Hello, welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios with Emily Peck of Axios.

Hello, hello. With Elizabeth Spires of all manner of media places.

Hello. And with a media refugee, Nate, would you say?

Yeah, I'd like that. Expat maybe. Or I don't know.

And media expat. We have Nate Silver, who needs very little introduction, but obviously is a statistician and

a poker player and the author of a new book-length essay about the lead guitarist for you

too.

Nate, plug the book.

The book is called On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything.

It's a tour of people who basically take crazy risks for a living. So we are going to talk

all about the book. We're going to talk about the world of artificial intelligence. We're going to

talk about Silicon Valley. We're going to talk about gambling. We're going to talk about this Valley. We're going to talk about gambling.

We're going to talk about this whole broad idea that you can split the country between two different classes of people, the river and the village. We also have a separate Slate Plus segment all about politics and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and probabilities in politics. So all of that

is coming up on Slate Money. Nate, the guiding metaphor in this book of yours is this distinction

between the river and the village. And I know that Emily

had a question about why a river? It's a great question. Originally it was going to be called,

in the proposal was called the pool. Because a pool, like gamblers love water metaphors,

like bad poker players are called fish or whales. A bedding pool is a thing.

I wanted a river, though, A, it's also a gambling term. Poker was developed in the Mississippi

Riverboat era, and the river is the last card that's dealt, the pivotal card in Texas,

Hold'em. But I wanted a community that was like a little bit more of a region because these people that the, you know, everyone from like poker players to venture capitalists to crypto dorks to like effective altruists, they kind of know one another, but there's like not quite a sense of like community as much, even though I travel through this community. I'm like, it's the same type of nerdy, competitive,

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