Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang show up on Culture Club with a lot to unpack. The Oscar-winning collaborators behind 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once are also producers on The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which opens March 27, 2026. Culture Club host Jackson Garrett tells them right away that the film shook him so badly that when he left, he was telling friends, “It’s over, guys. It’s over.”
What follows is less a promo interview than an attempt to talk Garrett off the ledge. Kwan says the project came together in the week after the 2023 Oscars, when people from Silicon Valley reached out, saying AI was advancing at a terrifying pace. Basically, the world wasn’t ready for what was coming, and someone needed to make a film to bring some clarity to the chaos. “The movie chose us,” he says. Wang says making the film felt like having “our heads forced to stare into the Eye of Sauron.” In other words, they spent months looking straight at a problem most people would rather avoid.
One of the most revealing moments comes when Kwan explains why the film left Garrett so shaken. He says there’s “a mourning process” built into understanding AI at this scale. Not because the world is over tomorrow, but because “we’re saying goodbye to the future we thought we were going to have.” Kwan and Wang don’t dismiss the panic, though. They just refuse to let panic be the final stop. “The future is not written,” Wang says, warning Garrett not to stay in “that stew of despair.”
That idea leads them to the bigger point about power. Kwan says, “We cannot let…a few billionaires, a couple of CEOs, a couple of politicians, be the ones making the decisions around these things.” From there, he shifts to the gap between intelligence and wisdom. Modern culture, he argues, has gotten very good at rewarding optimization, speed, and technical skill, while getting much worse at deciding what any of that power should actually serve. The conversation widens into something bigger than AI, turning into an argument about judgment, values, and what kind of people we’re becoming. They joke about making a film version of the biblical Book of Daniel with an all-Daniels cast, then circle back to 2016’s Swiss Army Man, which Wang produced and Kwan co-directed. Kwan says one cut idea involved Daniel Radcliffe’s corpse character projecting memories through his eyes. It’s ridiculous, vivid, and a good note to end on after that much AI anxiety.
The full episode is available now on the VICE Culture Club YouTube channel.
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