{"id":473366,"date":"2026-05-29T16:37:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T16:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/473366\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T16:37:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T16:37:15","slug":"seamas-oreilly-most-people-hate-public-speaking-but-pass-the-mic-i-love-it-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/473366\/","title":{"rendered":"S\u00e9amas O\u2019Reilly: Most people hate public speaking. But pass the mic, I love it \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a quandary I pose to people quite often. It goes like this: \u201cYou are about to take to the stage for a speaking event alongside a person you trust, and whose work and opinion you respect. There are 500 people in the audience. You cannot back out of this engagement, but you have both come fully prepared, and the audience are a polite and receptive crowd who are here for a good time. This will not, however, be a two-handed discussion. One of you gets to ask the questions, the other gets to answer. SO\u2026 [dramatic pause for emphasis] would you prefer to be the interviewer or the interviewee?\u201d<\/p>\n

Before we go any further, I\u2019ll clarify that my answer is, obviously, that I\u2019d prefer to be the interviewee. I started asking the question because this answer has always been so clear to me that I presumed most others would feel the same way. Almost immediately, I was proven wrong. And I mean extremely wrong, since my position has been outnumbered 10-1 in all the times I\u2019ve been asking it. <\/p>\n

Nearly everybody says they\u2019d prefer to be the interviewer \u2013 either because they wouldn\u2019t like that much attention on themselves, or fear they\u2019d say the wrong thing, or would freeze under questioning in front of a crowd. Without the crutch and shield of an interviewer\u2019s notes, they feel the interviewee is the more vulnerable, more naked position. <\/p>\n

Perhaps this is to be expected, given that public speaking regularly ranks above death in surveys of people\u2019s greatest phobias. Although, as Jerry Seinfeld<\/a> once put it, if more people fear public speaking than death, does that mean the average funeral-goer would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been returning to this puzzle a lot recently, since I\u2019ve spent much of the past month being interviewed about my book, which has prompted friends to ask me how it\u2019s all going, in much the same tone they might use if they\u2019d heard I\u2019d spent the past three weeks having daily tongue surgery. When I tell them I\u2019ve been really enjoying it, they look at me like I\u2019m a massive freak.<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019m willing to concede that much of this enjoyment must arise from some form of gut-level narcissism (the kind, for example, that might compel someone to write books or opinion columns for a living in the first place), but I\u2019ve also interviewed and been interviewed many, many times, and I know which one I prefer. This is because I am a congenitally lazy person, and it\u2019s a dirty secret of our profession that interviewers have the much harder job of the two. As an interviewer, you\u2019re dependent on you AND someone else for the event to be enjoyable for the audience. As an interviewee, this pressure is halved. If an interviewer asks you a terrible question that goes nowhere, you can always get around it by answering whatever way you like. But, as an interviewer, if you ask a terrible question \u2013 or if your subject clams up, gets weird, or goes on forever \u2013 it\u2019s much harder to break out of.<\/p>\n

I back myself to wrangle tricky interviewees, but I\u2019ve also interviewed people who hadn\u2019t been to bed, were too nervous to speak out loud, or were simply \u2013 to use technical language \u2013 complete a**eholes. Compared to those ordeals, answering questions about a book I\u2019ve written is easy. <\/p>\n

Interviewing people can be fun, of course. I\u2019ve had many, many more good ones, even great ones, than bad ones. I\u2019m a nosy person, and interviewing allows me to meet interesting people, and usually in contexts where we get to speak broadly as peers, rather than their imperial master passing truths to my lowly stenographer. For that reason, I know I\u2019d hate being a pack reporter lobbing questions at politicians or doing sit-downs with trade secretaries or housing ministers. I\u2019ve done a handful of celebrity junket things which ended up making me feel like a fleshy cog in a giant wheel, and I did not care for it.<\/p>\n

All of which suggests I can\u2019t quite beat the narcissist allegations, so maybe that really is what I like about it: the idea that I, Earth\u2019s most relatable and fascinating man, am finally being listened to for myself, rather than as a conduit for some much less interesting person that people have actually paid to see. Cue the spotlights, grab the mics and prepare to be riveted. I am ready for my close-up. I may even remember to mention the book.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0S\u00e9amas O\u2019Reilly: My children are my greatest source of joy – and stress, sadness, guilt and fearOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have a quandary I pose to people quite often. It goes like this: \u201cYou are about to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":404537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,631,61,60,709,178173],"class_list":["post-473366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-for-you","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-magazine","tag-seamas-o-reilly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/404537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}