tell us about the Narrative Observatory, which the labs website defines as a resource for organism. At least I interpreted what it is and you can tell me if I’m, how close I get. It’s a resource for organizations or media companies and others that want to understand how different audiences connect.

Brian Waniewski (11:25.564)
Yeah.

Eric Schurenberg (11:33.716)
with media narratives around specific issues that are of importance now to our society, like immigration or poverty, you mentioned before poverty and economic mobility, democracy. And I get the sense that you’re continually adding observations to the observatory. How’s that thumbnail description? Is that close?

Brian Waniewski (11:58.918)
did a really good job. Yeah, we should get you to re-say our website in plain English. Yeah, mean, so a lot of the people we work with, you know, they have an issue they care a lot about. Could be democracy, could be climate. They tend to be kind of big existential issues. And, you know, they tend to want to speak to different audiences in different ways in order to build support for their perspective on their issue.

And so it becomes important for them as they’re building a strategy to understand sort of the landscape that they’re working in, sort of where are people inside of the media landscape? What are they exposed to as a result of the media choices they’re making in terms of information? And then what kinds of information can we use to, you know, add to supplement that existing information diet? Those are the kinds of questions people come to us to answer. And so we built an air observatory back in 2020.

to help us answer those questions. And on a technical level, the Narrative Observatory brings together two types of behavioral media data. So this is like click by click, minute by minute views into how people are moving in media across all the devices, all the different platforms, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, legacy, linear TV, tablets, phones, laptops, you name it, all the things.

And we’re able to connect. that will tell us like, you know, Brian goes to CNN on a given day. Brian clicks on these two videos and watches, you know, listens to Eric’s podcast, you know, whatever. gives us a really granular sense of what people are doing. And then we connect those data to media content data. So if we know that Brian went to CNN the day and read this article, what’s inside of that article? What’s the text? What’s the closed caption data for TV? You what’s the transcript for a YouTube video?

Eric Schurenberg (13:45.23)
Hmm.

Brian Waniewski (13:51.632)
And those two things together allow us to build hypotheses about what a kind of information exposure might be doing to someone’s ideas about themselves or the world or whatever. So those two sorts of data are the narrative observatory. It sounds really simple, but it’s bringing multiple data sets together, finding ways to regularize their structures and connect them. There’s a lot in there which I’m not the best person to talk about.

Eric Schurenberg (14:16.238)
Well, it’s a fascinating way of looking at the world and looking at how people are constructing narratives around these issues. So I took the liberty of pulling out a few of the reports that appeared in the observatory. if you don’t mind, let’s go through some of them. I mean, they are fascinating. there’s the first one that popped up for me was the report on the ultra nationalist narrative in media.

Brian Waniewski (14:30.363)
Cool.

Brian Waniewski (14:33.937)
Okay.

Brian Waniewski (14:44.282)
Okay.

Eric Schurenberg (14:45.486)
The source of a lot of the data here was YouTube encounters that were used. What did you learn about the audience for this particular narrative and about ultra-nationalist storylines?

Brian Waniewski (15:02.053)
Yeah, so this partner came to us with a worry that young men in particular were very susceptible to narratives that would support political violence in the US.

We, you know, combed through the research on that and decided to characterize those kinds of narratives as ultra-lashless narratives, which have a particular sort of structure and flavor. And then we looked at sort of where they showed up on YouTube, we focused in on YouTube, and then who was exposed to them. And what we found kind of countered the original fear of the partner. So what we found was that.

young men are really not seeking out those narratives or exposed to those narratives so much. These are again generalizations, right? There will always be exceptions to this. More reliably though, it was older men who were really engaged in the fullest possible expressions of these ultra-nationalist narratives. The other thing we found was that it was pretty rare. So,

One of the beats in the ultra nationalist narrative is that so it’s so let me go through all four beats. The first beat is like there’s something decadent about society. Society has become impure. There’s some sort of fatal flaw that’s manifesting in society. You know, that that society that radical change is second beat radical change is required to sort of redo that fatal flaw. There’s some sort of leader savior figure that’s going to make that change happen.

in doing that change, violence is warranted. Anything is warranted. So those are the four beats. And what we found is that it’s very rare for those four beats to like occur in a total package, partly because of the explicit violence, talking about violence or inciting violence prohibitions on most of these platforms. But what was happening instead where people were

Brian Waniewski (17:03.173)
the people who were engaging with this kind of content were kind of piecing together the four beats for themselves based on the story choices they were making. So that was another big finding. And young men, whom our partner was really concerned about, we found that they were really, they were engaging with some of these narrative elements and mostly the narrative element that had to do with there being something impure or something decadent or something fallen about society. That was really what was appealing to them.

Eric Schurenberg (17:10.99)
Hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (17:29.39)
Part of the allure of this kind of narrative line seems to be the idea of becoming a hero in this rescue of society from its, you know, the forces of decadence, which one would think would appeal to younger men rather than older men, but apparently not. And I guess there is, unfortunately, a lot of

Brian Waniewski (17:43.312)
Absolutely.

Eric Schurenberg (17:59.138)
sad evidence most recently the tragic shooting at the Mormon church in Michigan that there’s people above a certain age, men in particular, are susceptible to these fantasies, if you want to call it.

Brian Waniewski (18:09.807)
Yep. Yep.

Brian Waniewski (18:16.846)
Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, I guess one of the other things our research more generally has shown us again and again is that everyone wants to be the hero in their own story, right? And there’s just different elements to that story that are important in sort of piecing together what it means to be a hero for different people. And so, you know, a lot of the younger folks that we looked at, the media behaviors of for this study, they’re just, they may not be at the point in their life where they’re,

Eric Schurenberg (18:25.134)
Mm.

Eric Schurenberg (18:32.014)
Hmm.

Brian Waniewski (18:44.312)
wanting to be a hero at a societal scale, they’re more concerned with, you know, getting a foothold in their lives. And so that kind of tends to structure the concerns that they have and therefore the media choices that they’re making.

Eric Schurenberg (18:54.87)
Hmm

Did the research offer any hope for interrupting the flow of these narratives before they led to actual violence or encouragement of violence?

Brian Waniewski (19:10.212)
Yeah, absolutely. I one of the other big findings, think, and one of the most interesting findings in terms of interventions, I thought was the observation that young men, more than anything else in the content that they’re choosing for themselves online, are engaging in a kind of play, which is a kind of play that’s pretty common among younger people, a play that helps

Eric Schurenberg (19:37.518)
Hmm.

Brian Waniewski (19:39.835)
that is helping them sort of make sense and find their place in the world. Sort of trying on this identity, trying on this way of talking, trying on this set of ideas, that set of ideas, seeing which one feels the most exciting or feels uncomfortable or edgy or gets a rise out of someone else. And so there’s a kind of playfulness that I think is really important to recognize. You know, a lot of the partners that we work with

are very serious about the issues that they care a lot about. And it’s very hard for them to understand the sort of playfulness that some audiences might be coming out the world with. A playfulness, which I want to be very clear, isn’t always fun or like light and happy. There’s a kind of play that can also be very transgressive and can transgress laws and things like that too. It can go quite far. But.

Eric Schurenberg (20:28.43)
Hmm.

Brian Waniewski (20:36.304)
You know, just recognizing that that’s happening, I think is really important for anyone who wants to speak to younger male audiences, because the kind of content that is speaking to them will not look like CNN, you know, will not look like political candidates talking about issues. It’ll look really different. And, you know, yeah. It’ll look like comedians. It’ll look like Joe Rogan. It’ll look like a lot of things, you know.

Eric Schurenberg (20:57.516)
It’ll look like comedians perhaps.

That was fascinating. There was another one that struck me as maybe a more optimistic subject matter, and that was a study of democracy narratives in entertainment, which the research, as I interpreted your findings, suggested that democracy was still a very popular topic and seen as a kind of unvarnished good in

in entertainment media, even though there were lots of ways to sort of approach it. But it seemed like something that was always worth striving for with the hero stories of media. So how did different stories inspire different audiences in your research, in the media that they were consuming, to support democracy?

Brian Waniewski (21:59.269)
Yeah, so the democracy work was really interesting. The assumption that our partner came to us with on that project was democracy doesn’t make good stories. Like, it’s not interesting enough, it’s not sexy enough, and therefore Hollywood really has no role to play in helping us strengthen democratic norms. And so we decided, maybe, well, let’s see. So we looked into the streaming media behavior of about 130,000 people in the US over the course of the year. That meant we were analyzing like,

Eric Schurenberg (22:14.702)
Hmm.

Brian Waniewski (22:27.45)
I don’t know, 30,000 programs or something like that, sampled that down to a more tractable number, and then really looked at those programs to see, first of all, whether they were depicting governments, whether democratic or autocratic or whatever, and then looked for the features of those depictions, like what were the specific features of the democracy that was presented in the show? Was it a democracy that was failing, a democracy that was improving?

what was the sort of attitude towards the future, all the features that were in there. And then we also looked at how those features affected different audiences. So, and what we found was really interesting. What we found was that something like 58 % of the daily average reach for the programs depicted government. So that means like 58 % of the stuff that people were watching on streaming on a daily basis was exposing them to ideas about what a government should look

And that’s a lot, like that’s just a lot. Inside of that 58%, 37 % were depicting democratic governments and about 29 or 26%, I think, were depicting authoritarian governments. And there was an overlap of content that was depicting both kinds of governments, about 16 % in that overlap. And that overlap is really interesting because what we learned from this work is that a lot of the best stories about government represent progressions towards democracy.

or away from democracy. And there’s a lot of conflict and excitement and great stories inside of that progression. So if you think about a movie like Star Wars, that’s exactly what Star Wars is, right? There’s an authoritarian regime, there’s just a democratic movement fighting that regime and its progression sort of towards it or away from it, winning or losing, and all of the conflict kind of comes out of that. So one of the big findings here was that there’s already a lot of government storytelling.

democracy storytelling going on in Hollywood. So, you what if we became more intentional about that and sort of better understood what it was doing for people or with people with respect to democracy.

Eric Schurenberg (24:28.994)
Hmm. Hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (24:34.894)
Were there particular kinds of narrative, a narrative in which the established government is authoritarian and there are democratic rebels working against it, the Star Wars model, did those appeal to particular kinds of audiences versus?

Brian Waniewski (24:56.045)
Yeah, yeah, there were some themes by audiences. So like if we think about people power, there was a lot of storylines about like insiders making things worse, of systems sort of rigged systems sort of interfering with people’s lives. Those sorts of storylines are really appealing there. There was a, know, the insiders making things better.

Eric Schurenberg (25:08.287)
Mm. Mm.

Brian Waniewski (25:24.643)
type of storylines, like the good bureaucrat inside of government, like fighting for the rights of the people sort of storyline was really appealing in the tough cookie audience, that bottom left audience. Outlaws, making things better by contrast was really appealing in the upper right audiences, if you say so, individualist audience. So it’s pretty intuitive, like the value structures that these different audiences have and the types of storylines they’re…

Eric Schurenberg (25:34.636)
Hmm, interesting.

Eric Schurenberg (25:44.322)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Waniewski (25:54.169)
choosing for themselves because those storylines tend to feature the heroes that these people want to be in their own lives.

Eric Schurenberg (26:01.71)
One thing that struck me about that that was that democracy appeared to be the goal that everyone was working for, whether they were sort of outlaws in the Sundance Kid style, but working towards the good or a Robin Hood kind of story, or someone working from the inside like the brave bureaucrat, Michael Lewis’s

book, for example, about what is government or the fifth risk. regardless of sort of the approach, the end goal seems to be a representative democracy in which fairness and justice and rule by majority is kind of the brass ring. And that contrast with some of the growing alarm that people are

fed up with government as it exists in the US and are embracing autocracy, even in an explicit way. But your research seems to contradict that, at least in the media narratives that people are consuming.

Brian Waniewski (27:15.843)
I think that’s true. mean, one of the things I think it’s important to keep in mind is that what people understand democracy to be or the practice of it in real life to be is pretty variable. There’s lots of variation there. But if you think about the folks who were involved in January 6, those folks thought that they were saving democracy. So even with that single goal, there’s a lot of

Eric Schurenberg (27:28.642)
Mm.

Brian Waniewski (27:44.014)
different types of understanding that can fit inside of it with respect to like what that means and how what saving means and how saving is done. And there’s a lot of different views about what democracy is actually like you the representative self-government is one way of looking at it kind of there’s an institutionalist way of looking at it there’s a set of kind of norms or culture way of looking at it.

Eric Schurenberg (27:54.07)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Brian Waniewski (28:13.879)
I think different people bring to bear on the idea of democracy lots of different ways of understanding it.

Eric Schurenberg (28:21.326)
Well, that’s a good point. Let’s pivot to the question of trust, which we were talking about before we started recording. It seems indisputable that mistrust is growing in, and maybe even pervasive in, all kinds of knowledge-based institutions, the science and medicine and government, the law.

And media is not exempt from any of that. That’s particularly true in the, if you say so and don’t tread on me groups. What’s your advice to media organizations, newsrooms, local and national about winning back the trust of those groups? maybe your implication is that the ship has sailed and that there is no winning back the trust and there needs to be a different path forward.

Brian Waniewski (29:19.375)
Yeah, think trust is generally a good thing. You’re probably familiar with the Edelman Trust Survey that happens every year. And one of the things that always interests me about the findings there, I think the kind of questions they ask is something like, does the government operate according to your expectations? Do you trust that the government will operate in the way that it is?

Eric Schurenberg (29:26.862)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Waniewski (29:43.225)
presenting itself and often trust is very high in authoritarian governments measured in that way. So trust is this interesting thing. You know, like Frameworks Institute also does some research in the US where they found that 70 % of people in the US believe that the system is rigged. Again, for all different sorts of reasons, all different ways of experiencing that riggedness. So the first thing I think we need to recognize is that there is this lack of trust.

Eric Schurenberg (29:49.816)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Waniewski (30:12.814)
And some of it might be warranted. And we have to kind of reckon with that. And so when I think about what to do, what media organizations should do about it, the first thing I think is like, I don’t think we should try to be winning back anything. I don’t think we should try to be reaching back for a past reality when we have this maybe this political consensus or economic or scientific or whatever kind of consensus, which was quite strong and.

Eric Schurenberg (30:15.608)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Waniewski (30:39.98)
kind of kept by a group of central gatekeepers, knowledge keepers, and didn’t always serve everyone, right? So I think we should like kind of let that go, that sort of past idea, and recognize that trust makes a lot of things easier, like we know this from our own relationships. But there are moments in relationships where trust goes away for all sorts of reasons, some of which might be warranted. And then you kind of have to make a choice, like how do you deal with that? How do you…

How do you move forward in a relationship with someone with whom you’ve lost trust? And think for media organizations, we have to think in the same way. It’s relationships. It’s relational. It’s about organizing people and giving them something of value. And if the trust has been lost, there might be a reason for that. We need to sort of get curious about what that reason might be so that we have a hope of regaining or reestablishing that

Eric Schurenberg (31:20.739)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Waniewski (31:37.74)
And so for media organizations, I think a lot of the media organizations that I’ve been exposed to, I think have not, I think I can say this, have not had the strongest discipline of listening internally to their audiences. And I think in general, listening is a good thing. And I think the more we could do of it, the more we could do of that as individuals and as organizations, probably the better for everyone.

Eric Schurenberg (31:54.05)
Mm-hmm, yes.

Eric Schurenberg (32:02.478)
I think that is very good advice for media organizations that listening is a great way to build trust and I mean not to get too psychological about it but it certainly seems like one thing that people demand at any kind of trusting relationship is a sense that the other party is concerned about their interests and if you don’t stop to listen to what their interests are you’ve neglected to take the first step.

Brian Waniewski (32:31.394)
Yeah, absolutely.

Eric Schurenberg (32:31.606)
in building trust. Pivoting to the demand side of sort of the media information transaction, if you will, are there any things that you would suggest that in reality listeners do to build resilience to polarization or to reduce their vulnerability to misinformation?

If there are, what would those elements of advice be?

Brian Waniewski (33:06.52)
That is such a great question. I’m so happy you asked that question. So many of the discussions of misinformation or information resilience that I’m part of center on sort of supply side solutions, highly technical supply side solutions. I think there is no way to sort of technology our way out of this. And I think the supply side.

You know, we should do all the things we should do on the supply side. We should moderate as well as we can. But we’re never doing even those things really well. We’re not doing them very well right now. But even if we were doing them well, I don’t think that would solve the problem. So yes, I think demand side is a really important thing to consider. And I’ve thought about it a lot lately.

And I don’t have great answers, honestly. It’s not that working on that side of things has not been what Harmony Labs has been focused on. There are a lot of people, I think, who are focused on it in different ways. Like there’s the work like someone like Tristan Harris is doing to think about.

like interfaces and the way devices are designed to offer people more agency in their interactions with those devices. There’s work of people like along those lines Nathan Schneider has a book called Governable Stasis which is really nice thinking about how sort of the command and control impulses

Eric Schurenberg (34:17.678)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (34:31.214)
Mm.

Brian Waniewski (34:37.192)
of the companies that built all these tools are kind of written into the code of the tools like this social technical code of the tools themselves and how that

especially for people who are organizing like social change movements, might be something they want to think about. And it starts to imagine like what would a tech stack to support mass movements look like that didn’t depend on those sorts of command and control structures. So that’s true. So there’s lots of interesting work going on. I don’t think anyone has cracked it. I think a lot about public education.

Eric Schurenberg (35:00.323)
Right.

Eric Schurenberg (35:06.51)
And Brian, to just for the sake of the audience, you that you’ve mentioned Tristan Harris of the Center of Humane Technology and Nathan Schneider is what is his group?

Brian Waniewski (35:15.788)
I think he’s at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I could be wrong about that. I think he’s been working in academia for a while.

Eric Schurenberg (35:22.38)
All right. But those actually sound like supply side. changes in design, changes in algorithms and form factor and things like that to make to make information less addictive or to make it more aligned with human flourishing. But as a consumer of news, are there any things that your work suggests you can do to make yourself less

Brian Waniewski (35:30.53)
Yep.

Yep. Yep.

Brian Waniewski (35:40.216)
Yeah.

Eric Schurenberg (35:50.806)
manipulable by a particularly clever use of a narrative.

Brian Waniewski (35:55.61)
Yeah, I I feel like there’s a couple things. So some of the work that we’ve seen in other places, like an inoculation type work where, you you talk about narratives that exist in the world that people may be exposed to in a way that offers them some kind of critical purchase or leverage in understanding those narratives before they might encounter them and be swept away by them in the real world. Shows that there’s been some good promise there.

Eric Schurenberg (36:05.005)
Hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (36:21.336)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Waniewski (36:25.486)
But in terms of stuff that people can actually do for themselves versus consume, I feel like we need to think about how to give folks an intentional attentional upgrade. We have all this stuff coming at us all the time, and we need a way to be able to control our own attention better than I think we can.

Eric Schurenberg (36:47.266)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Brian Waniewski (36:49.806)
You know, there lots of ways to think about how we would do that, like meditation, these sorts of things, education. But I think we’re in this moment where we need to think about the kind of training that is needed right now for humanity to…

move forward into the digital age and not move into like a matrix like future where we’ve all descended into like shivering, sunken-eyed, TikTok response machines, but can become something in service of God knows what kind of intelligence with all this AI stuff that’s coming out. But we can actually have some spaciousness in humanity in our lives.

Eric Schurenberg (37:19.906)
Yes.

Brian Waniewski (37:34.006)
So, you know, there was this moment where public education came up as an idea of something, sort of as democracy was really expanding, as the franchise was really expanding, you know, how do we deliver literacy and numeracy on a really large scale efficiently? And public education was the answer to that question. And it’s done a pretty good job at that. And I feel like there’s a new question now which has to do with attention and media and devices that needs a similar kind of answer that can give people the tools they need

be resilient and be strong and deploy their own attention with agency.

Eric Schurenberg (38:09.474)
I like that, an attention upgrade. is something to be desired. know, the Harmony Labs is devoted to the public good, which as you explained is why it is organized as a not-for-profit, one of the reasons, key reason. Are you optimistic about the achievement of public goods in all the areas in which you work with partners?

bridging divides, climate change, information integrity. And just kind of as a general rule, are you optimistic and seeing progress on those lines?

Brian Waniewski (38:52.299)
I am optimistic, actually. It’s hard not to look at a lot of the things that are happening around the world and feel like the institutional underpinnings for the kind of democratic togetherness that we’ve become accustomed to are crumbling. And that’s distressing. But I have a lot of faith in people and people’s ability to be creative.

Eric Schurenberg (39:11.022)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Waniewski (39:20.141)
And so I feel like if we can recognize the opportunity in that crumbling, that destruction, and not lose our cool, then there’s some real opportunity to build something new or something different or get closer to realizing, in the US at least, the ideals of

of this democratic system that was created hundreds of years ago. You know, I think I listened to a talk by Ethan Zuckerman, I think it was, so we met at the Media Impact Forum recent this year, and I think this talk was at that same forum many years ago. And I remember him presenting a picture of the early days of the American democratic experience. It’s like a total free for all with regard to like truth as the backbone of our togetherness and all these institutions like journalism that we’ve come to depend on. They just didn’t exist back

And yet this thing grew up in that environment. And so, you know, the fact that many of those institutions are weakened may point to the fact that they were just part of a particular historical moment that might be passing. And it also means something new will come up. And I think we all have a responsibility for making sure that thing is the best possible thing. And I’m excited about that.

Eric Schurenberg (40:18.403)
Yes.

Eric Schurenberg (40:47.15)
I think that is a great place to end this conversation on that note of optimism and the possibility that the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next year will not be the last birthday, last anniversary, and that we will muddle through as we have for the previous 250 years. Brian, thank you.

Thank much for this conversation. really enjoyed it. Thank you for the work that Harmony Labs is doing. Really, really interesting.

Brian Waniewski (41:20.119)
Thanks, Eric. I enjoyed the conversation.

 

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Oct 3 2025

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