A Conversation with the Team Behind "The AI Doc"

“The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist” opens in theaters across the U.S. this Friday, March 27. In this episode, we sit down with the team behind this groundbreaking documentary — Oscar-winning producers Daniel Kwan, Jonathan Wang, and Ted Tremper. They explore how they navigated the overwhelming complexity of AI, held space for radically different perspectives, and created a film designed not just to inform but to be experienced together.

At CHT, we believe clarity creates agency. This film has the power to create the shared clarity we need to steer the direction of AI towards a better, more humane technological future. With every new technology, there’s a brief window to set the rules of the road that determine the future we live in. This is ours. So grab your friends, your family and go see “The AI Doc.”

Tristan Harris: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Your Undivided Attention. I am Tristan Harris.

Aza Raskin: And I’m Aza Raskin.

Tristan Harris: So in the fall of 1983, ABC aired this film called The Day After. It was a television event. It was a historic moment, and it showed in this film the devastating aftermath of what would happen in a possible nuclear war. It was seen by more than a hundred million people on one night making it the most watched television event in human history, and it aired during one of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War.

Aza Raskin: And I remember reading about how President Ronald Reagan screened the movie for his national security advisors. After he watched it, Reagan wrote in his diary that it had left him greatly depressed and that we have to do quote all we can to see that we never have nuclear war. Later, he wrote in his memoir about how the film changed his thinking on nuclear war. He no longer saw it as something that the US could win, but rather something that everyone would lose.

Tristan Harris: And so over the next few years after the movie, Reagan and his Soviet counterparts began to discuss nuclear disarmament. In 1987, they signed the first ever agreement to begin cutting down their nuclear arsenals. So yeah, I mean, it took some time, but over the next few years, Reagan and some of his Soviet counterparts began discussing what it would take to have nuclear disarmament. And in 1987, they signed the first ever agreement to actually begin cutting down their nuclear arsenals. So The Day After wasn’t the magic bullet that solved everything, but it’s an example of the power that a film can have to nudge the world in a different direction. And it crystallized a mass movement against nuclear weapons by helping President Reagan fully understand some of the human stakes of his decisions.

Aza Raskin: Tristan, you and I have been saying ever since we did The AI Dilemma, so a couple years ago, that we need a Day After for AI. And that’s because AI is in fact going to be much more consequential to humanity than nuclear weapons were. And if we don’t want to go down the default path, which is an anti-human path, we are going to need the global clarity where all mammals feel the same thing at the same time to do something different.

Tristan Harris: Absolutely. And there’s a new movie coming out this week that we’re hoping can do exactly that. We are super excited because the new documentary film, The AI Doc: Or How I Became Apocaloptimist, is premiering this Friday, March 27th in theaters all across the US. And Aza and I are in this film. It clearly lays out the promise, the peril of AI, the stakes of AI, and it has 40 voices, people who are all the AI optimists, the people who are focused on AI risk, people focused on AI ethics and the problems right now. And you don’t need to have any technical expertise to watch it. It’s super accessible and it’s really engaging.

Aza Raskin: In fact, as I’ve watched people come out of the movie theater, people have said, “I wasn’t expecting to be moved at a movie like this.” It’s fun, it’s engaging, people gasp, they laugh. So today we’re inviting on a few folks who were instrumental in making the film, Daniel Kwan, Jonathan Wang, and Ted Tremper, who are producers on this film. And our listeners may know Daniel and Jonathan as the people that made the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. So we are so grateful to these guys for coming on to talk about this movie and the collective clarity and sensemaking it can bring to the greatest challenge humanity has ever had to face.

Aza Raskin: Daniel, Jonathan, and Ted, thank you so much for joining Your Undivided Attention.

Daniel Kwan: Thanks for having us.

Tristan Harris: Can just each of you just introduce yourselves so people recognize your name and which role you had in the movie?

Daniel Kwan: Yeah, this is Daniel Kwan. I am one of the directors of the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, but I’m also a producer on The AI Doc.

Jonathan Wang: I’m Jonathan Wang. I’m the producer of Everything Everywhere All Once, and I’m also a producer of The AI Doc.

Ted Tremper: This is Ted Tremper. I’m a certified permaculture designer and amateur woodworker. I’m also a producer on The AI Doc.

Tristan Harris: All right. So Kwan and Jon, since we met you first, how did this movie come together?

Jonathan Wang: Well, I mean, I guess I could jump in and say that as a bit of a rewind throughout the pandemic, I basically listened to hundreds of hours of you guys talking. So I almost have a Pavlovian training. I can hear the click and everything as soon as I hear your voice. But yeah, after... Well, it was actually during the run of Everything Everywhere. We had just premiered at the Castro Theater and I think we were up in San Francisco and I’d reached out to Aza. We’d connected in New York. And then with Dan and Tristan and Aza and Daniel, we all sat down and just wanted to just talk to you guys the way that typical Hollywood meetings go. “Let me talk to this actor or this director. We’re big fans. Let’s meet.”

And as we sat down, I think we felt very acutely the weight that was on Tristan and Aza’s shoulders as you guys had been looking at the bigger problems beyond social media and the real problems of AI. And I think that conversation was so fruitful and we covered so much ground. And I forget, you guys were on the way to something. I was so impressed. You guys had books in your hands. I was like, “This is a joke. You guys are playing this up. You guys grabbed some books from the library to look really smart before.” But then we had this really incredible conversation about the impact of technology on culture and the future of technology and what was ahead. And it was almost a bit of a bookmark into a much deeper conversation that was going to come. But I think that was the initial seed that planted into our heads that we might need to be working together on something beyond just having this fun meeting.

Daniel Kwan: Yeah. So I remember it was not too long after ChatGPT came out and that little nuclear bomb that went off across the internet, you guys reached out to us and you guys were basically wondering how much we knew about AI and large language models and what was coming. And we knew a little bit, but not enough. And so we had a conversation about how important clarity was going to be in the coming years because the bottom line that everyone agreed on was this is coming and the world’s not ready for it. And if we’re going to be able to navigate our way through this together collectively, we were going to need clarity. And so we realized that we were in a position where we could provide that. We were given this great opportunity to work on whatever we wanted to work on next, and we realized we could use our, whatever little influence we could to produce something.

We weren’t sure what it was going to be. We didn’t know if it was going to be a documentary. We didn’t know if it was going to be a narrative. We just knew we just needed to get as many eyes on this issue as possible. And so we started this years long journey into the heart of this extremely complicated hyper-object. And basically we set off with the goal to see if we could condense all of that information and all of that context and all the important framing devices into a one-hour, 40-minute movie that could be entertaining, emotional, take you on a journey and spit you out in time for dinner. That was kind of our goal so that anyone could watch it, any of our parents could watch it, any of our neighbors could watch it, and they would be able to understand what you all understand. So that was the goal. It’s a lot easier said than done.

Tristan Harris: Let’s go into this. I mean, so AI is this hyper-object. It’s so hard to talk about because it touches everything. And so I’d love to give listeners just a story of your process of how do you take this very complicated topic, and even I know with the film team, you had so many different views about the topic. And I think the meta story here of the film is around coordination and how do we coordinate? And you had a lot of different views that you’re managing. So yeah, Ted, do you want to also introduce yourself here and jump into this story?

Ted Tremper: Hi, I’m Ted Tremper. My origin story with the movie is very... I remember exactly where I was where I first became aware of the subject matter. I was walking down 10th Avenue in New York and Dan Kwan gave me a call and he said, “Hey, I think you should listen to this.” And he had sent me your AI Dilemma presentation and he basically explained that he feels like the difference between social media and AI in terms of its effect on humanity is going to be instead of racing for the bottom of the brainstem, it’s going to be race to intimacy. And he sort of explained what the fallout of that would be. And Dan has a very fun way of, he’ll never tell you you need to do something, but he’ll say in this very specific coy way, “I think you should look into this or I think that you should be interested in this.” And we’ve been friends now for 15 years, I think.

Jonathan Wang: Dan might treat you differently than me. He just tells me to do things.

Ted Tremper: Oh, yeah. It’s very funny because my background is in comedy and in journalism. And going back to your question, I think the most important thing in tackling an issue like this is that we discovered very early on that the perspective I think that most viewers have and most just human beings have is, please tell me the one thing you can tell me about AI so I never have to hear or talk about it again, that I never have to think about it, never have to talk about it. And unfortunately, the challenges we found early on were, one, we’re a movie, we’re not a podcast or a YouTube series. And so in tackling breaking news things would be extraordinarily difficult. So we needed to focus on things that would be evergreen, which tend to gravitate towards things you can zoom out on. Things that will be true now as true as they will be in six months or six years. And so a lot of the principles behind how the technology is made became really, really important.

In terms of the different perspectives of the film team, we all really were trying to keep in our minds the different members of the audience. So whether you’re conservative, whether you’re liberal and definitively making it removed from politics, because that’s one of the things that is critically important is that we don’t insert politics into this issue because it affects all of us. So trying to hold in our minds, our perspectives, the audience perspectives, and also because it’s a film, it needs to be entertaining. And so almost nothing is harder than making what we hope is a good AI movie because you actually do need to break down this incredibly complex hyper-object in ways that somebody with no existing knowledge could understand and could make sense of for their life.

Tristan Harris: Just define for people the word hyper-object is referring to Timothy Morton. He’s a philosopher who talked about these problems that sort of span the entire world, complexity that touches everything that are diffuse in time. So he says, when you turn your car on with the ignition of a key, that’s climate change. When you are feeling lightheaded because you’re in environment with pollution, that’s climate change. When you see your friend’s house burn down, that’s climate change. The point is that climate change is this diffuse thing that’s touching so many different things. So there you are with AI and you see a data center go up in your backyard on farmland that used to be there for a hundred years. That’s AI. When you see your niece who’s unable to get a job and you hear that they’re not able to find a job, that’s AI. When you see some new crazy report online that an AI model started going rogue and rewriting its own code, that’s also AI.

Just notice how far away those concepts are from each other. They’re not even close. And so what I love about what you all did with the film is you’re trying to represent something and you can almost only do this with a film medium where you’re taking the different faces of this very complex object and you’re packaging it into something where we can actually all see it together. We can actually make choices. Okay. Given the multiple faces of that object, which of the faces do we want? Do we want mass job blocks? We want cancer drugs. We want energy solutions, but we can only navigate that when we have a shared object. And I think so much of what you’re doing with the film is you’re creating common knowledge, not just, “Here’s the knowledge,” but common knowledge that I know that you know that I know and you know that I know that you know.

Because the other thing going on is that some people have this knowledge about one aspect, but they don’t know that other people do. So they feel alienated, like, “I’m worried about AI, but then I talk to my family and they’re talking about something completely different, like how useful it is to vibe code.” And I don’t know how to square the conversation between it’s being useful for you to vibe code and for me feeling overwhelmed that data centers are showing up in my backyard. So we now have an object that now the whole world can understand and come to a common place that starts from where are the choices we want to make from here.

“What I love about what you all did with the film is you’re…taking the different faces of this very complex object and you’re packaging it into something where we can actually all see it together. We can actually make choices. Okay. Given the multiple faces of that object, which of the faces do we want?”

Daniel Kwan: We ended up realizing this film had to be a sort of epistemological journey, not just a journey about just the hard facts and how the technology works, but also something that really covers the breadth of the ideologies driving everything that is behind this technology. So not just the ideological drivers, the economic drivers, the psychological drivers, just all these underlying drivers that will be true no matter what happens next year, what happens next month, because things are constantly changing. The other thing worth noting that was really difficult about this project, you guys mentioned The Day After and what that did for the nuclear conversation. The easy thing about nuclear, if there is an easy thing, is that there’s one basic worst case scenario that you could depict. You can say, “Okay, let’s show people what it looks like if nuclear goes wrong.” And there’s one obvious path.

And so then you can show the world, they can wake up to it and they can all agree we don’t want that. AI is so decentralized and so widely distributed and has such far-reaching implications for almost every aspect of our lives and our world and every industry that you could make a million movies. And so with this film, we ended up realizing we had to center it on one single story. Both the directors, Charlie and Daniel were expecting their first kids. And we felt like that was such a beautiful parallel to what humanity was doing together, collectively birthing something new with all of the unknowns attached to it. And so that was our way in on a personal level, and I think that the directors did an amazing job weaving those two stories together, the story of humanity creating AI and their own personal story becoming parents for the first time.

Aza Raskin: I think one of the things the film does very, very well, and this takes, I think, a lot of care from all of you is that if you are the kind of person who thinks that AI is going to be the thing that helps solve cancer and desalinate water for people, all the positive things, their view is well represented in the film. And not just well represented, I think everyone who is more on that optimist screen will say, “Yes, that is my view and it’s presented strong.” And for people that think that AI is going to be really more catastrophic, that position is also just very well represented. And I don’t think anyone gets short changed, and that this film still has a point of view about where things go, but it’s not hitting people over the head with what they should believe. I just wanted to get you guys to talk a little bit about that.

And also, I’m just tracking for the audience, is just to describe what is the structure of the film? We’re getting sort of hints of it, but just lay it out a little bit. What’s the elevator pitch?

Ted Tremper: Jon?

Jonathan Wang: We ended up arriving at this structure that we felt was indicative of our process going through learning about this topic, which at first when we started in, we were like, “This is terrible. What is going on? This is all bad. What is going on?” And I think through that process, you experience this dark night of the soul that you look for hope anywhere and you’re trying to say, “Well, is there any good here?” And then you start seeing, “Oh, there is some good here.” And then you go through this mental gymnastics where you try to think, okay, how can we just get the good and not get the bad? And what we realized is that the technology is just inextricably linked and that you can’t just filter out the bad and keep the good.

And so then we said, “Okay, so we need to take the audience through that experience of this is bad. Oh no, it’s good. Actually, it’s both.” Therefore, what? Therefore, what? Is a call to action for us as individuals, as society to say this path that we’re on, we’re told this lie that it’s out of our hands, it’s inevitable, this is the future, it’s here. And we want people to feel, no, this technology is here. How we use this technology is up to us and this trajectory on is not inevitable and we need to rally together to say no to the default path.

Ted Tremper: If it’s useful just actually running down the structure of the film, at the beginning, the sort of roundup of all of the different inertia and panic that’s going on with AI, Daniel goes out and he seeks out people to get answers. So he initially gets an overview of how the technology works, that leads to discussions of some of the ways that things might go wrong, including human extinction. He goes back to his now pregnant wife, and as one wants to do, just info dumps all of this on her, and she tells him that he needs to go out and find hope. Then he goes, of course, and he goes and tries to find hope. So he talks to people who are more excited about that technology, and they illuminate some of the positive things that it can do.

And then the force of needing to reconcile those things leads to a bunch of tremendously difficult questions and seeing where we feel like we need to go from there. And it seems as though there are these two paths that create an impossible needle to thread. And so he decides that he needs to actually talk to the people building it. And we interview three out of the five CEOs. You can see the movie to see which ones we got, but one would hope that those are the people who would have the answers to how we make it through this. And a thing I think that makes this issue very different than times in the past when industrialists have obfuscated what the actual worst of a technology were, whether it’s fossil fuels, whether it’s leaded gasoline, whether it’s asbestos, the CEOs are all pretty clear on record that this could bring about catastrophic harm. And of course they’re hyping it for different reasons in a different ways, but Daniel essentially gets no reassurances and then he’s left to actually ask the question, “Well, where do we go from here?” And that’s sort of where the movie leaves you.

And just speaking to the production side of it, we interviewed over 40 people on camera from myriad different camps. I personally spoke to and did background interviews with over a hundred people, developed confidential sources who are either current or former lab employees of every single lab. We have over 3,300 pages of transcripts to go through. And so the process of trying to encapsulate all those different points of views, making sure that people are feeling seen without obviously indexing every single thing that everyone believes was really difficult and putting that into a film that is entertaining that my 78-year-old dad was able to watch in a log cabin, a guy who’s literally never owned a laptop before. And he was able to explain to me how the technology works, where he thinks it’s going from here, and actually give really good archival notes. It was a very rewarding process to feel like we accomplished our goal.

Jonathan Wang: Ted has a comedy background, Daniel and I have a film background. AI isn’t necessarily the thing that you would expect to be first in the ranking of things that we’d be passionate about. And I think a lot of times people think, “Well, I’m not in a frontier lab. I’m not a computer scientist. I don’t know code. What does AI have to do with me?” And my way into the story was actually through environmentalism that I’ve been very concerned about the planet. For me, that was something that I was losing sleep about at night. And then I put in AI into that equation and I said, “Oh, wait, this is going to have the highest energy demands of all, and we’re just stacking this on top of everything else.” So AI, even without thinking about the problems of AI itself, just on an environmental impact, this is a problem that I need to be concerned about.

And then so for me, that was my way in and it opened me up to everything else. So I think that people who, whether they’re a parent, whether they’re a teacher, whether you’re a truck driver or whatever, your way into your concern around AI is just as valid, whether you have a technical understanding of what is under the hood or if you just have a philosophical understanding of what matters to you in life.

Ted Tremper: Can I add one thing to that, Jonathan? I think one of the things I think that’s unique and different about the film is that Daniel Roher, who is, I guess the star of the film and the co-director, this is very different than a TV special or something where somebody is saying, “Look, I don’t know about AI, and so we’re going to go in this journey together where I’m explaining AI to you.” This is very different. This is a guy who is in so far over his head and is trying to figure this out as he’s going along. And I think showing that, showing the fact that he is convinced by different people that he speaks to at different times really mirrors on a meta level the way that we all come to it as non-technology people.

You go out and you see a headline that says it’s going to fix every problem in the world, and then you say, “Okay, great, that’s awesome.” And then you see one that is going to take everybody’s jobs and kill everybody. Where are those things valid? Where is the overlap and where do we go from here? Showing that journey in a way that really shows our ass sometimes is very, very important because that’s what we all go through. That’s what the film team went through. That’s what I think all people who don’t have a technology background and even ones who do also need to go through that journey.

Daniel Kwan: Yeah. I think one of the things that I’ve been feeling a lot lately, not just pertaining to AI, but to everything in general is that, I mean, a lot of this comes from one of your guests, Daniel Schmachtenberger, the way he talks about the poly crisis, the meta crisis, all these interlocking crises that are all feeding into each other. How do we get our way out of this? One of the only ways he sees clearly is that if we cannot solve the communication and coordination crisis, we can’t solve any of the other ones. And that is something that’s really stuck with me for the past four or five years since I last heard it. And when it comes to the AI conversation, it feels so incredibly important that we all wake up and realize we can’t allow this conversation to become polarized in the same way that everything else in American politics and beyond American politics has become.

Everything has really become this binary that leads to a lot of friction, a lot of gridlock. And what happens when you have gridlock, nothing gets done except for the things that the people in power want to get done. The people with the money and the influence, they get to just do whatever they want while the rest of us are fighting. And with AI, you can already see the ways in which that is happening, which is unfortunate and we have to really resist that. But then at the same time, I see this as an opportunity because especially within American politics, this is one of those rare instances where people on the right and the left both agree that they want to do something about this. And one of the reasons why we decided to structure the movie the way we did was to bring in many people into this conversation. And it doesn’t matter who you are and what you believe in, who you voted for, what are the few things that we all can move together on because we have to move fast. We have to move yesterday and the cards are stacked against us.

Aza Raskin: And Ted, one of my favorite questions that you asked absolutely everyone was, how could you truly and royally mess up the film? How could you end it that would be horrific? And I’m just curious. I think it was a great question to ask. What answers did you get? And then did any come true?

Ted Tremper: Yeah, the two questions we asked everyone I think was, what is AI? Which was a very fun question to ask technologists because it immediately puts people in this like, “Oh, where could we possibly even start?” But it did a really great job of level setting, and I wish we could do a super cut. We have a little bit of a super cut of that at the beginning of the film of just what is AI and people’s reactions to that. But yeah, the question we asked everyone, I think as the last question was, how would we screw up making a documentary about AI? And that became a really interesting sort of compass as to how each of the different camps are feeling.

So unsurprisingly, there are some camps where when you said how you screw this up, they’ll say, “You’ll make it a killer robot movie. You’ll only talk about the things that are going to be bad that are going to happen.” Some people would say the way that we could screw it up was by not focusing enough on the fact that their perspective is that this is all hype and that all of essentially the hype you’re seeing is just to drive up stock prices and to be able to generate more capital.

But it’s a thing where what I hope that the film has done is show the interconnectivity between all these different perspectives and the failure states that exist and where they overlap so that we as a group can find a way forward. And I think that what we’re seeing, regardless of how you have aligned historically politically, is that there are things going on right now that if we take a moment to take a step back from the way we’ve been divided by things like social media or previous technologies, there actually is a tremendous amount of alignment there.

“What I hope that the film has done is show the interconnectivity between all these different perspectives and the failure states that exist and where they overlap so that we as a group can find a way forward…there actually is a tremendous amount of alignment there.”

Tristan Harris: I know this has been a really hard process for you. As filmmakers, I think originally, wasn’t it the case, Kwan and Jon, that you wanted to do this in nine months or something like that. And it took two and a half years. You want to speak a little bit to how do you also deal with something moving this fast? Just curious your reactions to that.

Jonathan Wang: So at first it was, “Be fast. We need to be the first to market. We need to have the first mover advantage. We need to wake people up to these certain things.” And then we realized, well, to do that well, we need to set up all these other things. And so there was just all these different pitfalls throughout the process that we said, if we just do it this way, then we leave all this other stuff, which will be an info hazard for all these other ways. Or if we do this thing over here, it’s going to have all these people will feel disenfranchised and they’re going to be actively fighting to tear down this movie. And so one of the things that Ted Tremper has always been so good at saying is that our movie is a first date. We are not trying to get anyone to get married.

We’re just trying to get someone to then go on a second date, third date and engage a little bit more. Because as you were just saying, Tristan, all of these things, if someone’s concerned about data centers, their maximal concern about the data centers and the degradation of a community and the environmental impact, those are maximally concerning and very important and is not to say that we want to say, “Don’t just follow that.” We want to be able to say, “That is just as important as all this other stuff and we want to hold a broad view.” And so I think that was the singular challenge for us as producers was to constantly be like, okay, we really believe this. This is making me fire up and I really want to make a movie about this, but how can we really make sure we give the counterpoint?

How can we really actually enter into this debate ourselves and approach all of these conversations with good faith? And that’s the thing that Ted did such a good job with all of these interviews is really, convince me of your view so we can represent it properly in the movie. So this full taxonomy of views is there. And then hopefully we can just see the through line, which is the incentives, the drivers, and be able to guide people through.

As someone who’s represented in the film and some of the strongest voices in the film, what was it like for you to watch it and to see it all laid out in this way?

Tristan Harris: That’s a good question. Actually on my team, people often say that the way to get Tristan to say the best stuff is to share something that’s a view about tech that’s incomplete or wrong, and then I’ll get agitated and then that’s when the best stuff will come out because I’m-

Ted Tremper: Let me say that’s one of my favorite parts of the entire shoot was being able to represent and say something to you that I know would make you very upset because it leads to a very precise rebuttal. It’s very, very useful.

Tristan Harris: It’s a good technique. So you heard it here first for people who want-

Aza Raskin: We’re all just triggering each other at home.

Ted Tremper: Exactly.

Tristan Harris: Yeah. I mean, I think what gets me is when there’s a view that’s represented that’s incomplete. So there are moments in the film when you see positives about AI that are represented, and then there’s this kind of like, oh no, wait, don’t believe all of that yet because if you don’t factor that, there’s this fundamental thing about AI that the upsides like cancer drugs don’t prevent bioweapons, but the downsides like bioweapons can prevent or disable a world from receiving the benefits of some of the upsides. And so there’s this asymmetry between upsides and downsides. So the kinds of weird scientific, medical, technological energy solutions that could generate are truly beyond your comprehension to even be able to consider. And that’s where the optimists are trying to say, “Look guys, you can’t even imagine how good this is going to be.”

So I mean, I think that the film does a really good job of taking people on this kind of journey. And it’s very representative of, I think, the style both visually and in storytelling wise from your Everything Everywhere All at Once background, which is taking people and yanking them around in these clever ways. And I think people film... I just watched the film with a very influential person recently, and I think people are sort of surprised to be yanked left and right, and then are landing someplace in the middle in these unexpected ways. And I think it’s a testament to your capability as storytellers. Aza, do you have your reaction?

Aza Raskin: An interesting quirk of history, The AI Doc debuted in the exact same theater that The Social Dilemma debuted-

Tristan Harris: In Sundance.

Aza Raskin: ... six years later. Yeah, at Sundance. And it’s just bizarre because as far as I can tell, Sundance is just sitting in one theater and it’s very powerful just feeling an audience go through something at the same time. People were bawling. Not a little bit. Having this hit people’s nervous systems altogether, people cried, but also people laughed. There was a lot of laughter. There were a number of moments of gasping. And I remember actually for Social Dilemma, this is stuff that Tristan and I live and breathe and swim in all the time. And yet seeing it all packaged up in an evocative way, experienced together somehow did something to my resolve. It refocused me and caused me to say, there are still parts of me that hide from the problem.

And even now, there’s still parts of me that hide from because it’s so big to take in. And seeing the film altogether did something similar to what happened with Social Dilemma or recommitted me to the cause because it just becomes inescapable. And actually, that’s a thing I then wanted to turn around to you all because this is not easy subject matter. A hyper-object sometimes can be also a hyper-bummer. And I’m just curious about your own personal stories of having to grapple with and deal with this kind of totalizing content because unlike a normal documentary or film, you can’t turn it off. You go home from the set and it’s still happening. You can’t escape anywhere. And so what was that like?

Daniel Kwan: Yeah, the thing we joke about, and it’s not really a joke, but everyone that we pulled into this project is almost like a welcome and a sorry, because everyone has to go on a different but very similar journey of grieving. And it’s not because I’m saying that worst case scenarios are inevitable and we should be grieving. What we’re grieving together is the future we thought we were going to live in. The world that we thought we were going to live in is no longer here. Regardless of whether or not you think this is the best technology in the world or the worst technology in the world, we are saying goodbye to the world that we were expecting. And everyone on this project had to go through a different version of that at different times. And it’s been really interesting watching this movie with new people, new audiences. Me and Jon just had an interview with a journalist who watched it last week and he was...

Jonathan Wang: He kept saying, “It’s over, man. It’s over.”

Daniel Kwan: But I tried to assure him that he was on the journey and just to trust the process, but everyone reacts differently to the materials and it hits everyone at places differently. I mean, because you guys listened to this podcast, this stuff might not be new to you. So maybe you’re already pretty far along. But for a lot of everyday people who haven’t wanted to engage with AI, I feel like this film gives them hopefully a safe place to collectively feel like they’re going on a journey of grieving and mourning and finally accepting and they’re not having to do it alone.

That was one thing that the journalist that we talked to last week said was he went and watched it by himself. And when he was done, he was like, “Oh my God, I wish there were other people here. I need someone to talk to about this.” And it’s feedback that we get even from some test audiences. When we did some random test audiences with strangers, one of the things that we heard was that everyone was really excited that they got to see it in the theater full of other people because that is a part of the experience too, is realizing you’re not alone. And so obviously this is a shameless plug, but go see in theaters. I think it actually is the best way to watch it, which is many people don’t watch documentaries in theaters anymore, but I think this is the kind of movie where you’re going to want to feel the presence of other people, like Aza said, laughing, crying, gasping, all of the things, but then ultimately in the end, processing together is really what we need to be doing.

“For a lot of everyday people who haven’t wanted to engage with AI, I feel like this film gives them hopefully a safe place to collectively feel like they’re going on a journey of grieving and mourning and finally accepting and they’re not having to do it alone… because that is a part of the experience too, is realizing you’re not alone…this is the kind of movie where you’re going to want to feel the presence of other people, like Aza said, laughing, crying, gasping, all of the things, but then ultimately in the end, processing together is really what we need to be doing.”

Tristan Harris: I wanted to talk about the visual style of the film because I think you guys took some really creative choices around how do you represent something like this? And yeah, just give people a flavor of that.

Daniel Kwan: Yeah, I think one of the things that we knew early on was that we didn’t want this to feel like a normal tech doc. Technology docs, they have a very specific look and feel and pace to them. And so because this film is so much about this, in my opinion, this imbalance between our relationship with technology and our relationship with our own humanity and spirituality and wisdom, just that imbalance is leading to so many problems. Very early on, we pulled on directors, Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell.

Daniel Roher is someone who is constantly painting because he says it’s a way for him to cope with his ADHD. And so he has notebooks filled with paintings and journals from his entire adult life. Whereas Charlie is a director who has made his name creating short documentaries using stop-motion animation and a lot of textural animation using objects. And so not only does it every frame feel handmade, there is also just this real deep soul and emotion to the whole thing where it is not trying to feel like, I guess most of the tech documentaries that you normally see.

Aza Raskin: I’m curious actually, and I don’t know the answer to this question, what was the moment of surprise for all of you in making this film? Or another way of asking this is in what ways and how did you change that surprised you in making this film?

Ted Tremper: Oh, man. Are you a licensed clinical therapist, Aza? I just need to ask for how much I should disclose at this point.

Aza Raskin: I’m as licensed as AI.

Ted Tremper: Perfect. Okay.

Daniel Kwan: The short answer is that I was very humbled by this experience. I think having an opportunity to try to do something that I perceive as good for the world and to be humbled at every turn and to meet all of the experts and meet all the people who think about this 24/7 and the people who are building this technology, the ones who are most afraid of this technology, the ones who are really influencing how this technology is being designed and just having an opportunity to go on that magical mystery tour and to come out the other end, not having the answers despite that and feeling that like, oh, everyone knows something.

In fact, they know more than most people, and yet everyone still has their blind spots and everyone still has uncertainty. And being humbled by that experience was, I think, really important for me because now I’ve been able to take that humility to other parts of my life because I’m realizing, oh, this is not just AI. This is really the energy we need to be taking back to all of our problems. I’m hoping people don’t leave this movie certain of anything except for one thing, which is the default path we’re on is not the one we want.

Tristan Harris: I know also along the way in this project and your journey, you started something called the Creators Coalition on AI. You want to talk about what this project was and how it was birthed out of your own making of this film?

Daniel Kwan: Yeah, of course. One of the things that we realized while making the film was we had to give audience members some direction, some instructions for how to move forward with all this information. And the fourth act does its best to elucidate and list out a bunch of different ways in which you can engage with this in your everyday life. But one of the things that I realized was that, oh, this is a topic that’s going to touch every industry, every aspect of our lives, every level of the world. And so people would have to meet AI where they’re at. And for me, that means meeting AI at the intersection of the film industry.

And as we were making this doc, I was watching Silicon Valley move very quickly. Meanwhile, on the other side of my life, I was watching the film industry kind of paralyzed. The film industry was not moving to meet this technology, not moving to meet this moment, but me and Jon and Ted and a bunch of other people working on this film realized we had an opportunity to step in and begin the conversation. Again, not knowing the answers, but knowing that we had to start the conversation. We had to start the conversation in a way that, again, brought clarity and brought all of this sort of energy that the film is asking for, which is an energy of coordination and collaboration to avoid the friction, avoid the polarization. Again, because the thing that we realized is we cannot allow the tech industry to set the terms for our industry. And so that’s where it started. I’m going to let Jonathan take it away.

Jonathan Wang: We also saw that because of where we were positioned in our industry, that we could be a galvanizing force and to get certain people who might have never talked to each other to talk. And so because it was a scary transitional period, we just got all the leaders of the labor unions together to just say, “What are your unions concerned about? What are you guys actually facing in terms of job loss, in terms of definitions? What are the problems?” And so once we knew the problems, then we were like, well, we can get together and we can try to help solve those problems as a neutral body, people who care to preserve this industry, and that we can be the kind of hub where you come and you’d say, “I need to understand what are the implications to this for job loss or for job degradation or for fill in the blank and that we can then help.”

And then we also have these upcoming negotiations within our industry and seeing that no one was even defining the basic technology correctly, we’re like, “Oh, this is a train wreck. We are going directly head to head into a train wreck.” And so we are still figuring it out as we go and we’re still trying to figure out the most high impact way to do it. And so that is what we’re trying to do within the Creators Coalition on AI.

Aza Raskin: What I love about what you’re doing is you’re turning this sense of, well, what can I do into action? The phrase that’s been bound throwing in my head is I heard a while ago, the phrase grief is love with nowhere to go. And I think sometimes depression or despondency is agency with nowhere to go. And a very simple question you could ask yourselves, well, what can I as a filmmaker do? I’m just one filmmaker. But you resisted that urge and you said, “I’m going to reach...” Tristan and I have this jazzercise thing like this, reach up and out, reach up, up and out.

You reached across to all the other filmmakers, Spielberg and whomever, and together you’re quite powerful. And I feel like that’s a template for everyone who’s listening on the podcast and watches the film, is that the natural place your mind will absolutely go is, well, there’s nothing that I as an individual teacher could do or I as an individual lawyer could do. But if all of the teachers got together, if all of the lawyers got together, actually that’s a very powerful blog.

Tristan Harris: Thank you guys so much for coming on Your Undivided Attention and the fact that we all met through this podcast and the fact that this podcast led to us getting to connect and then this movie that you are bringing into the world that is so important, we are so grateful to the so many hours that you all put into making this possible. I know there is so many things that go into this and I’m so excited for this to hit the world. I’m so grateful for you sharing your stories along the way and grateful for who you are in the world and what you do. Thank you so much for coming on.

Daniel Kwan: Thank you.

Ted Tremper: Thanks for having us. Thanks for being you.

Tristan Harris: One of the things I love about this story is that if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re a regular listener, you’re alongside these incredible Oscar-winning directors who we met through this podcast because they listened to the episode with Daniel Schmachtenberger, they listened to the episode with Audrey Tang. They’ve been following this work and it shows you that we don’t get the privilege of meeting so many of you, our listeners, except when we’re out there in the world and you come up to us. But I just want you all to know and get, this is why conversations matter.

This is why creating shared reality, getting other people to listen to this podcast or to watch The AI Doc or to watch The AI Dilemma or just creating these shared realities is part of the movement. And I’m just grateful to meet these guys because they’re incredible. And I remember fondly being at that dinner and just feeling like these were creative peers. These were people who just are so talented at telling stories and making things accessible and exciting and visually animated and just weird and quirky and fun.

Aza Raskin: I just remembered how, one, humble they were and two, how fast they were because sometimes you get to meet your creative heroes and the varnish sort of scratches off, but it was like the opposite with them is they have this huge wealth of metaphor and visual imagery. And really the other thing I think you’re pointing at, Tristan, is the power of the unknown unknown. And the metaphor to draw here is knowing what is the right path to walk for AI is impossible to see the whole thing from where we are. And so you just sort of have to put some trust into the, even though we can only point at the direction in which we’re going to have to move off the default path, and we cannot articulate every concrete action that has to go from here to there, that doesn’t mean give up hope. That means you have to try.

And the act of making this podcast, we had no idea that the directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once would first be listening, two, would want to meet up, and then three would lead to the creation of this next hopefully global moment where it gives the clarity we can do something about AI. And the meta is the act of doing creates compounding agency to do more in the future in pushing the world in the direction that we all want.

Tristan Harris: Yeah, 100%. And I think what you just said is, it’s so right, which is that hope or optimism comes from the unknown unknown set. It comes from, I can’t see what it could be because if I look at the things that are known, it doesn’t look like it’s going to get us there. It’s the things that are in the unknown set that could get us there. And this film is one object, that’s an example of that. But I think the other thing about the wisest, most mature version of ourselves is moving from the what can I do to how do we get we to act? It’s from me to we. And we often say in our work that there are no adults and that we are the adults we’ve been waiting for. There’s no secret room adults that’s going to figure this out for us.

Part of stepping into being an adult is the ability to reach up and out, to be a community convener, to take all the nurses that you know and talk about this film together, take all the teachers that you know and talk about this film together, take all the parents that I know and talk about this film together, take all the other business leaders that I know, talk about this film together. If everybody did that, if everybody took responsibility for the sphere of influence that they had, if everybody reached up and out, if everybody was comfortable with uncertainty and committed to finding that path, just imagine that culture, that wise, mature culture. It’s not that far from where we are, even though when you look around you, you don’t see that wisdom because social media’s reflecting back the worst angels of our nature and the least wise of our nature, that doesn’t mean that it’s not in us.

Aza Raskin: So The AI Doc comes out March 27th. It’s going to coming out in theater. So a big group of friends, your family, book a club, take your coworkers, especially the people that don’t think that AI is going to affect them. This I think will make it clear that even if they don’t use AI, they live in a world where AI was going to use them essentially. And then most importantly, go get drinks or dinner or host a conversation and talk about it. This isn’t something to go watch alone on your couch, it’s something to experience together. And then for everyone that’s like, “All right, I’m in, I want to do something now.” We’ve also got you. So stay tuned for our next episode where we get into sort of a walkthrough of the trailheads of specific solutions, actions you can take, what’s possible, what we’re working on, what other people are working on, and what you can be a part of.

Tristan Harris: Thank you all so much for tuning in.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Buy tickets for The AI Doc

The trailer for The AI Doc

The website for the Creators Coalition on AI

Further reading on The Day After

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A Problem Well-Stated Is Half-Solved with Daniel Schmachtenberger

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