How to have conversations with people who hate you? (with Dylan Marron)
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TED Audio Collective. I'm Chris Duffy, and you're listening to How to Be a Better Human. If you are online, and especially if you're on social media, it can be really easy to forget that there are people on the other side of the screen. And I think that that is one of the main reasons that I'm such an enormous fan of today's guest.

Dylan Marin is the creator and host of Conversations with People Who Hate Me. It's a podcast where he facilitates conversations and tries to explore the humanity of people online. I think that Dylan is incredible. I love him as a person, and I think that his work is so important and fantastic. I don't want to give too much away about what we talked about, but we did end up kind of questioning the ideas that we think we have around reconciliation.

We also talked about how maybe debating isn't as productive as we think it can be and how apologies and forgiveness, they're not this one and done instantaneous, big climactic moment. All of that is to say that I am really excited for you to hear this conversation. And I am so thrilled that we got to have Dylan as a guest on this show. We're going to be right back after this short break.

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My name is Dylan Maron and I am a digital creator and I'm the host of the podcast Conversations with People Who Hate Me. If someone's never heard of the podcast Conversations with People Who Hate Me, what is the podcast? So at its core, Conversations with People Who Hate Me is a podcast that takes very negative online interactions and turns them into hopefully productive offline phone calls.

What that looks like sometimes is that I speak one-on-one to people who have said something negative or hateful to me, and then other times I host conversations between strangers or sometimes even friends who got into it with each other online.

You know, you've had this experience, which I think pretty much anyone who's been on the Internet in the last 10 years has had of seeing people saying things that are cruel or mean or just seem like the kind of things you wouldn't say to someone in person or it wouldn't be OK to say to someone in person. And then instead of being

I guess like turned off by that and like, I'm just going to walk away from the computer. You thought like, how can I dig deeper into this? Which seems to me like the opposite of what most people's reactions would be. So where did that come from for you? So to be totally honest with you, it came from a coping mechanism. I began to get a big onslaught of online hate, online negativity.

when I was making very popular digital videos. And these digital videos commented on social issues from my, you know, progressive left perspective. So I got kind of the expected political pushback. I also got, you know, some pushback from people, fellow lefties who felt that I wasn't the right kind of lefty or wasn't doing leftism correctly. And the key thing to know is that, um,

through serendipity, these videos primarily were released on Facebook. And I bring that up because

of that, I was given an opportunity that every message I got, every DM I got, every comment I got was often linked to the profile of the person who sent these. And when I clicked on the profile, I could learn so much about them. And it struck me, one, as funny because it's as if like

you know, you would never send an anonymous hate letter and then paperclip to it, you know, like where you went to high school and your family records and your likes and your dislikes. Yeah, I heard some photos of my dog, also I hate you. Yes, yes. And your random thoughts, like a journal of your random thoughts. But that's what it felt like when I was clicking on the profiles of my detractors on Facebook. And so I developed that as a coping mechanism, right? I needed to see that the people who were sending me

this hate were indeed real people. And to explain that psychologically as best as I can understand it right now, I think it was too overwhelming when they were these distant monsters that I couldn't understand. And it soothed me to know that they were

these real three-dimensional human beings. And I think that what helped me the most with that is then it felt that I could reach them. Of course, I was just clicking through them, creating fictional backstories for who they were based on the information I had. And then eventually I had my first phone call. And it seems like...

I mean, I feel like part of this, too, is that people are saying really horrible things to you. You weren't putting up like come at me videos. Right. And I think a lot of the conversations that happened, at least at the beginning, were around your identity and people who were saying things that are just not OK. The interesting thing is it was almost exclusively about my voice, my sexuality, and my

kind of like my perceived levels of masculinity. A lot of comments, the denigrated masculinity, which I would include gay slurs among that, right? Like oftentimes those are rooted in a kind of like

toxic masculinity shaming. So this is where I think it starts to be something that's really interesting and different and new, at least for me. I think we've all had the experience of someone saying something that was cruel or hurtful to us. And then you reached out and you created this whole project that's about

Having a conversation with them. I think what I'm going for with these conversations is I just needed to know that it was a human being who I was dealing with on the internet and Because they were a human being the logic followed in my mind that I could then reach them We could connect to each other That's the best and truest answer I can offer is that it was to humanize them and also I think I

primarily to humanize myself to them too. And that really hits on this idea that you talk about in the TED talk of empathy is not endorsement. The idea that you don't have to necessarily win an argument to have a connection with this person who disagrees with you or maybe even more than disagrees with you, something even stronger than that. So for people who are listening, how do you get to that place of

being okay with just finding empathy? And even harder, how do you get to find the empathy in another person who you're coming at it from a very different angle? Here's what I believe about this very big buzzword these days, empathy, which is that I don't actually believe that we can teach empathy, right? What I do believe is that we can create spaces where empathy just grows freely. And conversation is one of those spaces. So the way that

mantra came about, empathy is not endorsement, was that what was happening is after I had a number of calls under my belt, after I was talking to a bunch of people, I found that no matter how politically oppositional we were, no matter how much we so strongly disagreed about such fundamental things, when I was on the phone with them, I could not help but see them as a human being. And when that happens, you start to

find moments of commonality. You start to relate to them. And when you start relating to them, when you start seeing all of who they are, when you hear their ums and uhs, when you hear that messy phone conversation that is totally erased in online communication, you start to see them as human, you start to like them, and then you start to empathize with them. So empathy is not endorsement was a mantra that I had kind of

created for myself as a permission slip to keep going. Has exploring the idea of empathy, has that changed the way that you think about apologies? What a great question. I think to me, I don't know, I don't have a counter of how many literal apologies I've gotten on the podcast. I don't keep tabs of that because to me,

for a guest to come on the show and have a conversation with me where they allow me to get to know them, they're interested to get to know me. And I'm just speaking for myself here, but that is apology enough, right? That is like, you know, sometimes you don't need to say the literal words, "I'm sorry," to hear that someone regrets what they wrote, sees you differently,

And you can hear, and maybe this is just hopeful, that you have planted a small seed of change in them that may make them reconsider doing that again. So if what we look for in an apology is changed behavior and...

accountability, that's just not stuff that happens immediately. And I think we are living at a time when we need things right now, right? We need an apology today, not tomorrow. Do not sit on it. Your silence is just wasted time before we're getting that apology. And I also just don't think that's how apologies work because a lot of times apologies, good apologies, which I think are just rooted in the idea of accountability and honest accountability,

really take a lot of time for the person to even realize that they did something wrong. I'll take myself as an example. You know, when I'm accused of something that I did wrong that I didn't realize was wrong, I don't immediately change the more harshly someone identifies it to me, right? It actually, first, I'm defensive, then I'm sad, and then

once I start to realize that I actually was culpable, that I did something wrong, then it takes time. It takes time to wrestle with like, why did I do that? How could I do that? How did it get to this point? There's a lot of time that goes into a good apology. So what I see a lot from the periphery of the public square of social media is people so hungry for accountability for

from systems that I think they train that anger on individual people who have erred and which individual people they train that on has a lot to do with who's most accessible to them, right? So it's not necessarily the people who have done the most wrong, but it's the people who they can most reach with a Twitter mention, which I think is the tension of the time we're living in today. We're going to be right back with more from Dylan Maron after this quick break.

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It's interesting because I think that in the newer seasons of the show, you are facilitating conversations between two people. So someone has said something hurtful or mean to another person, and then you have them have a conversation. And I think that's something that's really interesting is you are creating this space where they can have a conversation and see each other and not have it just be about like, I'm fighting you or we're arguing or we're debating and we're going to win.

What techniques have you learned over the course of doing this show to help people have these conversations that actually do end up with seeing someone else? Like, how can you actually how can a listener apply that in their own lives when they're approaching a difficult conversation? Yeah. Great question. Well, I think one of the key

things is one, remove the audience. And that typically means taking it out of a comment section, you know, not necessarily doing it publicly first, because I think in private, that's where a lot of vulnerability can happen. So that's number one. Number two, I started learning this early on, is that it is

So, like, it is so easy to be so overwhelmed by every possible topic that you could be talking about, right? And I think this is for a variety of reasons. Like, we are living in the moment of every, to quote Bo Burnham, the internet is everything all of the time, right? But so has the news always been, and so has the public square. And so,

When you're coming from this very chaotic, overwhelming, everything happening all of the time space, and then you try to move into a private space, that is going to kind of follow you. And it was happening to me all the time, right? I was talking to a guest. We started one place. We ended up in a totally different place. And we had just been picked up by the everything storm, a tornado that just moved us to a different spot.

And that really derails conversation because it doesn't allow you to get to know someone. And it's best to kind of focus on, you know, one issue. So another one is don't debate, right? The thing about debate, though, is it is this very combative form of communication. I think there are so many topics that require communication.

much more sensitivity than simply just sparring about it with talking points back and forth. And I don't think it helps to debate queer identity, to debate gender identity. Instead, I think...

A far more productive thing is to engage in conversation about it. And debates work when we can agree about the thing that we're there to debate. Taking an apolitical example right here, to debate, I have a better microphone versus you have a better microphone, right? We're acknowledging that we both have microphones and we can go back and forth on who has the better microphone, what even a better microphone entails.

And actually, for all the listeners, you will have a poll that you can vote on this after. OK, great, great, great, great, great. Give them the poll. So when you now think about all that you've learned, all the thinking that you've done around empathy and forgiveness, how does that change what how you approach these real life conversations with people that you really know, with your family or your friends or your loved ones? What are the tips that you have that you've learned of like this actually makes a conversation go well? Because it seems like one of the big ones that I'm taking away is don't try to win.

that it's not at all about winning or convincing someone so much. Certainly don't try to win. And like I said, you know, avoid talking about everything and remove the audience. But I think you're also right. I think a lot of the ways this

sprouts up in real life is through not strangers, people we know. So I'll share this, and I think this was born out of that coping mechanism I established early with creating backstories for my detractors. And really, I do this unconsciously, but now that I'm thinking about it, I suppose I'll do it consciously now. I imagine what is the most loving story I can tell about this person that I'm about to speak to?

Because most of the time, I'm not going to say all of the time, most of the time, someone's different way of seeing the world has so much to do with factors that we cannot even see. It has to do with how they were raised, it has to do with where they were raised, where they grew up, who surrounds them, who they are trying to impress socially, where they want to belong, where they already belong.

and what institutions they belong to, what their leaders are saying, what their media heroes are saying, what their media diet constitutes, what their media diet is made up of. It starts me off on such a more loving place when I try to understand that the person I'm about to speak to, or in the moment, the person who is saying this thing that I'm like, oh my god,

Like, God, how do you believe that? That it's like, this is actually, it definitely feels hateful. And in many cases, but you have like the hardest and slash most beautiful thing to realize is that it's not coming from this intentionally hateful place.

And that is where the interesting conversations can happen because you're trying to understand where it comes from. So I think the huge caveat is admitting conversations

across difference, especially when you're close to someone, are incredibly difficult. And they just require repeated application over and over and over again through time. It feels like that's one of the most important things here is that we kind of have this idea, whether it's from like movies or TV shows or whatever, that you're going to have like one amazing heart-to-heart conversation and it's going to end in tears and a huge transformation. And instead that it's actually like,

You know, these are you talk and it's it seems to do nothing and you talk again and maybe you have the smallest bit of connection and then over and over you kind of break these things down. Yeah. But that being said, there certainly I know I've heard you say this before, that there are certain people in certain topics where you don't encourage having these difficult conversations. Yeah. So where is that line where you're like, OK, this is a conversation that we should have and we should try and reach some sort of empathy. And this is one where we shouldn't.

Well, I think you need to have a baseline of mutual respect in the conversation. You don't want to continually drag someone

to a space for conversation, a phone call where they're going to be humiliated or mocked or belittled or dismissed. So safety is really important. If someone's like threatening you online, you don't then try and be like, how do I build common ground with this person? No, I think. And that just goes to the very simple rule of safety. I have to feel safe with any guests that I invite onto the podcast. And

That can mean a variety of things. I mean, I don't speak to anyone who has threatened me with physical violence. I did do one conversation with a man who said, kill yourself, but that got by on a technicality because he was asking me to do the violence to myself.

And I can't tell you what you determine safety is. So that is for the participants to determine what safety means to them. And obviously, a lot of the conversations that that you deal with and also that a lot of us experience where people say these terrible things, they happen online. So what have you found works for yourself to

in order to avoid treating people in a way online that's more hurtful than you want or to be being treated? How do you do both of those things online? Well, my answer in the last year has been to log off entirely. But I also think that that is not practical advice because if you had told me just log off five years ago when I was...

building my career on the internet. And when I was building a community on the internet, I would have said, and I did say to my friends, absolutely not, I'm not going to do that. And guess what? I didn't do that, right? So

I am speaking to you now as a person who has just been off of social media for one year, but I'm also speaking to you as a person who has been told to log off so many times, and I never did until I was ready for it. I think a caveat here is that there are a lot of amazing and wonderful things about the internet and social media, and maybe people who are listening right now

are finding those amazing things and they are in the throes of those amazing things right now. I don't think it is possible to call something as huge as the internet either good or bad. But I do think I have become hyper aware of how...

much this mode of communication where we can get points for dunking on each other. I can get more points than you if I clap back at you correctly, if I clap back at you in a funny enough way, if I mock you in a way that my followers think is worthy of praise, worthy of digital praise, worthy of a digital click.

I'm terrified. I am terrified of a world where we are increasingly in those spaces and don't have enough spaces to actually communicate with each other. I think we're still writing...

the social norms of the internet as we speak. We as a species are so new to this arena, this digital arena, that I don't think we've yet established what is and is not acceptable. We have in the extreme cases, right? But I think part of what we're experiencing with the

the conversation around cancel culture is we are currently redrafting what is and is not acceptable behavior in the digital sphere. And what are the appropriate consequences for that? With that idea that we are drafting the norms of acceptable behavior online and how people interact, and since so much of our lives now is spent online, how can we

create norms ourselves in our own small ways that are based in more empathy? Chris, what a beautiful question. I think certainly providing space from the internet is important and has helped me. I think really, here's the big thing.

The internet, social media, and let's get specific, Twitter, is a really, really, really challenging place to calibrate your moral compass. Because we have to take time, and it can be online, but I think it also has to, in addition, be offline too, to really, really, really dig in to what we feel and what we think online.

who we actually want to be, who we actually are. And of course, who we are is a combination of who we are on the internet and who we are off of the internet, because I don't like to traffic in that idea that the internet is not real life and this physical realm is real life because we live so much of our lives on the internet. We've talked about how to give a good apology. How do you take a good apology? How do you be on the receiving end of an apology? Well, I think...

One way to accept an apology is to also know that it takes time within you to accept it, right? Like just because someone says sorry, sorry is a wonderful word that yes, can be used performatively many times and is also policed about what is and is not the right way to use it. But I also, I think let's just land on that. It's a beautiful thing to say to someone. And it's especially beautiful when it's,

when it's said truthfully and genuinely. I think the way to accept it is to also understand that no matter how beautiful that word is, it's not a magic wand that instantaneously renders you accepting of that apology, right? It also takes time for you to let it settle in and for you to cool off and for you to be like,

well, they said sorry, and I'm going to give it a few days, and I know they're a person, and I'm a person too. And so give yourself time to accept it. By all means, we should be identifying if an apology feels fake or if an apology feels insincere. But I also recommend that we

recognize when we are over-policing an apology for not being perfect enough, right? For not hitting every mark, but to accept that like every apology is going to be imperfect, right? I'm sure one day a celebrity will write a notes app apology that people will be like, actually, this was good. But the truth is like, yes, don't over-police apologies. They're all going to be imperfect. And we can edit them till...

We can edit them until the day we die. We can mock them until the day we die. But we are not going to create a sustainable path forward

if we mock and reject every imperfect attempt at trying to be better. I also just want to add one thing, which is that I think sometimes we are afraid to accept someone's apology because we think that in doing so, we absolve the person of the wrong that they did and we erase the wrong that they did, and we then negate the real feelings of hurt we had from their wrong.

But that's also not true. You can both accept someone's apology and still have been hurt by the thing that they're apologizing for and also see them as a full three-dimensional human and also give them the grace to change. And all of those things can be true at the same exact time. I love that. It's so perfect. And I think that really hits it. That hits the nail completely on the head, right? There's so much nuance around all of these things can exist.

Simultaneously. Yes. Well, I apologize for the fact that this interview is going slightly over time, but I do have a few things that I want to continue. Thank you for accepting my apology. And it was not a process. It was an immediate acceptance. OK, excuse me. Great. OK, so what is one idea or book or book?

movie or piece of music or what's something that has made you a better human? Good. I hear this question and I always think of a different answer for it. Okay. There is this incredible, incredible documentary called The Painter and the Thief. Quick synopsis is that

This artist had a big show. Two men stole her most expensive paintings or her most highly priced paintings from the show. She couldn't find them. Eventually, they arrested the thieves, or I think they arrested one thief, and she established this friendship with him. And then—I don't want to give too much away—

But there is a scene in the movie where now that they are friends, her and the man who stole her painting, and her paintings are still at this point, I believe they have not been recovered, and she paints his portrait. And then she shows the portrait that she painted of him to the man who stole what was heralded as her masterpiece.

and he looks at the painting and he just starts crying. I think that is like one of the most moving pieces of anything that I have seen maybe in my whole life. I loved that so much and I please go watch The Painter and the Thief. Then what is one way in which you personally are trying to be a better human right now? I'm trying to be away from my phone more often. I think for a long time I was very addicted to my phone.

And I would just pull it out at meals. I would pull it out unknowingly. Like I cringe retroactively thinking about this now, but I would pull it out when I was talking to someone, you know. Now, I mean, this really helps that I've been off social media for a year, but I...

put it in another room. I don't even think about it. I don't have something to mindlessly scroll on. And it just allows me to be more present with people. Well, Dylan, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for talking to us about your work. Thank you for being my friend. And thanks for doing such deep thinking around empathy and forgiveness and how we can be better people out in the world. It's really important. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of yours. I'm a huge fan of this show.

Jocelyn and Daniela, huge fans of yours too. So really, really thank you for having me. That is it for today's episode. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and this has been How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to our guest, Dylan Maron. His podcast is called Conversations with People Who Hate Me.

On the TED side, this show is brought to you by Abimanyu Das, who is so beloved by all, Daniela Balarezo, who glows with understanding and acceptance, Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, who hears and validates your feelings, Ann Powers, who respectfully and productively disagrees, and Cara Newman, who would never give a fake apology.

From PRX Productions, How to Be a Better Human is brought to you by Jocelyn Gonzalez, who does not hate you. Pedro Rafael Rosado, who is trying to listen. And Sandra Lopez-Monsalve, who understands where you're coming from. Thanks to you for listening. And remember, you will never have to apologize for sharing this podcast with someone who you think will love it.

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