MidDays with Gerard Gibert 2026-06-16

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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Get ready to go beyond the headlines and join a meaningful conversation with people from around the state. You're listening to MidDays with Gerard Gibert here on SuperTalk Mississippi.

**Gerard Gibert** (1:01)
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to MidDays, SuperTalk Mississippi. I'm your host, Gerard Gibert, along with Rhino in the Element Wealth Studio, guiding you through the middle of your day with facts, fodder, and fine music. Morning there, Rhino.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:17)
Howdy, howdy.

**Gerard Gibert** (1:18)
I'm working overtime today, just completed being a guest on the other side of the iconic SuperTalk hosts desk here in the SuperTalk headquarters studio. On the Mary Whedon show, talking about datacenters, and thoroughly enjoyed the discussion. Hopefully, we cleared some things. And it wasn't just all about the various objections we hear that have gone viral on social media, but did a little discussion, just provided an overview of what exactly is a datacenter. Because I think it's one of those things that you sort of kind of know what it is. And that's fine. We don't expect everybody to understand all the intricacies and all the details. But I think it is helpful to know that and to get a better appreciation for, because you see this as well, Rhino, why do we need these things? And you know what they're doing? Using datacenters to ask the question, why do we need them? It's just mind boggling that there just is such little understanding. You would think at least at a minimum, they would understand that.
For example, Darren and Jackson says, so the people who protest datacenters, how will they react if it were announced, okay, we're shutting down all datacenters, and their phones and laptops stop working? Precisely. Not only that, Darren, so would every bank, hospital, retail store, restaurant, every government. That may be good, right? But we don't want the US military to be shut down. For example, they've leveraged the power of datacenters, cloud services, artificial intelligence, extensively in their operations in Venezuela and Iran.
That's just one example, but there's no aspect of life that isn't digitized. Can you name one these days, Rhino, that doesn't have a digital component to it anymore?

**Rhino** (3:22)
I was going to say charcoal grilling, but there's the meme of the guy that had to wait to grill because his grill had to update.

**Gerard Gibert** (3:31)
Well, and I know that I'm sounding a little fantastic there, but the point is, this is a good thing. It's a good thing that we've, innovators mainly from America, by the way, is evidenced by the fact that that stupid France wants to throw more taxes and penalties at American technology companies. And I applaud the president who said, okay, France, the only dead gum thing you've got that we primarily import into this country is wine. 100% tariff. Leave our technology companies alone. I've always thought it's resentment, it's jealousy, because their dumb economic system, it doesn't inspire, it doesn't produce innovators.
I think I got this right. Like, don't they take off the whole month of August or something like that in France?

**Rhino** (4:30)
In France? Yeah, large swaths of the population.

**Gerard Gibert** (4:32)
Yeah, just take off. And they have crazy laws like no business communications after normal business hours, and you know, day one, when you start working for a company, it's like three months of vacation. I might be exaggerating, but they're way more into leisure time, and drinking wine and doing nothing, than they are producing. And the innovators in this country, they don't have a clock. They don't adhere to a standard eight to five work day. That's not how you create greatness.
So they're mad because your lazy butts can't create what we did here in this country. You're happy to use everything we create.
Yeah, but you don't create it.
And that's what makes this country the most prosperous, the most powerful on the planet. But some of the misinformation going around, I got to at least talk about this one, and I know people are saying, Gerard, we've heard you talk about data centers and all, but I've been talking about the last hour, so it's kind of fresh on my head. There's this meme going around, social media meme, Rhino says, Amazon says they use 2.5 billion gallons, but they've been called out. It's actually 40 times that. Okay. So according to my math, that's 100 billion gallons.
Globally, by the way. So I got curious, started going down the old rabbit hole to try to find out, how much water do we consume globally? It's pretty easy to find out what we consume in the country, because it turns out the United States Geological Survey has been tracking that information for quite some time. I was a little shocked to find the wealth of information. You're shaking your head. You've seen it too, right? Oh, yeah. And it makes sense that they would do that. It's a precious, necessary resource. It's part of their function as a federal agency. But, globally, 946 trillion gallons, trillion. Amazon, 100 billion. That's.01% of total water. And they're freaking out over it. Like, no water is coming out of the faucet because of that.01%.