David Rosenthal

And then all of a sudden I thought, oh my God, I love this.

And what I loved was just that, was the constant recycling of the thought.

And so what I do is,

The process, I don't want to get too far away from your podcast.

So this is a filter.

Like if I'm talking to you, it takes effort to put it down on the page.

I don't record anything.

I've filtered it.

It's interesting enough to me that it belongs on the page.

Then I go home and I write the notes up quickly.

and that's another filter.

If what's on the page interests me enough to put it in a Word document, then I've got, it's filtered again.

And I keep those notes while I'm working on a book, and the file will be

500 pages long by then, maybe longer by the time.

And it's just stuff.

And then I start thinking about how do you frame this story?

What is this story?

But that's months usually down the road.

And there are times when I get into something and I am months into it and I realize, ooh, there's nothing here.

With Sam Beckman Freed, I was a year into it and I did not know what I was gonna do with it until it blew up.