 Let's see, where are we? Yes, industrial heartland. When I say industrial heartland, what comes to mind? What do you think of? Well, almost everybody in America would think of the Midwest. They think of, I don't know, Michigan, Wisconsin. They think of Illinois. They think of Ohio, right? This is the industrial heartland of America. This is where industrial plants, and we build stuff from cars to machines to steel to all of that stuff. This is industrial heartland. And yet, that has changed over the last, what is it, 40 years. The industrial heartland of the United States has actually shifted today, in our world today. There is just as much manufacturing heavy manufacturing that you associate with industrial. In the American South, as it is in the Midwest. So today, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, South Carolina, and of course, Texas, that's where the action is. That's when industrialization is happening. Today, there's many industrial workers in the South, as they are in the Midwest. Starting in the 1980s, companies like Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, all built plants in the Midwest. They did not go to Michigan partially to avoid unions. And partially because the Midwest, still to this day, has relatively low energy costs, generally has low living costs, and has a significant amount of labor. Indeed, the biggest problem in the South today is the shortage of labor. What is super interesting about this is that Biden's projects, Biden has passed a number of big bills that involve huge, massive, multi-billion. By the way, thank you, Bjorn. We'll get to Bjorn in a minute, but he just took us way past our goal for today. But he has passed these bills that involve massive investments and massive subsidies for industrialized progress, whether it's EV batteries, electric cars, or whether it's solar panels, or whether it is chip manufacturing. And almost all those investments are going into the South. Now, some are going into the Midwest, but most of them are going into the South. What is it? Toyota is building this factory that is the size of 1,200 football stadiums, football fields. That's just the size of it, and they're building it in Kentucky, right? And it's gonna produce EV batteries, right? So all of these subsidized projects go into the South. And what's interesting about that politically, if you think about poke barrel, poke barrel is where congressmen get the administration to hand over the poke to districts that support them. And here almost all the poke barrel is going to Republican districts, which is super interesting and probably not what Biden intended. But that is a fact. He didn't say to companies all over the world, if you build these factories, we'll give you subsidies only if you do it in Democratic districts. Maybe you should have had that. But he said, if you build it, we will subsidize it. So they're building and they're building all over the place. Chips, mostly Arizona, land is cheap. Water might be a problem, but land is cheap. Energy is relatively cheap. And seismically stable, not like California. And close to California, close to California, where they need the tech and they can get people moving there with the skills. But electric cars, electric batteries, all of that, mostly Kentucky, Tennessee, you know, south. They're south. Funnily enough, maybe funnily is not right. Ironically enough, guess why electricity is so cheap in those places? It's cheap because Kentucky, for example, produces 70% of electricity using coal. Coal that they dig right there, right? So a lot of these high tech factories, EV and everything, who are supposed to be clean, actually using electricity produced by coal, not exactly goes consistently with how they're thinking. Anyway, here we are. And a lot of it has to do, a lot of the energy around the south has to do with where people are moving to. It's not as much about unions anymore because only 6% of America's private sector workers are unionized as of 2022. So unions are not a factor really much anyway. But Texas has a lot of people moving into it. Georgia, Tennessee, Carolinas, are major magnets of people moving there, not just retirees, but working-age people. And if anything, there is a shortage of labor in all these places, in spite of people moving to them. But if they open up something in the Midwest, those are states that are shrinking and the labor shortages are much larger. So just thought it was interesting. Industrial Heartland no longer the Midwest, but the South. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching. Show your appreciation. 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