Hello!

Welcome to the Four Lost Cities episode of Slate Money,

or guide to the business and finance news of the we.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios.

I'm here with Emily Peck of Huffpost.

Hello.

We have the most fun, awesome, brilliant and exciting guest, definitely of the century on Slate Money this week.

Welcome, Annalie Newitz.

Hello.

Hello. You know everything about everything. You write everything. You write fiction. You write nonfiction. You've written how many books now?

A bunch. A bunch. You could count them on your two hands.

Which is a hell of a lot more than the number of books that Emily have I written between us.

I'm very impressed by anyone who can write a book. What is the new one?

This is called Four Lost Cities, a Secret History of the Urban Age.

We are going to talk to you about this book. We're going to talk about cities and their rise and their fall and what causes them to do both things. We are going to talk about

other emergent systems too. We're going to talk about electric vehicles and how those may

wind up expanding across the country. And we're going to talk about the internet, whether it is

like the altruity of a billion people and given what happens to cities, whether

that too is doomed. We have a

slate plus segment about

the payment system in America

and whether that is doomed and it's going to wind up

...