Okay, I want to stop you right now from wasting time. What you don't want to do is brainstorm on 50 or 100 possible questions. The reporter might ask you, in a moment, I'm going to ask you to come up with five and just five questions you think a reporter could ask, but do not waste time trying to think of every single possible question, you could spend the next two days on that and you only have two hours, possibly less. So don't do that. Don't waste a whole lot of time trying to figure out the biases of this reporter and reading every single article the person's ever written. knowing a little bit, spending a couple minutes on that is okay, but don't go overboard.

Next thing, don't try to relax. And now's no time to take a shot of this or pills or value or any of that. That's only going to slow your reaction time your thinking time down when you're in the interview. So resist that urge to have a glass of wine to relax you is not a good idea at all. Don't start investigating and trying to come up with more and more and more data. You've been asked to do this interview, presumably because you know more than the reporter does.

So at this point, you shouldn't be gathering more and more data, you've got to be refining data, narrowing it down to your top messages more about that in the next lecture. But I don't want you to panic. I don't want you going off on wild goose chases for 100 questions here and 10 more pages of data and trying to read 50 pages of briefing the time for that is over. Now the time is on focusing the messages we want. And we'll talk about in a later lecture packaging your messages with sound bites and practicing the delivery so we can execute this well.