how tay zonday reunited with adam bahner

parts of this series, grow up. Even if you do remember Tay's major viral moment back in two thousand and seven, much of the political context of his work was lost or intentionally ignored in the shuffle at the time of its release. And more about his upbringing growing up by racial and autistic with very little context for either that he hasn't shared in previous interviews. And our second part goes into how Tay formed the leftist politics that spawned

Chocolate Rain in the first place. So there's a lot to catch up on, But if you're rejoining us, I

don't want to make you wait a moment longer. In the final part of our I Don't Know interview monologue, not sure, but Tay's story of political awakening was already well into progress when he wrote Chocolate Rain as a grad student in Minnesota in his mid twenties, And today he's going to talk about how that translated into viral fame and how it helped and hurt him come into his own as a grown man, plus some weird a sides because it's tays on Day.

the way political discourse happens online. So as online political discourse became more and more tumultuous from two thousand and seven to twenty seventeen, I became more and more averse to the idea of ever entering any sort of political dialogue, partly for economic survival reasons, because I did not ever want to be seen as partisan, which I still don't. I mean a lot of people like to pag me as a leftist, which I'm not offended. But you know, the only thing I ever identify as is the truth.

This whole shenanigans where you are invisible unless you pledge your loyalty and virtue signal your complete devotion to an uncompromising policy. Caricature that is either puritanically leftist or puritanically right wing is just not useful intellectually. It's like Morse code, and we've allowed oligarchs to devolve the Internet into an

intellectual telegraph. But in that moment in twenty seventeen when BT expressed interest, I think my dad was helping pay part of my rent at the time, Like I was just not thriving, and so it felt like whatever fears I had that I would just be disowned by everybody and hated universally and never ever work again just seems like, well, okay, it seems like I'm kind of already in that state, so I might as well just be honest. And it

was fine. I mean, Bet did a great job. I still believe that music is a great place to sing about. What I can't say about the way I describe chocolate Rain as a trojan horse that's not unique. I mean, it's a history music. I mean, how many millions of people have played Michael Jackson's they don't care about us who would not agree with his position on criminal justice.

Part of my autism is that I overestimate the extent to which the world is logical, rational, self aware, and consistent, and that has often burned me and stunted my success, either by overestimating risks or underestimating benefits. I didn't even syndicate Chocolate Rain to digital stories until twenty ten, and yeah, my thinking was, hey, you know, the video says download the free MP three. Why would I ever put it

on iTunes or wherever else? And of course some viral singers like Liam Kyle Sullivan did okay economically with the better understanding of their music releases and the irrationality of human behavior. I feel like most consequential things are irrational. I've spent a lot of brain cycles just being distressed over the reality that a lot of things are less based on merit and more based on tribalism and clickishness.

We're taught to embrace these very sensible ideas of meritocracy and ration individualism to explain differences in human achievement, when just as often it's serendipity and cronyism. That animates human achievement, and that shouldn't be a zero sum conversation, like both

can be contributions that we can speak to openly. But I would presume that human beings are motivated by accuracy when most of us are motivated by self aggrandizing megalomania and content to deploy virtue signals of charity and humility and humanism as an avatar for our actual selfishness. And I think that's one way that my true self, Adam Bonner,

failed the mythos of Taizon Day. I never played Tason Day as a superhero avatar, and I never buried my insecurity and my uncertainties when I described the twenty seventeen Beeight interview as me being honest about the medium of chocolal rain. And obviously it's a bit more complicated than the same was dishonest before that, But generally speaking, I am honest to a fault. I lived in Los Angeles for twelve and a half years, which is famously a

play where everybody is bullshitting is the norm. Everybody is name dropping, everybody is grasping for calling cards and maximum prominence that will justify other people giving them the time of day. And believe me, with my lived experience, I could name drop with the best of them. I just don't do that. I would go to parties and be like, yeah, I'm in debt. I had to ask my dad for money. I never did that thing that people do at parties.

But it's like, well, you know when I was working with James Gunn, Well you know when I was talking to Daniel Tosh last time I appeared on the Disney Channel, the last time that I was on the BBC, Like, I don't do that. It nauseates me. I'm not saying that people who do that nauseate me. I'm just saying I'm not that person. And you kind of have to be that person. You have to Kim Jong ooh and curate yourself as a cult of personality and non stop

highlight reel of recognizable things. And I think anybody who saw me at social events or conventions as Daizon day saw me being visibly hesitant and reluctant and uncomfortable on top of being autistic and neurologically since we overwhelmed just being out in the world period. I was never good at being this baritone Kermit the Frog Santa Claus. But that's what people want. They want Santa Claus to go ho ho ho and let them take a picture on Santa Claus's lap, especially if they're a kid.

They expect Santa Claus to excitedly talk about the North Pole and how Rudolph is doing the same way they might expect a singer to talk about prominent acting credits and recent projects excitedly and oh my gosh, pageantry and red carpets and bread and circuses and fanciness and cosplaying aristocracy by poor people. Sorry, I know what that's like. I'm speaking autobiographically. I'm just saying I will personally never feel more comfortable with pageantry than a squirrel taking a

nap on Times Square on New Year's Eve. And don't get me wrong, I am very grateful that anybody has any interest in any version of me. I'm just saying that whatever Dazon Day is supposed to be, Adam is an autistic deer cot in headlights everywhere he goes, and Adam is a terrible liar. And also, to be fair, I've just never been likable as a confessional content creator.

Or maybe it's that I'm too likable because you really have to be divisive and have lots of hot takes, because obviously there're thousands and thousands of influencers who are successful just being vulnerable, being themselves, sharing their truths and their sorrows and their difficulties. I love pretending that this actually has some order and structure to it and is

not just some slow motion neurodiversion train wreck. And I just diabolically sprinkling random callbacks to fake continuity and make it hard to edit any part out. I'm shooting for two episodes like William hung. To be fair, a lot of popular nonfiction books are like that, just a vomitous thoughts spaghetti with chapters and sub sections applied as an afterthought, like the Manuscript is an acid trip that got sent

to a post production house. I know, I just glossed over calling my entertainment career not successful, and that does not mean that I'm not grateful. It just means I have never been rich, and there may be some years where I just tiptoed and to maybe it'd be called middle middle class. But many more years my net worth has technically been negative, and I've been very grateful to have a family that's able to support me when they can. As I mentioned earlier, I turned forty three this year.

In one of my biggest fears of my parents dying is that, well, I mean, I'll obviously be sad and devastated, and you know, there's that whole grief journey that one goes through, but it so I was kind of like, I'm not sure I've ever actually for a sustained period of like a decade, lived as a financially independent adult. Like I look at older transients who have nothing, and I'm like, oh, I hope I don't end up there.

has a pension. I think that when I was young, and I was thinking, oh, you know, one day I might just be like an actor like the people on Star Trek, or I might be a game show host. And I didn't appreciate my level of disability when I was young, partly because of what I talked about earlier, the ethos I grew up with, Well, that triggers your sensitivity or disability, well, isolate yourself. Like I said, everybody

meant well. Hollywood in particular does not know how to work with people who have psychiatric disabilities, at least not mine. Sometimes I forget the psychiatric disability has such a stigma you can't just like use it because people like, oh, it does not mean is is that person going to stab me? As if people with no diagnosed disabilities have some immaculate record when it comes to public safety or for that matter, private safety, if you look at stats

and things like domestic violence. But I digress a more politic term that's used for neurodivergent and autistic people by organizations like Culture City.

is not helping. I've been miscast. That actually happened when I appeared on Jimmy Kimmel in two thousand and seven. And by the way, this is not Tea. They're all wonderful people for all I know then and now. But I was really adamant before that segment that I wanted to perform the first third of Chocolate Rain that I ended up performing on the show with just a microphone and no keyboard, and being the passionate segment producers that

they are. They really wanted to curate a viral video aesthetic, and they wanted me to be playing the keyboard as I sang. They were very insistent, and at the time I knew that I probably could not perform Chocolate Rain live playing the keyboard on Jimmy Kimmel. I knew that I would just be sensory overwhelmed. Then it wouldn't work.

I didn't have a lot of terminology to explain why, other than that I'd be too nervous, because obviously I could play it live by myself in my living room, but I just knew that it wouldn't work in Jimmy Kimmel. The compromise is that I would have the keyboard in front of me, but I would be singing to a backing track, meaning the keyboard would not actually be playing any notes. I'd be pretending to play the keyboard while

actually singing. They recorded one tech rehearsal of me singing Chocolate Rain the way I wanted to sing it, which was just with the microphone and the backing track. The moment comes, Jimmy Kimmel hypes me up, the crowd is screaming, the curtain goes up, and I cannot feel my arms, like literally, I my hand it's felt like jello. I was so disoriented and since re overwhelmed. I missed the

first four lines of the song. You know chocolate Rain some stage right now, This feel of pain, chocolate rain, a baby born with eye before this sin, I did not sing those words. Luckily, Jimmy Kimmel Live is not

actually live, it's Jimmy Kimmel almost live. They have an hour or two before it goes live, so in that time, they took the audio from the tech rehearsal that they had recorded earlier, spiced it in with my actual performance, and they started with a very very very wide shot like above the heads of the audience in the last row.

to my mindor Jimmy Kimmel disaster have a name. In addition to sensitivity to sound, light, and touch, which earlier on if you're quizzing yourself, I described as hypercusius, misophonia, photophobia, and hapophobia, dyspraxia, which is basically muddled signaling between your brain and muscle movement, also played a role. My dyspraxia doesn't just make it harder to move my arms and legs and be coordinated, it makes it harder for me

to move my mouth to speak. One interesting side about psychiatric metach is that stimulants like ADHDM phetamines will help majorly improve my dyspraxia, but they will also worsen my sensitivity. Is like misophonia, hapophobia, hyperacusis, et cetera, and all of these are autistic comorbidities, meaning they just occur more in

autistic people. I should bring up alexithymia too, because alexithymia is not having words for your feelings, and in my case, it is kind of just like not having words at all. Because the more sensory overwhelmed I become in terms of sound and touch and light, the less able I am

to think or speak, particularly about my feelings. It's a good baseline to just assume I'm sensory overwhelmed everywhere in society, which means I'm kind of limited in how verbal I am depending on how many spoons I have left.

invisible disability. Because if I am a talent, whether that talent means I'm an employee in an office or an on camera talent like the Jimmy Kimmel experience I described, where is the safe context to assert my desire for accommodations or awareness and not have that regarded as oh, he's trauma dumping. I was in Los Angeles for a project last year, actually multiple projects. This is one that

you will not see. The project involved the song where I could hypothetically play the keyboard and sing as on

camera talent. Actually not that different than the situation I described with Jimmy Kimmel, and I try to communicate that I might not be comfortable doing that, partly because I'm autistic and experienced autistic dyspraxia, and it was the type of thing that if it was mission critical to get that footage of my singing and playing the keyboard, I could have made adjustments and planned to bring my own accommodations and adhere to my own processes that would allow

that to take place. The understanding I received just that singing and playing simultaneously it was not going to be mission critical.

It feels like I am someone with a physical disability being asked to, for example, shoot basketball hoops. But I don't have crutches to point too, I don't have a prosthetic leg. I don't have a wheelchair. All I have, with dozens of talented crew members on set and xxx xx x amount of money being spent, are words coming out of my mouth describing limitations that are invisible to everybody else. And I know that as polite and different and professional as everybody else is not of them.

and then the day arrives. Tayson Day replies with a single audio file. But when you open that eye audio file, it is two and a half hours long. Within the audio file. Our thoughts insightful, thoughts deep. He maybe answers at most three of your questions, and it's the most amazing look into someone's life anyone has shared with me on this show. So, without further ado, here are taison Days parting thoughts.

You are never more than one, or rarely two degrees of friendship separation from anybody else you work with professionally, so there's a justified fear in any vocation, including on camera, since so much of Los Angeles just happens by word of mouth, that the grapevine gossip about you will start to indicate that you are difficult to work with. And here I'll invoke a little bit of sociological marginalization theory.

It has always felt to me like the grapevine reviews of a person tend to be harsher the less they are, like the aesthetics of dominant power, and that includes people with invisible disabilities. My life is very much a jack of all trades, master of non mess of partially attempted things that didn't really value stack or get executed in a foundational way, including being Tazon day as an entertainer. That's a topic we could unpack. Firstly, I have never

been a super frequent uploader. I feel like nothing you do on social media matters if it's not uploaded to or three times per week. Now, that feeling that one has to run on this hamster wheel of recency bias when creating content is of course contrived, but unfortunately it

is also normative. Like if you own a plumbing company, took out what company's Instagram and nothing has been posted for two months, it reflects poorly on you, or people assume it is an un serious endeavor and you are an un serious person, Like it would almost be better to just not have an Instagram at that point, And I can list one hundred different ways that rigging a content economy wherever green content infrequently uploaded, content never has

organic region is not able to thrive, is grotesquely ablest and unfair towards people who struggled to speak, people who struggled to move. I have never been prolific, and my success peaked on an Internet where you did not have to be like on my Internet. Not just say my Internet, I'm saying like an old man.

were closed networks. Those are intronnets, not the Internet. We're being hoodwinked into using these glorified Bloomberg terminals for social Internet content, but instead of charging a high monthly fee for a proprietary operating system. They have us exhausting our bodies, our time, and our lives, chasing the tail of manufactured recency.

We are toiling on oligarchic algorithmic feed plantations. And because the ten percent of the population who make the best algorithmic kunti kentes, yes, I went there, get ninety percent of the engagement on these platforms as they destroy their bodies, destroy their mental health, destroy their personal relationships, desperately tossing pearls hoping to get pennies out of these sick algorithms. We're living in a culture that glorifies that grind as noble.

It's like the social platforms are drug cartels who have a single nautical conciones. And I love today's influences. Many are amazingly talented and very hard working. But we cannot get to a point as a civilization where that is the anticipated redemption arc for capitalism sucking.

have ever made. It's just hoping I can find some way to get out before I die. Every independent artist has to go through digital music distributors, and that ecosystem of middlemen. Many of the legal terms and independent artists has to sign are not fair. All of these distributors that I know of, are reserving AI rights to any new music they syndicate. They want unlimited rights to license artists tracks to train third party AI models or to

train their own AI models. This is of course completely unrelated to getting your artist tracks onto Spotify, iTunes, etc. At least unrelated to fans playing those tracks back, But most of these intermediaries do not offer these services a la carte.

with syndicating music tracks to social platforms. Because syndicating to social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts, Facebook stories, it's different than syndicating to retail storefronts like Spotify iTunes. It really does not need to be, but the distributors saw an opportunity a few years back to call it something different and then take a percentage of the ad revenue.

There is a small amount of content management involved with the shorts platforms because music tracks are being integrated with video, but the percentage is being paid to distributors are awfully high relative to my understanding of that actual cost. Grievance number three amounts to YouTube in twenty twenty five being a product design hot mess for independent musicians. Short history lesson.

I believe there was a time in two thousand and nine when major music label music videos were approximately eighty percent of YouTube's monetized advertising traffic. That's one reason major music labels had leverage to force YouTube to create Vevo, which is a separate reskin for their videos where they get a better ad revenue split. Viacoms unresolved billion dollar copyright lossit against YouTube also affected sentiments of the time,

but that's a separate story. Now, since the viral video era, which coincided with major music label artists like Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga getting two three billion views regularly on their Vivo music videos, we've seen the rising domination of mobile viewing and algorithmic feeds that prioritize watch time, session time, click through rates, etc. That's one reason you see content creators who make longer gameplay videos like market Plier and

Dashy blow up as soon as algorithmic feeds come out. Music videos just don't compete well with other content at keeping people on YouTube As a content genre. Music just tends to not be as targetable for advertisers who want to bid on keywords as technology, family, vlogs, basically any

other content category. The fact that music videos were among YouTube's highest earning content categories by sheer View Volli in two thousand and nine, with thousands of content creators making entire businesses out of parroting popular music videos, and after twenty twelve they just became one of the lowest earning content categories is important context for YouTube's products design afterwards.

The problem YouTube is trying to solve is that music is tremendously disadvantaged at creating the user behavior and advertised behavior that is most profitable for its business. That means my grievance one and grievance two make the artists give up their AI rights, their derivative work rights, and submits

to unfavorable social platform distribution terms. Most distributors are asking for that before they'll anoint your own YouTube channel as your official artist channel, which causes the channel subscribers to merge if you have one that was autogenerated, which I do right now. My main YouTube channel is eighteen years old. It does not need a third party music distributor operating as a multi channel network taking a portion of the

ad revenue on music video assets. As an independent muse a artist on YouTube, I am left to ask why am I being forced by these mandatory third party music distributors to opt into terrible, unfavorable music track distribution terms with every major music playback platform on the planet in order to activate my control of an essential YouTube product feature for my own music just because YouTube is an absent parent and music as a category is its runt

child in terms of alphabet shareholder value. Although to be fair, it is in Google's longer term interest to tacitly support a music ecosystem where AI derivatives and mashups are free to be created and proliferate with zero restrictions, because that expands targetable metadata that is the lifeblood of Google's advertising business. It goes back to what I said earlier. Capitalism forces fixed assets, fixed me, fixed context, fixed relation, fixed behavior.

When do we wake up as a species and say we are not broken. We do not need these oligarchs fixing us. We need fixed behavior in terms of do not drive into trees. We do not need fixed behavior in terms of I control what you see. You can tell I'm getting prophetic when the mother goose rhyms come out, the doctor seuss. The parts of this where my speaking gets faster and less guttural are when my ADHD medication

is hitting and I'm just not fighting it. Doing this actually had me go down from sixty milligrams to forty milligrams of events, because on sixty I was like, I can record on a lower dose and be a bit

more in control of that energizer bunny aspect. I talked earlier about how amphetamines make it neurologically easier for me to speak, But it's also interesting that a lot of the stylistic affect with which Chocolate Rain was sung, where I'm dropping my lyrics very deliberately and moving my lips in big formations, that is actually a muscular effort compensation for the reduced neurological control that dyspraxia creates. There are parts of me, the question, am I better off knowing that?

Because Tasonta was just doing what came naturally in the moment. It was Taison Tape blowing up as an entertainer and being forced into contact with society, me being put into constant realization that I am not like others, but must somehow remake myself in that likeness, and eventually realizing that was a ridiculous aspiration for me to have. It was not because of childhood trauma that I was different. It was not because of structural oppression that I was deterministically different,

as Lady Gaga says, I was just born that way. T. S. Eliot's cliche aphorism is that the end of all you're exploring will be to come back to where you started and know yourself for the first time. The future kind of terrifies me. I'm terrified of getting old, which past a certain age, you kind of start to resign yourself to the idea that it's likely to happen alone. I'm this weird cast role of transcendent capability fused with profound disability.

I am both borderline savant and my information aggregation and retention speed while measuring is learning disabled in some kind of battery tests because my brain sucks at translating the parallelism with which it experiences truth into the dogmatic serial declarative that majoritarian neurology change humankind to its likeness with and as that last sentence shows, it's a struggle that often comes out in hyphenated adjectives, hyphenated nouns, and subordinate clauses.

Some people in the academy would just tell me that John Quincy Adams like pros meant I was stupid that the job of a scholar was to clarify that. You don't really understand something if you're not clarifying it, if you can't explain it to a five year old. I'm like, well, okay, fine explaining everything to a five year old. Bad people took the ice cream. We won our ice cream back. So yeah, as I've said throughout this, I feel quite

uncertain about my future. I mean, anybody could have the wrong place, wrong time, get hit by a bus, get hit by a recreational homicide, it hit by falling SpaceX debris. But I think I had hoped at this point in my life that outside of random misfortunes, I would have reason to be confident in a safe and provided future. Some people have that in the post blog, saying I feel so empty. For me, It's like, Nope, not me. That's the life I should have picked. But I'm in

the life that I'm in now. I suspect that a lot of people with similar neurology to me have not been as lucky. And if not for myself, me making it over any hurdle, no matter how many hurdles I have ahead, comes with an obligation to keep running. The viral video era in which Chocolate Rain achieved prominence was for autistic neurology like mine. What Reconstruction after the American Civil War was for black rights.

not spy on user behavior. The viral video era where platforms did not act like gated communities and forbid you to link to other platforms. The viral video era where platforms trusted you that if you followed, or friended, or subscribed, you actually wanted to see the content. The viral video era where you did not have to consent to your data, your soul, your life, your voice being used unpaid for somebody else's artificial intelligence business. The viral video era where

everybody who googled something saw the same results. Because truth is not a business decision. It is the life or death of our species. And you know what today's search and social media that disrespects you, that somehow manages to target you with an advertisement about something you were talking to a friend about two hours ago, and you were wondering how the heck did it get that information. We do not need to live like that for seventy years.

We do not need to live with private interfaces owned by faceless oligarchs invading our homes and dictating what we see when we see it, and then lying to us that we are the ones choosing when they know the only options they are surfacing for us are profit profit profit. When we deserve power. Power power. We can pick a different history to be crashing through our veins. We can remake how we got to where we are, and we

can keep our privacy. We can keep our data, we can keep our mental health, and we do not need machines to be the means for meeting on our screens where nothing seems to hear them me if I say no to make me free. There, guys, mother goose again, I should end us. But it's been interesting for sure.

the earlier days of the Internet. Sure, because it's nostalgic to some degree, and it's really frustrating to hear that people as talented as tay Or Liam Kyle Sullivan really struggled to be taken seriously in the mainstream in their day.

But it's comforting in some ways to see well adjusted people on the other side of a very weird experience to be fair, at least in part because they were adults when they went viral, and both after dealing with quite a bit of mental health struggles and grappling with themselves along the way, just like anyone would have to do, but they had to do it while this unprecedented thing

was happening. And I do think stories like this are not just interesting but important because whether we like to think about the depressing march of time or not, with any luck, the main characters of today are going to have a similar road ahead of them, and depending on how you feel about it, either with some luck or a curse, you might have to deal with it too. And this brings me to a little announcement wow bonus for people who listen to the end of the episode.

The announcement is in the next few weeks, we are going to be switching up the format of sixteenth minute away from our character of the Week format and take more time between series so I can take a closer look at the missing history of the Internet and what we lose by not tracking or considering it more carefully. Because at this point, whether you like it or use the Internet, frequently or not, it does have a big influence over your daily life and has a significant guiding

hand at who is heard and who isn't. And I want to look at how this has developed more closely, because stories like tay Is almost serve as a canary in a coal mine for where we were headed and letting the grand audience of the Internet completely reshape someone's life. What I can be grateful for here is that, unlike so many people who are dragged into Internet fame or any kind of fame unwittingly or rooted in mockery, Tazon Day invented himself to be an entertainer and occasionally a commodity.

And Adam Bonner seems comfortable after many years of navigating public prominence, in separating this public and this private self, and it shouldn't have had to be hard won. But there's a lot to learn from that experience. And so with that, Tayson Day, your sixteenth minute ends now. But hold your little ponies, dear listener, there are still a few more characters that I have to share with you.

Next week we check in with the main character of twenty twenty four, Hailey Welch aka Hawk tool Girl, who has I don't know if you've heard, but been excused for a couple of crimes and is getting back into the podcast game very twenty twenty five of her and that's next week. But as acend off to our Tay series, here is the man himself, honoring my people, the Irish with Oh Danny Boy, We'll see you next week.