Thank you everyone for joining us today for our next installment on speaking to the press. Today, we're going to talk to Dr. Bob about preparing for the interview. I'm Jerome Lee, an emergency medicine and critical care physician at Mass General in Boston, and this is brought to you by our SCCM LEAD initiative. Thank you again, Dr. Bob, for joining us today. How do we prepare for an interview? The only thing that worked for me in terms of preparation is I had to know everything. I mean, I would go and talk to everybody I could. I mean, I would interview everybody I could. I talked to whoever at the Cleveland Clinic, or Mass General, or Stanford. I think that I'm going to share one thing here on the screen, and that is, I think it's incredibly important to be really well-prepared, and there's an easy way to do it. Here is Google News as an example. If you were to take a story, I'm just going to get rid of this here. Here's Google News. Let's take a story that has to do with COVID. We hear all the COVID-19 stories. What's nice about this is they often will have all the different takes on this. In other words, I would look at the Washington Post account, then I would look at the New York Times account. In other words, look at the traditional New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. Look at Fox to know what they're doing on the right. Look at MSNBC to know what they're doing on the left. Try to avoid at all costs anything that sounds political or is a narrative that sounds like it's from either side. Because as soon as people hear a narrative, they think they've heard, they're going to go, I love this guy, I agree with him. We're going to go, no, you're terrible. This whole anti-vaxxer issue, it's people just turn you off. You think of a really good way of being able to frame it. For instance, if someone's asking you about anti-vax, I used to get all riled up about it. I even did this one show on how the anti-vaxxers were more likely to only have a high school education. They were from states that on the US News had the lowest amount of education, whatnot, all that stuff's insulting. What I ended up saying now is, listen, they have an interesting number of very valid points. But the bottom line is that you could die without a vaccine or end up in ICU. And if you infect somebody else, it could lead to that person becoming a very serious deal or others or that person could die. So yeah, you may have some great points, but I think these are the ones to consider. And that's why these mandates are so important is it's not really about us as individuals, it's protecting the patients. So you want to have a nice way of being able to frame it up. So I would go through here and just read every article I could. It only takes you, in other words, let's say they have something, Boston schools mandate vaccines. It's going to take you 10 minutes to read all the stories on it. I'd look at the CDC site to see what they say. If there are any recent journal articles, I mean, it's like 10 or 15 minutes. And you really know the material, you have a command of it, never go in unprepared or surprised. And in this modern day and age, it's so easy to be really well-prepared. Amazing advice, Dr. Bob. If you had one key point or a lesson to take away from all this, what would that be? And I was going to say, if there's any one key lesson, it's to be in the moment. The years find me, I used to run in and I'd have a piece of paper and I have like 10 points I have to make. And if I didn't make all 10 points in order, I really felt that I'd failed and I'd kick myself all morning, right? So, you know, know the material, chat it over with colleagues. You're going to talk back and forth about it, ask some questions and whatnot, be familiar. If you have a news account, read it out loud, you know, so you're familiar with it. But you have to trust yourself. This is the most important point in all of broadcasting. You have to trust yourself that whatever you are going to say next is the most important thing to say. But all these points you had all skewed over the place. And after all, when we're in a conversation like, you're thinking right now, as I'm saying something about how you can respond, that's how conversation goes. You had some points, but you're reordering them, you're rethinking. So trust yourself. If you trust yourself, you can relax. And then you won't have two sort of things spinning in your brain. What you're saying now and, oh my God, what do I say next? What do I say next? And it will do a huge amount to calm yourself down. So you're going to know more than they are by a long shot. So be confident, be prepared, and be totally in the moment and available, friendly, and affable. Amazing points, Bob. I was definitely taking notes and will definitely use them next time I have to prepare for an interview. Thank you all again for joining us today. This is our second session in talking with the press with many more to come. Please join us again next time.

interview preparation

press interviews

researching sources

Google News

addressing opposing views