Startups & Venture · August 2026
The panel was reacting to an ad urging people to mail in their urine to cool data centres, which the hosts read as proof of how deep AI now sits in pop culture. Morin, just back from six weeks outside the Bay Area, answered with the opposite reading. Her co-host Dave Morin backed her up in the following turn: the issues Silicon Valley thinks are the issues aren't the ones people outside it have.
Transcript
Lake Mead thing is a real problem.
And so this ad urges you to pee in a jar and send it to cool the data centers and spare our water. This is kind of shocking, guys. I mean, we think AI shapes pop culture and tech, but this is wild. Britt, what was your take when you saw it?
The funniest comment I saw was this girl saying, No fucking way I'm sending my pee with my DNA to that data center. I want AI all up on me like that. I'm going to send my cat's pee instead. And I was like, that's so funny. Well, I can tell you that after having been in like real rural America for the last like six weeks, no one gives a fuck about AI. No one uses AI. People don't care. They dislike it.
Not only that, they actively do not care. And these issues are not actually the issues. Like, that's like the main thing we learned being in Montana most of the summer is like no one cares. And everything that Silicon Valley thinks is the issue is not actually the issue. The data centers, no one cares. What people actually care about is they're sick of people sending them AI slop in email for work. They like don't want to read AI. They don't want to.
Oh, hat switch, hat switch.
Yeah. I mean, they're just sick of it. They're like sick of it actually being in their life more than anything. And I think that's pretty interesting.