Love/Hate
How to Talk to People Who Hate You
What Dylan Marron has learned from talking to his online haters
Dylan Marron made his name with a series of barbed, satirical videos tackling social justice issues on YouTube. These pieces attracted a big audience and, predictably, a bounty of fairly sulfurous hate mail. Around 2016, the New York–based performer and writer started to question his approach. “Is my goal to joke about these issues with people who already understand the nuances of these issues?” he wondered. “Or is my goal to bring more people to the table?”
He opted for the latter and ended up launching a podcast called Conversations with People Who Hate Me. In the hands of a less skilled conversationalist, these interactions could easily come across as cloying, patronizing, or pointlessly antagonistic. But guided by Marron, they’re always surprising and often moving looks into how anger and prejudice form and manifest themselves on the internet and in real life.
“Somehow, seeing their three-dimensionality actually made me feel better. It made me feel like I have an in.”
Now into a second season, in which Marron moderates conversations between people at loggerheads, the show has been an…
