Hey there, I'm Jason Gatz, and you're listening to Think Again a Big Think podcast.

Started in 2008, Big Think is a kind of online think tank of big ideas from some of the most creative thinkers on the planet.

On the Think Again podcast, we revisit these ideas in new and unpredictable ways.

Our producers surprised me and my guests with short interview clips from Big Things Archives,

ideas that we didn't come here expecting to discuss.

I'm very, very happy to be here today with two guests for the very first time in the

history of the show, over 100 episodes.

Nicole Galland and Neil Stevenson.

Nicole is typically a writer of historical fiction and some contemporary fiction,

including The Fool's Tale and Iago.

And Neil Stevenson is known for a complex, mind-boggling, speculative science fiction, including Seven Eves, Snow

Crash, and many other novels. Together, they've written a new novel. It's called the Rise

and Fall of Dodo, which is an acronym for Department of Diacronic Operations. It's a massive and

massively entertaining epic involving magic, time travel, quantum physics,

secret government organizations, and an ancient banking family called the Fuggers that's spelled

with two Gs. Welcome to think again, Nicole and Neil. Thank you. Thanks for, thanks for having us on.

Yeah, no, so glad to have you. So this is the, you guys have written, you worked on one other book

together, but this is the first one, I guess, where you're the only two co-authors, right?

That's right.

Let's talk a little bit about, like, how that goes, because, I mean, it's a little mind-boggling

to me, and I know there's a bit of it

on the back of the book about how you did this, but how do you go about writing a book of this

...