Can Hollywood help heal America's divides? | The Excerpt

On the Wednesday, June 3, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: At a time when Americans are deeply divided over democracy, rights, power and belonging, Steven Olikara says entertainment can do something politics often can’t: bridge divides. He joins The Excerpt to discuss how movies and TV might help people move beyond outrage and contempt.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

This July 4th, the United States turned 250. The anniversary is meant to be a moment to reflect on the country's past and imagine its future, but it arrives at a time when Americans are deeply divided over politics, rights, power, and even who belongs in the nation's story. Can storytelling help move audiences beyond caricatures, outrage, and contempt? Hello and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026. As a social entrepreneur and commentator, Steven Olikara has spent much of his career trying to close those divides. Now, as founder and CEO of the nonprofit Bridge Entertainment Labs, he's taking his message of political reform and less combative politics to Hollywood. Can persuasive storytelling help Americans be more tolerant and accepting of those with different visions for what America ought to be? Steven, it is so good to have you here.

Steven Olikara:

Thanks for having me, Dana.

Dana Taylor:

You've spent years working on healing political division, first through an organization of young elected leaders and in your own run for the US Senate, and now through entertainment. What convinced you that movies and television could reach people in ways politics couldn't?

Steven Olikara:

Yes. Well, I think culture is upstream from politics, and for this mission that I've been focused on for the last 15 years, how do we combat the toxic polarization in our society. I think there's certainly something you can achieve by political organizing, and I've done that for many years, but there's something much deeper that you can achieve through culture. At the end of the day, democracy is not just a system; it's a relationship. It's a relationship between people, and the American project is a unique one in the context of human history, where we're seeking to create a self-governed society with the most diverse collection of people ever in human history. And in order to do that, it's not just about systems and institutions. It's about creating a story that we all feel connected to and where we all belong, and we feel like our piece of the larger pie is valued and dignified. And that's something that storytelling can uniquely do, and storytelling can uniquely cut through, I believe, a lot of the noise that's out there, too.

Dana Taylor:

When people talk about division in the US, the focus is often on politics or news media. From a storytelling perspective, what do you think Hollywood can bring to the table that's missing right now?

Steven Olikara:

I think in a moment where we have what I call a division industrial complex that profits on making people hate each other all the time, it's so easy to dehumanize those who are seen as different or in another tribe as you. And what storytellers can uniquely do is humanize our fellow Americans as being not so distant, but really our neighbors. Their data is so clear that Americans actually have so much more in common than we realize, but so much oxygen gets consumed on how we are divided. I think storytelling is such a unique way, and Hollywood leaders have a unique responsibility right now to be able to rehumanize Americans across our differences. And the research on storytelling, when you think about films and TV shows, really shows that being immersed in a really well-told story, they call this transportation, causes you to let your guard down a little bit and really connect to a lived experience that's different than your own.

Dana Taylor:

That being said, movies and TV shows, they often center on some sort of conflict to create a sense of urgency and to move the plot. From your perspective, what distinguishes the kind of conflict that deepens a story from one that just reinforces division?

Steven Olikara:

Yeah. Bridge Entertainment Labs, we have a set of storytelling principles that we called the 4 C's, and that's curiosity, complexity, contact, and good conflict. And that last one is really important, good conflict, because we're not talking about storytelling in the absence of conflict or tension. That's the stuff of good stories. But there's a difference between dead-end conflict and good conflict. Dead-end conflict is where the hero and the villain, the good guys and the bad guys, essentially never have any opportunity for movement or reconciliation at the end of the story. And what makes them on opposite sides of a divide is seen as very zero-sum and very stark in that way, versus good conflict shows that there is an opportunity for finding common understanding, and the audience is invited to actually understand maybe the backstory of a villain, to understand that maybe they're not irredeemable. I think if there's one word that sums us up, it's nuance. Having more nuanced stories where we understand the nuances of a person's background and lived experience.

Dana Taylor:

I know that your group worked on a film, The Elephant in the Room. It's romantic comedy that's built around a relationship across political lines. What did that film teach you about the challenge of portraying political differences without turning people into caricatures?

Steven Olikara:

That's such a great question because working with the filmmaker, Erik Bork, he's someone who was not in this bridge-building and pluralism field that we represent. He's someone who tells romantic comedy stories, and he noticed that certainly one of the biggest roadblocks in romantic relationships in America today is politics. So he really wanted to explore that more. But one of the challenges that we really saw working with him is, as much as you might have the intention of wanting to tell a story that bridges divides, the execution of it is very hard, and we all have our own biases and blind spots, and we all are subject to some of the echo chambers that exist online.

So as a filmmaker and as a creative, how do you break out of those bubbles? And fortunately, Erik Bork, the director of that film, really wanted to check his own biases and echo chambers and invited us and others to help advise him on the script and to ensure that the script itself is not painting a caricature of the characters. I think helping filmmakers like Erik break out of those echo chambers, I think, is really important and something we took away from that film.

Dana Taylor:

Steven, as you know, there's a difference between helping someone understand another person and changing what they believe politically. Which one does your organization aim for, and how do you distinguish between the two in your work?

Steven Olikara:

I think one rule typically of bridge building is that a didactic approach, that is a sort of one-sided conversation, not only doesn't work, but actually often has the opposite effect, where people even further recoil into their own corners. And so the way we really look at this is starting from a place of you want to build a sense of shared humanity. And so if you start to really peel the layers back of someone's lived experience, their upbringing, where they grew up, then you really start to understand what forms their worldview. So what we're really after is to have that type of true openness and curiosity about someone's lived experience as opposed to I have to convert this person.

And if you take the example of one of my favorite bridge builders, Daryl Davis, as an example. Daryl Davis is an African-American blues musician who has played in many different locations in the South. He utilized this bridge-building philosophy when it came to someone coming up to him after a performance who shared that he's a member of the KKK. And Daryl Davis didn't go into the conversation saying, "I want to convert him," but he did go in saying, "I want to understand more. How is it that you can hate me if you don't know me?" Well, fast-forward to the end of the story, and a number of those KKK members he met with did end up putting down their robes and leaving that organization. And so I just think some unexpected positive things can happen when you engage in this process, and you don't have to start with conversion as your goal.

Dana Taylor:

Right now, Americans are fighting over democracy, civil rights, political violence, disinformation, and who holds power. What can entertainment realistically do about conflicts that are this consequential?

Steven Olikara:

I think there's some nuance there. I think a lot of debates we have can be existential, but not all of them, but people feel that it's so personal. In many ways, I think politics in America has replaced religion, where it's kind of a religious battle that people are after. And that makes it really, really hard to be bridging divides. But I think now, as we reach this America 250, I think what I'm seeing and the opportunity we're trying to elevate with filmmakers and storytellers is that democracy is really messy. It has been from the beginning. And the answer to our differences, I think, is not to just retreat and write off millions of people in our country and say they're all irredeemable, but instead create a culture of invitation and curiosity and create a culture of bridge building. There's, in my view, few things that are more American than creating a community of people of different backgrounds to make your community better.

That's how I got into this work. I grew up in Wisconsin and suburban Milwaukee. No one really looked like me or shared my background at the school that I went to. And initially, I did feel very isolated, and I really wondered, "How do I become part of this community?" Fortunately, I had music. I grew up playing in bands and different genres of music, and that music really tapped into different subcultures in the greater Milwaukee area, and I felt like I was able to become part of the community because of music. I was able to be seen as a human being because of music. And that to me is what pluralism looks like. That is out of many one, the founding creed of America that we're still aspiring to get to. That's what I think we can tell as a story of Americans for the next 250 years.

Dana Taylor:

Bridge Entertainment Labs is making the case for this kind of storytelling, but Hollywood, economics driven by ratings, box office performance, what keeps audiences watching. Stories focused on emotional hot-button issues do draw audiences, so what makes you think that audiences will or are moving towards stories that are less fueled by outrage or division?

Steven Olikara:

I think first in both politics and entertainment, there have always been two different business models. There's the business model where you only appeal to your side, and you amp up some of the division and polarization. So your side gets really sort of excited, but then you're also alienating audiences. But the other model is that you're trying to tell more humanizing stories that can cut across our differences. And I do think that is a viable business model and it has already been proven, whether it's films like Forrest Gump that I think embody these values, or this summer, the new Spider-Man film is directed by Destin Cretton, who is a filmmaker in our Bridge Entertainment Labs community. And I know that this film is going to touch on some of these key themes of isolation and building community. And I think that is going to be a really important moment for the industry to see how this film performs.

Being an optimist, I think, it's going to perform really well. Again, not giving up on tension or conflict or the real differences, but telling more nuanced stories. It's like a game of addition. You want to be able to add up as many audience members as you can. And if you're not alienating Americans, but instead speaking to their lived experiences, that's going to invite a much larger audience.

Dana Taylor:

News media across the country spent more than a year now telling stories about what America has been, what it is now, what it wants to become. At a moment when people disagree so deeply about that history, where we are today, about the future, do you think we need a different story of us? And if so, what is it, and how should we tell it, or how would you tell it?

Steven Olikara:

Yeah, I love that question. The answer is yes. I do think we need to collectively create a new story of us, of what it means to be an American and what it means to be part of America. I shared my musical background earlier. The way I would tell that story is through the lens of jazz music. Jazz is a quintessential American art form, one that was invented in America, a collision of very different influences of Afro-Caribbean influences and rhythms and European classical influences all coming together in this melting pot. And in the practice of playing jazz, it's three things that I think are really important as a metaphor for American democracy. One is listening. You can't play unless you listen first. The second is that jazz is an improvised art form where you're creating something new in real time with musicians, and I would even argue audience members around you.

And finally, it's a call and response art form that requires us to be fully present in conversations. Now, of course, our political discourse has devolved into more of a call and shut down kind of culture, but I would tell this new story of us through the lens of these jazz modes. And I always tell people you don't have to be a jazz musician to be a jazz artist in this project of democracy. It's about embodying these values of being fully present, of listening, of engaging in a true call and response. That I think is how we can create a healthier discourse and find out how we all belong in this crazy experiment that's called America.

Dana Taylor:

Steven, thank you so much for the conversation for sharing your thoughts with us here on The Excerpt.

Steven Olikara:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. If The Excerpt helps you start your day, tap follow, or subscribe so it's here every morning.