VICE is back with a new podcast

March 30, 2026·34 min·3 clips

Vice returns with Oscar winners Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wong discussing their documentary that aims to be a 'cognitive nuclear bomb' on AI risks.

The feed wakes back up. The opening frames Vice as returning with another podcast about people living near the edge of culture. AI gets the first alarm bell. Three Oscar winners, Daniel Rower, Daniel Kwan, and Jonathan Wong, come in through a conversation about a documentary that tries to make the future feel less abstract and a lot closer. The tone is earnest, not polished. Their worry is not only clever machines. It is disinformation, a government falling, supply chains breaking, and tech billionaires and bros getting to decide a future that puts ordinary lives at risk. Then the excerpt swerves. A guest explains that TikTok started less as a grab for attention than as a record for himself, because earlier parts of his life and older projects barely exist on video. That reason feels surprisingly grounded. During the pandemic, watching other hobbyists film their work made him think about memory, legacy, and how good it would be to show future people what he had actually made. So he started filming the tunnel. The project begins with a door cut into a foundation wall, rock being carved out, and a small audience drifting in through comments before one video breaks through. The viral moment is great because it is so unglamorous. He is trying to install a welder outlet for an elevator that can move rock to the surface, while admitting he has no real electrical experience and is doing it badly. That honesty is the hook. The story works because it shows process: confusion, ambition, bad assumptions, and the weird pull of watching someone solve a problem in public. By the end, it gets stranger. The conversation turns to another person keeping fish and eels in an underground space, the kind that do not need sunlight, and the guest sounds genuinely tempted to build something similar in his own tunnel. Nobody pushes it too hard. The host floats a meeting between the two, less as a stunt than as the next step in the same question: why stop at why? A possible tunnel tour brings it around. What starts as a reactivated feed and an AI warning becomes a story about documentation, obsession, and the sideways logic that turns a private project into public culture.

As heard by us

A revived VICE feed pairs AI dread with Tunnel Girl lore and a sharp taste for obsessive DIY culture.

VICE reopens the feed with a curious little sampler: a warning flare about AI from Oscar-winning filmmakers Daniel Roher, Daniel Kwan, and Jonathan Wang, then a turn toward Kala, aka TikTok Tunnel Girl, and the stranger pleasures of private obsession made public.

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Why you'd press play

For VICE back in the feed, a sharp AI warning, and a TikTok Tunnel Girl detour into DIY obsession.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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