Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast, your source for policy rants and raves and a safe space for former employees to come on the show and rant about their former employers.

I'm Evan Swartzchstraver, your host, on today's show, The Sharing Economy.

Of course, listeners have seen stories about Uber's regulatory battles in New York City or strikes in Paris or court decisions in Germany, but today we're not going to talk about the on-the-ground combat in the sharing economy. We're going to talk about the big picture. What is the sharing economy? What does it look like? How is it impacting our economy? Joining me to discuss this is Will Reinhart,

Director of Technology and Innovation Policy at the American Action Forum. Will, thank you for

coming back on the show, despite my snarky comments about your disgraceful exit from Tech

Freedom, which was written about extensively in Washington City paper. I mean, it's great to know

that being the first hire, I think I was the first hire

of Tech Freedom, and whenever I come back, I'm greeted with open arms, and they allow me

to do a podcast, which is, oh, so nice.

Yeah, I mean, originally you weren't allowed within 100 feet of this building, but I had

the restraining order temporarily lifted.

That's not true for the listeners who were concerned about that, by the way.

All right.

So, Will, let's start with the basics.

I think one of the frustrations for a lot of policy people like yourself is you see, you know, on Twitter and Facebook and, you know, in the news, just commentary about the sharing economy.

Yeah.

And it's not really clear what the people writing these articles mean, what they think they mean,

and not everything's the same.

So you have companies like Uber and Airbnb, but then you have companies like Etsy,

and then you have companies like Thumbtack that we've talked about on the show.

And these are not all the same, and they all get lumped together.

So let's start with the sharing economy. What does that mean to you?

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