Ted Audio Collective.

When you first wrote this, do you remember why you wrote it to me?

I guess I just thought at the time that you were kind of an easy

target. Hey listener, a quick favor. We are conducting an audience survey and we'd be really grateful

if you could take just a few minutes to respond. Please visit survey.

PRX.org slash Ted to take the survey today. That's survey. PRX.org.

slash Ted. Thanks. Hey and welcome back to conversations with people who hate me, the show where I take

negative online comments and use them as the starting point for offline conversations.

I'm your host, Dylan Merrin.

And today I'm talking to Brian, who two and a half years ago wrote me a message that said,

were you born a bitch or did you just learn to be one over time?

He followed this up with, you're such a faggot,

but the kind of hilarious part about this message is that his finger must have slipped because then he sent me the thumbs-up emoji which creates this really funny juxtaposition to the opening of his note.

For context, this message from Brian was one of the very first hate messages I received through my public Facebook page as my videos began to gain in popularity, and I was scared, and and you know I was new to this so in a moment of

reflexive self-protection I just blocked him then last year I gave a TED Talk

where I discussed this podcast and in doing so I provided some background to explain why I even created this show in the first place So I displayed some screenshots of negative comments I had received of course with the author's profile pictures and their

last names blacked out, and one of these messages was Brian's. Brian then saw a video of the

TED Talk and was shocked to see his own message up there.

He wrote me a sweet and sincere apology for his original message and I asked him to be on this show.

He said yes.

Now two quick audio notes about this phone call.

One, Brian is outside, so you're going to hear some wind disruption on his end, and then

...