On August 31, 2025 I blogged about a dogmatic claim that everyone fears public speaking in a contrary post titled Not everyone fears public speaking. The opposite and equally silly claim has turned up in a five-minute YouTube video by Jim Cathcart on October 8, 2025 titled Nobody Is Afraid Of Public Speaking. He mentioned:
“It’s widely known that public speaking is the greatest fear in the world. That comes from a study that was done in the 1980s or 1990s and it ranked public speaking as the number one fear but it was a limited study and it said that public speaking was feared more than death itself. But that’s not a scientific fact. That has not been statistically validated.
But the point that I’m making is that those people who say that they’re afraid of public speaking are not afraid of public speaking. They’re just not. They’re afraid of being judged. Right?”
Back on May 19, 2011 I blogged about America’s Number One Fear: Public Speaking – that 1993 Bruskin-Goldring Survey. Jim didn’t mention any survey showing no one feared public speaking.
Lots of people have no problem with being judged: they participate in speech contests, like the series with 30,000 people held by Toastmasters International starting at clubs and leading all the way up from Area, to Division, to District, to Region, and their World Championship. Page 30 of the March 2001 Toastmaster magazine describes that Mr. Cathcart would receive the Golden Gavel award from Toastmasters in August 2001.
Silhouettes of a podium and a judge both were adapted from OpenClipArt.
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