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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.

Elon Musk has led the charge of Silicon Valley gaining not just influence in Washington, but a seat at the table.

To help us understand how this affects government and the startup ecosystem today, we're joined by Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center's Elections and Government Program. Daniel, welcome to the show.

It's so nice to be here with you. I really appreciate you coming to join us. We spoke last week or a couple of weeks ago about how Silicon Valley's influence in Washington is starting to benefit the tech elite,

as we're seeing employees, allies, investors of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen,

Palmer Lucky, all these kind of big names in tech taking roles at federal agencies.

So I was really excited to have you come on the show to talk a little bit more about that.

Before we get into it, give us a little bit of your background. How did you get here? Well, I, as you said,

work at the Brennan Center for Justice, where I'm director of our Elections and Government

program. My background's actually in the studying of money and politics. So before I came to the

Brennan Center, lo these many years ago,

I was a senior lawyer at the Federal Election Commission, which is a small federal agency

that regulates campaign finance in federal elections. Before that, I'm a lawyer. I was a lawyer

in private practice, and I studied a number of the issues and

worked on issues around the First Amendment and the structure of government. So I've been working on

these issues for a while, obviously as the tech sector has become more prominent, and frankly,

also as the communications landscape has changed, I've done more work on the intersection of money and politics and tech and just democracy and tech in general.

I think with this election and this current administration, we're seeing a lot of attention paid to Silicon Valley and tech leaders and their role in Washington.

Can you speak a little bit about how this is unique and also how it's not that unique?

So much of what we're dealing with right now, you know, is both unique and then not unique.

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