Welcome to the tech policy podcast. I'm Ash Kuzarian. On today's show, we're going to talk about technology, cryptocurrency, and Florida. Those are the free topics that are very exciting, and we have a very special guest joining us to cover them. We have Andrea Sullivan

from the James Madison Institute in Florida. She is the new director of tech policy there.

They just opened a technology and innovation policy center and I am so excited to have her on.

Thank you so much for joining. Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to talk to you.

So tell our listeners first about the James Madison Institute if they might not be familiar

with your work and if they're maybe not from Florida or they don't do state policy.

Sure.

What do you guys do? Sure. So the James Madison Institute is

part of the state policy network. So we are a Florida focused think tank looking at economic

matters in the state of Florida. We have a focus on, you know, limited government, free markets,

the typical kind of SPN toolkit,

and we try to look at ways to make the state of Florida more competitive, just a nicer place

to live in terms of policy. And now with the, I should say, reopening of the center, because

we've had it for a while, but now we're kind of revamping it. We're really starting to look at tech policy and what reforms the state of Florida can make

to be more competitive, not only in the country but in the world.

Florida is already a really nice place to live, right? We have beautiful nature.

We have pretty good policies in terms of regulations and taxes.

But surprisingly, we don't have too much in the way of people really addressing tech policy

specifically. There's a couple of industry groups and, you know, lobbyists, right, for maybe specific

companies or like I said, industries. But in terms of, like,

taking a principled approach, there's not much. And there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there. So we're

very excited to harvest that, I guess, in Florida, it's oranges, right? We're looking forward to,

...