Mr Daniel Marron’s Conversations With People Who Hate Me is the new must-listen-to.

Mr Dylan Marron is an affable and talented young writer and performer from New York, who made a name for himself during the 2016 US presidential election with a series of wry YouTube videos about hot-button topics such as race, sexuality and gender politics. On the phone, he speaks with a gentle, unassuming eloquence, and has the kind of impeccable manners that Brits often secretly admire in Americans. But online, to pick a few of the more printable examples, there are people who believe that he “deserves to be put on an island to die”, is “the reason [the US] is dividing itself”, is a “talentless propaganda hack”, a “sissy”, a “moron” and “everything that’s wrong with liberalism”.

So far, it’s a grimly familiar story: person makes content, internet responds with vitriol.

But rather than shrug this off as par for the course, Mr Marron decided to take a conciliatory approach. He reached out to some of his detractors and invited them to talk things through with him on a podcast that he’s made in collaboration with the Night Vale Presents network. He called it Conversations With People Who Hate Me, and it’s one of the most unexpectedly heartening shows of the past year. Across 10 half-hour-long episodes – and a second season that launched yesterday – it’s become an exemplar of a different kind of online discourse and a timely reminder that we’re all more complex than the versions we present on the net.

Part of the reason for the show’s success, Mr Marron says, is that it taps into an old-fashioned truth about human interaction. “When we aren’t face to face or voice to voice, our minds can go to crueller places than they would otherwise,” he says. “But when you hear the nuances of someone’s voice, and when it sinks in that they’re just a human too, with their own day-to-day struggles and biases, it’s totally different.”

One of the pleasures of the show is hearing this realisation play out across the different episodes, as both Mr Marron and his guests acclimatise to each other, often finding shared ground ­– and at the very least occupying a civil space in which they can agree to disagree. In the first episode, for instance, Mr Marron talks to Chris, a self-described “staunch conservative” who called him a “piece of sh*t” online. What’s striking by the end of the episode isn’t that they’ve profoundly changed each other’s minds about anything, but that they’ve had a conversation coloured with laughter, respect and the kind of nuance that rarely makes it into YouTube comment threads.

“There’s this new movement of people who just think that conversation is schooling the other person and shutting them down,” says Mr Marron. “This podcast is a reaction against that. It’s really more about listening and creating a space in which two people can empathise.”

For the second season, Mr Marron has expanded his brief and taken on the role of mediator between two parties on opposite sides of a thorny issue. The first episode features two former marines, one of whom wrote a post in support of a military trans ban in the US, and another who has come out as transgender since leaving the army. I approached it wondering if Mr Marron might, this time, have bitten off more than he could chew. But if anything, the episode is the most compelling thing he’s done to date, and reaches a point of profound catharsis. “It was everything you want from a conversation like this,” says Mr Marron. “They’re still in touch now, weeks after we recorded it.”

Buoyed by such successes, and a sense that the internet could probably use more conversations like these, Mr Marron hopes to continue this new format indefinitely. “When you know that there are people who are like, ‘Hey, I see the world differently from you, I said this thing that wasn’t so nice, I’m sorry about it, and I’m here to talk on the phone with you about it,’ you can’t help but think that maybe there is hope in this world after all.”

Conversations With People Who Hate Me by Mr Dylan Marron is available now

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