The Ben Shapiro Show - July 24, 2026


"Everyone Hates You." Elon Had the Perfect Response.

Topics
data centers innovation fight
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Elon Musk James Carville Trump Andy Masley Brian Kemp Netanyahu Oracle
Sophie Cunningham Refuses to Back Down Berlin and Paris: Europe's Weekend of Terror

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

179.86

Word count

2,572

Sentence count

196

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Will data centers take over America's farmland? Will they be a gigantic scar visible from space on the face of America? Well, the short answer is no. In this episode, we examine the truth about data centers.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Sometimes it feels like it's Elon Musk versus the entire world.
00:00:03.000 Well, yesterday, Elon faced off against an interviewer who literally told him to his face, everyone hates you.
00:00:08.000 And Elon handled the whole thing with aplomb.
00:00:10.000 AOC and her socialist friends also railed against data centers, including Elon Musk's, with completely made up grievances.
00:00:16.000 And we examine the truth about data centers.
00:00:18.000 Will they take up the entirety of America's farmland?
00:00:20.000 Will they be a gigantic scar visible from space on the face of America?
00:00:24.000 Well, the short answer is no.
00:00:26.000 Let's dive in.
00:00:27.000 There are large scale economic battles happening here in the country.
00:00:30.000 And a lot of that battle is whether we should innovate or not.
00:00:33.000 We've been discussing this for a while.
00:00:35.000 Artificial intelligence.
00:00:36.000 I understand the concerns about what people believe AI is going to do.
00:00:40.000 I understand that, of course, anytime there's a new technology, there are job dislocations.
00:00:44.000 And then those jobs end up being absorbed back into the new forms of the economy that are created by the innovation, right?
00:00:50.000 This happened with industrialization, it happened with the information age, and it's going to happen again with AI.
00:00:55.000 There is an overt campaign to destroy innovation in America.
00:00:58.000 It's a campaign that is fostered by China and Russia and the DSA types, and yes, the Tucker Carlson types.
00:01:04.000 It is a very real thing.
00:01:05.000 Well, the White House is fighting back against this, as the White House should.
00:01:09.000 So, yesterday, the White House put out a press release, what they called their rate payer protection pledge.
00:01:14.000 They asked for a public commitment that hyperscalers, AI companies, and the utilities and data center developers behind them will build, bring, or buy every kilowatt their facilities need and cover every dollar of the infrastructure that delivers it.
00:01:25.000 American households and businesses should not be footing the bill.
00:01:29.000 200 plus organizations committed to do this, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, XAI, OpenAI, and Amazon.
00:01:37.000 Of course, they committed to it because it's good for them also to actually build more energy facilities to help pay for the energy that's going to go into AI.
00:01:45.000 So, this is good.
00:01:47.000 And the White House emphasized that data centers are not just AI.
00:01:50.000 They said every phone call routed, every plane sequenced through the skies, every Amazon order, hospital chart, credit card swipe, and Netflix stream, getting the economics right protects far more than the AI boom.
00:01:59.000 And this is right.
00:02:00.000 The president himself pointed out that revenue from these data centers in places like Georgia allows them to reduce property tax, which, of course, is true.
00:02:08.000 The revenue from Google's data center construction is allowing them to eliminate property taxes entirely.
00:02:16.000 And that's what you call using it to your advantage.
00:02:18.000 The numbers are so incredible.
00:02:21.000 Nobody's ever seen.
00:02:22.000 You know, all my life, the biggest building in the whole world was the Pentagon.
00:02:27.000 And you can fit 25 Pentagons into some of these buildings, 25.
00:02:32.000 And if you happen to be a community, and there's very little disruption, they're just large, they go on for miles.
00:02:39.000 And frankly, if you like certain types of things, they're incredible to look at, to see that we could do something like this.
00:02:46.000 But they also throw off tremendous amounts of money for the community.
00:02:52.000 Again, he is not wrong about this.
00:02:55.000 He's not wrong about this.
00:02:55.000 Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia says the same thing.
00:02:58.000 He says, You know what I noticed is that our power generation is going up and our rates are actually going down because of the additional facilities being built.
00:03:06.000 But the best thing is, is our power generation is going up, our rates are going down.
00:03:14.000 He is right about that.
00:03:15.000 Also, as Elon Musk says, and this is important for innovators to make the case, he says that AI is going to get better and better, and it's actually going to create abundance, which is what better technologies do.
00:03:25.000 They create more material abundance.
00:03:27.000 This is what innovation has always done.
00:03:31.000 AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in about five years.
00:03:37.000 In five years.
00:03:38.000 Roughly five years is my guess.
00:03:42.000 So.
00:03:44.000 There really won't be anything that AI can't do better than humans apart from being human, perhaps.
00:03:50.000 In a more prosaic level, what will life be like?
00:03:56.000 The most likely outcome is an age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of.
00:04:08.000 This may sound preposterous, but well, here we are in 2026.
00:04:13.000 Let's see where we stand in 2036.
00:04:15.000 I mean, he's right about this, by the way.
00:04:19.000 Again, people who are anti innovation, do they understand how much innovation has already happened in the last 10 years?
00:04:25.000 Just take a quick personal example.
00:04:26.000 So, my father was in a car crash and he is still recovering somewhat, but he's fine.
00:04:33.000 Okay, so my father had to get a new car because the car that he had was totaled in this car crash.
00:04:39.000 Somebody broadsided him while he was making a left.
00:04:41.000 And I encouraged him that he should get a Tesla.
00:04:43.000 And the reason I encouraged him to get a Tesla is because Tesla's self driving mechanism is unbelievable.
00:04:47.000 And particularly as you get older and your response time goes down and you have vision problems at night and all the rest of it, Tesla's driving is significantly safer than you driving.
00:04:56.000 And my father, who's always a very aggressive driver, he has used Tesla self drive pretty much everywhere.
00:05:01.000 And he said, and he's correct, that he feels significantly more relaxed and safer because the car is seeing things he wouldn't see.
00:05:07.000 The car is responding in ways he wouldn't necessarily respond in safer ways than he would.
00:05:12.000 Like, can you imagine how many lives are going to be saved by just the self driving?
00:05:17.000 The more self driving takes over, it will save legitimately tens of thousands of lives in this country every single year.
00:05:23.000 Innovation is a good thing.
00:05:24.000 Naturally, the left is very much against it.
00:05:27.000 Because the left wishes to freeze the economy, shrink the economy, and redistribute everything.
00:05:31.000 So just last week, AOC was trying to make the case that we should oppose the data centers because they're making people sick.
00:05:38.000 I don't know what she is claiming.
00:05:39.000 Making people sick based on what?
00:05:43.000 There's no control over the radiation that's happening here.
00:05:47.000 And what we see is that these plants produce that ash, and then they have to do something.
00:05:54.000 That's right.
00:05:55.000 All they're trying to do is dump it, please.
00:05:57.000 Where do they dump it in? 1.00
00:05:59.000 Rural areas, poor areas, disenfranchised areas, black and brown areas. 1.00
00:06:03.000 And meanwhile, all these folks are getting sick.
00:06:07.000 Guarantee you, we've got a high Medicaid population.
00:06:10.000 Oh, yeah.
00:06:11.000 And so now they're profiting off of all of this, and they don't have to pitch into the cost at all for the health care burdens that they're providing.
00:06:21.000 Not only that, they get tax breaks.
00:06:23.000 What evidence does she have?
00:06:24.000 Does she have a single bit of evidence that data centers are making people sick? 0.70
00:06:28.000 Does she have one iota of evidence about this?
00:06:30.000 Of course not. 0.92
00:06:31.000 The idea, by the way, That they are disproportionately dumping data centers in black and brown areas is nuts. 0.99
00:06:36.000 That's really silly.
00:06:38.000 They're putting data centers in proximity to areas where people can work on the AI.
00:06:44.000 And do you think they're just going to build a data center?
00:06:45.000 What in the middle of midtown Manhattan or something?
00:06:48.000 Okay.
00:06:48.000 Let us look at a map on how we use our land because we're being told that all of our, all of our precious farmland is being eaten by the data centers.
00:06:55.000 Our precious bodily fluids are being, are being utilized.
00:06:59.000 Okay.
00:06:59.000 This is a map of the United States for those who cannot see.
00:07:03.000 Each square here on this map is about a million acres.
00:07:06.000 Basically, the entire map, or nearly the entire map, is either pasture and range, cropland, or forest.
00:07:14.000 There are a few special use areas, diminishingly small urban areas.
00:07:19.000 So, the vast majority of America is, believe it or not, population empty.
00:07:23.000 Very, very small population.
00:07:26.000 And based on the analysis of one Andy Masley, by 2028, data centers will take up of this entire map 3.5 squares on this entire map.
00:07:35.000 Okay, actually, we are going to be dedicating, according to Massly, by 2030, data center buildings will take up 1 15th of the land we use to grow Christmas trees in America.
00:07:48.000 Basically, 0.3% of the land that we use for prime farmland.
00:07:56.000 This is just silly.
00:07:57.000 Okay, but the catastrophism is designed to kill the innovation. 0.60
00:08:01.000 The point is not to save our precious farmland.
00:08:03.000 Okay, the point is to destroy the innovation.
00:08:05.000 That's what this is all about.
00:08:07.000 Now, Elon Musk was pointing this out.
00:08:10.000 He was speaking with Zanni Bedos of The Economist, talking about a wide variety of issues.
00:08:16.000 And he points out that the sort of socialistic redistribution scheme is nonsense.
00:08:20.000 And so is the envy that suggests that he isn't paying his taxes.
00:08:24.000 For my stock options, I pay 40% income tax on a national basis.
00:08:31.000 And then because I spend, I don't know, about 30% of my time in California, thereabouts, I pay another sort of roughly a third of the California state taxes, which are now around 15%.
00:08:44.000 So I pay about 45% in taxes, just so people know this.
00:08:48.000 I don't know if it's quite, so roughly half.
00:08:52.000 Then, when I die, there'll be another sort of 45%, roughly half, that will be taxed.
00:09:01.000 So, at the end of the day, I'll probably have a quarter of whatever I have.
00:09:08.000 Well, she then went after him and said, People really, really hate him.
00:09:10.000 And he said, Well, you know, they hate the media too.
00:09:12.000 It turns out they hate a lot of people.
00:09:16.000 But do you see why this makes people think that this man, who has all this power, he's the world's richest man, he thinks he has a right to?
00:09:23.000 To influence our politics.
00:09:25.000 It makes people, it's why, you know, we started this conversation saying superlatives.
00:09:28.000 It's why people loathe you.
00:09:31.000 I mean, some people do loathe you.
00:09:32.000 Yes, some people do.
00:09:33.000 But do you understand why?
00:09:35.000 Do you think what you're doing is helpful for Western democracy?
00:09:38.000 Maybe some people do loathe me. 1.00
00:09:40.000 And that's probably true. 0.97
00:09:41.000 I don't care.
00:09:44.000 But the fact that, as you pointed out, a quarter billion people follow me is that I think a lot more people actually like me than don't.
00:09:55.000 And I think a lot more people hate you and the media more than you realize.
00:10:01.000 Again, he is not wrong.
00:10:02.000 And this is one of the points that is worth making.
00:10:05.000 It turns out that normy, rational Americans, they like things like free markets and American strength.
00:10:08.000 We do.
00:10:09.000 We do.
00:10:09.000 Okay, that's why the DSA program is too online.
00:10:14.000 It just is.
00:10:16.000 So President Trump was going off on Nate Silver's poll of DSA members demonstrating that they are essentially overeducated white people who don't earn a lot of money. 1.00
00:10:24.000 And he says they're losers. 0.99
00:10:26.000 And he happens to be correct. 0.96
00:10:29.000 We have to stop the threat of the communist rhetoric that you're hearing right now because these people, they don't act.
00:10:37.000 I'm very happy a poll came out.
00:10:39.000 It said they're highly educated but doing very poorly. 1.00
00:10:43.000 In other words, they're losers. 0.98
00:10:45.000 They went to school, they got a good education, now they can't, they don't know what they're doing. 0.98
00:10:50.000 So what they do is they complain about people like yourselves that have done so well.
00:10:54.000 But we can't let the communist ideology even, we don't want to even think about it for this country.
00:11:00.000 It would be terrible.
00:11:04.000 Well, he is right about that.
00:11:06.000 Meanwhile, AOC is still trying to cram the DSA box into the we just want health care thing.
00:11:12.000 That's not what the DSA is saying.
00:11:13.000 That's not what they're saying at all.
00:11:14.000 It's not going to work.
00:11:16.000 Do Republicans really think that this stuff is going to happen?
00:11:19.000 No, they don't.
00:11:20.000 They're trying to scare people because they don't want us talking about the fact that we all have a right to health care in this country.
00:11:27.000 So they want to call it communist and they want to call everything they don't like communist because.
00:11:32.000 If people actually wake up to the fact that their elected officials are screwing them over when they get here, then they're going to realize that they deserve better and that health care as a right isn't crazy.
00:11:44.000 It isn't pie in the sky.
00:11:46.000 They want to call this stuff communist because they don't want us to realize that the rest of the developed world has guaranteed health care in this country.
00:11:53.000 So they want to call it communist because they don't want you to know that Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada, everybody else has it better than us, and we spend the most amount of money for the worst care in the modern developed world.
00:12:06.000 Okay, that is not actually why people are opposing communism, and also the UK does not have a better off than we do.
00:12:12.000 James Carville agrees with President Trump about the DSA.
00:12:16.000 When James Carville and Trump are linking arms, you know it's probably politically true. 0.94
00:12:22.000 These people are paternalistic, and it's a bunch of overeducated little white turds who think they know more than other people know, and they know what's wrong, and they're going to go, and then you got. 0.95
00:12:37.000 They're talking about indicting Netanyahu. 0.95
00:12:41.000 And that the problem is, you have a candidate, a DSA candidate in New York saying we should be against interracial dating.
00:12:48.000 Let me tell you something.
00:12:50.000 These people, and these are to all my black friends and friends, people like me, they think they know more than you do.
00:13:00.000 Okay, now he is not wrong about the fact that the DSA is disproportionately white, which is why black populations don't particularly like the DSA.
00:13:09.000 The DSA future leaders actually were lamenting that the DSA is too white centered.
00:13:14.000 These would be candidates for seats on the DSA's national leadership body.
00:13:18.000 A strong group of comrades in this organization feel like they have been left behind and are ignored because of these different issues stemming from a predominant notion of whiteness within YDSA.
00:13:31.000 Having a disdain for a space for us to accurately address those things and let out those things, it's what the white man wants from you.
00:13:39.000 And I hate to see comrades that look like me and other people in my slate having that sentiment.
00:13:44.000 I've seen how white the organization is. 0.55
00:13:46.000 I'm running for NCC at large with the global majority slate under the commitments of diversifying a disproportionately white, white ESA. 0.68
00:13:52.000 A lot of the times, people feel alienated and don't want to organize with us because of our white centered organizational practices and our lack of anti imperialist sentiment. 0.61
00:14:05.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.57
00:14:06.000 Okay, well, good luck with all of this.
00:14:08.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:14:10.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:14:11.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or.
00:14:16.000 Check out this crazy story here.