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Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.

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Speaker 2: Hello sixteenth minute listeners. It's Jamie, just saying really quick

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Speaker 2: at the top that a show that is my honor

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Speaker 2: to produce on the iHeartRadio network. We the Unhoused has

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Speaker 2: been nominated for a Webby and we need your help.

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Speaker 2: If you haven't listened to the show before, first of all,

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Speaker 2: I highly recommend you do. But it is a show

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Speaker 2: that began in twenty nineteen. It's created, hosted, and reported

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Speaker 2: by the wonderful Theo Henderson. He began the podcast while

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Speaker 2: living on the streets of LA and it's grown significantly

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Speaker 2: during that time, but remains the only podcast that tells

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Speaker 2: stories that affect the unhoused and tells the stories of

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Speaker 2: the unhoused while continuing to center their own perspectives and experiences.

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Speaker 2: We've been nominated in a Weby category and we need

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Speaker 2: your help. If you click the link in the description,

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Speaker 2: it goes directly to our category. It's literally two clicks.

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Speaker 2: It's a tight race, so I would really appreciate it

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Speaker 2: if you both gave us a vote and also checked

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Speaker 2: out the show. You can do both at the link

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Speaker 2: and the description. I want to ask what your favorite

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Speaker 2: protest song is, but I don't know if you're prepared

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Speaker 2: for that question, because protest songs over time haven't always

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Speaker 2: been celebrated for their original intention. Okay, I'll tell you mine.

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Speaker 2: It's from a pretty political artist who I grew up

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Speaker 2: listening to. It's called Waiting for the Great Leap Forward

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Speaker 2: by English singer Billy Bragg from nineteen eighty eight. My

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Speaker 2: dad loved Billy Bragg. He's a punk, Dad staple and

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Speaker 2: mister Bragg, who's still with us, built his career on

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Speaker 2: leftist politics that some fans will debate whether he remained

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Speaker 2: completely consistent with many such punks. But regardless, I love

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Speaker 2: this song and it's unflinchingly political.

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Speaker 3: Mixing Puplin pul.

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Speaker 4: He asks me what the U sees I offer.

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Speaker 5: Embarrassment, my usual excuses while looking down the corridor fatuate

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Speaker 5: Vani's lighting.

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Speaker 6: I'm looking for the quely forward.

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Speaker 2: So there's already a lot coming up here. The title

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Speaker 2: references Mao Zedong's disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign in China,

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Speaker 2: which promised progress but resulted in the death of millions

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Speaker 2: by starvation, and its lyrics reference everything from the false

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Speaker 2: promise of the Kennedy administration in the nineteen sixties, to

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Speaker 2: Oppenheimer's optimism leading to again the death of hundreds of thousands,

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Speaker 2: to che Guevara, Fidel Castro. The list of references goes on.

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Speaker 2: But what I love about this song is how it

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Speaker 2: addresses Billy Bragg's insecurities around being a political artist. In

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Speaker 2: the verse I just shared, he says that he's embarrassed

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Speaker 2: to be a political musician in an age where it

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Speaker 2: didn't feel like his work was moving the needle very much,

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Speaker 2: even when that music was successful for him personally. And

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Speaker 2: maybe the most famous line from the song is this,

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Speaker 2: so I'm join.

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Speaker 3: This fugging whoever.

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Speaker 2: The revolution is just a T shirt away. Come on,

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Speaker 2: that's so good. He's cooking here, folks. Billy Bragg is

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Speaker 2: talking about something that is still very present in today's culture,

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Speaker 2: the tendency for protest to be quickly commoditized in some

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Speaker 2: ways to make it more acceptable, aside any of the

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Speaker 2: feminist protests from the first Trump administration. And he wrote

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Speaker 2: this song as so many of these political songs have

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Speaker 2: been written in the past, in conversation with a song

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Speaker 2: from a previous generation that he admired, that song being

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Speaker 2: Sam Cook's A Change is Gonna come from the nineteen sixties.

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Speaker 2: Here's Billy Bragg talking about the song in an interview,

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Speaker 2: saying that Waiting for the Great Leap Forward was.

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Speaker 5: My way of owning up to the ambiguities of being

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Speaker 5: a political pop star, while stating clearly that I still

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Speaker 5: believe in Sam Cooks promised that a change was going.

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Speaker 2: To come, and that song is one you absolutely know.

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Speaker 7: I was by the river.

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Speaker 3: In a little sense ooh and just live the river.

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Speaker 3: I'm in a running every since. It's been a long,

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Speaker 3: a long time coming when I loved Let's Chase Go Come.

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Speaker 2: Oh, Yes, A Change is Gonna Come. Was originally released

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Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty four, in the midst of the civil

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Speaker 2: rights movement, and was inspired by Sam Cook and his

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Speaker 2: entourage being refused rooms at a holiday inn because of

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Speaker 2: their race and fun fact, the song was also inspired

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Speaker 2: by Sam Cook's love of the Bob Dylan song Blowing

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Speaker 2: in the Wind from the previous year. I don't even

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Speaker 2: like Bob Dylan, but music is so cool. Protest music

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Speaker 2: is a genre so vast that it's easier to break

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Speaker 2: it down into subcategories, whether that be by musical genre

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Speaker 2: or just subject. There's against Me's transgender dysphoria, Blues about

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Speaker 2: lead singer Laura Jane Grace's transition, Loretta Lynn's the pill

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Speaker 2: that scandalized country music for being overtly pro birth control.

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Speaker 8: Damn your bruder health, because now I've got.

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Speaker 3: The far.

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Speaker 2: There was Peter Tash's legalize It about well, you know,

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Speaker 2: there was Woody Guthrie's all you fascists are bound to

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Speaker 2: lose oil.

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Speaker 8: We'll show these fascist what a couple of hill Billies

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Speaker 8: can do.

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Speaker 2: And there's my man Billy Bragg again, with which he

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Speaker 2: performs at rallies to this day. But one of the

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Speaker 2: largest subcategories under the protest music umbrella is Black American

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Speaker 2: protest music, which has produced some of the greatest songs

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Speaker 2: of all time. Swing Low Sweet Chariot was not just

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Speaker 2: an anti slavery folk spiritual, It was actually used as

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Speaker 2: a political signal. The sweet Chariot in question will the

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Speaker 2: underground railroad, and the song being played meant that it

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Speaker 2: was time to begin the dangerous process of escape. And

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Speaker 2: while throughout history, white music executives have done everything they

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Speaker 2: possibly can to erase the fact that Black Americans invented

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Speaker 2: both jazz and rock and roll, In the twentieth century,

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Speaker 2: politically charged hits kept coming. It would be impossible to

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Speaker 2: mention them all, but some of the highlights. The late

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Speaker 2: nineteen thirties brought Billie Holliday's Strange Fruit, a song about

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Speaker 2: public lynching of black Americans during the Jim Crow era.

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Speaker 3: So Cheese Bazz Strange through Blood onwle.

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Speaker 9: And led it.

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Speaker 2: And while a Change Is Gonna Come is probably the

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Speaker 2: most famous example of a nineteen sixties civil rights protest song.

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Speaker 2: There are so many urgently politically charged classics from this

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Speaker 2: stretch of years, and you know them all. Nina Simons

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Speaker 2: Mississippi Goddamn, James Brown's say It Loud, I'm Black and

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Speaker 2: I'm proud Edwin Stars, Wow, Aretha Franklin's Respect my personal favorite,

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Speaker 2: Marvin Gay's What's going On, which was a Motown release

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Speaker 2: that protested the Vietnam War, and then Governor Ronald Reagan's

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Speaker 2: violent reprisal on student protesters picket lad and Pickett sience,

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Speaker 2: don't punish me with brutalities.

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Speaker 3: Talk to me so you can see what's going on.

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Speaker 2: And I'm skipping around in history a bit here, But

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Speaker 2: there's also a legacy of protest in reggae music. The

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Speaker 2: way Get Up Stand Up is probably the most famous

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Speaker 2: mainstream example, but a lot of Bob Marley's catalog stands

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Speaker 2: out as having these revolutionary themes, and protest was critical

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Speaker 2: to early rap music all the way to the present.

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Speaker 2: In the earlier days, you have NWA's Fucked the Police,

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Speaker 2: a song that Ice Cube said was four hundred years

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Speaker 2: in the making. There is Public Enemies Fight the Power,

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Speaker 2: which shared a title and pulled a sample from an

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Speaker 2: Eisley Brothers protest song of the same name from the seventies,

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Speaker 2: and soon after would become the iconic intro to Do

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Speaker 2: the Right Thing from Spike Lee. There's Tupac's Changes, Lauren

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Speaker 2: Hill's Black Rage, all the way up to Kendrick Lamar's

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Speaker 2: most famous works before recently pivoting to Ruin Drake's Life,

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Speaker 2: songs like all Right, Stay Woke, and on and on.

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Speaker 2: But music, particularly music so successful that virtually everyone knows it,

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Speaker 2: is a business, and plenty of prot songs are either

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Speaker 2: misunderstood in their day or later have their meaning capitalized

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Speaker 2: upon to sell something unrelated to its original message. Sam

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Speaker 2: Cooks A Change Is Gonna Come is actually a pretty

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Speaker 2: decent example of this. Back in twenty seventeen, Alicia Keys

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Speaker 2: covered that song for a Nike commercial, Nike being a

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Speaker 2: company that's been credibly accused of their product being produced

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Speaker 2: in sweatshops in East Asia. In the last couple of months,

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Speaker 2: there have been criticisms lobbed against Kendrick Lamar for headlining

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Speaker 2: the Super Bowl due to, among other things, the NFL

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Speaker 2: not being an institution known for supporting black lives. There's

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Speaker 2: a great episode of Code Switch on NPR on this

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Speaker 2: topic of the commercialization of hip hop and rap throughout

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Speaker 2: time from a couple months ago that I'm going to

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Speaker 2: link in the description for more on that topic. But

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Speaker 2: the point is that protest music is both in the

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Speaker 2: DNA of music history, but that music's message is often

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Speaker 2: sanitized in order to be monetized. But everything we've talked

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Speaker 2: about here so far has had to make its way

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Speaker 2: through traditional music hubs, record labels, promotional machines, even if

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Speaker 2: those labels are independent or pretty small, because for a

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Speaker 2: long time that was really the only way to get

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Speaker 2: your work out there until until you've got mail. The

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Speaker 2: Internet was a new world when it came to music distribution,

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Speaker 2: with so many of today's biggest acts getting their start

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Speaker 2: by making music in their bedroom and uploading it to

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Speaker 2: band Camp or SoundCloud. Billie Eilish and Lil NASA's come

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Speaker 2: straight to mind. Before that, there was MySpace, which can

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Speaker 2: take credit for basically every two thousand's emo band that

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Speaker 2: initially lacked studio backing. I had to check, but the

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Speaker 2: most famous Exams people is in fact Panic at the Disco.

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Speaker 2: And of course there was early YouTube. As we've discussed

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Speaker 2: on this show before, Justin Bieber is probably still YouTube's

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Speaker 2: most successful pop star output, but there are plenty of

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Speaker 2: songs that went viral in the two thousands on that

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Speaker 2: platform that failed the catapult its singer songwriter to international

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Speaker 2: lasting fame.

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Speaker 3: Broom Room Za two thousand and a.

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Speaker 9: Can.

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Speaker 2: I thought about playing Rebecca Black's Friday, but she actually

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Speaker 2: has become a pop diva. It just took a little while.

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Speaker 2: Love Rebecca Black. But there was one song that went

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Speaker 2: viral on YouTube to this day, probably the song that

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Speaker 2: defines the platform that everyone knew but very few initially

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Speaker 2: realized was indeed a protest song.

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Speaker 3: It's been a bud of Jella time. Been a bud

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Speaker 3: of Jella time, been a bud of Jella time.

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Speaker 2: Wait, sorry, I had to no. I am talking about

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Speaker 2: a YouTube video with the contrast levels set so high

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Speaker 2: that the artist and his single microphone are flooded in light.

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Speaker 2: A video that begins with an automated piano sample looping

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Speaker 2: with the artist just out of frame, as many would parody. Later.

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Speaker 2: You can see the top of his head in the

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Speaker 2: lower left corner of the video before he springs into

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Speaker 2: frame and starts singing.

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Speaker 10: Tough metaling, some speed dry and others feel the pain

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Speaker 10: chok littering. A baby born would die before this in

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Speaker 10: tough littery.

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Speaker 2: Adam Bonner aka a Dayzon Day. Your sixteenth minute starts now.

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Speaker 11: Stay it, Thank you. Sixteen sixteen.

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Speaker 2: Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk

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Speaker 2: to the main characters of the Internet see how their

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Speaker 2: moment in the spotlight affected them and what that says

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Speaker 2: about us and the Internet and this week and Thursday

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Speaker 2: and next week. Because boy is this a dense topic.

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Speaker 2: We are talking with one of the greats, the one

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Speaker 2: and only Tayson Day Tay, as you might expect, is

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Speaker 2: easily one of the most popular requests for this show

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Speaker 2: and has been from moment one, and I can promise

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Speaker 2: you that this was worth the wait. This is a

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Speaker 2: story that needs to be told in multiple parts and

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Speaker 2: in a way that we've never done on this show before.

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Speaker 2: What we're airing is less of an interview with Tay

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Speaker 2: than Tay Aka Adam telling you his story directly. Okay,

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Speaker 2: let me explain. I first reached out the Tayson Day

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Speaker 2: almost a year ago now to see if he would

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Speaker 2: ever be interested in coming on the show, and over

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Speaker 2: the course of that year, we figured out what the

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Speaker 2: best way to get deep into his history, not just

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Speaker 2: with the Internet, but with any number of things he

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Speaker 2: wanted to touch on, from race to neurodivergence to forming

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Speaker 2: friendships with fellow Internet stars. And eventually Tay decided it

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Speaker 2: would be best if I sent him my questions and

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Speaker 2: he would then record his answers in response. But what

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Speaker 2: neither of us expected, I don't think, is not just

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Speaker 2: Tay's story, but the way that his politics have evolved

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Speaker 2: and changed over time, a journey that I think is

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Speaker 2: well worth your time. So here's what we're gonna do today.

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Speaker 2: I'm gonna give you the broad strokes of Tay's moment

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Speaker 2: of massive viral fame, and then for the remainder of

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Speaker 2: the series. I'm going to let him take it away,

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Speaker 2: and whether he leans away from the mic to take

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Speaker 2: a breath is up to him, but I'll say if

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Speaker 2: he doesn't, I'm going to freak out because if you

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Speaker 2: know anything about Tayzon Day, you will know he is

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Speaker 2: a really smart and insightful guy, and not for nothing.

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Speaker 2: His voice is way more fun to listen tooth than mine.

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Speaker 2: But before we can get there, we have to go

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Speaker 2: back to April two thousand and seven, a mass shooting

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Speaker 2: at Virginia Tech leaves thirty three dead and twenty nine

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Speaker 2: injured to this day, the most deadly school shooting in

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Speaker 2: American history. Talk radio host Don Imus as one of

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Speaker 2: the most cruelly, out of pocket, casually racist and misogynistic

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Speaker 2: comments about black women basketball players at Rutgers, which gets

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Speaker 2: him fired. Don't worry, though, he got a redemption arc

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Speaker 2: for some reason. And on April twenty third, two thousand

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Speaker 2: and seven, a YouTube user going by Tayzon Day uploads

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Speaker 2: what he says was his twelfth video ever, a video

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Speaker 2: that would go down in history. Chocolate Rain, a complete

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Speaker 2: unknown tay Or Adam was a graduate student in Minnesota

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Speaker 2: who was performing his original work at open mics around

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Speaker 2: the city before realizing that uploading the songs to YouTube

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Speaker 2: wasn't just more time efficient, it also stood to net

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Speaker 2: him a much larger audience since entering college and going

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Speaker 2: into grad school, Tay and I'm going to call him Tay.

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Speaker 2: Throughout the series, Tay had taken an increased interest in

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Speaker 2: studying institutional racism, something you wouldn't talk about for years

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Speaker 2: in the press. He's biracial, he was raised by a

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Speaker 2: black mother and white father, and is autistic, another facet

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Speaker 2: of his life that he wasn't initially open to sharing

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Speaker 2: about outside of performing at a fundraiser or two. All

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Speaker 2: that to say, Tay's interest in the themes of discrimination

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Speaker 2: that are explored in Chocolate Rain come from a very

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Speaker 2: sincere place and were initially intended to make people think

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Speaker 2: more than and laugh. But he's rolled with it and

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Speaker 2: continues to roll with it to this day. But believe

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Speaker 2: it or not, Chocolate Rain wasn't even the first time

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Speaker 2: that Tayson Day was noticed by the YouTube staff. His

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Speaker 2: second video ever, which I'm just reading the title here,

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Speaker 2: Love original song by Kooby featuring Tayzon Day, was also

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Speaker 2: featured by the website on its front page after being

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Speaker 2: handpicked by an employee. Here's a taste. Oh shit, Hey

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Speaker 2: keep going, give me yiss a.

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Speaker 9: Hot and have.

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Speaker 12: I.

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Speaker 2: Okay, So we've talked about how YouTube curation has changed

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Speaker 2: significantly in past episodes of this show, our series on

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Speaker 2: Lena Morris, the Overly Attached Girlfriend, as well as Liam

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Speaker 2: Kyle Sullivan aka Kelly from Shoes. But to refresher memory,

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Speaker 2: the YouTube of two thousand and seven had twenty million

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Speaker 2: monthly visitors to their now two point seven billion monthly visitors,

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Speaker 2: and the recommendation pages were curated by staff members, not

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Speaker 2: algorithms as they are today. And that doesn't mean that

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Speaker 2: the site was a total meritocracy, but it was certainly

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Speaker 2: much closer and there was far less competition from other users. So,

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Speaker 2: as Tay explains in our interview and in many others

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Speaker 2: he's done, this first bump of encouragement on the platform

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Speaker 2: was what motivated him to finish and then upload Chocolate Rain,

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Speaker 2: a song he'd been tooling around with for months that,

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Speaker 2: if you pay attention to the lyrics, is very obviously

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Speaker 2: about systemic racism, and Tay would later confirm systemic racism

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Speaker 2: he had experienced or witnessed firsthand. So before we get

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Speaker 2: into how the two thousand and seven world received Chocolate Rain,

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Speaker 2: let's actually listen to the song, and we're gonna take

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Speaker 2: it first by verse. The song begins.

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Speaker 3: Chaff lit rain. Some stayed dry and others feel.

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Speaker 9: A pain chocolate rain.

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Speaker 7: A baby born will.

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Speaker 3: Die before this in chof lit ring.

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Speaker 10: The school books say it can't be here again, chocolt rain.

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Speaker 3: The prisons make you wonder where it win chok So.

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Speaker 2: In short, Tay is talking about the liberal notion of

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Speaker 2: a post racial society, one that Adam Bonner was raised

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Speaker 2: in during the eighties and nineties while Black Americans continued

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Speaker 2: to suffer. He also mentions, quote a baby will die

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Speaker 2: before the sin, a possible reference to black infant mortality rates.

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Speaker 2: And the prisons will make you wonder where it went,

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Speaker 2: the prison industrial complex that disproportionately imprisons black men. He's

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Speaker 2: saying this right out the gate, so let's keep going.

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Speaker 2: The next few verses expand upon the idea of a

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Speaker 2: post racial society, lyrics like zoom the camera out and

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Speaker 2: see the lie only in the past is what they say,

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Speaker 2: and then he gets into more issues.

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Speaker 10: Let's listen we say chocklit rain, we is your neighborhood

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Speaker 10: insureance rage, chop lit rain makes us happy live. Then

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Speaker 10: in again, chocklit rain.

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Speaker 3: Made me cross the.

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Speaker 10: Street of the day, choflp ray.

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Speaker 3: Made you turn your hand the way child.

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Speaker 2: Okay, now we're getting into housing discrimination and redlining, as

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Speaker 2: well as the very common fear mongering around black people

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Speaker 2: as dangerous to be in your neighborhood. And look, I

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Speaker 2: want to go through the whole song, but to be honest,

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Speaker 2: it is quite long, and I would like to get

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Speaker 2: to the Tay interview. So to summarize the other issues

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Speaker 2: mentioned in Chocolate Rain, reference everything from the public gaslighting

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Speaker 2: that happens to people of color who insist that systemic

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Speaker 2: racism is still alive and well. And there are many

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Speaker 2: more references to the prison industrial complex.

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Speaker 6: Lines like this, the same crime has a high you've

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Speaker 6: priced upate the dure gen juries where is not in

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Speaker 6: the base?

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Speaker 3: Turn that body into GDP.

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Speaker 2: He mentions the Bell Curve theory, a very racist notion

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Speaker 2: that is popular within mensa that dictates that black people

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Speaker 2: are genetically less intelligent than white people. Here's the line

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Speaker 2: the mill cup blames the baby, the nag The song

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Speaker 2: also tries to acknowledge international racism, and then closes on this.

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Speaker 6: Verse, cho Rain, it's pre quickly crashing through your Chocolate Rain,

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Speaker 6: using you to bomb back down again.

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Speaker 2: Chocolate Rain is an intense song, one whose agenda is

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Speaker 2: very clear, particularly when you're just listening to the song

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Speaker 2: without any music video kind of visual because sure Tay's

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Speaker 2: voice is unusually deep, but personally I don't find that

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Speaker 2: distracting because there's plenty of famous singers with voices just

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Speaker 2: as low or even lower. The great Paul Robison is

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Speaker 2: a great example, a civil rights activist who most famously sang.

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Speaker 7: Oh man rebad man, he must, but don't say no man.

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Speaker 2: But this is YouTube in two thousand and seven, and

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Speaker 2: I would be lying if I said that as a kid,

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Speaker 2: I understood the song Chocolate Rain, or was even bothering

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Speaker 2: to listen to the lyrics. When it first came out, No,

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Speaker 2: Chocolate Rain was not received as an anti racist anthem.

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Speaker 2: It was received as comedy. So let's get into a

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Speaker 2: few reasons why that may have been. First, let's talk

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Speaker 2: about the visuals, because there's no getting around the visuals

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Speaker 2: of the Chocolate Rain video are distinct as Tay is

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Speaker 2: quick to acknowledge himself in the two thousand and seven video.

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Speaker 2: He is a very young looking, skinny guy with this

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Speaker 2: deep bass voice, and the juxtaposition is a little jarring

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Speaker 2: at first, not to mention the camera he's using his

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Speaker 2: pretty low quality and Tay's body language. Well, it rules,

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Speaker 2: but it can be a little bit distracting from the

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Speaker 2: song's message. The most famous and still iconic to this

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Speaker 2: day example of this is every time that Tay, then

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Speaker 2: twenty five years old, wearing his white T shirt and glasses,

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Speaker 2: takes a breath during the song. He leans really far

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Speaker 2: away from the microphone and kind of like inhales from

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Speaker 2: the side of his mouth. It's a little weird, to

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Speaker 2: be sure, but what makes it iconic is that Tay

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Speaker 2: in the video adds text on screen that further draws

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Speaker 2: attention to this writing into the annals of history.

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Speaker 5: I move away from the mic to breathe.

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Speaker 2: In amazing, incredible poetry. Yes it's awkward, Yes Tay is

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Speaker 2: clearly not a professional performer yet. But let's be clear,

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Speaker 2: it is not Tay's fault that the Internet audience of

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Speaker 2: two thousand and seven completely failed to interpret this clearly

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Speaker 2: political song for what it was, because he famously moves

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Speaker 2: away from the mic de breathe in the problem is, well,

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Speaker 2: the problem is kind of what Tay is singing about

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Speaker 2: in the song. The liberal idea of a post racial

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Speaker 2: society suits people of many races, an idea that assured

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Speaker 2: them that America used to be a racist place, but

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Speaker 2: it isn't now. And while certainly not everyone drank this

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Speaker 2: kool aid, a lot of people did, and that's kind

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Speaker 2: of what Tay's fighting.

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Speaker 3: He sings choflit rain.

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Speaker 10: Worse than swearing, worse than calling names, chocksld rain, saying

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Speaker 10: it publicly, and you're insane, chocklit rain. No one wants

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Speaker 10: to hear her about it. Now, chocolate rain, which real hot?

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Speaker 10: It goes away somehow.

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Speaker 2: So to answer the question, did anyone really get it?

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Speaker 2: When YouTube reached out to Tay to see if they

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Speaker 2: could feature his work on their front page, again, no,

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Speaker 2: not really. It is framed almost universally as comedy, and

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Speaker 2: as with a lot of early YouTube success stories, it's

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Speaker 2: actually a second party website that ends up making the

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Speaker 2: video take off a couple months after it was posted.

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Speaker 2: And here's Tayson Day explaining what he thinks was the

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Speaker 2: initial appeal of Chocolate Rain to the Internet. In a

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Speaker 2: video for Know Your Meme back in twenty twenty one.

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Speaker 13: I think there was an appealing aspect of Chocolate Rain

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00:28:50,120 --> 00:28:54,520
Speaker 13: that was found footage. It was like someone just put

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Speaker 13: a camera in their living room and this is what

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00:28:56,920 --> 00:29:00,480
Speaker 13: you see. In that period of time, the Internet driven

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00:29:00,520 --> 00:29:05,680
Speaker 13: by novelty, finding new interesting things that hadn't been seen before,

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Speaker 13: and kind of getting to know each other in that way.

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Speaker 13: And it changed around twenty eleven twenty twelve, and after that,

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Speaker 13: you know, videos did not go viral in the same way.

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Speaker 2: In future interviews, Tay would credit the link sharing site

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Speaker 2: dig for really drawing attention to the video, and Dig

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Speaker 2: was kind of a prototype for the Reddit model. And

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Speaker 2: the early characterization of Chocolate Rain was not, Hey, this

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Speaker 2: kind of weird guy has a really salient point to

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Speaker 2: make about racism in America. It much closer aligns with

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Speaker 2: headlines like this from the Edmonton.

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Speaker 5: Journal Mo Chocolate, Mo Money.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, mainly framing the video as novelty comedy. And this

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Speaker 2: remained consistent for nearly a decade, which especially sticks out

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Speaker 2: now when you see how many of Tay's early fans

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Speaker 2: were prominent white people. The closest that publications get to

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00:30:03,120 --> 00:30:07,040
Speaker 2: meaningfully analyzing what the song means is with a little

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00:30:07,040 --> 00:30:11,400
Speaker 2: bit of bewilderment. This is from the Honolulu Star Advertiser

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Speaker 2: from August two thousand and seven.

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Speaker 5: As the initial puzzlement wears off and you begin to

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Speaker 5: listen to the lyrics, you quickly become aware of Chocolate

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Speaker 5: Rain's central contradiction. Hold on a second. Some stay dry

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Speaker 5: and others feel the pain. This is a song about racism,

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Speaker 5: but racism is not funny, But Chocolate Rain is funny.

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Speaker 5: Or maybe it's not, but isn't it.

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Speaker 2: The next Internet forum to take notice of Chocolate Rain

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Speaker 2: was four Chan, which sounds a little scarier in this

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Speaker 2: case than it actually was, because at this time four

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Speaker 2: Chan had yet to escalate to the full on hate

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Speaker 2: group generator that they would become in a few short years.

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Speaker 2: But they were still overwhelmingly male and good at organizing

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00:31:04,560 --> 00:31:10,720
Speaker 2: shit posting campaigns, a system they would never use for evil.

436
00:31:10,800 --> 00:31:13,800
Speaker 14: Giorsine La Flesh was attacked by an online group of

437
00:31:13,800 --> 00:31:17,760
Speaker 14: gamers whose activities are known as gamer Gate. Initially a

438
00:31:17,840 --> 00:31:21,520
Speaker 14: social media hashtag for discussion of ethics and gaming journalism,

439
00:31:21,960 --> 00:31:25,800
Speaker 14: it has increasingly become a catchphrase for the online harassment

440
00:31:25,840 --> 00:31:27,440
Speaker 14: of female gamers.

441
00:31:27,400 --> 00:31:30,160
Speaker 2: And it's here where things really start to heat up

442
00:31:30,200 --> 00:31:34,040
Speaker 2: for the video, because remember, it did take much longer

443
00:31:34,240 --> 00:31:37,120
Speaker 2: for internet stars to get their foothold in the mainstream.

444
00:31:37,440 --> 00:31:40,520
Speaker 2: Back in the two thousands. You could still become an

445
00:31:40,560 --> 00:31:44,000
Speaker 2: overnight star a Lah William Hung in two thousand and four,

446
00:31:44,480 --> 00:31:47,719
Speaker 2: but not without the help of a nationally successful media

447
00:31:47,760 --> 00:31:52,200
Speaker 2: conglomerate like American Idol. In two thousand and seven, YouTube

448
00:31:52,280 --> 00:31:55,320
Speaker 2: was still too niche to turn someone into a household

449
00:31:55,400 --> 00:31:59,040
Speaker 2: name without a lot of help, and that help came

450
00:31:59,160 --> 00:32:04,400
Speaker 2: in the form of Tom Green. Somehow, the Freddy got

451
00:32:04,400 --> 00:32:07,760
Speaker 2: Fingered guy Never seen it, don't really want to, but

452
00:32:07,800 --> 00:32:10,840
Speaker 2: a group of four Chan users organized a shit posting

453
00:32:10,920 --> 00:32:15,000
Speaker 2: campaign in order to flood Green's livestreamed call in show

454
00:32:15,520 --> 00:32:19,160
Speaker 2: and start singing Chocolate Rain until Tom Green had to

455
00:32:19,200 --> 00:32:22,400
Speaker 2: ask them what the fuck they were doing, and when

456
00:32:22,440 --> 00:32:25,800
Speaker 2: he learned the video they were referencing, he loved it.

457
00:32:26,120 --> 00:32:29,600
Speaker 2: And so while there's no exact moment that Taizon Day

458
00:32:29,640 --> 00:32:34,960
Speaker 2: goes supersonic, this first celebrity co sign seems to be

459
00:32:35,080 --> 00:32:39,480
Speaker 2: what got the ball rolling, and very soon after, Boy

460
00:32:39,640 --> 00:32:45,600
Speaker 2: Oh boy, did people love Haazon day. He embodied all

461
00:32:45,720 --> 00:32:49,560
Speaker 2: that was eccentric about how the Internet was perceived at

462
00:32:49,600 --> 00:32:51,760
Speaker 2: the time, and it was almost a sign that you

463
00:32:51,920 --> 00:32:55,040
Speaker 2: knew what the kids were into by knowing who he was,

464
00:32:55,560 --> 00:32:59,520
Speaker 2: which led to covers from other artists. Here's John Mayer

465
00:33:00,200 --> 00:33:19,600
Speaker 2: Dollar plus about a million expectedly bad parodies. Here's the

466
00:33:19,600 --> 00:33:24,280
Speaker 2: most popular one for some reason called Vanilla Snow Wow

467
00:33:24,400 --> 00:33:25,160
Speaker 2: good one.

468
00:33:26,280 --> 00:33:34,680
Speaker 12: Snow a basketball Launtrey who became Vanilla Snow Open Doors

469
00:33:34,720 --> 00:33:36,800
Speaker 12: with hotspotettity use Vanilla the.

470
00:33:36,920 --> 00:33:40,400
Speaker 2: Snow seven point three million views, no accounting for it.

471
00:33:40,680 --> 00:33:44,600
Speaker 2: But add this Internet engagement to the appearances in traditional

472
00:33:44,640 --> 00:33:48,120
Speaker 2: media that Tay made that first year, and he was

473
00:33:48,160 --> 00:33:52,600
Speaker 2: becoming famous, and I mean a lot of appearances. Going

474
00:33:52,680 --> 00:33:55,600
Speaker 2: viral can be a nightmare, But make no mistake, Hay

475
00:33:55,760 --> 00:33:57,080
Speaker 2: was not resisting the attention.

476
00:34:16,160 --> 00:34:20,160
Speaker 13: Hey Tay, Hey, we're digging your Chocolate Rain song.

477
00:34:21,200 --> 00:34:22,600
Speaker 3: What we love the song?

478
00:34:23,520 --> 00:34:23,600
Speaker 1: Oh?

479
00:34:23,640 --> 00:34:24,440
Speaker 7: What can you repeat that?

480
00:34:24,480 --> 00:34:25,160
Speaker 12: I didn't get it?

481
00:34:25,480 --> 00:34:28,799
Speaker 13: We like your song a lot, Chocolate Rain, Chocolate Rain.

482
00:34:29,280 --> 00:34:30,120
Speaker 15: Yeah, well thanks?

483
00:34:31,000 --> 00:34:33,360
Speaker 16: Are you making any money just yet off of this?

484
00:34:33,520 --> 00:34:34,759
Speaker 12: At you too? Chocolate Rain?

485
00:34:35,719 --> 00:34:35,880
Speaker 1: You know?

486
00:34:35,920 --> 00:34:38,120
Speaker 17: I mean, I can't talk about that in too much detail.

487
00:34:38,960 --> 00:34:41,040
Speaker 17: You know, nothing that change my life at this point,

488
00:34:41,160 --> 00:34:42,719
Speaker 17: but you know, maybe a little bit here and there,

489
00:34:42,760 --> 00:34:44,200
Speaker 17: but you know, I take it a day at a time.

490
00:34:44,239 --> 00:34:45,200
Speaker 17: Who knows.

491
00:34:44,640 --> 00:34:46,719
Speaker 12: Come on, now a little bit here there? Come on?

492
00:34:46,719 --> 00:34:47,560
Speaker 17: How much were talking about?

493
00:34:48,719 --> 00:34:48,920
Speaker 4: You know?

494
00:34:49,000 --> 00:34:50,160
Speaker 3: That's all I can say.

495
00:34:50,200 --> 00:34:52,520
Speaker 17: You know, it's uh not going to retire to my

496
00:34:52,600 --> 00:34:53,680
Speaker 17: penthouse in Dubai.

497
00:34:53,920 --> 00:34:57,040
Speaker 16: Easily gets my vote for Song in the Summer from Minneapolis.

498
00:34:57,040 --> 00:34:59,960
Speaker 16: Please welcome tays On Day with the song Chocolate Rain

499
00:35:00,000 --> 00:35:02,600
Speaker 16: into Tonight's Internet Talent showcase.

500
00:35:04,160 --> 00:35:04,640
Speaker 3: Thas On.

501
00:35:05,080 --> 00:35:07,080
Speaker 16: Well, I'll tell you that was a real treat to

502
00:35:07,080 --> 00:35:09,320
Speaker 16: see you here live in person. Was that your first

503
00:35:09,320 --> 00:35:10,080
Speaker 16: live performance?

504
00:35:10,200 --> 00:35:12,680
Speaker 18: It was pretty much I did one last week, but

505
00:35:13,200 --> 00:35:13,920
Speaker 18: pretty new to it.

506
00:35:13,960 --> 00:35:15,719
Speaker 16: Well, I didn't know if your voice really was that

507
00:35:15,840 --> 00:35:19,160
Speaker 16: d board just your svoic was No, that's my voice,

508
00:35:19,160 --> 00:35:20,400
Speaker 16: it's real, Israel.

509
00:35:20,440 --> 00:35:21,440
Speaker 3: What do you do for a living?

510
00:35:21,640 --> 00:35:22,520
Speaker 17: I'm a grand student.

511
00:35:22,640 --> 00:35:24,840
Speaker 16: And can you believe all the attention that you've gotten

512
00:35:24,920 --> 00:35:25,399
Speaker 16: for the No.

513
00:35:25,480 --> 00:35:27,279
Speaker 17: You know, you just kind of put something silly upon

514
00:35:27,360 --> 00:35:28,840
Speaker 17: YouTube and it gets lots of attention.

515
00:35:29,080 --> 00:35:31,719
Speaker 7: So what do you tend? No idea you could.

516
00:35:31,480 --> 00:35:34,600
Speaker 16: Be the next Darth Vader, you know, or at least

517
00:35:34,600 --> 00:35:35,680
Speaker 16: say this is CNN.

518
00:35:35,800 --> 00:35:38,200
Speaker 3: Let's just see this is CNN, and.

519
00:35:38,120 --> 00:35:40,240
Speaker 1: Do you do you get recognized in the street and stuff?

520
00:35:40,239 --> 00:35:41,080
Speaker 7: Now I do.

521
00:35:41,239 --> 00:35:43,759
Speaker 17: It was funny. I was at a white Castle fast

522
00:35:43,760 --> 00:35:46,360
Speaker 17: food chain in the US the other day and you know,

523
00:35:46,400 --> 00:35:48,719
Speaker 17: this person was just sticking out the window as I

524
00:35:48,800 --> 00:35:50,480
Speaker 17: was trying to order at Burger, just like you know,

525
00:35:50,520 --> 00:35:53,920
Speaker 17: practically in my car, Charcot Ryan Chains. You know, it

526
00:35:54,680 --> 00:35:55,280
Speaker 17: does happen.

527
00:35:56,480 --> 00:36:00,040
Speaker 2: This is just a sampling of Taizon Day's TV and

528
00:36:00,200 --> 00:36:03,560
Speaker 2: radio appearances from two thousand and seven into two thousand

529
00:36:03,560 --> 00:36:06,440
Speaker 2: and eight. You just heard him on Opie and Anthony,

530
00:36:06,680 --> 00:36:10,560
Speaker 2: on Jimmy Kimmel on CNN, and on Lily Allen's BBC

531
00:36:10,760 --> 00:36:14,920
Speaker 2: talk show. And even when he didn't physically appear, he

532
00:36:15,080 --> 00:36:18,959
Speaker 2: was mentioned on basically every TV institution of the day

533
00:36:19,160 --> 00:36:23,600
Speaker 2: across genres, from The Daily Show to Maury and everything

534
00:36:23,640 --> 00:36:27,520
Speaker 2: in between. Tay also got a bump from traditional print media,

535
00:36:27,960 --> 00:36:31,279
Speaker 2: which was only just starting to take an eventual nose

536
00:36:31,400 --> 00:36:36,160
Speaker 2: dive into obscurity. Rip to all my Friend's jobs and

537
00:36:36,239 --> 00:36:40,120
Speaker 2: in a lot of print media people also tracked Tayzon

538
00:36:40,200 --> 00:36:44,239
Speaker 2: Day's journey to attempt to monetize the sudden fame that

539
00:36:44,320 --> 00:36:48,040
Speaker 2: had come with Chocolate Rain, and so, like a lot

540
00:36:48,120 --> 00:36:52,280
Speaker 2: of early online successes. We just spoke with Liam Kyle

541
00:36:52,360 --> 00:36:56,600
Speaker 2: Sullivan about this recently, there weren't any systems in place

542
00:36:56,760 --> 00:36:59,960
Speaker 2: that could take an online star into a mainstream star

543
00:37:00,560 --> 00:37:03,719
Speaker 2: in the way there is now, in part because the

544
00:37:03,920 --> 00:37:09,120
Speaker 2: Hollywood people with money didn't yet understand how the internet worked. Really,

545
00:37:09,800 --> 00:37:13,080
Speaker 2: people who became famous online were viewed as flashes in

546
00:37:13,120 --> 00:37:16,400
Speaker 2: the pan, and even if they weren't, as Tay explains

547
00:37:16,440 --> 00:37:20,560
Speaker 2: in our interview and in others, virtually every major music

548
00:37:20,640 --> 00:37:23,319
Speaker 2: label was trying to work with him. At the time

549
00:37:23,360 --> 00:37:28,160
Speaker 2: that Chocolate Rain got really big, most big institutions didn't

550
00:37:28,200 --> 00:37:32,160
Speaker 2: know what to do with Tay. Many publications at the

551
00:37:32,160 --> 00:37:36,800
Speaker 2: time compared Taizon Day to William Hung, basically a novelty

552
00:37:36,840 --> 00:37:40,520
Speaker 2: act who didn't seem to be in on the joke, which,

553
00:37:40,680 --> 00:37:43,560
Speaker 2: in my opinion is also a pretty ablest way of

554
00:37:43,680 --> 00:37:48,160
Speaker 2: assuming that neurodivergent people are incapable of being in on

555
00:37:48,200 --> 00:37:51,160
Speaker 2: the joke. We'll circle back to that, but what we

556
00:37:51,200 --> 00:37:54,040
Speaker 2: see Tay try to do to monetize his career and

557
00:37:54,120 --> 00:37:58,239
Speaker 2: turn it into something more because yeah, he dropped out

558
00:37:58,280 --> 00:38:01,319
Speaker 2: of grad school shortly after, just like William Hung and

559
00:38:01,400 --> 00:38:04,520
Speaker 2: Lena Morris did after they went viral. But what we

560
00:38:04,560 --> 00:38:07,560
Speaker 2: see him do is kind of the playbook we've discussed

561
00:38:07,600 --> 00:38:12,719
Speaker 2: on the show before, very much the two thousands Internet

562
00:38:12,840 --> 00:38:18,480
Speaker 2: famous playbook. He sells MP three's, although because Chocolate Rain

563
00:38:18,520 --> 00:38:21,080
Speaker 2: had been up online for so long it seemed difficult

564
00:38:21,120 --> 00:38:24,759
Speaker 2: to get much return on investment there. He sold Ringtones,

565
00:38:24,920 --> 00:38:28,279
Speaker 2: He takes meetings in Hollywood. He does public appearances with

566
00:38:28,400 --> 00:38:32,160
Speaker 2: Mario Lopez. He wins an Obscure Award from an award

567
00:38:32,200 --> 00:38:34,960
Speaker 2: that wouldn't exist two years later. He moves to Los

568
00:38:35,000 --> 00:38:37,440
Speaker 2: Angeles in two thousand and eight, and he starts a

569
00:38:37,480 --> 00:38:41,200
Speaker 2: career in voice acting, which he would later successfully parlay

570
00:38:41,320 --> 00:38:45,360
Speaker 2: into gigs on Robot Chicken and Epic Rap Battles of History.

571
00:38:46,160 --> 00:38:49,879
Speaker 2: And because of where he went viral, Hayes on day

572
00:38:50,320 --> 00:38:54,320
Speaker 2: makes more videos and while nothing ever goes anywhere close

573
00:38:54,400 --> 00:38:57,800
Speaker 2: to his viral as Chocolate Rain, Hayes work on YouTube

574
00:38:57,840 --> 00:39:01,600
Speaker 2: in a few years that followed the hit seemingly experimented

575
00:39:01,920 --> 00:39:05,719
Speaker 2: with how to stay relevant on the platform while remaining

576
00:39:05,840 --> 00:39:09,960
Speaker 2: true to himself. So the question seems to be is

577
00:39:10,000 --> 00:39:13,840
Speaker 2: he going to lean into the perceived comedy of Chocolate

578
00:39:13,960 --> 00:39:16,400
Speaker 2: rain that people took away at the time, or was

579
00:39:16,440 --> 00:39:19,640
Speaker 2: he going to continue with the core motivation behind his

580
00:39:19,719 --> 00:39:25,960
Speaker 2: first hit, extreme musical earnestness. He tries out both. Here's

581
00:39:26,080 --> 00:39:29,080
Speaker 2: one of the comedy songs, Do the Can't Dance from

582
00:39:29,160 --> 00:39:30,719
Speaker 2: September two thousand and seven.

583
00:39:37,880 --> 00:39:39,960
Speaker 3: Sound the River Dance.

584
00:39:41,280 --> 00:39:48,920
Speaker 9: Sad, the Salsa Dance, Sound the Dance, I do the

585
00:39:49,080 --> 00:39:49,960
Speaker 9: Can't Dance.

586
00:39:51,960 --> 00:39:55,000
Speaker 2: And here is a very sincere ballad. This is called

587
00:39:55,040 --> 00:39:59,200
Speaker 2: Someday and it is also from September two thousand and seven.

588
00:40:00,040 --> 00:40:06,240
Speaker 4: Lose Your Rise and hear my name Sody, I'll be

589
00:40:06,560 --> 00:40:12,440
Speaker 4: talk about I have failed a lot, but try to help.

590
00:40:15,120 --> 00:40:28,320
Speaker 4: I love you, child, you, but someday, Oh be God.

591
00:40:30,880 --> 00:40:33,400
Speaker 2: And then there's the work that kind of falls somewhere

592
00:40:33,440 --> 00:40:36,600
Speaker 2: in the middle of these two categories, as July two

593
00:40:36,640 --> 00:40:41,600
Speaker 2: thousand and seven song Internet Dreams Best demonstrates, I actually

594
00:40:41,680 --> 00:40:44,800
Speaker 2: really like this song. It plays for jokes while making

595
00:40:44,880 --> 00:40:48,200
Speaker 2: some light critiques of people being addicted to the Internet

596
00:40:48,440 --> 00:40:51,439
Speaker 2: and the nature of viral fame, as he was right

597
00:40:51,480 --> 00:40:53,839
Speaker 2: in the middle of experiencing it himself.

598
00:40:55,600 --> 00:40:58,680
Speaker 17: Man this is in and his something Else.

599
00:41:00,200 --> 00:41:00,640
Speaker 3: Cindy.

600
00:41:00,719 --> 00:41:06,160
Speaker 15: Closely, there is done Green everyone chasing Devin Dream, so

601
00:41:06,520 --> 00:41:09,640
Speaker 15: I can't help me a triple next funk When in

602
00:41:09,640 --> 00:41:13,120
Speaker 15: the auction turning my editor Jones Cavin's the flag.

603
00:41:13,239 --> 00:41:16,919
Speaker 3: Yeah a virtue will dash skipping your wedding to bring

604
00:41:17,000 --> 00:41:19,960
Speaker 3: your old match shut out a lands o. Ye I

605
00:41:19,960 --> 00:41:23,760
Speaker 3: I've seen say it alone with Yam and Dream.

606
00:41:24,360 --> 00:41:27,600
Speaker 2: And at the height of his name recognition, shortly after

607
00:41:27,719 --> 00:41:32,840
Speaker 2: he'd been established as a reliable TV, radio and print fixture,

608
00:41:33,320 --> 00:41:36,160
Speaker 2: Tay gets what I have to assume is the biggest

609
00:41:36,160 --> 00:41:39,120
Speaker 2: paycheck of his career when he was the face of

610
00:41:39,160 --> 00:41:42,120
Speaker 2: a doctor Pepper commercial in November two thousand and seven.

611
00:41:43,000 --> 00:41:47,640
Speaker 2: I give you cherry Chocolate, Rain, allow.

612
00:41:47,400 --> 00:41:52,360
Speaker 18: Me to introduce myself. My name is j It's t

613
00:41:52,920 --> 00:41:58,560
Speaker 18: A Y T A Y to the Z. This is

614
00:41:58,600 --> 00:42:01,520
Speaker 18: the web and it's gone my murder your TV.

615
00:42:07,640 --> 00:42:12,879
Speaker 8: It was chop Rain, a song out my bad your

616
00:42:12,960 --> 00:42:14,960
Speaker 8: stuffy chomp Yet Rain.

617
00:42:16,200 --> 00:42:17,319
Speaker 3: Now I'm paid a.

618
00:42:17,400 --> 00:42:22,239
Speaker 8: Half py half if job yet Rain re sim to

619
00:42:22,520 --> 00:42:27,000
Speaker 8: the punk you bands that we chop Yet Rain. I

620
00:42:27,200 --> 00:42:29,520
Speaker 8: moved my way from the night to breathe.

621
00:42:29,680 --> 00:42:31,360
Speaker 9: He moves his mouth away from the.

622
00:42:31,440 --> 00:42:32,960
Speaker 3: Mic so he can breathe.

623
00:42:33,200 --> 00:42:37,640
Speaker 2: Bring okay as much as we're enjoying this amazing verse.

624
00:42:37,640 --> 00:42:40,719
Speaker 2: I'm gonna cut it off here because you can hear

625
00:42:40,800 --> 00:42:43,719
Speaker 2: and not see this. This is a high budget video

626
00:42:44,320 --> 00:42:50,000
Speaker 2: where Tay is advertising chocolate dr Pepper, which even as

627
00:42:50,000 --> 00:42:54,320
Speaker 2: a fan, sounds repulsive, but the aesthetics of the video

628
00:42:54,440 --> 00:42:58,960
Speaker 2: are cool and definitely echo how William Hung was presented

629
00:42:59,280 --> 00:43:03,080
Speaker 2: in his early high budget appearances after he first got

630
00:43:03,120 --> 00:43:05,040
Speaker 2: famous on American idol.

631
00:43:05,400 --> 00:43:09,320
Speaker 3: William I'm telling you the record company got nice meets you.

632
00:43:09,719 --> 00:43:11,160
Speaker 3: I want you to meet you in a PEARLFI.

633
00:43:12,360 --> 00:43:16,440
Speaker 2: In both of these videos, the viral star is surrounded

634
00:43:16,480 --> 00:43:19,919
Speaker 2: by hot, scantily clad women who are all over him,

635
00:43:20,360 --> 00:43:24,000
Speaker 2: and the underlying suggestion is isn't it funny that women

636
00:43:24,120 --> 00:43:28,840
Speaker 2: want to be around this awkward guy? Lazy? It's lazy,

637
00:43:29,520 --> 00:43:32,440
Speaker 2: and in Tay's case, the closest we get to knowing

638
00:43:32,480 --> 00:43:35,920
Speaker 2: what the original intent of Chocolate Rain was in this

639
00:43:36,040 --> 00:43:39,880
Speaker 2: video is that early in the song reference to history,

640
00:43:40,480 --> 00:43:44,279
Speaker 2: but the paid song quickly moves on, mainly focused on

641
00:43:44,480 --> 00:43:48,560
Speaker 2: Tay's newfound fame and clout. Here's a bit of the

642
00:43:48,880 --> 00:43:50,920
Speaker 2: second rap guest first.

643
00:43:51,320 --> 00:43:56,560
Speaker 10: Mostly video clips mostly closed Bady Yo Shake, Sneaking Pig Baby,

644
00:43:56,640 --> 00:44:01,480
Speaker 10: Yo's fluid Big City pros got tad witty prose that over.

645
00:44:07,200 --> 00:44:10,360
Speaker 2: And just like that, in short order, it's become a

646
00:44:10,440 --> 00:44:14,320
Speaker 2: Doctor Pepper commercial. And so here Tay makes an interesting

647
00:44:14,440 --> 00:44:18,479
Speaker 2: full circle with this outwardly political song. In the space

648
00:44:18,520 --> 00:44:21,160
Speaker 2: of a couple of months, He's changed the meaning of

649
00:44:21,239 --> 00:44:24,720
Speaker 2: Chocolate Rain in order to sell something for someone else,

650
00:44:25,520 --> 00:44:28,480
Speaker 2: just as so many political songs have been transformed to

651
00:44:28,520 --> 00:44:32,279
Speaker 2: warp their meaning before him. He actually commented on the

652
00:44:32,320 --> 00:44:35,319
Speaker 2: process of working with Doctor Pepper at this time ten

653
00:44:35,400 --> 00:44:37,960
Speaker 2: years later in an interview with B. E. T.

654
00:44:38,640 --> 00:44:41,920
Speaker 13: Doctor Pepper approached me to write a song about diet

655
00:44:42,000 --> 00:44:42,720
Speaker 13: cherry chocolate.

656
00:44:42,760 --> 00:44:43,440
Speaker 3: Doctor Pepper.

657
00:44:43,560 --> 00:44:45,480
Speaker 13: They didn't like any of the songs that I made.

658
00:44:45,760 --> 00:44:48,399
Speaker 13: They said, why don't we just do this song you've

659
00:44:48,440 --> 00:44:51,040
Speaker 13: already done and they did a fancy video.

660
00:44:51,480 --> 00:44:55,800
Speaker 2: So did anyone criticize or even point this out about

661
00:44:55,920 --> 00:44:59,799
Speaker 2: Chocolate Rain to cherry chocolate Rain at the time, Well,

662
00:45:00,040 --> 00:45:04,040
Speaker 2: not really, But to be fair, Tay himself was pretty

663
00:45:04,040 --> 00:45:09,920
Speaker 2: avoidant about acknowledging how intensely political the original song was himself.

664
00:45:10,280 --> 00:45:13,080
Speaker 2: There are more clips from those same Opie and Anthony

665
00:45:13,320 --> 00:45:15,040
Speaker 2: and Lily Allen interviews.

666
00:45:15,440 --> 00:45:17,800
Speaker 17: Yeah, I mean I mean I think, I mean, it

667
00:45:17,800 --> 00:45:20,719
Speaker 17: has undertones about you know, racism and institutional right.

668
00:45:20,880 --> 00:45:24,279
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, I felt that, but I didn't know if

669
00:45:24,560 --> 00:45:26,920
Speaker 13: you had like a meaning to everything or some of

670
00:45:26,960 --> 00:45:28,480
Speaker 13: it was just the kind of words coming at you.

671
00:45:28,680 --> 00:45:31,520
Speaker 13: So what Day's trying to say is that Voss was wrong. Again,

672
00:45:31,560 --> 00:45:34,040
Speaker 13: It's not about Heroin Horace Boss.

673
00:45:34,840 --> 00:45:36,400
Speaker 7: Yeah, he's pretty simple.

674
00:45:43,080 --> 00:45:46,120
Speaker 1: Obvious question next, what is chocolate line?

675
00:45:46,560 --> 00:45:49,200
Speaker 17: You know, I always say that the question is more

676
00:45:49,239 --> 00:45:50,480
Speaker 17: important than the answer.

677
00:45:51,160 --> 00:45:54,279
Speaker 2: So even when interviewers did ask about the meaning of

678
00:45:54,320 --> 00:45:57,600
Speaker 2: the song, and I'm honestly kind of impressed that fucking

679
00:45:57,719 --> 00:46:01,960
Speaker 2: Opie and Anthony thought to for about ten years, he

680
00:46:02,239 --> 00:46:07,040
Speaker 2: avoided ever talking about its meaning explicitly, usually saying some

681
00:46:07,200 --> 00:46:10,839
Speaker 2: version of the song means whatever you think it means.

682
00:46:11,160 --> 00:46:15,080
Speaker 2: But that would change over ten years later in twenty eighteen,

683
00:46:15,520 --> 00:46:20,080
Speaker 2: in that same interview with b T titled Hazon Day's

684
00:46:20,280 --> 00:46:23,480
Speaker 2: Chocolate Rain was more woke than we realized.

685
00:46:24,080 --> 00:46:26,480
Speaker 13: I grew up in a biracial household. My mom's black,

686
00:46:26,520 --> 00:46:29,920
Speaker 13: my dad's white. We never talked to each other, referred

687
00:46:29,920 --> 00:46:31,960
Speaker 13: to each other as black and white. So it was

688
00:46:32,239 --> 00:46:33,839
Speaker 13: a little bit of a shock to go out into

689
00:46:33,880 --> 00:46:35,759
Speaker 13: the world as it became a teenager like, wait, there

690
00:46:35,760 --> 00:46:38,799
Speaker 13: are these things and they don't really speak to my

691
00:46:38,880 --> 00:46:40,799
Speaker 13: life for who I know human beings to be.

692
00:46:41,120 --> 00:46:43,000
Speaker 3: I guess overall, Chocolate.

693
00:46:42,640 --> 00:46:45,839
Speaker 13: Rain was intended as a ballad about institutional racism, and.

694
00:46:45,800 --> 00:46:48,080
Speaker 2: When he was asked why he waited so long to

695
00:46:48,160 --> 00:46:52,000
Speaker 2: talk about this in the years since, Hay basically cites

696
00:46:52,000 --> 00:46:55,080
Speaker 2: his own work. Here he is last year talking with

697
00:46:55,239 --> 00:46:59,720
Speaker 2: Anthony Padia from Smash alongside friend of the show Lena Morris.

698
00:47:00,400 --> 00:47:03,720
Speaker 13: For ten years, I refused to answer that question.

699
00:47:03,840 --> 00:47:05,319
Speaker 3: I dodged the first time.

700
00:47:05,360 --> 00:47:06,759
Speaker 13: I actually just came out and said, yeah, it's a

701
00:47:07,440 --> 00:47:12,120
Speaker 13: ballad about institutional racism. Was a bet interview in twenty seventeen.

702
00:47:12,320 --> 00:47:13,640
Speaker 13: I hate to say, but I didn't want to run

703
00:47:13,680 --> 00:47:15,840
Speaker 13: everybody's fun and a lot of the perception of it

704
00:47:15,920 --> 00:47:19,319
Speaker 13: going viral was that it had a comedic potential or

705
00:47:19,320 --> 00:47:23,080
Speaker 13: people didn't take it super super seriously. And eighty percent

706
00:47:23,120 --> 00:47:26,120
Speaker 13: of people who heard Chocolate Rain believed it was a

707
00:47:26,160 --> 00:47:29,320
Speaker 13: funny joke, and only maybe about twenty percent of people

708
00:47:30,040 --> 00:47:32,160
Speaker 13: saw a deeper meaning, whether it was you know, black

709
00:47:32,200 --> 00:47:35,719
Speaker 13: lives matter or you had Trayvon Martin. What a lot

710
00:47:35,760 --> 00:47:38,400
Speaker 13: who would come back to that and be like, oh,

711
00:47:39,040 --> 00:47:42,040
Speaker 13: I thought this was about defication when I was a child,

712
00:47:42,040 --> 00:47:44,960
Speaker 13: But now I'm looking back and like, I really see this,

713
00:47:45,080 --> 00:47:48,200
Speaker 13: this serious story about institutional racism.

714
00:47:48,280 --> 00:47:49,600
Speaker 17: I'm like, oh, oh, thank you.

715
00:47:50,000 --> 00:47:53,680
Speaker 2: He thought that being overtly political would ruin the fun

716
00:47:54,280 --> 00:47:58,839
Speaker 2: and probably sabotage his commercial prospects. The only value a

717
00:47:58,840 --> 00:48:02,160
Speaker 2: song has to capital is its ability to sell something,

718
00:48:02,280 --> 00:48:04,600
Speaker 2: after all, and that's a cynical thing to say, But

719
00:48:04,719 --> 00:48:08,800
Speaker 2: remember what era this song came out into. Barack Obama

720
00:48:08,840 --> 00:48:12,240
Speaker 2: had announced his candidacy for president in February two thousand

721
00:48:12,280 --> 00:48:15,359
Speaker 2: and seven, and Chocolate Rain came out in April. More

722
00:48:15,400 --> 00:48:17,960
Speaker 2: than ever, it was a moment for many liberals of

723
00:48:18,280 --> 00:48:23,040
Speaker 2: what they called optimism. Dare I say, hope and change?

724
00:48:23,560 --> 00:48:27,120
Speaker 2: So let may be clear that extended this nineteen nineties

725
00:48:27,160 --> 00:48:30,919
Speaker 2: Clinton era liberal post racial attitude. If a black man

726
00:48:30,960 --> 00:48:34,279
Speaker 2: could be considered a viable candidate for the American presidency,

727
00:48:34,760 --> 00:48:38,759
Speaker 2: doesn't that mean racism is over? So, for what it's worth,

728
00:48:39,080 --> 00:48:41,600
Speaker 2: it did seem like a uniquely challenging time to be

729
00:48:41,680 --> 00:48:45,600
Speaker 2: pushing a radical as well as kind of pessimistic idea

730
00:48:45,760 --> 00:48:49,560
Speaker 2: with regards to American racism. Even though the message of

731
00:48:49,640 --> 00:48:55,319
Speaker 2: Chocolate rain itself is true on YouTube, particularly before that

732
00:48:55,440 --> 00:48:59,400
Speaker 2: Beet interview in twenty eighteen. Kay seems most comfortable in

733
00:48:59,440 --> 00:49:03,440
Speaker 2: the world of infotainment, so there's always a comedy bent

734
00:49:03,520 --> 00:49:05,879
Speaker 2: to his work, but as you'll hear, he still wants

735
00:49:05,920 --> 00:49:09,320
Speaker 2: to explore some pretty complex ideas. This is from November

736
00:49:09,360 --> 00:49:12,200
Speaker 2: twenty eleven, after a few years in la and weathering

737
00:49:12,239 --> 00:49:16,120
Speaker 2: the recession, a song called Mama Economy.

738
00:49:16,920 --> 00:49:18,759
Speaker 3: Are you confused about the economy?

739
00:49:19,040 --> 00:49:20,160
Speaker 7: Well, have no fear.

740
00:49:20,480 --> 00:49:24,960
Speaker 13: I'm going to explain the American economy right now.

741
00:49:25,880 --> 00:49:27,799
Speaker 3: The dollar just think of a luck of promise from

742
00:49:27,840 --> 00:49:29,759
Speaker 3: the government. But the value of the dalla has to

743
00:49:29,800 --> 00:49:30,800
Speaker 3: be there to be relevant.

744
00:49:30,880 --> 00:49:32,680
Speaker 13: The value of the dalla comes from China and a

745
00:49:32,800 --> 00:49:34,799
Speaker 13: van when they put the cast reserves in a US

746
00:49:34,840 --> 00:49:35,319
Speaker 13: dollar plan.

747
00:49:35,440 --> 00:49:37,879
Speaker 3: There by firs Rey bonds from the federal reserves.

748
00:49:38,120 --> 00:49:40,279
Speaker 2: And while plenty of these videos do well as time

749
00:49:40,360 --> 00:49:44,840
Speaker 2: goes on, as Tay alternatively works in voice performance chases

750
00:49:44,880 --> 00:49:47,880
Speaker 2: the occasional YouTube trend, but after a while he mainly

751
00:49:47,920 --> 00:49:51,640
Speaker 2: switches to covering songs he likes. As with Liam Kyle

752
00:49:51,680 --> 00:49:56,560
Speaker 2: Sullivan's experience performing as Kelly, Tay remained an iconic, beloved

753
00:49:56,880 --> 00:50:00,960
Speaker 2: early YouTube character, but the timing of his fame made

754
00:50:01,000 --> 00:50:05,040
Speaker 2: it nearly impossible to capitalize on, and like many early

755
00:50:05,080 --> 00:50:08,239
Speaker 2: YouTube stars, he didn't have any desire to be a

756
00:50:08,400 --> 00:50:11,440
Speaker 2: YouTuber as that came to be known in the years

757
00:50:11,440 --> 00:50:14,399
Speaker 2: to come. Here he is in a vlog from March

758
00:50:14,440 --> 00:50:15,240
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen.

759
00:50:15,760 --> 00:50:18,120
Speaker 13: Part of the reason is that YouTube has changed so much,

760
00:50:18,160 --> 00:50:21,799
Speaker 13: and I legit don't recognize the platform anymore, not in

761
00:50:21,840 --> 00:50:23,600
Speaker 13: a bad way, just to a point where it's like,

762
00:50:23,640 --> 00:50:26,759
Speaker 13: I'm looking at videos that go viral now and it's like,

763
00:50:26,880 --> 00:50:29,640
Speaker 13: I spent twenty four hours in Coca cola where someone

764
00:50:29,640 --> 00:50:33,000
Speaker 13: fills a bathtub with coca cola and that goes viral.

765
00:50:33,040 --> 00:50:36,279
Speaker 13: Lord I flew using leaf flowers, which he and by

766
00:50:36,280 --> 00:50:38,279
Speaker 13: the way, he doesn't actually find the video, but hey, good,

767
00:50:38,360 --> 00:50:41,080
Speaker 13: good for him, it went viral. There's this tremendous pressure

768
00:50:41,120 --> 00:50:43,040
Speaker 13: now to be sensational and extreme.

769
00:50:43,520 --> 00:50:47,000
Speaker 2: So while Tay participated in Internet retrospectives in the years

770
00:50:47,040 --> 00:50:51,440
Speaker 2: that followed your classic BuzzFeed, I accidentally went virals. You're

771
00:50:51,480 --> 00:50:55,799
Speaker 2: Anthony Padilla videos. Hey moved forward in his life, not

772
00:50:55,920 --> 00:50:59,160
Speaker 2: sharing very much in the meantime, How is he look

773
00:50:59,200 --> 00:51:02,319
Speaker 2: back on all of it now, Oh, it's complicated. So

774
00:51:02,400 --> 00:51:14,560
Speaker 2: when we come back the world according to Tayson Day,

775
00:51:21,680 --> 00:51:26,480
Speaker 2: ladies and gentlemen, Days on Day or Adam Bonner, I'll

776
00:51:26,520 --> 00:51:29,120
Speaker 2: let him tell you. And this interview has been edited

777
00:51:29,239 --> 00:51:30,440
Speaker 2: for time and clarity.

778
00:51:31,000 --> 00:51:34,359
Speaker 13: I'm Tayson Day. I sang the song Chocolate Rain, which

779
00:51:34,480 --> 00:51:37,759
Speaker 13: was one of the early viral videos on YouTube. As

780
00:51:37,800 --> 00:51:41,080
Speaker 13: I'm recording this, I'm almost forty three years old, and

781
00:51:41,239 --> 00:51:43,400
Speaker 13: at the time I was on the cusp of turning

782
00:51:43,520 --> 00:51:46,759
Speaker 13: twenty five. So April of two thousand and seven is

783
00:51:46,840 --> 00:51:49,480
Speaker 13: when the video got uploaded. And of course I've done

784
00:51:49,480 --> 00:51:52,080
Speaker 13: many other things, As is often the case in entertainment

785
00:51:52,200 --> 00:51:55,600
Speaker 13: and life, do hundreds of things and a couple of

786
00:51:55,680 --> 00:51:58,880
Speaker 13: them get more attention. William Shatner is primarily known for

787
00:51:58,960 --> 00:52:01,719
Speaker 13: being Captain Kirk and maybe the Price Line spokesperson in

788
00:52:01,800 --> 00:52:04,800
Speaker 13: Boston Legal, and he's done hundreds and hundreds of things.

789
00:52:05,400 --> 00:52:08,440
Speaker 13: The surprising future that was hard to get a perspective

790
00:52:08,480 --> 00:52:11,520
Speaker 13: on while I was living that moment is that I

791
00:52:11,640 --> 00:52:16,000
Speaker 13: became sort of this torch bearer and this common point

792
00:52:16,040 --> 00:52:21,600
Speaker 13: of experiential reference for a moment in internet history and

793
00:52:21,800 --> 00:52:26,960
Speaker 13: a moment in viral video experience history. I'll see young

794
00:52:27,000 --> 00:52:30,120
Speaker 13: people commenting on my video saying, oh, my parents at

795
00:52:30,120 --> 00:52:32,760
Speaker 13: me here, as though chocolate rain is like the most

796
00:52:32,840 --> 00:52:39,120
Speaker 13: immaculately preserved tyrannosaurus. Via this, this embodiment, you know, the

797
00:52:39,520 --> 00:52:42,200
Speaker 13: entire world used to be filled with these things, and

798
00:52:42,320 --> 00:52:44,520
Speaker 13: along with some other viral videos of the time, like

799
00:52:44,560 --> 00:52:47,279
Speaker 13: Evolution of Dance or the Shoes video, it became a

800
00:52:47,680 --> 00:52:51,120
Speaker 13: common touchstone and point of reference, a positive memory that's

801
00:52:51,160 --> 00:52:55,160
Speaker 13: widely shared, like people widely share a lot of negative memories,

802
00:52:55,239 --> 00:52:58,279
Speaker 13: like everybody who was past a certain age remembers where

803
00:52:58,280 --> 00:53:00,840
Speaker 13: they were when they found out Michael Jackson or if

804
00:53:00,880 --> 00:53:04,360
Speaker 13: they're a bit older, John Lennon, and so viral videos

805
00:53:04,400 --> 00:53:07,200
Speaker 13: are kind of this happy memory that people can come to,

806
00:53:07,280 --> 00:53:11,000
Speaker 13: Oh wow, this is a happy memory, a positive memory

807
00:53:11,040 --> 00:53:13,560
Speaker 13: that many of us share. I was born in nineteen

808
00:53:13,600 --> 00:53:17,239
Speaker 13: eighty two while living in Chicago, as the youngest of

809
00:53:17,360 --> 00:53:19,880
Speaker 13: three by quite a bit. My siblings are six and

810
00:53:19,960 --> 00:53:23,320
Speaker 13: eleven years older than me. My parents were both school teachers.

811
00:53:23,360 --> 00:53:25,440
Speaker 13: My dad was a high school science teacher. My mother

812
00:53:25,520 --> 00:53:29,279
Speaker 13: taught elementary school and eventually served twenty five years as

813
00:53:29,360 --> 00:53:32,120
Speaker 13: a principal. Is served the right word there? I guess

814
00:53:32,480 --> 00:53:36,720
Speaker 13: it's a public service. I definitely had had many, many

815
00:53:36,760 --> 00:53:39,960
Speaker 13: memories of being alone in gigantic school buildings as a

816
00:53:40,080 --> 00:53:43,440
Speaker 13: child with my mom because she started her principal career

817
00:53:43,440 --> 00:53:45,880
Speaker 13: when I was about six, And if you didn't know,

818
00:53:45,920 --> 00:53:48,560
Speaker 13: principles are often coming in and doing work on Saturday

819
00:53:48,600 --> 00:53:51,680
Speaker 13: and or Sunday, so not just the five school days

820
00:53:51,680 --> 00:53:53,799
Speaker 13: of the week. This was before cell phone, so if

821
00:53:53,800 --> 00:53:55,359
Speaker 13: my mom wanted to talk to me, she'd just get

822
00:53:55,400 --> 00:53:57,520
Speaker 13: on the building wide intercom. I guess if your family

823
00:53:57,520 --> 00:53:59,720
Speaker 13: owns a bodega, you grew up learning about the food

824
00:53:59,719 --> 00:54:02,560
Speaker 13: reach hell business. I kind of felt like elementary schools

825
00:54:02,600 --> 00:54:05,120
Speaker 13: were our family business. We moved around quite a bit,

826
00:54:05,160 --> 00:54:07,439
Speaker 13: partly because of my mom's principal career, so I had

827
00:54:07,520 --> 00:54:12,480
Speaker 13: ten different schools that I attended from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

828
00:54:12,800 --> 00:54:16,359
Speaker 13: Not having a consistent cohort of kids to grow up

829
00:54:16,360 --> 00:54:20,520
Speaker 13: with or landmarks to interact with over time probably contributed

830
00:54:20,560 --> 00:54:23,200
Speaker 13: to a sense of loneliness, as well as just being

831
00:54:23,239 --> 00:54:25,680
Speaker 13: the youngest in my family by quite a bit. I

832
00:54:25,840 --> 00:54:30,279
Speaker 13: felt very intensely and helicopter parented as a child. As

833
00:54:30,280 --> 00:54:33,279
Speaker 13: school teachers, my parents had plenty of examples of who

834
00:54:33,400 --> 00:54:35,640
Speaker 13: they did not want their kids to turn out like.

835
00:54:35,920 --> 00:54:38,640
Speaker 13: I've had the privilege of growing older with both of

836
00:54:38,680 --> 00:54:42,120
Speaker 13: my parents, so that's been an interesting perspective because I

837
00:54:42,200 --> 00:54:45,600
Speaker 13: barely survived my teenage years. I experienced some bullying in

838
00:54:45,680 --> 00:54:47,680
Speaker 13: junior high in the start of high school. Anyone who

839
00:54:47,719 --> 00:54:49,960
Speaker 13: remembers me from that time probably would say more than some.

840
00:54:50,520 --> 00:54:52,560
Speaker 13: But also for reasons I'll get into that were not

841
00:54:52,640 --> 00:54:56,279
Speaker 13: completely my parents' fault, ended up being self mutilating, suicidal,

842
00:54:56,560 --> 00:55:00,680
Speaker 13: and eventually from about ages sixteen to nineteen completely nonverbal

843
00:55:00,719 --> 00:55:03,160
Speaker 13: at home. And nonverbal at home really meant I could

844
00:55:03,160 --> 00:55:06,200
Speaker 13: not be verbal anywhere I believed there was any possibility

845
00:55:06,280 --> 00:55:08,600
Speaker 13: of my parents hearing me speak, which also meant the

846
00:55:08,640 --> 00:55:12,360
Speaker 13: outside world. I remember being seventeen years old attending my

847
00:55:12,480 --> 00:55:17,160
Speaker 13: therapeutic day school as a special ed placement, and my therapist,

848
00:55:17,480 --> 00:55:20,000
Speaker 13: outside of her job description, said we needed to do

849
00:55:20,040 --> 00:55:23,760
Speaker 13: our sessions walking around outside. It took her multiple weeks

850
00:55:23,800 --> 00:55:26,480
Speaker 13: to convince me that my mother or father might not

851
00:55:27,160 --> 00:55:31,640
Speaker 13: incidentally be among the cars that passed by as we

852
00:55:31,680 --> 00:55:35,440
Speaker 13: walked outside, and therefore it was safe for me to speak.

853
00:55:35,600 --> 00:55:37,560
Speaker 13: And the school was in Wilmette, Illinois, which is a

854
00:55:37,760 --> 00:55:40,960
Speaker 13: very storybook and douclic place to walk around. A lot

855
00:55:40,960 --> 00:55:42,680
Speaker 13: of people would ask me later on what was it

856
00:55:42,719 --> 00:55:45,840
Speaker 13: like when your voice got deep and the truthful answers.

857
00:55:45,880 --> 00:55:49,640
Speaker 13: I was grunting like a toddler and completely nonverbal and

858
00:55:50,080 --> 00:55:55,280
Speaker 13: terrified of being verbal. Eventually, that same therapist, again outside

859
00:55:55,280 --> 00:55:58,960
Speaker 13: of her job description, did family therapy between my parents

860
00:55:58,960 --> 00:56:01,440
Speaker 13: and I. I was about eighteen and a half and

861
00:56:01,560 --> 00:56:05,880
Speaker 13: I finally started to at least occasionally and awkwardly, be

862
00:56:05,960 --> 00:56:09,279
Speaker 13: able to speak. I didn't appreciate when I was a

863
00:56:09,320 --> 00:56:13,279
Speaker 13: teenager that getting to know my parents as a teenager

864
00:56:13,360 --> 00:56:16,160
Speaker 13: and then during my twenties, and then in my thirties

865
00:56:16,160 --> 00:56:19,359
Speaker 13: and then in my forties, I would be getting to

866
00:56:19,400 --> 00:56:24,080
Speaker 13: know different dimensions and different layers and different vulnerabilities of

867
00:56:24,160 --> 00:56:27,279
Speaker 13: both of them, which would then give me new insights

868
00:56:27,280 --> 00:56:30,160
Speaker 13: into what happened in my childhood. There's a lot that

869
00:56:30,200 --> 00:56:32,120
Speaker 13: I was not allowed to do in terms of pop

870
00:56:32,120 --> 00:56:34,680
Speaker 13: culture when I was a child, I was not allowed

871
00:56:34,719 --> 00:56:38,040
Speaker 13: to own any toys with weapons. So no Gi Jones,

872
00:56:38,120 --> 00:56:42,040
Speaker 13: no he Man, no Shira, no watching Indiana Jones or

873
00:56:42,239 --> 00:56:44,560
Speaker 13: mc iver or any of those other things that one

874
00:56:44,640 --> 00:56:47,680
Speaker 13: might have thought would be iconic for a nineteen eighties childhood.

875
00:56:47,800 --> 00:56:51,400
Speaker 13: I resented while growing up the way that what I

876
00:56:51,680 --> 00:56:56,080
Speaker 13: perceived as overparenting forced me into this mold of being

877
00:56:56,360 --> 00:57:00,680
Speaker 13: like a Steve vercle or Carlton Banks, the archetypic nerd

878
00:57:00,840 --> 00:57:04,400
Speaker 13: and model child. I realized much much later in life

879
00:57:04,760 --> 00:57:08,280
Speaker 13: that my parents had their own traumas that were unique

880
00:57:08,320 --> 00:57:10,560
Speaker 13: to them that informed the way that they parented me,

881
00:57:10,640 --> 00:57:14,600
Speaker 13: and then that I'm also autistic and had certain sensitivities

882
00:57:14,600 --> 00:57:17,880
Speaker 13: in the ways that I reacted to stimuli. That you know,

883
00:57:18,120 --> 00:57:22,280
Speaker 13: there was a lot happening that nobody was particularly conscious

884
00:57:22,400 --> 00:57:25,280
Speaker 13: of at the time, but everybody did the best that

885
00:57:25,320 --> 00:57:27,280
Speaker 13: they knew how to do with the person that they

886
00:57:27,280 --> 00:57:29,720
Speaker 13: could bring to the table. In those moments, I was

887
00:57:29,760 --> 00:57:33,160
Speaker 13: a loved child, and my parents loved each other. They've

888
00:57:33,200 --> 00:57:36,240
Speaker 13: been together more than fifty years as of this regarding

889
00:57:36,240 --> 00:57:40,000
Speaker 13: they're still alive. Knock on woodcrossy fingers. As people get older,

890
00:57:40,160 --> 00:57:41,960
Speaker 13: my father would want me to clarify it, even the

891
00:57:42,000 --> 00:57:44,400
Speaker 13: story that I was. They provided for a child. We

892
00:57:44,400 --> 00:57:46,919
Speaker 13: were never rich, but we were also never poor, and

893
00:57:47,520 --> 00:57:50,400
Speaker 13: it was one of his proudest life accomplishments. So yeah,

894
00:57:50,440 --> 00:57:51,760
Speaker 13: I was born in eighty two, and a lot of

895
00:57:51,760 --> 00:57:54,520
Speaker 13: the things that you can mention pop culture wise, I

896
00:57:54,680 --> 00:57:57,280
Speaker 13: just wasn't allowed to you. Ninja Turtle is not allowed,

897
00:57:57,640 --> 00:58:01,520
Speaker 13: Terminator to not allowed, Wayne's World not allowed, Beavis Butthead

898
00:58:01,640 --> 00:58:04,120
Speaker 13: not allowed, mc hammer and other rap music not allowed.

899
00:58:04,400 --> 00:58:07,680
Speaker 13: Kurt Cobain or Devada country music not allowed. South Park,

900
00:58:07,720 --> 00:58:09,960
Speaker 13: which eventually parodied me. I wasn't allowed to watch that

901
00:58:10,000 --> 00:58:11,480
Speaker 13: when I was fifteen years old at the time that

902
00:58:11,600 --> 00:58:14,440
Speaker 13: I launched. I would say that black affect and vernacular

903
00:58:14,680 --> 00:58:17,720
Speaker 13: was not allowed, but it was really just that anything

904
00:58:17,760 --> 00:58:21,880
Speaker 13: that was not highly educated affect and vernacular was not allowed.

905
00:58:22,040 --> 00:58:24,840
Speaker 13: I did become quite a Star Trek fan starting around

906
00:58:24,840 --> 00:58:27,320
Speaker 13: age nine, both of the original series and Star Trek

907
00:58:27,320 --> 00:58:30,080
Speaker 13: the Next Generation and Deep Space nine. Star Trek and

908
00:58:30,120 --> 00:58:34,160
Speaker 13: then especially characters like Spock and Data and Odo existed

909
00:58:34,160 --> 00:58:36,560
Speaker 13: on sort of a nerd pass island that did not

910
00:58:36,760 --> 00:58:39,280
Speaker 13: set off my parents' anxieties, and therefore it was allowed.

911
00:58:39,400 --> 00:58:41,960
Speaker 13: There were aspects of my childhood family life that could

912
00:58:42,000 --> 00:58:45,600
Speaker 13: be emotionally immature and tumultuous, not always have the healthiest dynamics,

913
00:58:45,640 --> 00:58:49,360
Speaker 13: and so characters like an Android or a Vulcan who

914
00:58:49,360 --> 00:58:53,160
Speaker 13: have no emotion. I retreated into those characters to process

915
00:58:53,200 --> 00:58:55,200
Speaker 13: that the same way that Star Trek got to pass.

916
00:58:55,280 --> 00:58:57,520
Speaker 13: I felt like Disney and Broadway music was the only

917
00:58:57,560 --> 00:59:00,000
Speaker 13: thing I was allowed to listen to Musically. I felt

918
00:59:00,040 --> 00:59:02,680
Speaker 13: the tremendous pressure at all ages as a child to

919
00:59:02,760 --> 00:59:05,920
Speaker 13: both costplay being older because my siblings were older, and

920
00:59:06,080 --> 00:59:10,080
Speaker 13: cosplay being a future governor or senator or future pinnacle

921
00:59:10,320 --> 00:59:13,080
Speaker 13: of human achievement. In some ways, particularly, my father could

922
00:59:13,160 --> 00:59:16,320
Speaker 13: lean towards being sad, and I kind of realized in

923
00:59:16,360 --> 00:59:20,760
Speaker 13: retrospect I became sort of this costplayven ein Rand protagonist,

924
00:59:20,880 --> 00:59:25,160
Speaker 13: this little seedling who oversignaled my trajectory of being a

925
00:59:25,320 --> 00:59:29,640
Speaker 13: future perfect human in order to soothe and assure both parents.

926
00:59:30,160 --> 00:59:33,080
Speaker 13: My parents, being baby boomers, were never the type to

927
00:59:33,120 --> 00:59:37,080
Speaker 13: be particularly vulnerable with their feelings. On one hand, it

928
00:59:37,120 --> 00:59:39,120
Speaker 13: can be good, I think, to not turn your kids

929
00:59:39,160 --> 00:59:42,680
Speaker 13: into a therapist. But on the other hand, when feelings

930
00:59:42,720 --> 00:59:46,600
Speaker 13: and irrationality and subjectivity that we each have inside of

931
00:59:46,680 --> 00:59:51,840
Speaker 13: us just to kind of present without any interrogation or explanation,

932
00:59:52,520 --> 00:59:55,400
Speaker 13: that can be disorienting for a child because speaking on

933
00:59:55,480 --> 00:59:58,720
Speaker 13: those things in a way that is honest and that

934
00:59:58,880 --> 01:00:03,560
Speaker 13: validates everybody involved is a life skill. Instead of learning

935
01:00:03,600 --> 01:00:06,120
Speaker 13: that skill, I learned to care for my parents by

936
01:00:06,200 --> 01:00:09,760
Speaker 13: pretending to be perfect and repress my true self, which

937
01:00:09,880 --> 01:00:12,520
Speaker 13: probably leaned towards wanting to be more of a wild child.

938
01:00:12,760 --> 01:00:15,520
Speaker 13: My parents would ardently say this was never their intention,

939
01:00:15,640 --> 01:00:17,400
Speaker 13: but at times in my life it has felt like

940
01:00:17,440 --> 01:00:20,800
Speaker 13: that has been the only pathway to validation from them

941
01:00:20,920 --> 01:00:23,800
Speaker 13: or my family. Both Geene Roddenberry with Star Trek and

942
01:00:23,880 --> 01:00:28,280
Speaker 13: Disney Renaissance movies had a sappy vision of life being

943
01:00:28,280 --> 01:00:31,160
Speaker 13: a post racial utopia, very imperfectly if you think of

944
01:00:31,160 --> 01:00:34,360
Speaker 13: some original Star Trek episodes or movies like Pocahontas and Mulan.

945
01:00:34,720 --> 01:00:37,400
Speaker 13: We didn't talk about race in my family. My dad's white,

946
01:00:37,480 --> 01:00:41,840
Speaker 13: my mom's black. I do not present as white passing

947
01:00:41,840 --> 01:00:44,439
Speaker 13: at all. I'd present as black. I was not ever

948
01:00:44,480 --> 01:00:47,600
Speaker 13: allowed to identify as being black, And I think my

949
01:00:47,640 --> 01:00:50,320
Speaker 13: parents meant well. Their love blossomed towards the end of

950
01:00:50,360 --> 01:00:53,640
Speaker 13: the civil rights movements, and they truly believed that a

951
01:00:53,840 --> 01:00:59,240
Speaker 13: post racial utopia was America's future, and whether or not

952
01:00:59,280 --> 01:01:01,520
Speaker 13: that was happening in America, I think they tried to

953
01:01:01,560 --> 01:01:05,720
Speaker 13: create that in their vision of the family. My parents

954
01:01:05,720 --> 01:01:08,040
Speaker 13: would say that there is a true love story that

955
01:01:08,160 --> 01:01:11,360
Speaker 13: race never occurred to either of them, and it's kind

956
01:01:11,360 --> 01:01:14,600
Speaker 13: of this dumb idea that the world retcouned onto the

957
01:01:14,600 --> 01:01:17,240
Speaker 13: trajectory of their lives. So if at any point of

958
01:01:17,280 --> 01:01:20,840
Speaker 13: my childhood I've en deigned to suggest that the black

959
01:01:20,920 --> 01:01:25,080
Speaker 13: identity was a key and salient experience in my own life,

960
01:01:25,120 --> 01:01:27,680
Speaker 13: my mom would immediately redirect me and say, you come

961
01:01:27,720 --> 01:01:31,360
Speaker 13: from two heritages. Black was like the F word in

962
01:01:31,360 --> 01:01:34,440
Speaker 13: my household, if used in the first person by us

963
01:01:34,480 --> 01:01:36,840
Speaker 13: as children. My mom might rarely use it if she

964
01:01:36,920 --> 01:01:39,040
Speaker 13: was talking to one of her best friends on the phone,

965
01:01:39,120 --> 01:01:42,160
Speaker 13: but she really didn't use it either. That created plenty

966
01:01:42,200 --> 01:01:44,320
Speaker 13: of interesting tensions for me as a teenager in the

967
01:01:44,400 --> 01:01:47,360
Speaker 13: nineteen nineties, which, if anyone recalls, was not a post

968
01:01:47,440 --> 01:01:49,680
Speaker 13: racial utopia. And in some ways, I feel like my

969
01:01:49,720 --> 01:01:51,960
Speaker 13: mom did not ever want my father to feel left

970
01:01:52,160 --> 01:01:56,240
Speaker 13: out of my life experience or for me to feel

971
01:01:56,280 --> 01:01:59,800
Speaker 13: like I was somehow less the son of my father,

972
01:02:00,200 --> 01:02:02,919
Speaker 13: which America did not give my mom an easy job,

973
01:02:02,960 --> 01:02:05,560
Speaker 13: because that's exactly what it tells me, that I am

974
01:02:05,680 --> 01:02:07,720
Speaker 13: less the son of my white father. I mean, our

975
01:02:07,760 --> 01:02:10,720
Speaker 13: first black president was biracial. He didn't get to use

976
01:02:10,760 --> 01:02:12,880
Speaker 13: his mom's racial identity. There's a lot more to be

977
01:02:12,920 --> 01:02:15,000
Speaker 13: said about my teenage years especially, but I'm going to

978
01:02:15,040 --> 01:02:17,920
Speaker 13: zoom ahead on the timeline to being age twenty one

979
01:02:17,920 --> 01:02:20,120
Speaker 13: because there was an awkward moment when I was an

980
01:02:20,240 --> 01:02:23,160
Speaker 13: undergrad that's a very teachable moment, and we had moved

981
01:02:23,200 --> 01:02:26,400
Speaker 13: to Washington State. By this point, I had started learning more,

982
01:02:26,440 --> 01:02:30,640
Speaker 13: as often happens in college, about marginalization theory and critical

983
01:02:30,680 --> 01:02:34,760
Speaker 13: race theory and black radicalism and Belle Hooks. And I

984
01:02:34,840 --> 01:02:37,880
Speaker 13: was having lunch with my parents at hometown beffet All places,

985
01:02:37,920 --> 01:02:41,600
Speaker 13: remember those restaurants, And I started excitedly parroting the language

986
01:02:41,720 --> 01:02:44,919
Speaker 13: used by Bell Hooks and talking to my parents saying, yeah,

987
01:02:44,920 --> 01:02:48,320
Speaker 13: the world is run by white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. And

988
01:02:48,640 --> 01:02:52,800
Speaker 13: my father started to cry, and as a little tear

989
01:02:52,880 --> 01:02:56,560
Speaker 13: started to run down his eye, it's almost like a

990
01:02:56,600 --> 01:03:00,840
Speaker 13: part of him was saying, not me. I feel like

991
01:03:01,000 --> 01:03:06,600
Speaker 13: that moment is this micro encapsulation of American society and

992
01:03:06,640 --> 01:03:11,880
Speaker 13: the way that some terminology like capitalist patriarchy, like white

993
01:03:11,920 --> 01:03:14,680
Speaker 13: supremacy as part of critical race theory, is part of

994
01:03:14,760 --> 01:03:19,160
Speaker 13: sociological marginalization theory can lend because my father was not

995
01:03:19,280 --> 01:03:22,280
Speaker 13: alone in that type of reaction. I think a lot

996
01:03:22,320 --> 01:03:27,040
Speaker 13: of people react by feeling agast, feeling sad, feeling personally attacked,

997
01:03:27,240 --> 01:03:29,680
Speaker 13: and not just white people. Because my mom was present,

998
01:03:29,720 --> 01:03:31,720
Speaker 13: she was not crying, but she also did not like

999
01:03:31,760 --> 01:03:33,840
Speaker 13: to hear that language. I want you to pause the

1000
01:03:33,840 --> 01:03:36,320
Speaker 13: story of my life in this moment with my father,

1001
01:03:36,360 --> 01:03:38,840
Speaker 13: because I'm going to use this moment to unpack a

1002
01:03:38,920 --> 01:03:40,520
Speaker 13: whole lot of things in a whole lot of different

1003
01:03:40,560 --> 01:03:43,920
Speaker 13: timelines in seeking to answer this question, why did my

1004
01:03:44,000 --> 01:03:47,880
Speaker 13: white father cry when twenty one year old me enthusiastically

1005
01:03:48,440 --> 01:03:53,280
Speaker 13: celebrated learning about white supremacist capitalist patriarchy from Bell Hooks.

1006
01:03:53,960 --> 01:04:08,280
Speaker 2: We'll be back with more taison day maybe.

1007
01:04:10,520 --> 01:04:12,960
Speaker 13: I finished my undergrad in communications in two thousand and

1008
01:04:13,000 --> 01:04:16,240
Speaker 13: four at the Evergreen State College, where as a footnote,

1009
01:04:16,280 --> 01:04:18,720
Speaker 13: I was the twenty twenty one commencement speaker. In late

1010
01:04:18,760 --> 01:04:20,920
Speaker 13: summer two thousand and four, I moved to Minneapolis and

1011
01:04:21,000 --> 01:04:24,040
Speaker 13: began the PhD program at American Studies at the University

1012
01:04:24,040 --> 01:04:26,800
Speaker 13: of Minnesota. I still see in Minnesota. Like Minnesotan, I

1013
01:04:26,800 --> 01:04:29,280
Speaker 13: have extended family Minneapolis, so I visited as a child,

1014
01:04:29,280 --> 01:04:31,560
Speaker 13: so I was always a part time Minnesotan, even growing

1015
01:04:31,640 --> 01:04:34,640
Speaker 13: up in Chicago, I did not thrive as a graduate student.

1016
01:04:35,120 --> 01:04:38,120
Speaker 13: To enjoy being a graduate student, I put enjoy there

1017
01:04:38,120 --> 01:04:41,400
Speaker 13: in quotes. You have to either really love research or

1018
01:04:41,720 --> 01:04:45,880
Speaker 13: love teaching, love pedagogy, and I had so much personal

1019
01:04:45,920 --> 01:04:47,800
Speaker 13: stuff going on I couldn't focus on either of them.

1020
01:04:48,040 --> 01:04:50,080
Speaker 13: There are aspects of my childhood and the way I

1021
01:04:50,120 --> 01:04:52,120
Speaker 13: was raised as well as being autistic. I was first

1022
01:04:52,160 --> 01:04:56,120
Speaker 13: diagnosed at age fifteen, where I ended up being very

1023
01:04:56,200 --> 01:04:59,200
Speaker 13: emotionally regressed. I love my parents dearly, but it's probably

1024
01:04:59,240 --> 01:05:02,640
Speaker 13: not inaccurate to describe my life as ages zero to

1025
01:05:02,680 --> 01:05:05,520
Speaker 13: eighteen or may becoming a legal adult and then ages

1026
01:05:05,560 --> 01:05:07,960
Speaker 13: eighteen to thirty six is me kind of figuring out

1027
01:05:08,000 --> 01:05:11,800
Speaker 13: how regressed my childhood actually left me. And the next

1028
01:05:11,800 --> 01:05:14,760
Speaker 13: eighteen years we're figuring out how to retread the first

1029
01:05:14,760 --> 01:05:19,920
Speaker 13: eighteen and mature to being a viable human being in society.

1030
01:05:20,120 --> 01:05:22,720
Speaker 13: So age thirty six was my age eighteen, So with

1031
01:05:22,760 --> 01:05:26,160
Speaker 13: any luck, age one hundred will be my age fifty Anyway.

1032
01:05:26,160 --> 01:05:28,360
Speaker 13: By the summer of two thousand and seven, when Chocolate

1033
01:05:28,440 --> 01:05:32,480
Speaker 13: Rangin went viral, I was a distracted and middling PhD

1034
01:05:32,600 --> 01:05:37,080
Speaker 13: student dealing with a lot of unseen internal baggage. I

1035
01:05:37,120 --> 01:05:39,880
Speaker 13: apologized to any undergrads who had me as a teaching

1036
01:05:39,880 --> 01:05:42,000
Speaker 13: assistant during this period of time because I think I

1037
01:05:42,040 --> 01:05:45,080
Speaker 13: was a hot mess, although to be fair, institutional pedagogy

1038
01:05:45,160 --> 01:05:46,720
Speaker 13: is also a hot mess, so it was sort of

1039
01:05:46,760 --> 01:05:49,640
Speaker 13: a tango. Instead of being passionate about teaching and research,

1040
01:05:49,720 --> 01:05:53,640
Speaker 13: I had been passionate about independent music pursuits for the

1041
01:05:53,680 --> 01:05:57,080
Speaker 13: prior three years, and I intermittently performed at open mics

1042
01:05:57,120 --> 01:06:01,440
Speaker 13: throughout the Greater Minneapolis metropolitan area. Honestly, I was never

1043
01:06:01,480 --> 01:06:04,960
Speaker 13: a great performer or singer live. I've learned that I'm very,

1044
01:06:05,080 --> 01:06:11,840
Speaker 13: very sensory overwhelmed, both in hapophobia, sensitivity to touch, hypercusis, missiphonia,

1045
01:06:11,920 --> 01:06:15,320
Speaker 13: sensitivity to sound, photophobia, sensitivity delight, and all of that

1046
01:06:15,440 --> 01:06:18,320
Speaker 13: kind of overwhelms me in live environments or honestly just

1047
01:06:18,480 --> 01:06:22,840
Speaker 13: every day society environments. But I didn't know that quite

1048
01:06:22,880 --> 01:06:25,480
Speaker 13: as clearly at the time. YouTube came along, and it

1049
01:06:25,560 --> 01:06:27,480
Speaker 13: was easier for me to sing in my living room

1050
01:06:27,520 --> 01:06:29,040
Speaker 13: than it was for me to drag an amp and

1051
01:06:29,120 --> 01:06:32,360
Speaker 13: keyboard and other stuff along to an open mic. So

1052
01:06:32,800 --> 01:06:36,640
Speaker 13: I started uploading content to YouTube. I invented Taison Day,

1053
01:06:36,760 --> 01:06:38,640
Speaker 13: which is not my birth name. My birth name is

1054
01:06:38,640 --> 01:06:42,360
Speaker 13: Adam Potter. But Taison Day was this alter ego for

1055
01:06:42,720 --> 01:06:45,440
Speaker 13: my music pursuits, and I assumed it would never have

1056
01:06:45,640 --> 01:06:50,200
Speaker 13: any intersection with my serious career, which at the time

1057
01:06:50,320 --> 01:06:53,920
Speaker 13: was on the trajectory of finishing my PhD and eventually

1058
01:06:53,920 --> 01:06:57,640
Speaker 13: presumably becoming a professor or researcher of some sort. My

1059
01:06:57,720 --> 01:07:00,920
Speaker 13: first YouTube videos, I was singing and playing stage piano,

1060
01:07:01,000 --> 01:07:04,000
Speaker 13: the same thing I did at open Mics, and eventually

1061
01:07:04,160 --> 01:07:08,680
Speaker 13: I wrote a song over a backing track that had

1062
01:07:08,680 --> 01:07:11,680
Speaker 13: been created by an Australian who goes by the moniker

1063
01:07:11,840 --> 01:07:15,320
Speaker 13: of Kooby. Michelle Flannery, who was YouTube's music editor at

1064
01:07:15,360 --> 01:07:17,560
Speaker 13: the time, reached out to me to ask if I

1065
01:07:17,600 --> 01:07:20,160
Speaker 13: would like to have that video featured. The song was

1066
01:07:20,320 --> 01:07:24,200
Speaker 13: titled Love on YouTube's front page, and that was the

1067
01:07:24,240 --> 01:07:27,280
Speaker 13: email that every YouTuber dreamed of receiving in early two

1068
01:07:27,320 --> 01:07:29,320
Speaker 13: thousand and seven, and flt like winning the lottery to

1069
01:07:29,320 --> 01:07:31,720
Speaker 13: be featured on the front page. I knew the week

1070
01:07:31,760 --> 01:07:34,600
Speaker 13: that the love video was going to be featured, and

1071
01:07:35,160 --> 01:07:38,200
Speaker 13: I also knew that I could sort of double dip

1072
01:07:38,440 --> 01:07:42,120
Speaker 13: on the exposure that that feature created for me by

1073
01:07:42,160 --> 01:07:47,400
Speaker 13: having another video in the automatic or default player of

1074
01:07:47,440 --> 01:07:51,520
Speaker 13: my YouTube channel, so that people who watched the featured

1075
01:07:51,600 --> 01:07:53,440
Speaker 13: video on the front page would click and see this

1076
01:07:53,840 --> 01:07:56,520
Speaker 13: other video on my channel. So I had already written

1077
01:07:56,520 --> 01:07:58,680
Speaker 13: the lyrics to Chocolate Rain over the prior six weeks,

1078
01:07:58,680 --> 01:08:01,479
Speaker 13: and I had the arrange idea in my head for

1079
01:08:01,560 --> 01:08:03,560
Speaker 13: a number of years. A lot of my songs are

1080
01:08:03,600 --> 01:08:06,560
Speaker 13: like that. They come together in various conceptual pieces in

1081
01:08:06,560 --> 01:08:09,840
Speaker 13: my brain, and eventually I decide to assemble all those pieces.

1082
01:08:10,080 --> 01:08:14,600
Speaker 13: So I rushed Chocolate Rain to completion the weekend before

1083
01:08:14,600 --> 01:08:17,599
Speaker 13: I knew this other video would be featured on YouTube's

1084
01:08:17,600 --> 01:08:20,439
Speaker 13: front page, and so I released it. It did not

1085
01:08:20,600 --> 01:08:23,800
Speaker 13: immediately go viral. It was uploaded in April, i'd say.

1086
01:08:23,840 --> 01:08:25,679
Speaker 13: By June of two thousand and seven, it had about

1087
01:08:25,680 --> 01:08:30,599
Speaker 13: thirty thousand views. Then somebody posted it ondig dot com,

1088
01:08:30,680 --> 01:08:33,400
Speaker 13: which is kind of an earlier version of Reddit with

1089
01:08:33,479 --> 01:08:36,719
Speaker 13: a slower cycle time. Someone saw it on that social

1090
01:08:36,760 --> 01:08:39,360
Speaker 13: book marking site dig and decided to post it on

1091
01:08:39,479 --> 01:08:42,240
Speaker 13: four chan. Four Chan was an Internet forum primarily known

1092
01:08:42,240 --> 01:08:45,639
Speaker 13: as an imageboard and also known for being to say,

1093
01:08:45,800 --> 01:08:48,760
Speaker 13: very inclusive. To put it mildly with regard to the

1094
01:08:49,520 --> 01:08:54,800
Speaker 13: content that surfaced on their b sub form other than

1095
01:08:54,800 --> 01:08:57,040
Speaker 13: my own experience, which is that when Chocolate Rain was

1096
01:08:57,080 --> 01:08:59,880
Speaker 13: posted on four Chan in two thousand and seven, I

1097
01:09:00,320 --> 01:09:04,320
Speaker 13: entered a succession of nerds that four Chan both embraced

1098
01:09:04,360 --> 01:09:07,080
Speaker 13: and helped the spread on social media, prior nerds including

1099
01:09:07,200 --> 01:09:09,920
Speaker 13: Gary Postman Tom Green, who are both more than able

1100
01:09:09,960 --> 01:09:11,960
Speaker 13: to tell their own stories. So yeah, that's the story

1101
01:09:11,960 --> 01:09:15,519
Speaker 13: of my recollection. My first aha moment that Chocolate Rain

1102
01:09:15,640 --> 01:09:19,280
Speaker 13: might be going more viral was in early July two

1103
01:09:19,280 --> 01:09:23,360
Speaker 13: thousand and seven, when four Chan successfully prank called Tom

1104
01:09:23,439 --> 01:09:26,280
Speaker 13: Green's late night show that he was at the time

1105
01:09:26,320 --> 01:09:29,439
Speaker 13: doing in his living room, and a caller broke out

1106
01:09:29,760 --> 01:09:33,800
Speaker 13: and randomly busted out singing Choklue Rain, and you know,

1107
01:09:33,880 --> 01:09:36,680
Speaker 13: Tom Green, being a good improv comedian, he took it

1108
01:09:36,720 --> 01:09:40,200
Speaker 13: as a prank call and yes and yeah Rain and

1109
01:09:40,240 --> 01:09:43,080
Speaker 13: slammed the phone and hung up, and I was kind

1110
01:09:43,080 --> 01:09:45,519
Speaker 13: of like, oh, wait, I've heard of Tom Green before.

1111
01:09:45,840 --> 01:09:47,919
Speaker 13: After the dig dot com and then four Chan exposure,

1112
01:09:48,040 --> 01:09:52,240
Speaker 13: Chocolate Rain began to take off as a wider cultural phenomenon.

1113
01:09:52,520 --> 01:09:54,479
Speaker 13: A day or two later, Carson Daley, who was doing

1114
01:09:54,520 --> 01:09:56,800
Speaker 13: a late night show, and I believe in BC at

1115
01:09:56,800 --> 01:09:59,880
Speaker 13: the time featured it on his show and in Midgely.

1116
01:10:00,360 --> 01:10:03,799
Speaker 13: It took off as a national news story where media

1117
01:10:03,840 --> 01:10:08,200
Speaker 13: outfits began feverishly attempting to contact me. I did my

1118
01:10:08,320 --> 01:10:11,880
Speaker 13: first radio interview ever on OPI and Anthony, which was

1119
01:10:12,000 --> 01:10:15,080
Speaker 13: not a small platform, and my first television interview ever

1120
01:10:15,240 --> 01:10:18,840
Speaker 13: on CNN Saturday Morning, which was not an obscure show.

1121
01:10:19,040 --> 01:10:22,799
Speaker 13: I was a terrible, awkward and experienced interviewer. I spoke

1122
01:10:23,040 --> 01:10:26,320
Speaker 13: like a nerd who had had very little human contact

1123
01:10:26,320 --> 01:10:29,400
Speaker 13: and who was socially regressed being plucked out of my

1124
01:10:29,439 --> 01:10:31,919
Speaker 13: living room and stuck in front of a national spotlight

1125
01:10:32,200 --> 01:10:35,280
Speaker 13: because that's who I was. There was a magical Santa

1126
01:10:35,280 --> 01:10:39,280
Speaker 13: Claus aspect about the way Chocolate Rain was going viral,

1127
01:10:39,600 --> 01:10:42,559
Speaker 13: because it was not going viral as a deep ballot

1128
01:10:42,560 --> 01:10:43,759
Speaker 13: about institutional racism.

1129
01:10:43,760 --> 01:10:44,600
Speaker 3: It was going.

1130
01:10:44,680 --> 01:10:48,479
Speaker 13: Viral as a oh wow, there's the funny guy who

1131
01:10:49,000 --> 01:10:51,160
Speaker 13: moves like mister Bean, with a voice like Barry White

1132
01:10:51,200 --> 01:10:54,120
Speaker 13: and has absolutely no awareness of it. So from mid

1133
01:10:54,160 --> 01:10:55,920
Speaker 13: July to the end of July two thousand and seven,

1134
01:10:56,000 --> 01:10:59,120
Speaker 13: I probably did thirty or forty different media interviews, and

1135
01:10:59,800 --> 01:11:02,680
Speaker 13: in none of them, was I actually ready to be

1136
01:11:02,960 --> 01:11:05,680
Speaker 13: a person, because I said earlier that there was a

1137
01:11:05,800 --> 01:11:08,479
Speaker 13: little bit of strategy in my not just blurting out

1138
01:11:09,439 --> 01:11:13,680
Speaker 13: polemically my intended meeting for chocolate rain and you're kind

1139
01:11:13,680 --> 01:11:15,760
Speaker 13: of sitting back like, oh yeah, it's kind of a joke,

1140
01:11:15,800 --> 01:11:18,240
Speaker 13: and let it be a joke. The deeper reason is

1141
01:11:18,280 --> 01:11:20,559
Speaker 13: that why a autism spectrum disorder is probably my most

1142
01:11:20,600 --> 01:11:25,719
Speaker 13: public and formal diagnosis. I probably also experienced dissociative identity disorder,

1143
01:11:25,760 --> 01:11:29,679
Speaker 13: also formerly known as multiple personality disorder, which is basically

1144
01:11:29,720 --> 01:11:32,960
Speaker 13: a trauma response that happens when you are, for whatever reason,

1145
01:11:33,280 --> 01:11:37,560
Speaker 13: not able to naturally develop and cohere a healthy individual

1146
01:11:37,640 --> 01:11:40,720
Speaker 13: identity in your childhood. That's not all it is, but

1147
01:11:40,760 --> 01:11:42,680
Speaker 13: that's what it is for me, And what happens in

1148
01:11:42,760 --> 01:11:46,800
Speaker 13: many experiences of dissociative identity disorder, including my own, is

1149
01:11:46,840 --> 01:11:49,960
Speaker 13: you end up being kind of a receiver of identity

1150
01:11:50,400 --> 01:11:55,320
Speaker 13: and you never built any infrastructure to push back on that.

1151
01:11:55,880 --> 01:11:58,519
Speaker 13: And so, with me receiving no autism diagnosis until I

1152
01:11:58,640 --> 01:12:03,120
Speaker 13: was a teenager, my parents, through emotional intuition, sort of

1153
01:12:03,160 --> 01:12:08,240
Speaker 13: improvised their own applied behavior analysis methodology for me to

1154
01:12:09,040 --> 01:12:11,120
Speaker 13: live I've never been a parent, and it's kind of

1155
01:12:11,160 --> 01:12:14,160
Speaker 13: like fighting in war. You shouldn't speak too authoritatively on

1156
01:12:14,280 --> 01:12:16,640
Speaker 13: it without actually doing it. But I think there's a

1157
01:12:16,680 --> 01:12:18,880
Speaker 13: day to day drudgery of it, of how do I

1158
01:12:18,960 --> 01:12:21,959
Speaker 13: get this sentient bag of liquids out the door someday

1159
01:12:22,040 --> 01:12:24,519
Speaker 13: and able to thrive. So, like I said before, my

1160
01:12:24,560 --> 01:12:27,240
Speaker 13: parents are passionate, loving, imperfect people. Part of their parenting

1161
01:12:27,360 --> 01:12:29,600
Speaker 13: was informed by their own traumas. But I was not

1162
01:12:29,680 --> 01:12:32,719
Speaker 13: an easy project to raise, and it's kind of amazing

1163
01:12:32,720 --> 01:12:35,960
Speaker 13: I developed into any type of functioning adult, regressed or not.

1164
01:12:36,439 --> 01:12:38,120
Speaker 13: So I can't take everything that I know in twenty

1165
01:12:38,160 --> 01:12:40,200
Speaker 13: twenty five and ask, well, hey, why wasn't that done

1166
01:12:40,200 --> 01:12:41,760
Speaker 13: in nineteen eighty five when I was two and three

1167
01:12:41,800 --> 01:12:44,559
Speaker 13: years old. All of this is important backstory for why

1168
01:12:44,640 --> 01:12:48,679
Speaker 13: I dodged and hemmed and hawed and did not talk

1169
01:12:48,760 --> 01:12:51,439
Speaker 13: about the intended meaning of chocolate rain for ten years.

1170
01:12:51,680 --> 01:12:53,960
Speaker 13: When I say I did not know how to be

1171
01:12:54,040 --> 01:12:58,559
Speaker 13: a person, while I believe I was trending worldwide on Google,

1172
01:12:58,760 --> 01:13:01,720
Speaker 13: his chocolate Rain was going by. That's not hyperbole, that's

1173
01:13:01,760 --> 01:13:05,160
Speaker 13: not metaphor. It's psychiatrically true. Now, imagine me not knowing

1174
01:13:05,200 --> 01:13:08,240
Speaker 13: this about myself at the time, when I'm appearing on

1175
01:13:08,320 --> 01:13:10,519
Speaker 13: Jimmy Kimmel, three out of the four major music labels

1176
01:13:10,560 --> 01:13:13,760
Speaker 13: at the time wanted to do deals with me. A

1177
01:13:13,920 --> 01:13:17,080
Speaker 13: random wealthy people were contacting me to like, please come

1178
01:13:17,160 --> 01:13:19,600
Speaker 13: sing of my kids bar Mitzvah. Publishers wanted to do

1179
01:13:19,680 --> 01:13:22,040
Speaker 13: book deals with me. I quickly began to feel like

1180
01:13:22,120 --> 01:13:25,040
Speaker 13: I was floating in space and just a spectator to

1181
01:13:25,840 --> 01:13:31,320
Speaker 13: this cult of personality called Taizon Day. Depersonalization derealization disorder

1182
01:13:31,400 --> 01:13:34,640
Speaker 13: DPDR is another psychiatric diagnosis that can be a co

1183
01:13:34,880 --> 01:13:37,920
Speaker 13: morbidity of autism. I feel like I should stop listing

1184
01:13:37,920 --> 01:13:41,040
Speaker 13: psychiatric diagnoses because I've often joked that the DSM five

1185
01:13:41,200 --> 01:13:44,960
Speaker 13: the prevailing authority on psychiatric conditions. It's just my memoir.

1186
01:13:45,200 --> 01:13:47,320
Speaker 13: But even as the momentum of Chocolate Rain and its

1187
01:13:47,320 --> 01:13:50,280
Speaker 13: attention continued that October, I opened for Girl Talk at

1188
01:13:50,280 --> 01:13:53,160
Speaker 13: First Avenue, which is made famous by prints in his

1189
01:13:53,240 --> 01:13:56,040
Speaker 13: Purple Rain song. I did a big remix with Doctor Pepper.

1190
01:13:56,160 --> 01:13:58,519
Speaker 13: The following spring, I was parodied on South Park. I

1191
01:13:58,560 --> 01:14:01,400
Speaker 13: did Weezer's Pork and Dads video that brought many viral

1192
01:14:01,439 --> 01:14:04,000
Speaker 13: stars together. The following summer two thousand and eight, I

1193
01:14:04,000 --> 01:14:06,920
Speaker 13: want a Webby award, all while neglecting my graduate studies

1194
01:14:06,960 --> 01:14:10,320
Speaker 13: and being politely asked to leave the PhD program after

1195
01:14:10,360 --> 01:14:13,360
Speaker 13: four years with a master's degree, and offered that I accepted.

1196
01:14:13,680 --> 01:14:16,679
Speaker 13: Notice how I describe this period of my life through

1197
01:14:16,760 --> 01:14:21,320
Speaker 13: headline grabbing events that I participated in, but that were

1198
01:14:21,600 --> 01:14:26,080
Speaker 13: largely initiated by other people, not myself, Because while I

1199
01:14:26,120 --> 01:14:27,920
Speaker 13: was twenty five and twenty six years old on the

1200
01:14:27,960 --> 01:14:30,439
Speaker 13: outside in two thousand and seven to two thousand and eight,

1201
01:14:30,840 --> 01:14:33,479
Speaker 13: on the inside, I was still six or seven years

1202
01:14:33,479 --> 01:14:36,360
Speaker 13: old and learning how to process being in contact with

1203
01:14:36,439 --> 01:14:41,240
Speaker 13: an over stimulating world that my parents had largely said, well,

1204
01:14:41,280 --> 01:14:42,960
Speaker 13: just don't be in contact with it, We're not allowed

1205
01:14:43,000 --> 01:14:44,559
Speaker 13: to be in contact with it. Well, you know, that

1206
01:14:45,000 --> 01:14:49,320
Speaker 13: life strategy kind of sort of worked until I accidentally

1207
01:14:49,320 --> 01:14:52,400
Speaker 13: went viral, And of course nobody knew what going viral was.

1208
01:14:52,520 --> 01:14:54,200
Speaker 13: It was kind of the first time, or one of

1209
01:14:54,200 --> 01:14:57,000
Speaker 13: the first times, like being launched with Spotnik, and we

1210
01:14:57,040 --> 01:14:59,919
Speaker 13: think it's going to automit the out within Becorde Saturday

1211
01:15:00,280 --> 01:15:03,760
Speaker 13: full Dubois another one with these greg that video if

1212
01:15:03,840 --> 01:15:06,000
Speaker 13: Russian dressing her that terrible action, I would pretend to

1213
01:15:06,040 --> 01:15:09,280
Speaker 13: be Aquafina. So while I was great at conceptualizing tas

1214
01:15:09,320 --> 01:15:13,760
Speaker 13: On Day as a recognizable and iconic brand, Adam Ponter,

1215
01:15:13,840 --> 01:15:16,559
Speaker 13: who I actually am outside of Tayson Day, lacked the

1216
01:15:16,640 --> 01:15:20,920
Speaker 13: developmental and life skills to hew that brand coherently out

1217
01:15:20,960 --> 01:15:24,640
Speaker 13: of a chaotic world. It's hard to describe the magnitude

1218
01:15:24,680 --> 01:15:28,960
Speaker 13: of just the sensory experience that overwhelmed me just walking

1219
01:15:28,960 --> 01:15:33,360
Speaker 13: around in public or being anywhere as chocolate rain blew

1220
01:15:33,439 --> 01:15:36,840
Speaker 13: up and you know, continued to become sort of a phenomenon,

1221
01:15:37,120 --> 01:15:38,800
Speaker 13: because you know, I'd be in the drive through at

1222
01:15:38,800 --> 01:15:41,360
Speaker 13: White Castle and the person practically falls out the window

1223
01:15:41,400 --> 01:15:43,559
Speaker 13: unto my lap, trying to take my picture as they're

1224
01:15:43,560 --> 01:15:46,800
Speaker 13: handing me my sliders. And it's not just my face

1225
01:15:46,840 --> 01:15:50,880
Speaker 13: that's recognizable, just my body and movement style and mannerisms

1226
01:15:51,240 --> 01:15:55,519
Speaker 13: stick out like big Bird. A DHL driver almost crashed

1227
01:15:55,560 --> 01:15:58,960
Speaker 13: his courier van rolling down his window Yella Chocolate Ride,

1228
01:15:59,200 --> 01:16:01,600
Speaker 13: and I was on my bike. I had my helmet on,

1229
01:16:01,800 --> 01:16:04,559
Speaker 13: I had sunglasses on. I did not have an inch

1230
01:16:04,600 --> 01:16:07,240
Speaker 13: of skin exposed if I robbed at seven to eleven,

1231
01:16:07,320 --> 01:16:11,040
Speaker 13: completely covering up the entire world that's days on day,

1232
01:16:11,080 --> 01:16:13,280
Speaker 13: even if they hadn't thought about me for fifteen years.

1233
01:16:13,560 --> 01:16:15,840
Speaker 13: Just put microphones in all the intersections. He'll be trapped

1234
01:16:15,840 --> 01:16:18,080
Speaker 13: because he moves away. I don't know if my jokes

1235
01:16:18,080 --> 01:16:19,760
Speaker 13: are funnier or this moment where I feel like I

1236
01:16:19,800 --> 01:16:22,599
Speaker 13: have to break the fourth wall and acknowledge each one

1237
01:16:22,840 --> 01:16:24,280
Speaker 13: like a three year old to just sas to show

1238
01:16:24,320 --> 01:16:26,920
Speaker 13: everybody the picture I drew. So I just described some

1239
01:16:27,040 --> 01:16:31,679
Speaker 13: of the magnitude of public attention that entered my life

1240
01:16:31,840 --> 01:16:35,360
Speaker 13: kind of permanently after chocolate rain blew up. Now keep

1241
01:16:35,400 --> 01:16:38,800
Speaker 13: that in mind. Now combine that with the fact that

1242
01:16:39,400 --> 01:16:44,439
Speaker 13: being unremarkable and blending in had been my life and

1243
01:16:44,640 --> 01:16:48,240
Speaker 13: heart and soul's passionate desire from the time I was

1244
01:16:48,400 --> 01:16:51,280
Speaker 13: very young, because it's exactly what I was forbidden to be.

1245
01:16:51,720 --> 01:16:53,320
Speaker 13: I could just be a kid. I had to be

1246
01:16:53,360 --> 01:16:56,040
Speaker 13: the teacher's son, the principal son. That I couldn't be

1247
01:16:56,080 --> 01:16:58,720
Speaker 13: my age. I was always surrounded by older families, so

1248
01:16:58,760 --> 01:17:01,439
Speaker 13: I had to be older. LUs My father might have

1249
01:17:01,520 --> 01:17:06,040
Speaker 13: some of my special needs diagnoses, but undiagnosed. Being a

1250
01:17:06,040 --> 01:17:09,320
Speaker 13: boomer who just mental health care wasn't acceptable when he

1251
01:17:09,360 --> 01:17:11,160
Speaker 13: came of age and he just never believed in it.

1252
01:17:11,439 --> 01:17:13,799
Speaker 13: I know in my own life experience that I've developed

1253
01:17:13,880 --> 01:17:19,800
Speaker 13: many maladaptive beliefs and behaviors to cope with being auxistic

1254
01:17:19,840 --> 01:17:23,600
Speaker 13: in a neurotypical world. My crude definition of a maladaptation

1255
01:17:23,880 --> 01:17:28,400
Speaker 13: is an adaptation that helps you survive a specific environmental hostility,

1256
01:17:28,720 --> 01:17:34,479
Speaker 13: but can itself be injurious or counterproductive. One maladaptive attitude

1257
01:17:34,520 --> 01:17:36,439
Speaker 13: of mine was that, hey, if I'm never allowed to

1258
01:17:36,439 --> 01:17:39,360
Speaker 13: be normal and never allowed to do normal things, well,

1259
01:17:39,520 --> 01:17:43,320
Speaker 13: my only permitted pathway to confidence and self esteem was

1260
01:17:43,360 --> 01:17:48,880
Speaker 13: to lean into being weird and bizarre. And that maladaptive

1261
01:17:48,880 --> 01:17:51,479
Speaker 13: behavior was very much modeled by my father, because my

1262
01:17:51,560 --> 01:17:55,840
Speaker 13: father can often be shy and or sensitive, but he

1263
01:17:56,000 --> 01:17:58,800
Speaker 13: is manic and confident when he has an opportunity to

1264
01:17:59,520 --> 01:18:04,640
Speaker 13: dramatic demonstrate both being weird and correct. Some of you

1265
01:18:04,760 --> 01:18:07,240
Speaker 13: going wow, tay, you don't say, But my point is

1266
01:18:07,240 --> 01:18:12,519
Speaker 13: that while during my childhood, proud weirdness was my only

1267
01:18:12,640 --> 01:18:17,120
Speaker 13: existential option and a behavior that was modeled for me

1268
01:18:17,960 --> 01:18:21,240
Speaker 13: that conflicted with my true desire, that all I wanted

1269
01:18:21,360 --> 01:18:25,120
Speaker 13: was to dump this affect and have some actual friends

1270
01:18:25,280 --> 01:18:29,960
Speaker 13: and consume some actual popular culture dabble in actual vice

1271
01:18:30,040 --> 01:18:34,720
Speaker 13: and have it all be unremarkable. So I obsessed over

1272
01:18:34,800 --> 01:18:38,280
Speaker 13: my heart just went pitter pat. My entire childhood, from

1273
01:18:38,280 --> 01:18:41,280
Speaker 13: the youngest ages I can remember, like three, all the

1274
01:18:41,320 --> 01:18:44,519
Speaker 13: way to like being nonverbal, and it taken five years

1275
01:18:44,520 --> 01:18:48,000
Speaker 13: to graduate high school at age nineteen. Like my entire

1276
01:18:48,360 --> 01:18:53,400
Speaker 13: childhood and even early adulthood, I just obsessed over this

1277
01:18:53,640 --> 01:18:57,600
Speaker 13: desire to be more normal. Now in practice, when I

1278
01:18:57,600 --> 01:18:59,120
Speaker 13: got a little bit older, got to know some more

1279
01:18:59,120 --> 01:19:02,639
Speaker 13: people and more intimate details and more people's lives, I

1280
01:19:02,720 --> 01:19:04,439
Speaker 13: kind of found out that a lot of people got

1281
01:19:04,479 --> 01:19:06,440
Speaker 13: some messed up stuff in their closets.

1282
01:19:06,680 --> 01:19:08,360
Speaker 3: I don't know if anybody's that normal.

1283
01:19:08,680 --> 01:19:10,880
Speaker 13: You ever had that experience where you believe that your

1284
01:19:10,920 --> 01:19:13,920
Speaker 13: family has all these problems and then you learn about

1285
01:19:13,960 --> 01:19:15,240
Speaker 13: somebody else's family.

1286
01:19:15,080 --> 01:19:18,559
Speaker 3: Like, oh, shoot.

1287
01:19:17,680 --> 01:19:21,600
Speaker 13: Okay, I guess we're okay. Sometimes. But I still to

1288
01:19:21,760 --> 01:19:25,600
Speaker 13: this day struggle with a limiting self belief. It's a

1289
01:19:25,640 --> 01:19:27,840
Speaker 13: belief that goes back to child the trauma that if

1290
01:19:27,880 --> 01:19:31,519
Speaker 13: I'm in a predicament or encountering adversity, the problem is

1291
01:19:31,560 --> 01:19:35,880
Speaker 13: that I need to be more normal, or be more conventional,

1292
01:19:35,960 --> 01:19:39,040
Speaker 13: more of what's expected. Because I lived my whole childhood

1293
01:19:39,040 --> 01:19:43,120
Speaker 13: and what felt like some upside down staring at oggling

1294
01:19:43,320 --> 01:19:46,719
Speaker 13: at normalcy, as if the world was in a cage

1295
01:19:46,720 --> 01:19:50,720
Speaker 13: and everything outside my parents' control was this menagerie. The

1296
01:19:50,760 --> 01:19:53,439
Speaker 13: truth is I was in the menagerie and often felt

1297
01:19:53,439 --> 01:19:55,599
Speaker 13: it when I got teased by or had to interact

1298
01:19:55,680 --> 01:19:59,880
Speaker 13: with other kids. A big takeaway of feeling involuntarily sh

1299
01:20:00,600 --> 01:20:05,240
Speaker 13: into an embrace of weird affect while actually wanting to

1300
01:20:05,320 --> 01:20:09,760
Speaker 13: be less remarkable is that independent of race, gender, sexuality, height,

1301
01:20:09,920 --> 01:20:15,720
Speaker 13: or any other personal attribute, I felt constantly marginalized as

1302
01:20:15,720 --> 01:20:20,720
Speaker 13: a child and harmed by that marginalization and resentful towards it.

1303
01:20:21,160 --> 01:20:25,160
Speaker 13: So even without sociological marginalization theory or critical race theory,

1304
01:20:25,240 --> 01:20:30,240
Speaker 13: I am feeling from ages barely beyond being a toddler,

1305
01:20:30,880 --> 01:20:33,519
Speaker 13: like I am missing things that are key to connecting

1306
01:20:33,600 --> 01:20:37,280
Speaker 13: with and belonging in the rest of the species. So

1307
01:20:37,360 --> 01:20:39,800
Speaker 13: you can bet that when I first encountered those types

1308
01:20:39,840 --> 01:20:41,960
Speaker 13: of theories in college, I took to them like a

1309
01:20:42,280 --> 01:20:44,679
Speaker 13: lawn mower, a dumpt In the battles of Brave Heart,

1310
01:20:44,760 --> 01:20:47,280
Speaker 13: I'm like, stop the movie, I am mowing all of this.

1311
01:20:47,880 --> 01:20:50,360
Speaker 13: I'm the main character now. I didn't even know grass existed.

1312
01:20:50,800 --> 01:20:53,439
Speaker 13: They told me I was a snowblower that one. I

1313
01:20:53,439 --> 01:20:55,800
Speaker 13: feel like I lost some people, not everybody, but I

1314
01:20:55,880 --> 01:20:59,040
Speaker 13: lost some people because y'all aren't overall that imaginative. Sometimes

1315
01:20:59,080 --> 01:21:00,680
Speaker 13: I really have to think, Am I staying within the

1316
01:21:00,720 --> 01:21:02,719
Speaker 13: abstraction bandwidth of my audience?

1317
01:21:03,360 --> 01:21:04,960
Speaker 2: And that's as good a place as I need to

1318
01:21:05,040 --> 01:21:08,720
Speaker 2: end the first part of our Tayzon Day series. He's

1319
01:21:08,920 --> 01:21:12,200
Speaker 2: the best, and this Thursday We're going to hear more

1320
01:21:12,240 --> 01:21:16,200
Speaker 2: from him. As Tay admits throughout this interview file, he

1321
01:21:16,240 --> 01:21:19,600
Speaker 2: does have a tendency to go on some real tangents.

1322
01:21:20,200 --> 01:21:23,559
Speaker 2: So I assembled what really amounts to the story of

1323
01:21:23,600 --> 01:21:27,040
Speaker 2: his political awakening, spurred on by this moment he just

1324
01:21:27,080 --> 01:21:30,439
Speaker 2: spoke about his father crying when hearing what Tay had

1325
01:21:30,439 --> 01:21:34,920
Speaker 2: discovered about writing and theory around race in America. So

1326
01:21:35,000 --> 01:21:44,400
Speaker 2: this Thursday, the Political World according to Tazon Day sixteenth

1327
01:21:44,400 --> 01:21:47,120
Speaker 2: minute as a production of fool Zone Media and iHeart

1328
01:21:47,200 --> 01:21:50,360
Speaker 2: rod Desk. It is written, posted, and produced by me

1329
01:21:50,560 --> 01:21:54,639
Speaker 2: Jamie Rostis. Our executive producers are Sophie Lickterman and Robert Evans.

1330
01:21:54,880 --> 01:21:58,439
Speaker 2: The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer, and our

1331
01:21:58,640 --> 01:22:03,360
Speaker 2: editor are song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is

1332
01:22:03,360 --> 01:22:06,400
Speaker 2: from Grant Crater and pet. Shout outs to our dog

1333
01:22:06,439 --> 01:22:09,960
Speaker 2: producer Anderson, my cat's flee and Casper, and my pet Rockbert,

1334
01:22:10,120 --> 01:22:13,000
Speaker 2: who will outlive us all. Bye.