I have a quandary I pose to people quite often. It goes like this: “You 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… [dramatic pause for emphasis] would you prefer to be the interviewer or the interviewee?”Before we go any further, I’ll clarify that my answer is, obviously, that I’d 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’ve been asking it. Nearly everybody says they’d prefer to be the interviewer – either because they wouldn’t like that much attention on themselves, or fear they’d say the wrong thing, or would freeze under questioning in front of a crowd. Without the crutch and shield of an interviewer’s notes, they feel the interviewee is the more vulnerable, more naked position. Perhaps this is to be expected, given that public speaking regularly ranks above death in surveys of people’s greatest phobias. Although, as Jerry Seinfeld 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?I’ve been returning to this puzzle a lot recently, since I’ve spent much of the past month being interviewed about my book, which has prompted friends to ask me how it’s all going, in much the same tone they might use if they’d heard I’d spent the past three weeks having daily tongue surgery. When I tell them I’ve been really enjoying it, they look at me like I’m a massive freak.Now, I’m 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’ve 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’s a dirty secret of our profession that interviewers have the much harder job of the two. As an interviewer, you’re 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 – or if your subject clams up, gets weird, or goes on forever – it’s much harder to break out of.I back myself to wrangle tricky interviewees, but I’ve also interviewed people who hadn’t been to bed, were too nervous to speak out loud, or were simply – to use technical language – complete a**eholes. Compared to those ordeals, answering questions about a book I’ve written is easy. Interviewing people can be fun, of course. I’ve had many, many more good ones, even great ones, than bad ones. I’m 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’d hate being a pack reporter lobbing questions at politicians or doing sit-downs with trade secretaries or housing ministers. I’ve 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.All of which suggests I can’t quite beat the narcissist allegations, so maybe that really is what I like about it: the idea that I, Earth’s 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.[ Séamas O’Reilly: My children are my greatest source of joy - and stress, sadness, guilt and fearOpens in new window ]