Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Joy ex.
Speaker 3: Six.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk
Speaker 2: to the main characters of the Internet to see how
Speaker 2: now their moment in the Spotlight affected them and what
Speaker 2: that says about us and the Internet. And today we
Speaker 2: are concluding the World according to Tazon Day, a retrospective
Speaker 2: on the Chocolate Rain singer's time in the Spotlight. And
Speaker 2: then some told by the man himself. And if you're
Speaker 2: tuning into this episode before listening to the first two
Speaker 2: parts of this series, grow up. Even if you do
Speaker 2: remember Tay's major viral moment back in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 2: much of the political context of his work was lost
Speaker 2: or intentionally ignored in the shuffle at the time of
Speaker 2: its release. And more about his upbringing growing up by
Speaker 2: racial and autistic with very little context for either that
Speaker 2: he hasn't shared in previous interviews. And our second part
Speaker 2: goes into how Tay formed the leftist politics that spawned
Speaker 2: Chocolate Rain in the first place. So there's a lot
Speaker 2: to catch up on, But if you're rejoining us, I
Speaker 2: don't want to make you wait a moment longer. In
Speaker 2: the final part of our I Don't Know interview monologue,
Speaker 2: not sure, but Tay's story of political awakening was already
Speaker 2: well into progress when he wrote Chocolate Rain as a
Speaker 2: grad student in Minnesota in his mid twenties, And today
Speaker 2: he's going to talk about how that translated into viral
Speaker 2: fame and how it helped and hurt him come into
Speaker 2: his own as a grown man, plus some weird a
Speaker 2: sides because it's tays on Day.
Speaker 4: Enjoy the twenty seventeen Beet interview where I first spoke
Speaker 4: about Chocolate Rain being a ballad about institutional racism. That's
Speaker 4: a good moment to unpack. Just like the conversation with
Speaker 4: my father, I already talked about why I don't like
Speaker 4: the way political discourse happens online. So as online political
Speaker 4: discourse became more and more tumultuous from two thousand and
Speaker 4: seven to twenty seventeen, I became more and more averse
Speaker 4: to the idea of ever entering any sort of political dialogue,
Speaker 4: partly for economic survival reasons, because I did not ever
Speaker 4: want to be seen as partisan, which I still don't.
Speaker 4: I mean a lot of people like to pag me
Speaker 4: as a leftist, which I'm not offended. But you know,
Speaker 4: the only thing I ever identify as is the truth.
Speaker 4: This whole shenanigans where you are invisible unless you pledge
Speaker 4: your loyalty and virtue signal your complete devotion to an
Speaker 4: uncompromising policy. Caricature that is either puritanically leftist or puritanically
Speaker 4: right wing is just not useful intellectually. It's like Morse code,
Speaker 4: and we've allowed oligarchs to devolve the Internet into an
Speaker 4: intellectual telegraph. But in that moment in twenty seventeen when
Speaker 4: BT expressed interest, I think my dad was helping pay
Speaker 4: part of my rent at the time, Like I was
Speaker 4: just not thriving, and so it felt like whatever fears
Speaker 4: I had that I would just be disowned by everybody
Speaker 4: and hated universally and never ever work again just seems like, well, okay,
Speaker 4: it seems like I'm kind of already in that state,
Speaker 4: so I might as well just be honest. And it
Speaker 4: was fine. I mean, Bet did a great job. I
Speaker 4: still believe that music is a great place to sing about.
Speaker 4: What I can't say about the way I describe chocolate
Speaker 4: Rain as a trojan horse that's not unique. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's a history music. I mean, how many millions of
Speaker 4: people have played Michael Jackson's they don't care about us
Speaker 4: who would not agree with his position on criminal justice.
Speaker 4: Part of my autism is that I overestimate the extent
Speaker 4: to which the world is logical, rational, self aware, and consistent,
Speaker 4: and that has often burned me and stunted my success,
Speaker 4: either by overestimating risks or underestimating benefits. I didn't even
Speaker 4: syndicate Chocolate Rain to digital stories until twenty ten, and yeah,
Speaker 4: my thinking was, hey, you know, the video says download
Speaker 4: the free MP three. Why would I ever put it
Speaker 4: on iTunes or wherever else? And of course some viral
Speaker 4: singers like Liam Kyle Sullivan did okay economically with the
Speaker 4: better understanding of their music releases and the irrationality of
Speaker 4: human behavior. I feel like most consequential things are irrational.
Speaker 4: I've spent a lot of brain cycles just being distressed
Speaker 4: over the reality that a lot of things are less
Speaker 4: based on merit and more based on tribalism and clickishness.
Speaker 4: We're taught to embrace these very sensible ideas of meritocracy
Speaker 4: and ration individualism to explain differences in human achievement, when
Speaker 4: just as often it's serendipity and cronyism. That animates human achievement,
Speaker 4: and that shouldn't be a zero sum conversation, like both
Speaker 4: can be contributions that we can speak to openly. But
Speaker 4: I would presume that human beings are motivated by accuracy
Speaker 4: when most of us are motivated by self aggrandizing megalomania
Speaker 4: and content to deploy virtue signals of charity and humility
Speaker 4: and humanism as an avatar for our actual selfishness. And
Speaker 4: I think that's one way that my true self, Adam Bonner,
Speaker 4: failed the mythos of Taizon Day. I never played Tason
Speaker 4: Day as a superhero avatar, and I never buried my
Speaker 4: insecurity and my uncertainties when I described the twenty seventeen
Speaker 4: Beeight interview as me being honest about the medium of
Speaker 4: chocolal rain. And obviously it's a bit more complicated than
Speaker 4: the same was dishonest before that, But generally speaking, I
Speaker 4: am honest to a fault. I lived in Los Angeles
Speaker 4: for twelve and a half years, which is famously a
Speaker 4: play where everybody is bullshitting is the norm. Everybody is
Speaker 4: name dropping, everybody is grasping for calling cards and maximum
Speaker 4: prominence that will justify other people giving them the time
Speaker 4: of day. And believe me, with my lived experience, I
Speaker 4: could name drop with the best of them. I just
Speaker 4: don't do that. I would go to parties and be like, yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm in debt. I had to ask my dad for money.
Speaker 4: I never did that thing that people do at parties.
Speaker 4: But it's like, well, you know when I was working
Speaker 4: with James Gunn, Well you know when I was talking
Speaker 4: to Daniel Tosh last time I appeared on the Disney Channel,
Speaker 4: the last time that I was on the BBC, Like,
Speaker 4: I don't do that. It nauseates me. I'm not saying
Speaker 4: that people who do that nauseate me. I'm just saying
Speaker 4: I'm not that person. And you kind of have to
Speaker 4: be that person. You have to Kim Jong ooh and
Speaker 4: curate yourself as a cult of personality and non stop
Speaker 4: highlight reel of recognizable things. And I think anybody who
Speaker 4: saw me at social events or conventions as Daizon day
Speaker 4: saw me being visibly hesitant and reluctant and uncomfortable on
Speaker 4: top of being autistic and neurologically since we overwhelmed just
Speaker 4: being out in the world period. I was never good
Speaker 4: at being this baritone Kermit the Frog Santa Claus. But
Speaker 4: that's what people want. They want Santa Claus to go
Speaker 4: ho ho ho and let them take a picture on
Speaker 4: Santa Claus's lap, especially if they're a kid.
Speaker 1: You know. They want Tazon Day to sink.
Speaker 4: Four include rain and you move away from the bike,
Speaker 4: to breathe in and just be happy and gracious and
Speaker 4: take a picture. Nobody wants to hear that Santa Claus
Speaker 4: is scheduled for hernia surgery and going through a divorce.
Speaker 4: I mean, he might be, but that's not really not
Speaker 4: what the majority people are interested in hearing from him.
Speaker 4: They expect Santa Claus to excitedly talk about the North
Speaker 4: Pole and how Rudolph is doing the same way they
Speaker 4: might expect a singer to talk about prominent acting credits
Speaker 4: and recent projects excitedly and oh my gosh, pageantry and
Speaker 4: red carpets and bread and circuses and fanciness and cosplaying
Speaker 4: aristocracy by poor people. Sorry, I know what that's like.
Speaker 4: I'm speaking autobiographically. I'm just saying I will personally never
Speaker 4: feel more comfortable with pageantry than a squirrel taking a
Speaker 4: nap on Times Square on New Year's Eve. And don't
Speaker 4: get me wrong, I am very grateful that anybody has
Speaker 4: any interest in any version of me. I'm just saying
Speaker 4: that whatever Dazon Day is supposed to be, Adam is
Speaker 4: an autistic deer cot in headlights everywhere he goes, and
Speaker 4: Adam is a terrible liar. And also, to be fair,
Speaker 4: I've just never been likable as a confessional content creator.
Speaker 4: Or maybe it's that I'm too likable because you really
Speaker 4: have to be divisive and have lots of hot takes,
Speaker 4: because obviously there're thousands and thousands of influencers who are
Speaker 4: successful just being vulnerable, being themselves, sharing their truths and
Speaker 4: their sorrows and their difficulties. I love pretending that this
Speaker 4: actually has some order and structure to it and is
Speaker 4: not just some slow motion neurodiversion train wreck. And I
Speaker 4: just diabolically sprinkling random callbacks to fake continuity and make
Speaker 4: it hard to edit any part out. I'm shooting for
Speaker 4: two episodes like William hung. To be fair, a lot
Speaker 4: of popular nonfiction books are like that, just a vomitous
Speaker 4: thoughts spaghetti with chapters and sub sections applied as an afterthought,
Speaker 4: like the Manuscript is an acid trip that got sent
Speaker 4: to a post production house. I know, I just glossed
Speaker 4: over calling my entertainment career not successful, and that does
Speaker 4: not mean that I'm not grateful. It just means I
Speaker 4: have never been rich, and there may be some years
Speaker 4: where I just tiptoed and to maybe it'd be called
Speaker 4: middle middle class. But many more years my net worth
Speaker 4: has technically been negative, and I've been very grateful to
Speaker 4: have a family that's able to support me when they can.
Speaker 4: As I mentioned earlier, I turned forty three this year.
Speaker 4: In one of my biggest fears of my parents dying
Speaker 4: is that, well, I mean, I'll obviously be sad and devastated,
Speaker 4: and you know, there's that whole grief journey that one
Speaker 4: goes through, but it so I was kind of like,
Speaker 4: I'm not sure I've ever actually for a sustained period
Speaker 4: of like a decade, lived as a financially independent adult.
Speaker 4: Like I look at older transients who have nothing, and
Speaker 4: I'm like, oh, I hope I don't end up there.
Speaker 1: But I don't know.
Speaker 4: There's no guarantees that Billie Club of life can beat
Speaker 4: you up any moment. They're like, oh there's a car wreck, help,
Speaker 4: there's can there's you know whatever. It's all downhill after
Speaker 4: this podcast. This is a Swan song. I've said it
Speaker 4: in many interviews. The best life for me would have
Speaker 4: been just pick a boring job at something like the
Speaker 4: Social Security Administration, that has stability, that has routine, that
Speaker 4: has a pension. I think that when I was young,
Speaker 4: and I was thinking, oh, you know, one day I
Speaker 4: might just be like an actor like the people on
Speaker 4: Star Trek, or I might be a game show host.
Speaker 4: And I didn't appreciate my level of disability when I
Speaker 4: was young, partly because of what I talked about earlier,
Speaker 4: the ethos I grew up with, Well, that triggers your
Speaker 4: sensitivity or disability, well, isolate yourself. Like I said, everybody
Speaker 4: meant well. Hollywood in particular does not know how to
Speaker 4: work with people who have psychiatric disabilities, at least not mine.
Speaker 4: Sometimes I forget the psychiatric disability has such a stigma
Speaker 4: you can't just like use it because people like, oh,
Speaker 4: it does not mean is is that person going to
Speaker 4: stab me? As if people with no diagnosed disabilities have
Speaker 4: some immaculate record when it comes to public safety or
Speaker 4: for that matter, private safety, if you look at stats
Speaker 4: and things like domestic violence. But I digress a more
Speaker 4: politic term that's used for neurodivergent and autistic people by
Speaker 4: organizations like Culture City.
Speaker 1: Kulture is sinceory inclusion.
Speaker 4: There have been a number of cases where I book
Speaker 4: a gig and I get the job, and I think
Speaker 4: the client or the director, the producer are just a
Speaker 4: little bit surprised that I actually needed the accommodations that
Speaker 4: I tried to communicate and request, or I'll be the
Speaker 4: one who's surprised. I'll actually be in the moment where
Speaker 4: there go I'm on the set and the cameras rolling
Speaker 4: and the cruise being paid, and oh shit, I can't
Speaker 4: do this. I'm completely sincere overwhelmed, and this medication cocktail
Speaker 4: is not helping. I've been miscast. That actually happened when
Speaker 4: I appeared on Jimmy Kimmel in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 4: And by the way, this is not Tea. They're all
Speaker 4: wonderful people for all I know then and now. But
Speaker 4: I was really adamant before that segment that I wanted
Speaker 4: to perform the first third of Chocolate Rain that I
Speaker 4: ended up performing on the show with just a microphone
Speaker 4: and no keyboard, and being the passionate segment producers that
Speaker 4: they are. They really wanted to curate a viral video aesthetic,
Speaker 4: and they wanted me to be playing the keyboard as
Speaker 4: I sang. They were very insistent, and at the time
Speaker 4: I knew that I probably could not perform Chocolate Rain
Speaker 4: live playing the keyboard on Jimmy Kimmel. I knew that
Speaker 4: I would just be sensory overwhelmed. Then it wouldn't work.
Speaker 4: I didn't have a lot of terminology to explain why,
Speaker 4: other than that I'd be too nervous, because obviously I
Speaker 4: could play it live by myself in my living room,
Speaker 4: but I just knew that it wouldn't work in Jimmy Kimmel.
Speaker 4: The compromise is that I would have the keyboard in
Speaker 4: front of me, but I would be singing to a
Speaker 4: backing track, meaning the keyboard would not actually be playing
Speaker 4: any notes. I'd be pretending to play the keyboard while
Speaker 4: actually singing. They recorded one tech rehearsal of me singing
Speaker 4: Chocolate Rain the way I wanted to sing it, which
Speaker 4: was just with the microphone and the backing track. The
Speaker 4: moment comes, Jimmy Kimmel hypes me up, the crowd is screaming,
Speaker 4: the curtain goes up, and I cannot feel my arms,
Speaker 4: like literally, I my hand it's felt like jello. I
Speaker 4: was so disoriented and since re overwhelmed. I missed the
Speaker 4: first four lines of the song. You know chocolate Rain
Speaker 4: some stage right now, This feel of pain, chocolate rain,
Speaker 4: a baby born with eye before this sin, I did
Speaker 4: not sing those words. Luckily, Jimmy Kimmel Live is not
Speaker 4: actually live, it's Jimmy Kimmel almost live. They have an
Speaker 4: hour or two before it goes live, so in that time,
Speaker 4: they took the audio from the tech rehearsal that they
Speaker 4: had recorded earlier, spiced it in with my actual performance,
Speaker 4: and they started with a very very very wide shot
Speaker 4: like above the heads of the audience in the last row.
Speaker 1: You couldn't see me not singing.
Speaker 4: And God blessed the Q card employee who had years
Speaker 4: of experience writing cue cards, because in addition to not
Speaker 4: feeling my arms, I knew I would not be able
Speaker 4: to remember the words to my song. I missed the
Speaker 4: entire first verse and the Q card changed on time.
Speaker 4: It's funny to think this was almost eighteen years ago.
Speaker 4: I think there are a few shows that still use
Speaker 4: handwritten cque cards and human operators, but it's a lost
Speaker 4: art today. I know that my psychiatric experiences that contributed
Speaker 4: to my mindor Jimmy Kimmel disaster have a name. In
Speaker 4: addition to sensitivity to sound, light, and touch, which earlier
Speaker 4: on if you're quizzing yourself, I described as hypercusius, misophonia, photophobia,
Speaker 4: and hapophobia, dyspraxia, which is basically muddled signaling between your
Speaker 4: brain and muscle movement, also played a role. My dyspraxia
Speaker 4: doesn't just make it harder to move my arms and
Speaker 4: legs and be coordinated, it makes it harder for me
Speaker 4: to move my mouth to speak. One interesting side about
Speaker 4: psychiatric metach is that stimulants like ADHDM phetamines will help
Speaker 4: majorly improve my dyspraxia, but they will also worsen my sensitivity.
Speaker 4: Is like misophonia, hapophobia, hyperacusis, et cetera, and all of
Speaker 4: these are autistic comorbidities, meaning they just occur more in
Speaker 4: autistic people. I should bring up alexithymia too, because alexithymia
Speaker 4: is not having words for your feelings, and in my case,
Speaker 4: it is kind of just like not having words at all.
Speaker 4: Because the more sensory overwhelmed I become in terms of
Speaker 4: sound and touch and light, the less able I am
Speaker 4: to think or speak, particularly about my feelings. It's a
Speaker 4: good baseline to just assume I'm sensory overwhelmed everywhere in society,
Speaker 4: which means I'm kind of limited in how verbal I
Speaker 4: am depending on how many spoons I have left.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, we're talking about spoon theory.
Speaker 4: Now we're just doing like this crash course and autistic psychiatry.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: I started this by talking about trauma dumping, and it
Speaker 4: goes back to the theme I touched on earlier, which
Speaker 4: is we've got to be very careful when pathologizing individuals
Speaker 4: for misdeeds that systemic actors are most guilty of. I
Speaker 4: also raise the topic of trauma dumping because it's a
Speaker 4: pathology that can be experienced by a person who is disabled,
Speaker 4: including a person who is invisibly disabled. I happen to
Speaker 4: think I'm pretty visibly autistic, but people call it an
Speaker 4: invisible disability. Because if I am a talent, whether that
Speaker 4: talent means I'm an employee in an office or an
Speaker 4: on camera talent like the Jimmy Kimmel experience I described,
Speaker 4: where is the safe context to assert my desire for
Speaker 4: accommodations or awareness and not have that regarded as oh,
Speaker 4: he's trauma dumping. I was in Los Angeles for a
Speaker 4: project last year, actually multiple projects. This is one that
Speaker 4: you will not see. The project involved the song where
Speaker 4: I could hypothetically play the keyboard and sing as on
Speaker 4: camera talent. Actually not that different than the situation I
Speaker 4: described with Jimmy Kimmel, and I try to communicate that
Speaker 4: I might not be comfortable doing that, partly because I'm
Speaker 4: autistic and experienced autistic dyspraxia, and it was the type
Speaker 4: of thing that if it was mission critical to get
Speaker 4: that footage of my singing and playing the keyboard, I
Speaker 4: could have made adjustments and planned to bring my own
Speaker 4: accommodations and adhere to my own processes that would allow
Speaker 4: that to take place. The understanding I received just that
Speaker 4: singing and playing simultaneously it was not going to be
Speaker 4: mission critical.
Speaker 1: I showed up for the shoot.
Speaker 4: It ended up being a big part of the vision,
Speaker 4: and I simply was not prepared to deliver, and it
Speaker 4: just ended up being awkward because it was not a
Speaker 4: low budget shoot for a client and attached talent that
Speaker 4: you've heard of. And by the way, everybody involved was wonderful, professional,
Speaker 4: was a delight. It was just a regrettably awkward sequence
Speaker 4: of events because when I'm in that type of moment
Speaker 4: and people are asking me to do something that I
Speaker 4: know in my own cognitive disability, it's not able to happen.
Speaker 4: It feels like I am someone with a physical disability
Speaker 4: being asked to, for example, shoot basketball hoops. But I
Speaker 4: don't have crutches to point too, I don't have a
Speaker 4: prosthetic leg. I don't have a wheelchair. All I have,
Speaker 4: with dozens of talented crew members on set and xxx
Speaker 4: xx x amount of money being spent, are words coming
Speaker 4: out of my mouth describing limitations that are invisible to
Speaker 4: everybody else. And I know that as polite and different
Speaker 4: and professional as everybody else is not of them.
Speaker 2: Nderstand We'll be back with the grand conclusion to the world.
Speaker 2: According to Tason Day, welcome back to sixteenth minute. Imagine
Speaker 2: you're me and after nine months you've gotten your interview
Speaker 2: with Taizon. Day you send questions back late because you're
Speaker 2: struggling with depression. He checks in a month after getting
Speaker 2: the questions to say he's getting close to being done
Speaker 2: recording the answers to the questions, but he still has
Speaker 2: a little more to say. You say, sure, that's fine,
Speaker 2: and then the day arrives. Tayson Day replies with a
Speaker 2: single audio file. But when you open that eye audio file,
Speaker 2: it is two and a half hours long. Within the
Speaker 2: audio file. Our thoughts insightful, thoughts deep. He maybe answers
Speaker 2: at most three of your questions, and it's the most
Speaker 2: amazing look into someone's life anyone has shared with me
Speaker 2: on this show. So, without further ado, here are taison
Speaker 2: Days parting thoughts.
Speaker 4: So on the grand scale of things, me feeling particularly
Speaker 4: autistic during a shoot that happened to not be released
Speaker 4: potentially for many reasons unrelated to myself, it's not that
Speaker 4: big of a deal. Although as talent you also become
Speaker 4: aware very quickly that Los Angeles is indeed a small town.
Speaker 4: You are never more than one, or rarely two degrees
Speaker 4: of friendship separation from anybody else you work with professionally,
Speaker 4: so there's a justified fear in any vocation, including on camera,
Speaker 4: since so much of Los Angeles just happens by word
Speaker 4: of mouth, that the grapevine gossip about you will start
Speaker 4: to indicate that you are difficult to work with. And
Speaker 4: here I'll invoke a little bit of sociological marginalization theory.
Speaker 4: It has always felt to me like the grapevine reviews
Speaker 4: of a person tend to be harsher the less they are,
Speaker 4: like the aesthetics of dominant power, and that includes people
Speaker 4: with invisible disabilities. My life is very much a jack
Speaker 4: of all trades, master of non mess of partially attempted
Speaker 4: things that didn't really value stack or get executed in
Speaker 4: a foundational way, including being Tazon day as an entertainer.
Speaker 4: That's a topic we could unpack. Firstly, I have never
Speaker 4: been a super frequent uploader. I feel like nothing you
Speaker 4: do on social media matters if it's not uploaded to
Speaker 4: or three times per week. Now, that feeling that one
Speaker 4: has to run on this hamster wheel of recency bias
Speaker 4: when creating content is of course contrived, but unfortunately it
Speaker 4: is also normative. Like if you own a plumbing company,
Speaker 4: took out what company's Instagram and nothing has been posted
Speaker 4: for two months, it reflects poorly on you, or people
Speaker 4: assume it is an un serious endeavor and you are
Speaker 4: an un serious person, Like it would almost be better
Speaker 4: to just not have an Instagram at that point, And
Speaker 4: I can list one hundred different ways that rigging a
Speaker 4: content economy wherever green content infrequently uploaded, content never has
Speaker 4: organic region is not able to thrive, is grotesquely ablest
Speaker 4: and unfair towards people who struggled to speak, people who
Speaker 4: struggled to move. I have never been prolific, and my
Speaker 4: success peaked on an Internet where you did not have
Speaker 4: to be like on my Internet. Not just say my Internet,
Speaker 4: I'm saying like an old man.
Speaker 5: On my Internet, every piece of content got a fair shot.
Speaker 1: Upload once a day, upload once a year. It was
Speaker 1: the land of opportunity.
Speaker 4: Although it's not even accurate to describe what we experience
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty five as the Internet. Every social network
Speaker 4: that you might seek to build an audience on algorithmically
Speaker 4: demotes external links. You can't link to outside content. That's
Speaker 4: definitionally an intro net. Like the early dial up services
Speaker 4: in the eighties and nineties, Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online, they
Speaker 4: were closed networks. Those are intronnets, not the Internet. We're
Speaker 4: being hoodwinked into using these glorified Bloomberg terminals for social
Speaker 4: Internet content, but instead of charging a high monthly fee
Speaker 4: for a proprietary operating system. They have us exhausting our bodies,
Speaker 4: our time, and our lives, chasing the tail of manufactured recency.
Speaker 4: We are toiling on oligarchic algorithmic feed plantations. And because
Speaker 4: the ten percent of the population who make the best
Speaker 4: algorithmic kunti kentes, yes, I went there, get ninety percent
Speaker 4: of the engagement on these platforms as they destroy their bodies,
Speaker 4: destroy their mental health, destroy their personal relationships, desperately tossing
Speaker 4: pearls hoping to get pennies out of these sick algorithms.
Speaker 4: We're living in a culture that glorifies that grind as noble.
Speaker 4: It's like the social platforms are drug cartels who have
Speaker 4: a single nautical conciones. And I love today's influences. Many
Speaker 4: are amazingly talented and very hard working. But we cannot
Speaker 4: get to a point as a civilization where that is
Speaker 4: the anticipated redemption arc for capitalism sucking.
Speaker 1: And that's what I fear.
Speaker 4: It becomes this thing where young people go, well, I
Speaker 4: can't afford a house, I can't afford college, I can't
Speaker 4: afford to pay off these predatory healthcare bills where I
Speaker 4: look at the invoice and it's four hundred and fifty
Speaker 4: dollars for a bandage. But it's okay because I'm gonna
Speaker 4: be on the influencer grind and I can blow up
Speaker 4: any day.
Speaker 1: No, it's not okay.
Speaker 4: You better start listing to some Boots Riley starts singing,
Speaker 4: we got the Guillotine. Sometimes, I swear that mode just
Speaker 4: kind of takes over. I don't even know where it
Speaker 4: comes from. It only happens when I'm by myself, in
Speaker 4: complete isolation and hit record. Maybe that's what Taizonda is.
Speaker 4: An atom is just this noise that. But yeah, I
Speaker 4: should release more music. I don't even know what to
Speaker 4: do with music releasing now, which is kind of frustrating
Speaker 4: because I am making and recording the best music I
Speaker 4: have ever made. It's just hoping I can find some
Speaker 4: way to get out before I die. Every independent artist
Speaker 4: has to go through digital music distributors, and that ecosystem
Speaker 4: of middlemen. Many of the legal terms and independent artists
Speaker 4: has to sign are not fair. All of these distributors
Speaker 4: that I know of, are reserving AI rights to any
Speaker 4: new music they syndicate. They want unlimited rights to license
Speaker 4: artists tracks to train third party AI models or to
Speaker 4: train their own AI models. This is of course completely
Speaker 4: unrelated to getting your artist tracks onto Spotify, iTunes, etc.
Speaker 4: At least unrelated to fans playing those tracks back, But
Speaker 4: most of these intermediaries do not offer these services a
Speaker 4: la carte.
Speaker 1: It's a take it or leave it quid pro quo.
Speaker 4: Distributors also face some pressure from platforms like Spotify to
Speaker 4: secure derivative and AI rights because Spotify wants a future
Speaker 4: where there can be unlimited remixing by DJs and mashups
Speaker 4: that don't pay the original artist. So that is my
Speaker 4: independent music ecosystem grievance Number one, AI and derivative rights
Speaker 4: with terrible economics that are impossible for independent artists to
Speaker 4: opt out of. My grievance number two is bad deals
Speaker 4: with syndicating music tracks to social platforms. Because syndicating to
Speaker 4: social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts, Facebook stories, it's
Speaker 4: different than syndicating to retail storefronts like Spotify iTunes. It
Speaker 4: really does not need to be, but the distributors saw
Speaker 4: an opportunity a few years back to call it something
Speaker 4: different and then take a percentage of the ad revenue.
Speaker 4: There is a small amount of content management involved with
Speaker 4: the shorts platforms because music tracks are being integrated with video,
Speaker 4: but the percentage is being paid to distributors are awfully
Speaker 4: high relative to my understanding of that actual cost. Grievance
Speaker 4: number three amounts to YouTube in twenty twenty five being
Speaker 4: a product design hot mess for independent musicians. Short history lesson.
Speaker 4: I believe there was a time in two thousand and
Speaker 4: nine when major music label music videos were approximately eighty
Speaker 4: percent of YouTube's monetized advertising traffic. That's one reason major
Speaker 4: music labels had leverage to force YouTube to create Vevo,
Speaker 4: which is a separate reskin for their videos where they
Speaker 4: get a better ad revenue split. Viacoms unresolved billion dollar
Speaker 4: copyright lossit against YouTube also affected sentiments of the time,
Speaker 4: but that's a separate story. Now, since the viral video era,
Speaker 4: which coincided with major music label artists like Justin Bieber
Speaker 4: and Lady Gaga getting two three billion views regularly on
Speaker 4: their Vivo music videos, we've seen the rising domination of
Speaker 4: mobile viewing and algorithmic feeds that prioritize watch time, session time,
Speaker 4: click through rates, etc. That's one reason you see content
Speaker 4: creators who make longer gameplay videos like market Plier and
Speaker 4: Dashy blow up as soon as algorithmic feeds come out.
Speaker 4: Music videos just don't compete well with other content at
Speaker 4: keeping people on YouTube As a content genre. Music just
Speaker 4: tends to not be as targetable for advertisers who want
Speaker 4: to bid on keywords as technology, family, vlogs, basically any
Speaker 4: other content category. The fact that music videos were among
Speaker 4: YouTube's highest earning content categories by sheer View Volli in
Speaker 4: two thousand and nine, with thousands of content creators making
Speaker 4: entire businesses out of parroting popular music videos, and after
Speaker 4: twenty twelve they just became one of the lowest earning
Speaker 4: content categories is important context for YouTube's products design afterwards.
Speaker 4: The problem YouTube is trying to solve is that music
Speaker 4: is tremendously disadvantaged at creating the user behavior and advertised
Speaker 4: behavior that is most profitable for its business. That means
Speaker 4: my grievance one and grievance two make the artists give
Speaker 4: up their AI rights, their derivative work rights, and submits
Speaker 4: to unfavorable social platform distribution terms. Most distributors are asking
Speaker 4: for that before they'll anoint your own YouTube channel as
Speaker 4: your official artist channel, which causes the channel subscribers to
Speaker 4: merge if you have one that was autogenerated, which I
Speaker 4: do right now. My main YouTube channel is eighteen years old.
Speaker 4: It does not need a third party music distributor operating
Speaker 4: as a multi channel network taking a portion of the
Speaker 4: ad revenue on music video assets. As an independent muse
Speaker 4: a artist on YouTube, I am left to ask why
Speaker 4: am I being forced by these mandatory third party music
Speaker 4: distributors to opt into terrible, unfavorable music track distribution terms
Speaker 4: with every major music playback platform on the planet in
Speaker 4: order to activate my control of an essential YouTube product
Speaker 4: feature for my own music just because YouTube is an
Speaker 4: absent parent and music as a category is its runt
Speaker 4: child in terms of alphabet shareholder value. Although to be fair,
Speaker 4: it is in Google's longer term interest to tacitly support
Speaker 4: a music ecosystem where AI derivatives and mashups are free
Speaker 4: to be created and proliferate with zero restrictions, because that
Speaker 4: expands targetable metadata that is the lifeblood of Google's advertising business.
Speaker 4: It goes back to what I said earlier. Capitalism forces
Speaker 4: fixed assets, fixed me, fixed context, fixed relation, fixed behavior.
Speaker 4: When do we wake up as a species and say
Speaker 4: we are not broken. We do not need these oligarchs
Speaker 4: fixing us. We need fixed behavior in terms of do
Speaker 4: not drive into trees. We do not need fixed behavior
Speaker 4: in terms of I control what you see. You can
Speaker 4: tell I'm getting prophetic when the mother goose rhyms come out,
Speaker 4: the doctor seuss. The parts of this where my speaking
Speaker 4: gets faster and less guttural are when my ADHD medication
Speaker 4: is hitting and I'm just not fighting it. Doing this
Speaker 4: actually had me go down from sixty milligrams to forty
Speaker 4: milligrams of events, because on sixty I was like, I
Speaker 4: can record on a lower dose and be a bit
Speaker 4: more in control of that energizer bunny aspect. I talked
Speaker 4: earlier about how amphetamines make it neurologically easier for me
Speaker 4: to speak, But it's also interesting that a lot of
Speaker 4: the stylistic affect with which Chocolate Rain was sung, where
Speaker 4: I'm dropping my lyrics very deliberately and moving my lips
Speaker 4: in big formations, that is actually a muscular effort compensation
Speaker 4: for the reduced neurological control that dyspraxia creates. There are
Speaker 4: parts of me, the question, am I better off knowing that?
Speaker 4: Because Tasonta was just doing what came naturally in the moment.
Speaker 4: It was Taison Tape blowing up as an entertainer and
Speaker 4: being forced into contact with society, me being put into
Speaker 4: constant realization that I am not like others, but must
Speaker 4: somehow remake myself in that likeness, and eventually realizing that
Speaker 4: was a ridiculous aspiration for me to have. It was
Speaker 4: not because of childhood trauma that I was different. It
Speaker 4: was not because of structural oppression that I was deterministically different,
Speaker 4: as Lady Gaga says, I was just born that way. T. S.
Speaker 4: Eliot's cliche aphorism is that the end of all you're
Speaker 4: exploring will be to come back to where you started
Speaker 4: and know yourself for the first time. The future kind
Speaker 4: of terrifies me. I'm terrified of getting old, which past
Speaker 4: a certain age, you kind of start to resign yourself
Speaker 4: to the idea that it's likely to happen alone. I'm
Speaker 4: this weird cast role of transcendent capability fused with profound disability.
Speaker 4: I am both borderline savant and my information aggregation and
Speaker 4: retention speed while measuring is learning disabled in some kind
Speaker 4: of battery tests because my brain sucks at translating the
Speaker 4: parallelism with which it experiences truth into the dogmatic serial
Speaker 4: declarative that majoritarian neurology change humankind to its likeness with
Speaker 4: and as that last sentence shows, it's a struggle that
Speaker 4: often comes out in hyphenated adjectives, hyphenated nouns, and subordinate clauses.
Speaker 4: Some people in the academy would just tell me that
Speaker 4: John Quincy Adams like pros meant I was stupid that
Speaker 4: the job of a scholar was to clarify that. You
Speaker 4: don't really understand something if you're not clarifying it, if
Speaker 4: you can't explain it to a five year old. I'm like, well, okay,
Speaker 4: fine explaining everything to a five year old. Bad people
Speaker 4: took the ice cream. We won our ice cream back.
Speaker 4: So yeah, as I've said throughout this, I feel quite
Speaker 4: uncertain about my future. I mean, anybody could have the
Speaker 4: wrong place, wrong time, get hit by a bus, get
Speaker 4: hit by a recreational homicide, it hit by falling SpaceX debris.
Speaker 4: But I think I had hoped at this point in
Speaker 4: my life that outside of random misfortunes, I would have
Speaker 4: reason to be confident in a safe and provided future.
Speaker 4: Some people have that in the post blog, saying I
Speaker 4: feel so empty. For me, It's like, Nope, not me.
Speaker 4: That's the life I should have picked. But I'm in
Speaker 4: the life that I'm in now. I suspect that a
Speaker 4: lot of people with similar neurology to me have not
Speaker 4: been as lucky. And if not for myself, me making
Speaker 4: it over any hurdle, no matter how many hurdles I
Speaker 4: have ahead, comes with an obligation to keep running. The
Speaker 4: viral video era in which Chocolate Rain achieved prominence was
Speaker 4: for autistic neurology like mine. What Reconstruction after the American
Speaker 4: Civil War was for black rights.
Speaker 1: It was this.
Speaker 4: Exceptional eye of the storm before ferocious backlash. People who
Speaker 4: had to live under Jim Crow for seventy years looked
Speaker 4: back at Reconstruction and mar and said, yeah, Mississippi had
Speaker 4: a black senator. Yeah, it actually happened. People look back
Speaker 4: at the viral video era now and go, yeah, you
Speaker 4: could be weird, you could be niche, and you would
Speaker 4: be syndicated all over the world by platforms that did
Speaker 4: not spy on user behavior. The viral video era where
Speaker 4: platforms did not act like gated communities and forbid you
Speaker 4: to link to other platforms. The viral video era where
Speaker 4: platforms trusted you that if you followed, or friended, or subscribed,
Speaker 4: you actually wanted to see the content. The viral video
Speaker 4: era where you did not have to consent to your data,
Speaker 4: your soul, your life, your voice being used unpaid for
Speaker 4: somebody else's artificial intelligence business. The viral video era where
Speaker 4: everybody who googled something saw the same results. Because truth
Speaker 4: is not a business decision. It is the life or
Speaker 4: death of our species. And you know what today's search
Speaker 4: and social media that disrespects you, that somehow manages to
Speaker 4: target you with an advertisement about something you were talking
Speaker 4: to a friend about two hours ago, and you were
Speaker 4: wondering how the heck did it get that information. We
Speaker 4: do not need to live like that for seventy years.
Speaker 4: We do not need to live with private interfaces owned
Speaker 4: by faceless oligarchs invading our homes and dictating what we
Speaker 4: see when we see it, and then lying to us
Speaker 4: that we are the ones choosing when they know the
Speaker 4: only options they are surfacing for us are profit profit profit.
Speaker 4: When we deserve power. Power power. We can pick a
Speaker 4: different history to be crashing through our veins. We can
Speaker 4: remake how we got to where we are, and we
Speaker 4: can keep our privacy. We can keep our data, we
Speaker 4: can keep our mental health, and we do not need
Speaker 4: machines to be the means for meeting on our screens
Speaker 4: where nothing seems to hear them me if I say
Speaker 4: no to make me free. There, guys, mother goose again,
Speaker 4: I should end us. But it's been interesting for sure.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much to the wonderful Taison Day for
Speaker 2: his time, his thoughtfulness and just being himself. You can
Speaker 2: follow him at the links in the description. It's hard
Speaker 2: for me to say anything here that tay Or Adam
Speaker 2: hasn't said himself with far more eloquence. But I really
Speaker 2: loved hearing the experiences of someone who went viral in
Speaker 2: the earlier days of the Internet. Sure, because it's nostalgic
Speaker 2: to some degree, and it's really frustrating to hear that
Speaker 2: people as talented as tay Or Liam Kyle Sullivan really
Speaker 2: struggled to be taken seriously in the mainstream in their day.
Speaker 2: But it's comforting in some ways to see well adjusted
Speaker 2: people on the other side of a very weird experience
Speaker 2: to be fair, at least in part because they were
Speaker 2: adults when they went viral, and both after dealing with
Speaker 2: quite a bit of mental health struggles and grappling with
Speaker 2: themselves along the way, just like anyone would have to do,
Speaker 2: but they had to do it while this unprecedented thing
Speaker 2: was happening. And I do think stories like this are
Speaker 2: not just interesting but important because whether we like to
Speaker 2: think about the depressing march of time or not, with
Speaker 2: any luck, the main characters of today are going to
Speaker 2: have a similar road ahead of them, and depending on
Speaker 2: how you feel about it, either with some luck or
Speaker 2: a curse, you might have to deal with it too.
Speaker 2: And this brings me to a little announcement wow bonus
Speaker 2: for people who listen to the end of the episode.
Speaker 2: The announcement is in the next few weeks, we are
Speaker 2: going to be switching up the format of sixteenth minute
Speaker 2: away from our character of the Week format and take
Speaker 2: more time between series so I can take a closer
Speaker 2: look at the missing history of the Internet and what
Speaker 2: we lose by not tracking or considering it more carefully.
Speaker 2: Because at this point, whether you like it or use
Speaker 2: the Internet, frequently or not, it does have a big
Speaker 2: influence over your daily life and has a significant guiding
Speaker 2: hand at who is heard and who isn't. And I
Speaker 2: want to look at how this has developed more closely,
Speaker 2: because stories like tay Is almost serve as a canary
Speaker 2: in a coal mine for where we were headed and
Speaker 2: letting the grand audience of the Internet completely reshape someone's life.
Speaker 2: What I can be grateful for here is that, unlike
Speaker 2: so many people who are dragged into Internet fame or
Speaker 2: any kind of fame unwittingly or rooted in mockery, Tazon
Speaker 2: Day invented himself to be an entertainer and occasionally a commodity.
Speaker 2: And Adam Bonner seems comfortable after many years of navigating
Speaker 2: public prominence, in separating this public and this private self,
Speaker 2: and it shouldn't have had to be hard won. But
Speaker 2: there's a lot to learn from that experience. And so
Speaker 2: with that, Tayson Day, your sixteenth minute ends now. But
Speaker 2: hold your little ponies, dear listener, there are still a
Speaker 2: few more characters that I have to share with you.
Speaker 2: Next week we check in with the main character of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, Hailey Welch aka Hawk tool Girl, who
Speaker 2: has I don't know if you've heard, but been excused
Speaker 2: for a couple of crimes and is getting back into
Speaker 2: the podcast game very twenty twenty five of her and
Speaker 2: that's next week. But as acend off to our Tay series,
Speaker 2: here is the man himself, honoring my people, the Irish
Speaker 2: with Oh Danny Boy, We'll see you next week.
Speaker 1: Oh Danny Boy. The pipes.
Speaker 5: The pipes are lea from Glen to Glen and down
Speaker 5: the mountainside. The songs gone and.
Speaker 1: Do the roses, Fallly.
Speaker 6: Eats, You Eats, You must go, and I must buy,
Speaker 6: but come ye back.
Speaker 3: Queen Salons in the name.
Speaker 1: Pollween.
Speaker 3: Thele is host and White with Snow.
Speaker 2: Sixteenth minute is a production of Whole Zone Media and Iheartwodia.
Speaker 2: It is written, hosted, and produced by me Jamie Astis.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Sophie Lickderman and Robert Evans. Hemsy
Speaker 2: Ian Johnson is our super using producer and our editor.
Speaker 2: Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
Speaker 2: from Grant Crater and Pet. Shout outs to our dog
Speaker 2: producer Anderson, my Kat's Flee and Casper and my pet
Speaker 2: Rockbird who will outlive us all Bye.