The Florida Roundup - Three perspectives on Florida’s economy and reputation

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

This week on The Florida Roundup, we bring you three interviews: first, we spoke with Catherine Wood, founder and CEO of ARK Investment, about what attracted her to St. Petersburg (01:33). Then, we’ll speak with John Bartleman, president & CEO of TradeStation, which is based in South Florida (19:36). Plus, author Malcolm Gladwell talks about what makes Miami so unique (37:32).

Covering Florida Navigator Program provides confidential assistance for Floridians looking to explore health care coverage within the federal health insurance marketplace. Open enrollment ends January 15th, 877-813-9115 or coveringflorida.org. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Happy New Year and thanks for being here. Today as we start the new year, we're going to hear from three people with very different takes on Florida's reputation, or at least the reputation for parts of Florida. The first is a veteran of the investment markets who moved her multi-billion dollar investment firm to St. Petersburg during COVID-19. I think that Florida is developing now as both a political power center and an innovation power center. So she's a fan. The second interview coming up today is with the head of an online trading platform based here in Florida. I think Florida is in a prime opportunity

in a space to really take advantage of the explosion that I think is coming in this market. Obviously, it's a very pro-business state. He's a fan. Later on in the program, you'll hear from a veteran and best-selling journalist who concentrates on society and social trends. You forget this because you live here. That an outsider coming to Miami is immediately struck by the fact that it doesn't bear any resemblance to any other city in the United States, right? Well, is that a good thing? Yeah, it depends.

Let's start with Kathy Wood. She's the investment company CEO who moved her firm from New York to Florida during the pandemic. Wood is the CEO of ARK Invest. She has a complicated reputation on Wall Street. She's known as an investor willing to make big and bold bets on new technologies. That appetite for risk has also meant investment losses. About a year ago, investment fund analysis firm Morningstar found Wood's flagship investment fund was one of the worst performing funds over the past decade.

A top wealth-destroying fund is how Morningstar put it. Now among her better known investments is Tesla. She's owned the stock since 2016 and knows its CEO Elon Musk pretty well. Musk has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to make the federal government more efficient. I sat down with Wood late last year to talk about her investment outlook, the Florida economy, and how she thinks Musk will approach efforts to remake federal government spending. The largest holding in your largest fund is Tesla. Yes. You've been a shareholder for a good long time.

Since the beginning. How does his involvement in the efficiency effort that he's undertaking with the Trump administration potentially impact his leadership of the largest holding that you have and your largest fund, that being Tesla? Oh, and yes, we've had discussions with the team about that. And they have assured us, and it makes sense, this is how he would do this sort of thing. He is the mastermind and is really going to be thinking carefully about AI and other technologies, automation and other technologies that can improve government efficiency. He won't be afraid to suggest strong actions. So regarding the Tesla investment, so much of the potential future value of that is going to rest on consumer consumption of the end product being the car and, of course, the profit margin. What are you anticipating there as the CEO is busy with the new incoming administration and the consumer response to that perhaps for his chief product, that being the car

or the truck? We've had this question from the beginning because, of course, he's also got SpaceX. He's very involved with SpaceX and Boring, the Boring Company, Neuralink and XAI. And our answer has been, he keeps his eye on the moat, the barrier to entry, the technology. In Tesla's case, there are three technologies that really matter. Robotics, energy storage, and artificial intelligence. That's where he spends most of his time, and it's concentrated time. One of the reasons this is working is we are now in the AI age. And in the AI age, we as a company, ARK Invest, are looking at the convergence among technologies and concluding that the most important variable today to power AI is data.

Elon Musk understands that all of the data from these various companies is going to serve various purposes at the companies, but he probably is going to amalgamate the data and derive large language models to make each of his companies even better than it is. No one is going to be able to beat Elon at a data game. And many people say data is the new oil, and we believe that's true. I do want to ask about kind of the

other part of his big portfolio, which is in the public space with this Department of Government Efficiency. The federal government is a large funder of a lot of research and development and pharmaceutical and robotics and innovation and technology overall. As Elon is going through his assessment of where to find efficiency in government spending, do you have any concern about the government appetite for core research and development spending that turns into certain kinds of technologies that industry then winds up taking to market and consumers benefit from, investors potentially benefit from. If you look at some of the line items that he's thrown out there in terms of actual things that we taxpayers are paying for, I think when I hear Orrita, it's like,

what are we doing? I would not have voted for my tax dollars to go there. But we will, we have voted for our tax dollars to help fund research, especially grants and universities, to keep America number one in research and innovation. I think he's extremely focused on that. Government efficiency and spending is one of the tentpoles of the new Trump administration's economic policies. Immigration certainly is one of them. Tariffs, trade tariffs is another one. How do those mix into your investment outlook for the decisions you're going to make for your investors in 2025? Well, in the world of innovation, what has happened over many, many years,

but especially the last four years, is the number of regulations has been strangling companies, strangling, stifling innovation. We think that the digital asset revolution is three revolutions in one. Bitcoin is the money revolution, a rules-based global monetary system with private, decentralized, really technology-enabled. Then the financial services revolution is going to take a lot of the middlemen out of the system. They are toll takers, but they're there because they're trying to minimize the risk to the system. With a peer-to-peer system, which is blockchain technology and the transparency, you don't need them anymore. That will take the two and a half to four percent tax out of every purchase. The cost of transaction. Yes, the cost of transactions away. And then the third revolution is the digital property rights revolution. And this might be the most underestimated. I know from my economics

background that the best way to lift people and countries out of poverty is property rights. And it's very hard for my generation, an older generation, to conceive that property rights online means anything, all right? That it's not something tangible. Not tangible. But a lot of the social status that young people seek is online. And so they want that Gucci handbag, the only one of that variety, and as defined by immutable property rights on. So it's a big movement that is quite misunderstood. the Trump administration regarding immigration and his pledge to deport millions of people who

are currently working in the United States, and trade tariffs, especially when it comes to China? As he did in the first administration, I think he's using them for bargaining power, particularly against China, because when our companies go into China to sell, effectively, China disregards their IP, intellectual property. Talk about property rights. What's interesting about China these days is that it has pivoted to innovation to try and bail itself out of its property deflation and all of the damage that is causing. I think China is in a weakened condition economically and therefore there probably is going to be more latitude for bargaining. And so that's good.

The offset to tariffs here in the U.S., to the extent they do happen, is lower tax rates, which impact everyone. I think one of the things wisely that President-elect Trump has done is he's basically proposing that we not tax tips. Now, where do we see tips primarily? They are in service establishments. A lot in Florida. A lot of tips in Florida. A lot of tips in Florida. In the hospitality industry. Yes, exactly. Very, very much so. And if that's true, we're going to see more people attracted to that industry. So as an antidote to perhaps people who are going to leave the country, hopefully come back legally, think about that. Many of these people get most of their income

in tips. They will have such an advantage. I really do think it's going to invite a whole different kind of person into that business or those businesses. Florida has seen a lot of wealth migration since COVID-19, certainly. Your company has been part of that as it moved from New York to St. Petersburg in 2021. Back then, I want to read something you said in a press release to kind of get a measurement now. You said that the move would, quote, allow us to be more innovative and to impact the broader community while shining a spotlight on the technological advances and creativity permeating the Tampa Bay region. What do you think the impact has been three years on?

Well, I cannot tell you how open the community is to our desire to make an impact. We have a foundation around education. to make an impact, we have a foundation around education. After a year of pilot testing, ARCS research, which is all around disruptive innovation, so robotics, energy storage, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and multi-omic sequencing in the life science space, we have hired educators to make that research age-appropriate for middle school. It is now in the middle school science curriculum throughout Pinellas County for the sixth grade. We're piloting seventh grade this year, and we think it will be throughout the middle school in the next two years. We're piloting seventh grade this year, and we think it will be throughout the middle school in the next two years.

We're also thrilled that we have a great relationship with the leaders of the community who really are St. Petersburg. It has incredible entertainment, restaurants. It's a wonderful place to visit. They need a balance in terms of new businesses, commercial enterprises coming in. And in terms of helping jumpstart that, we, in conjunction with the city, at the Innovation Center, it's named ARC Innovation Center, Center. We are starting an incubator, and we are going to start early stage venture funds to help fund some of the startups. I'll just say one more thing about St. Petersburg versus New York. So I worked in New York City for 40 years. It's a very intense place. I do think this is St. Pete and Florida generally. Professionally, I feel an optimism. Do you think being based in St. Pete has changed you as an

investor, as a trader? No, I don't think that. No. Your background is in economics, and I want to ask an economic question as it relates to Florida. You're probably somewhat familiar with Florida's economic history of boom and busts. It tends to be more optimistic than the rest of the country and perhaps more pessimistic when the bust happens. There's some economic turmoil that will be coming. What the cause may be and exactly how it manifests will be up to the future to decide for us, right? manifests, it will be up to the future to decide for us, right? With your 40-year experience in New York, in New York's centuries as the center of the financial world, some of that has been dispersed here to Florida, some of it in Pinellas County, courtesy of you, some of it in Palm Beach

County, and we've seen other funds and other financial services begin to disseminate throughout the Sunshine State. The question I have is, do you think Florida has the wherewithal to be able to maintain and retain the gains that it has seen in the financial industry when the economic turmoil comes next time? I do. And for a few reasons, we're already seeing this. There are people who were educated in Florida, and they had to leave at the time because there was nothing here for them. They are so happy that there is a company where they grew up, where they can return. I can see how laser-focused this administration is on in on making lots of new Silicon Valleys. We'd like to think Tampa Bay is the new Bay Area. Thank you for not saying Silicon Beaches. Yes no no no no no no I wouldn't do that. We would like Tampa Bay to be the new

Bay Area. We think, we think... I see what you did there. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So we see Miami has been a magnet, certainly for the digital asset space. I think they want to make Tallahassee and Jacksonville. I think that Florida is developing now as both a political power center and an innovation power center. It's much earlier on in the latter. Around COVID, we were basically hybrid. And now from a cultural point of view, we find it's extremely important that anyone who wants to join ARC move to St. Pete. And we're not having trouble. Kathy, if I may change gears entirely for the last few moments here. You've been open about your faith, your Christian faith for a number of years. Evangelical Christian faith played a role, certainly, in the 2024 election. What I'm curious about is how do you find kind of the balance between your faith,

politics, and economics to guide some investor decisions? So I started ARC, and ARC is named for Ark of the Covenant, because I felt we were going to do something different, and the investment world needed it. That was really prayer-driven. It was inspired. I wasn't even thinking about doing it, and just one, it hit me as I was thinking, okay, how can I do something to contribute to society? What inspired me was that I was a little disenchanted that the investment world was going passive and just following indexes as their investment guide. And I said, no, there's a place for that. But no, we can't go full throttle that direction. We need to look into the future and see how these

technologies are going to transform life. I think prayer is very important and, you know, just seeking wisdom and guidance and, you know, every minute of the day and with every major strategic decision. And so it's just very much a part of who I am. Speaking with Kathy Wood, she's the founder, CEO and chief investment officer of ARK Invest. It manages about $12 billion across nine publicly available funds. It's based in St. Petersburg. You can connect with us. Our inbox is always open. Email us radio at thefloridaroundup.org radio at thefloridaroundup.org. I'm Tom Hudson. Still to come, more on the Florida economy in the year ahead from the boss at an online trading platform based here in the Sunshine State. Extremely painful for residents of Florida and other areas of the U.S. with inflation rising,

costs rising, price of food. I mean, we just went through the entire election cycle and, you know, the pain that people are feeling is real. And I think that's going to just continue to grow. You're listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio station. Insurance Marketplace. Open enrollment ends January 15th. 877-813-9115 or coveringflorida.org. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Thanks for being along with us in the new year. This new year begins with the state unemployment rate higher than it was last year. Inflation has cooled off. That's good news. And the cost to borrow money to buy a home is about the same as it was a year ago. It's a mixed outlook. The jobless rate, while higher, still remains near historic lows.

The state's population continues growing. Average home prices are flattening out, and average incomes have grown. Now, Floridians ended last year feeling pretty good. The University of Florida surveys consumers every month. Last year, feeling pretty good, the University of Florida surveys consumers every month. In November, their confidence jumped by the largest amount in three and a half years, rising to its highest level since 2021. This optimism came as voters decisively chose to return Donald Trump to the White House. Trump was reelected with the message of imposing tariffs on China and other trading partners and cracking down on immigration.

John Bartleman thinks the president-elect will have a tough time taking on inflation with those priorities. He thinks that means economic volatility, and that may be good for his business, which is the active buying and selling of stocks and cryptocurrencies. Bartleman is the CEO of online trading platform TradeStation. The company is based in Broward County. I spoke with Bartleman in the CEO of online trading platform TradeStation. The company is based in Broward County. I spoke with Bartleman in November at the Crossroads Summit for Traders and Investors in Coral Gables. Let's talk about some of the big economic issues that are ahead for 2025. President-elect Trump has made immigration a priority. He has made trade tariffs a priority.

He has made reviewing existing government spending a priority. What do you think the impact of those policies may be on the investment markets? Well, I think from my perspective, I see a lot of what he's proposing to put in place very inflationary. So for us, I think that's going to create an environment of higher rates, higher, longer. Higher interest rates. Yeah, higher interest rates. So more expensive borrowing. More expensive borrowing, but I think there'll be potentially more volatility in the markets. So for our kind of traders, this may be an interesting market to be in. We'll see a lot of chaos coming. A lot of things are combining to show, I think, a lot of volatility coming

into the market. The higher cost of borrowing is an interesting piece for a business owner like yourself. Certainly the kind of business you run thrives on volatility. But at the same time, you're also trying to run a business and have employees be able to afford a place of living in one of the most expensive areas, certainly in Florida, if not in the United States. And housing, affordability, and supply is a real issue. And so when you're talking about mortgage rates at 8% or so, that can be a real challenge for you as you're trying to balance out your payroll. Absolutely. It's a strain on our employees, for sure. It's a strain on us to borrow, to be able to grow the company.

It's a double-edged sword for us because you have those negatives, but the other side is with the higher interest rates, we have a lot of customers that have their cash sitting with us uninvested. They're day traders. A lot of them trade during the day, leave their cash overnight. We're able to benefit off that by keeping the interest rate and sharing some of that with our customers. The float.

Yeah, the float. So that actually benefits on one side, but yes, it can be difficult on the other side. And then drill down a little bit smaller here in terms of kind of the impact of the Florida economy, which is constrained with its housing supply. Affordability used to be just an issue in South Florida, but in the last five, six years, it's gone up and down the peninsula and the panhandle for that matter. Immigration labor is a big question. What's going to happen with the deportation pledges that President Trump has? And of course, the tariff issue and some of the international trade routes that we have, particularly on the East Coast. Yeah, I think this is going to become extremely painful for residents of Florida and other areas

of the U.S. With inflation rising, costs rising. I mean, we've got strong development in a lot of South Florida here. Prices are skyrocketing. You know, price of food. I mean, we've got strong development in a lot of South Florida here. Prices are skyrocketing. You know, price of food, I mean, we just went through the entire election cycle. And, you know, the pain that people are feeling is real. And I think that's going to just continue to grow. And we're going to have to find some solutions to that. More pain. Do you think the economic growth is able to catch up to maybe ease some of that? And what I mean there specifically is wage growth. Well, I think it's slower than what we're seeing in the inflation. If the wage growth could keep up, sure, that may happen. But we're seeing the pain on more and more

people that aren't making the income necessary to be able to overcome this. And then how are you positioning TradeStation to navigate some of those painful times? Well, we're trying to empower our customers to be able to help themselves by investing in the markets. Some of them are actual professional traders that do this for a living. So we give them the advantage to try to put their money to work and earn a living through that. And I suspect tax policy may be part of that and how investment income and trading income is treated. Absolutely. And we'll see now in this new administration, I'd assume the tax reductions may help some of this and we'll see. Florida has seen an enormous amount of wealth come to the state, certainly since the COVID-19 pandemic. There are regions that are working very hard to attract

the financial services industry. South Florida is doing that, particularly Palm Beach County. We're seeing some of that also happen in Tampa St. Pete area, in Orlando area. What role does being based in Florida play for TradeStation as it's been here since the early 1980s? This has been our home base, but we're a global company. So we have employees really spread across the world. Our customers are worldwide. But I think being in Florida is just a great center and sort of the world came to us being down here. I mean, we all have locations in Chicago and New York and London and the major financial centers of the world. But being here where things are happening is really exciting.

And I think as we're part of this community in South Florida, developing out more of an ecosystem for technology more broadly to accelerate, I think we need the counties to better collaborate and building opportunities for companies to come together. I think Miami-Dade County has done a great job at building and fostering a fintech-friendly environment. We have a lot of young people here, a lot of opportunities for them to network and interact. I don't see those same opportunities in Broward and Palm Beach yet. There are pockets, but very small, not as active and engaging as what you see in Miami.

You know, Florida is not known as a technology hub. Certainly in the past 10 or 12 years or so, that has begun to change a little bit with certain efforts in some of these locations to try to attract technology companies. South Florida, of course, has always been long a destination for Latin American operations for U.S. companies, technology companies included, but other areas, again, trying to build out that technology. What is TradeStation's experience attracting technology workers in an area where there's not a lot of technology competitors. We did have a pocket of really good technology companies here in South Florida that generated an ecosystem that we all sort of hired each other software engineers over

the years. Kept bidding salaries up, essentially. Absolutely. But, you know, being a global company and hiring from anywhere now after COVID, we can really hire talent wherever it is. And they can stay there. And they can stay there. And we've seen some actually move into Florida on purpose and got closer. Others are looking to move to other locations. I think for Florida, we've got to make this a very attractive place for employees to come to. And I think we need to really continue to build out the university system to create talent that's going to want to stay here. And I think the universities are doing that.

As we are looking at 2025, equity markets, stock markets are at or close to record highs. Bond market has had a little bit of trouble over the past couple of months. What do the trading flows of your customers tell you about the appetite for risk into the new year? I'd say it's been very strong, running from about January through September, August, September period. Really good volatility, really good volumes for traders. We had a little drop off here over the last two months prior to the election. I think maybe coming out of the fall season, people are taking a break. But now as we come through the election, you're starting to see that volume of volatility kick back in. And after the election now, I think the equity markets are

making a run. You see crypto making a run, hopefully crossing 100,000. Bitcoin here, specifically. Yeah, Bitcoin here. A look at the investment markets would call those risk assets, right? Stocks are a lot riskier, traditionally speaking, than the bond market or treasuries, certainly, from the United States government. Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin specifically, a lot more risky than stocks even, a lot more volatile. What do you think is feeding that appetite for folks that are trading on your platform for risk? So our type of customers that are day traders or more sophisticated swing traders are looking for

volatility. They want movement in products. It doesn't necessarily matter if it's going up or down. They want movement. Because they can make money either way. They can make money either way. So the more volatility, the more trading we're getting through our platform. Yeah. Let's talk a little about crypto, because TradeStation was an early adopter of crypto. 2024 was a difficult year for you and the company in crypto. It began as a difficult year. You were fined $3 million for a lending program that wasn't registered with the federal authorities, the Securities and Exchange Commission. You exited that business. Let's start here with basic stuff first, John. Do you consider crypto

a security? So I think this's, this has been the difficulty. The vast majority of cryptos are probably securities in the classic definition of it. So I consider them more like penny stocks. I mean, they're really maybe good projects, should be registered securities. And if you believe in them and understand those projects, maybe good investments. Bitcoin, I think, stands alone. We've seen the governments that told us that's considered a commodity and not a security and falls under the CFTC's regulations. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is different than the Securities and Exchange Commission. There's lots of finance cops when it comes to the Fed. Exactly. So, you know, and the issues that we've experienced in

crypto, obviously, we were an early adopter in getting into this space, and there was not clear regulation. So, for example, in what you brought up with the interest earning program we had on crypto, we're allowed under regulation to pay our customers interest on their cash that's sitting in their brokerage account. Same concept was applied for crypto. We don't see any difference, but there were not regulations around that. So the regulators came down on that. That was not a regulated product. And the reason this is important of whether or not a cryptocurrency is a security under federal law or not is whether or not, if it is, then folks have to be registered in order to do the kind of business that you had been doing, for instance. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And now I think with the new administration

and some of the legislation on the Senate side, at least, that looks like it may be pushed through, hopefully we get clarity in this now and actually define this as an asset class and really get more understanding of what the government's going to be comfortable with on each side. The price of Bitcoin certainly has exploded since the election. The ability for the common investor to invest in Bitcoin or any of the other cryptocurrencies, many of the other cryptocurrencies, has also gotten a lot easier through exchange-traded funds, which at some level are no different than the S&P 500 exchange traded fund or the Nasdaq exchange traded fund or the Dow Jones Industrial Exchange traded fund.

What do you anticipate? What are you hoping for from the new Trump administration in regards to the treatment of cryptocurrency? If we get some clear regulatory guidelines on which side of the fence they said, are they going to be considered commodities like Bitcoin? Are they going to be considered securities or not? Or are they going to define a new category of crypto that companies now are not listing, for example, as much on the listed exchanges? There's a lot of costs associated with being a public company, but you see now this ICO market on the cryptos and be able to list sort of your company out there and drive funding for advancement of what it is you're doing is an interesting approach for new companies,

new projects coming forward. But we need clarity on where that's going to sit from a regulatory standpoint. Gary Gensler is the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is, one would argue, the top cop of Wall Street and the investment markets. It's not the only one, as we mentioned earlier. What do investors need in an investment market regulator as he prepares to step down in January? I think we're going to need a regulator that really understands where technology is taking this industry. The rules that we have in place have been there for a very long time. I think they make a lot of sense in some of the legacy industries and products that we have in the markets. This is now evolving in a whole new landscape. And although you can apply the old rules to the current products, we've seen the

headaches and hassle that the lack of regulatory clarity from the government has really caused in the industry. And if we don't clean this up and get clear regulation sooner, the U.S. has risk of losing its edge and being a leader in this space. And you'll let the, you know, all these major projects will then go offshore, which has happened. Are there, where is the foreign competition coming from? Everywhere. So you see a lot going on in Europe, you know, the more regulatory friendly jurisdictions, you see a lot in Japan and in Asia and more broadly, you know, this is a worldwide opportunity. As you said, we can now live and work anywhere. You want to be in the right jurisdiction where you have the ability to build the business and do the types of things you want to be able to

do. I'm Tom Hudson. This is the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio station. We're listening to a conversation I had with John Bartleman, the CEO of online trading platform TradeStation. The company is based in South Florida. South Florida and Miami specifically has planted a flag with cryptocurrency. FTX Arena with the cryptocurrency was named with the where the Miami Heat played basketball. Of course, FTX blew up in a spectacular financial fraud criminal case. There's the crypto bull, right? Which is ours, the Bitcoin bull, it's yours. Yeah, that's the Miami bull. It was designed and created and owned by us. Yep. And so it's in now down Miami, still, it's there for everybody to

see, just like the Wall Street bull is at corner of Wall and Broad in New York. How is Florida poised around cryptocurrency for a new administration as you await some of those decisions? I think Florida is in a prime opportunity in a space to really take advantage of the explosion that I think is coming in this market. Obviously, it's a very pro-business state. But I think with the movement through COVID of all these executives and companies moving themselves to South Florida has really primed us. And we've got great universities here. So obviously, the weather's amazing. So I think we're in a situation where you could see significant growth over the next few years. I want to ask you more about those ingredients for that kind of environment in Florida.

If you look, for instance, really across the globe at the global finance centers, one can make an argument. The reasons why those geographies are global finance centers oftentimes are because they were historic trade routes. It was physically where the people who had the commodities or the money, the capital, were doing those trades. Cryptocurrency, of course, is famously borderless. What makes Florida in a position to potentially take advantage of this? Well, I think it's because it's the one place in the world a lot of people want to come and visit. They love to be here. And once you're here, you're like, wow, I could live here.

This is a place that I could be. I mean, for a lot of reasons, as I said. I mean, it's a beautiful state. We get amazing weather through most of the year, minus some of these hurricanes. But what about the industry, though? The underlying, you know, the fintech, the financial technology industry, the back office kind of work that's necessary if crypto enters into more of a regulated world? Well, I think we've seen the influx of a lot of the financial services companies down here. We've always had some hedge funds and some of the,

you know, family offices sitting down here. But I think now you've got much more of the institutional players and you see a lot of crypto came into South Florida at the time. But you're now getting into more mature businesses, the financial services business. You have a lot of the market makers down here. You have Citadel now. It's a major player down here. You know, TradeStation, we've been here for a long time. It's sort of our home. I think we were the flagship here. But I think that's going to build on itself and continue to grow. Artificial intelligence has, of course, been a big buzzword now for a couple of years. Every industry is after it, trying to capture it, trying to understand it, trying to monetize it, profit to make profit from it, for instance, and also do it in a way that does not

expose a company or a shareholder or an investor to any additional liability or risk. How is artificial intelligence intersecting your business of providing a marketplace for investors and particularly traders to try to look for opportunities? Yeah, I think the way we've looked at this within our company is that we're learning to apply AI within our operations first. We think that's an area where we can start adapting, getting our data and capabilities AI friendly. So is this like accounting and human resources? Every department within our organization right now is using AI, whether it's in software that we now use to run our day-to-day operations or we're using chat GPT and the other models.

We are learning to leverage that to become more efficient as an organization. We are also looking at opportunities to expose these capabilities out to our customers. So, for example, as I mentioned, we have Easy Language. It's a software development language that we provided. We are looking to now provide an AI chatbot that will allow you to interact. You can speak to it now or write simple English to say, this is what I want my strategy to be looking at and this thing in the market. It will write the code for you.

So that's an obvious one. We're also looking at customer service with AI. It's able to provide more intelligent chatbots to be able to help customers. But because we are highly regulated in this space, we have to be very clear and have regulatory approval to when we have AI having conversations with our customers. We have to understand what the AI is going to say back to our customers and make sure that's regulatory appropriate. business operations at TradeStation. Might this lead to a smaller workforce at TradeStation? Maybe potentially in the future that they may come out. Right now, what we're seeing is that this is augmenting our staff. So it's allowing them to take a lot of the mundane tasks, let AI use that, and we're then focused on the bigger picture things. So particularly across

our software development team, obviously AI is great right now at writing software code. And what it's doing is taking on, again, all those mundane tasks for our software engineers to do that. It's writing better, safer code. So now our engineers are able to spend their time thinking of the higher level problems and solving those. So I think it'll help us advance faster, not necessarily reduce jobs. Yeah. John, thank you very much. I appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Speaking with your time. Thank you very much. Speaking with John Bartleman, the CEO of online trading platform TradeStation,

which is based here in Florida. Now, still to come, journalist and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell comes to Miami and what returning shopping carts to the corral in the public's parking lot tells us about our cultural norms. I'm Tom Hudson.

You're listening to The Florida Rondo from your Florida Public Radio station. Covering Florida Navigator Program provides confidential assistance for Floridians looking to explore health care coverage within the federal health insurance marketplace. Open enrollment ends January 15th. 877-813-9115 or coveringflorida.org. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Thanks for being here. Malcolm Gladwell wanted to learn more about Medicare fraud. So the journalist and author decided to visit the

capital of the schemes. He came to Miami. So once I found out that Miami had this exalted position in this fraud category, I came to Miami to kind of get to the bottom of it. 25 years ago, Gladwell helped popularize the concept of how fashion and social issues become trends. He wrote a book about it called The Tipping Point. Now, he revisited his theories and looked at some of the darker elements of social epidemics in his new book titled Revenge of the Tipping Point. And in doing so, Florida, particularly Miami, found itself playing a central role thanks to schemes to rip off Medicare, the government health care program. Gladwell knows Miami presents a compelling setting to explore his theories. a compelling setting to explore his theories.

And he knows it sparks a natural, shall we say, curiosity in audiences who only know about Miami by its reputation as a place with a tolerance for outrageous behavior, to put it politely. After all, the first sentence on the book flap of Revenge of the Tipping Point asks, Why is Miami, Miami? And that's why it was the first question that I asked him when I interviewed him in November at the Miami Book Fair in front of a live audience. Malcolm, why is Miami, Miami? I felt like a reference to Miami's weirdness would be the right place to start.

Let's be frank here, Malcolm. You have held up a mirror to some Miami behavior. to Miami's weirdness would be the right place to start. Let's be frank here, Malcolm. You have held up a mirror to some Miami behavior that is not all that becoming. Yeah. What did you find about Miami that was so intriguing as a storyteller, that was so compelling as a journalist? I was very interested in this question of why there is so much unexplained variation in the behavior across a wide range of things from one city to the next in the United States. The way a cardiologist treats you in Buffalo

is very different from a way a cardiologist would treat the exact same patient with the exact same problem in Boulder, Colorado, for example. And you can look across any number of medical procedures, and you will find these crazy variations from place to place. So I got interested in Miami because Miami is a great example of this crazy variation. And the thing that I focused on was Medicare fraud. This is the Medicare fraud capital of America. And thus, I'm not sure that really deserves a round of applause, Miami.

I think this is part of the problem that Malcolm is going to be talking about. Yeah, it would be. Medicare fraud is a huge deal. It's the biggest kind of fraud in a category of fraud in America. Nothing else comes close. I mean, and what's curious is that, you know, it's really easy to do, as I discovered. So if it's really easy for anyone to do in the United States, then why isn't everyone doing it? Why, of all the small number of people who really are doing it aggressively, is Miami far and away the leader? So once I found out that Miami had this exalted position in this fraud category, I came

to Miami to kind of get to the bottom of it. So 25 years ago, when you wrote Tipping Point, you chose stories about hush puppies. Yeah. Right? The shoes. You chose a story about Sesame Street and blues clues. And 25 years go by and then you decide to feature a story about Medicare fraud in Miami. Yeah. My vision has gotten a little darker over the last 25 years.

Maybe I have a richer appreciation for the full diversity of crazy behavior in this country. You forget this because you live here. That an outsider coming to Miami is immediately struck by the fact that it doesn't bear any resemblance to any other city in the United States, right? I began just by kind of diagnosing the varieties of flamboyant Medicare fraud behaviors that take place in a city, which are considerable. There's something called the Medicare Fraud Task Force, which is this group put together by the FBI, the DOJ, and HHS. They figured out that there was one of the biggest money launderers involved in the Medicare fraud business in Miami. They were tracking him down.

And they realized that he was in the office upstairs from where the task force was. So in other words, here's a guy, every morning he goes to an office building in North Miami. He's literally on the sixth floor. And on the fifth floor, and on the fifth floor it says Medicare Fraud Task Force. So it's like you have to put yourself inside the mind of that guy. He's like, he has a certain amount of audacity. So in fact, in the book, when you are talking with a member of this task force, you write, quote, there was a certain characteristic shamelessness, a particular kind of brazenness,

and flamboyance that sets Miami apart. Yeah, it is. So a lot of this, I don't go into this in the book, but I had many occasions to reflect while writing the book about the central role that the television series Miami Vice plays in this because you know this is the first for most Americans our first encounter with my aminess is Miami Vice and of course Miami Vice in retrospect is an extraordinarily peculiar television show

some may consider it groundbreaking for the time. And if you think back, I don't know how many of you remember my advice. It's a Don Johnson vehicle from, yes, from the 80s. What's peculiar about it is that up until that point, if you did a television show about cops in a corrupt place, the job of the cops, the place was considered to be a bad place

that needed cleaning up. The job of the cops was place was considered to be a bad place that needed cleaning up the job of the cops was to confront the bad guy and then when you watch Miami Vice you're immediately struck by the fact that the two cops who are at the center of the show wear Armani suits and your first thought as a viewer is how do they afford that on a police officer's salary

you know in previous cop shows the veniality or the corruption in the city was presented as part of the problem of the city. In Miami, the corruption and veniality was presented as part of the appeal of the city. And there is actually a kind of scholarly literature about, did Miami Vice play a key role in the turnaround in the city's fortunes because, by means we'll remember, in the late 70s, this was not a tourist destination. It was, in fact, being passed

over in a large number of ways. And it suddenly goes from being a place that no one wanted to go to to a place people did. I'm Tom Hudson. This is the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio station. We're listening to an interview with author Malcolm Gladwell. He wrote the influential book The Tipping Point 25 years ago. His new book revisits his ideas and theories about how social trends start and perpetuate for good and bad. We spoke in November in front of a live audience at the Miami Book Fair. A quarter of a century ago, you introduced kind of three key concepts around social epidemics. One of the key concepts in here, and it's the first word of the subtitle,

is overstories, which is related to this idea of local variances, local area variances, right? And it's described as the patterns of behavior attract themselves to places in ways that can sometimes surprise us. I tell a story in that chapter of this marvelous character named Philip S. Forms, who was accused by the government of masterminding one of the largest Medicare frauds in American history. So here's a guy who came from Chicago, where his family had been upstanding citizens and had run a chain of nursing homes up there. Then they all move

en masse to Miami and Philip S. Forms very quickly becomes embroiled in some kind of questionable behavior. And at his sentencing hearing, his rabbi shows up and his rabbi says he was an honest man in Chicago. It wasn't

until he came to Miami that he became a crook. Maybe Miami is to blame. And I chose in the chapter to take that seriously. And I do think there's something to that, that there is something about the ethos of a community that has an impact on us in a way that we may not realize. So when I was reading this in the book what I was thinking about is who among us takes our Publix shopping cart back to this shopping cart corral? There's your book fair audience. Yeah this this is... Which Publix are you shopping at? Because I need to... This is a good example of a community norm.

Right. Right? Right. If you ask that same question in Minneapolis, everyone would... And you do it because everyone else is doing it. Because, you know, there is a point, a tipping point, when you no longer feel any kind of social pressure to adhere to that particular norm.

You know, I was talking about this recently at an event a couple of weeks ago in Broward County. Oh, a whole different story. That's right. Well, Malcolm, I mean, you know, when you're driving in Broward County, you never turn off your turn signal. And when you're driving in Dade County, you never turn it on. So it's a bright line there of a cultural norm. So this individual is from Dade County, but we had this conversation in Broward, which for this audience is good context, I think. And I was talking about kind of this idea of the overstory to him. And this was a long time community civic business leader,

and he said, you know, Dade County is a community of risk takers, or descendants of risk takers, historically. And so perhaps that risk appetite is materially different in this community. Yeah, I think those kinds of observations are really useful. They're not definitive. They don't explain behavior on the individual level fully,

but they're really useful in understanding that there are these enormous differences in behavior from one group to the next. Malcolm, congratulations on another terrific read. Best of luck to you. Speaking with Malcolm Gladwell in November in front of a live audience at the Miami Book Fair, his latest book is Revenge of the Tipping Point, Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering. And that'll do it for our program this week. It's produced by WLRN Public Media in Miami and WUSF in Tampa by Bridget O'Brien and Grayson Docter. WLRN's Vice President of Radio and the program's Technical Director is Peter Meritz.

Engineering help each and every week from Doug Peterson, Ernesto Jay, and Jackson Harp. Our theme music is provided by Miami jazz guitarist Aaron Libos at AaronLibos.com. Thanks for listening and supporting public radio in your area. I'm Tom Hudson. Have a terrific weekend. your area. I'm Tom Hudson. Have a terrific weekend.