how tay zonday reunited with adam bahner

Summary

Summary of "How Tay Zonday Reunited with Adam Bahner" Episode on Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)

Podcast Information:

• Title: Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
• Host/Author: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
• Episode: How Tay Zonday Reunited with Adam Bahner
• Release Date: April 22, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of Sixteenth Minute (of Fame), host Jamie Loftus engages in a profound and introspective conversation with Tay Zonday, also known by his real name, Adam Bonner. The discussion delves deep into Tay's journey from internet virality to personal struggles, shedding light on the often-overlooked aspects of online fame and its impact on mental health and personal identity.

Tay Zonday’s Background and Rise to Fame

Tay Zonday gained widespread recognition with his viral hit "Chocolate Rain" in 2007. However, his rise to fame wasn't just a fortunate break but intertwined with his personal experiences as a biracial, autistic individual navigating the complex landscape of internet stardom.

Notable Quote:

• "Chocolate Rain was a Trojan horse." (04:46)

Challenges of Internet Fame

Tay discusses the duality of internet fame, highlighting both its empowering and detrimental effects. While it brought him global recognition, it also led to unwarranted attention, financial instability, and personal turmoil. The lack of context regarding his upbringing and identity exacerbated these challenges.

Notable Quote:

• "What do you do when you get more attention and judgment than any one person is built to handle?" (02:20)

Personal Struggles and Mental Health

Adam delves into his personal battles with autism, sensory overload, and the stigma surrounding psychiatric disabilities. He recounts specific instances, such as his difficult performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where his neurological sensitivities impeded his ability to perform as expected.

Notable Quote:

• "Adam is a terrible liar." (11:42)
• "I was completely sensory overwhelmed." (17:15)

Impact of Viral Fame on Personal Identity

The episode explores how Tay's online persona, Tay Zonday, became a façade that masked his true self, Adam Bonner. This dichotomy created internal conflicts, making it challenging for him to reconcile his public image with his private struggles and insecurities.

Notable Quote:

• "Adam is a deer caught in headlights everywhere he goes." (09:00)

Industry Struggles and the Music Ecosystem

Adam provides a critical analysis of the music distribution industry's impact on independent artists. He highlights issues such as AI rights, unfavorable distribution terms, and the decline of music's prominence on platforms like YouTube. These systemic problems hinder artists' ability to monetize their work and maintain creative control.

Notable Quote:

• "My independent music ecosystem grievances include AI and derivative rights with terrible economics." (25:00)

Future of Internet Fame and Content Creation

The conversation shifts to the evolving nature of internet fame, emphasizing the pressure on content creators to conform to algorithm-driven platforms that prioritize recency and engagement over authenticity. Adam expresses concern over the sustainability of such a model, particularly for individuals with disabilities or non-conforming identities.

Notable Quote:

• "We're living in a culture that glorifies that grind as noble." (35:00)
• "The viral video era was for autistic neurology like mine." (40:00)

Conclusion and Reflections

In the concluding segments, Tay Zonday reflects on his past and present, expressing both gratitude for his experiences and a sense of uncertainty about the future. He emphasizes the importance of understanding and supporting neurodivergent individuals in an increasingly digital and algorithm-driven world.

Notable Quote:

• "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." (42:22)

Host’s Final Thoughts

Jamie Loftus wraps up the episode by acknowledging Tay's candidness and the significance of his story. She announces a format change for future episodes, aiming to explore the overlooked history of the internet and its profound effects on individuals' lives.

Notable Quote:

• "Stories like this are not just interesting, but important." (42:22)

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Key Takeaways:

• The Complexity of Viral Fame: Tay Zonday's experience underscores the multifaceted nature of internet fame, revealing both its allure and its profound personal costs.
• Mental Health and Neurodiversity: The episode highlights the unique challenges faced by neurodivergent individuals in the public eye, emphasizing the need for greater understanding and support.
• Critique of the Music Industry: Adam Bonner provides a critical perspective on systemic issues within the music distribution ecosystem, advocating for more equitable practices for independent artists.
• Future of Content Creation: The discussion raises important questions about the sustainability of current content creation models and their impact on creators' well-being and authenticity.

Conclusion

This episode of Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) offers an in-depth and heartfelt exploration of Tay Zonday’s journey through internet fame, personal struggles, and systemic challenges within the entertainment industry. It serves as a poignant reminder of the human stories behind viral moments and the importance of empathy and support for individuals navigating public scrutiny and mental health challenges.

Transcript

[Tay Zonday]

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[Jamie Loftus]

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[Tay Zonday]

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[Jamie Loftus]

Hello darlings. Pack your suitcase for a new season of the Hulu original reality series Vanderpump Villa.

[Tay Zonday]

Let's do this. Ciao. It's Stassi. Of course Lisa brought in her favorite to be resident chaperone of the castle.

[Jamie Loftus]

Stassi is an icon. She's my eyes and ears.

[Tay Zonday]

I love this.

[Jamie Loftus]

Get ready for the luxury and drama that awaits us in Italy.

[Tay Zonday]

Cheers to all the toxic couples in the Castle.

[Jamie Loftus]

Season two of Vanderpump Villa premieres April.

[Tay Zonday]

24Th, streaming on Hu War Zone Media. Welcome back to 16th Minute, the podcast where we talk to the main characters of the Internet to see how their moment in the spotlight affected them and what that says about us and the Internet. And today we are concluding the World According to Tay Zonday, a retrospective on the Chocolate Rain singer's time in the spotlight, and then some told by the man himself. And if you're tuning into this episode before listening to the first two parts of this series, grow up. Even if you do remember Tay's major viral Moment back in 2007, 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 biracial 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-20s. 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 asides because it stays.

[Jamie Loftus]

On day enjoy the 2017 BET interview where I first spoke about Chocolate Rain being a ballad about institutional racism. That's a good moment to unpack. Just like the conversation with my father. I already talked about why I don't like the way political discourse happens online. So as online political discourse became more and more tumultuous from 2007 to 2017, 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 peg 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 2017 when the BET 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 seemed 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, that's a history of music. I mean, how many millions of people have played Michael Jackson? 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 stores until 2010, and my thinking was, hey, you know, video says Download the free MP3. 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 a 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 cliquishness. We're taught to embrace these very sensible ideas of meritocracy and rational 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 that 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 Tay Zonde. I never played Tay Zonde as a superhero avatar and I never buried my insecurity and my uncertainties when I described the 2017 BET interview as me being honest about the meaning of Chocolate Rain. And obviously it's a bit more complicated than to say I was dishonest before that, but Generally speaking, I am honest to a fault. I lived in Los Angeles for 12 and a half years, which is famous. A place where everybody is bullshitting as the norm, everybody is name dropping, everybody is grasping for calling cards of 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, 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. 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 Un, 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 Tay Zonde saw me being visibly hesitant and reluctant and uncomfortable on top of being autistic and neurologically sensory 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. You know, they want Tay's on day to say chocolate rain and, you know, move away from the bike, to breathe in and just be happy and gracious and take a picture. Nobody wants to hear that Santa Claus is scheduled for hernia surgery and going through a divorce. I mean, he might be, but that's not really not what the majority of people are interested in hearing from him. 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 Tay's on day is supposed to be, Adam is an autistic deer caught 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 coming. Obviously there are 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 neurodivergent train wreck. And I just diabolically sprinkle in 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 vomit as thought spaghetti with chapters and subsections 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 into maybe 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 turn 443 this year and 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's always again 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. But I don't know. There's no guarantees that Billy Club of Life can beat you up any moment. Like, oh there's a car wreck, oh there's cancer, oh there's, you know, whatever. It's all downhill after this podcast. This is the swan song.

[Tay Zonday]

Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places.

[Jamie Loftus]

That take credit cards nationwide.

[Tay Zonday]

And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn [e-mail] credit card based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, not everyone who.

[Jamie Loftus]

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[Tay Zonday]

Let's do this. Ciao. It's Stassi. Of course. Lisa brought in her favorite to be resident chaperone of the castle.

[Jamie Loftus]

Stassi is an icon. She's my eyes and ears.

[Tay Zonday]

I love this.

[Jamie Loftus]

Get ready for the luxury and drama that awaits us in Italy. Cheers to all the toxic couples in the Castle. Season 2 of Vanderpump Villa premieres April 24th.

[Tay Zonday]

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[Tay Zonday]

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[Tay Zonday]

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[Jamie Loftus]

I've said it in many interviews. The best life for me would have been just pick a button. Boring job at something like the Social Security Administration that has stability, that has routine, that 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 that psychiatric disability has such a stigma. You can't just, like, use it because people are like, oh, what does that mean? Is that person gonna 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 on things like domestic violence. But I digress. A more politic term that's used for neurodivergent and autistic people by organizations like Culture City. K U L T U R E Sensory Inclusion. There have been a number of cases where I book a gig and I get the job. And I think the client or the director, the producer are just a little bit surprised that I actually needed the accommodations that I tried to communicate and request. Or I'll be the one who's surprised. I'll actually be in the moment where it's like, oh, I'm on the set and the camera's rolling and the crew's being paid and oh, shit, I can't do this. I am completely sensory overwhelmed. And this medication cocktail is not helping. I've been miscast. That actually happened when I appeared on Jimmy Kimmel in 2007. And by the way, this is not tea. 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, and 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, my hands felt like jello. I was so disoriented and sensory overwhelmed. I missed the first four lines of the song, you know, Chocolate rain. Some stay dry and others feel the pain. Chocolate rain, a baby born with I before the 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, spliced 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. You couldn't see me not singing. And God bless the cue card employee who had years of experience writing cue cards, because in addition to not feeling my arms, I knew I would not be able to remember the words to my song. I missed the entire first verse, and the cue card changed on time. It's funny to think this was almost 18 years ago. I think there are a few shows that still use handwritten cue cards and human operators, but it's a lost art today. I know that my psychiatric experiences that contributed to my minor 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 hyperacusis, 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 aside about psychiatric meds is that stimulants like ADHD amphetamines will help majorly improve my dyspraxia, but they will also worsen my sensitivities like misophonia, hapophobia, hyperacusis, etc. 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's 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. Oh, wow, we're talking about spoon theory now. We're just doing like this crash course in autistic psychiatry now. I started this by talking about trauma dumping. And it goes back to the theme I touched on earlier, which is just we've got to be very careful when pathologizing individuals for misdeeds that systemic actors are most guilty of. I also raise the topic of trauma dumping because it's a pathology that can be experienced by a person who is disabled, including a person who is invisibly disabled. I happen to think I'm pretty visibly autistic, but these people call it an invisible disability. Because if I am a talent, whether that talent means I am 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 where 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 a 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 tried to communicate that I might not be comfortable doing that, partly because I'm autistic and experience 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 is that singing and playing simultaneously was not going to be mission critical. I showed up for the shoot, it ended up being a big part of the vision and I simply was not prepared to deliver. And it just ended up being awkward because it was not a low budget shoot for a client and attached talent that you've heard of. And by the way, everybody involved was wonderful, professional. It was a delight. It was just a regrettably awkward sequence of events because when I'm in that type of moment and people are asking me to do something that I know in my own cognitive disability, it's not able to happen. 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 to. 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 xxxxxx 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 deferent and professional as everybody else is, none of them understand.

[Tay Zonday]

We'll be back with the grand conclusion to the World According to Tay Zonday. Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide and every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn [e-mail] credit card based on the February 2024 Nilsson report.

[Jamie Loftus]

Hello darlings. Pack your suitcase for a new season of the Hulu original reality series Vanderpump Villa.

[Tay Zonday]

Let's do this. Ciao. It's Stassi. Of course. Lisa brought in her favorite to be resident chaperone of the castle.

[Jamie Loftus]

Dassi is an icon. She's my eyes and I love this. Get ready for the luxury and drama that awaits us in Italy.

[Tay Zonday]

Cheers to all the toxic couples in the castle.

[Jamie Loftus]

Season 2 of Vanderpump Villa premieres April.

[Tay Zonday]

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[Jamie Loftus]

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[Tay Zonday]

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[Jamie Loftus]

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[Tay Zonday]

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[Jamie Loftus]

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[Tay Zonday]

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[Jamie Loftus]

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[Tay Zonday]

Welcome back to 16th Minute. Imagine you're me, and after nine months you've gotten your interview with Tay's on Day. You send questions back late because you're struggling with depression. He checks in a month after getting the questions to say he's getting close to being done recording the answers to the questions, but he still has a little more to say. You say, sure, that's fine, and then the day arrives. Tay's on day replies with a single audio file, but when you open that audio file, it is two and a half hours long. Within the audio file are 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 Tay Zonday's parting thoughts.

[Jamie Loftus]

So on the grand scale of things, me feeling particularly autistic during a shoot that happened to not be released, potentially for many reasons unrelated to myself, it's not that big of a deal. Although as talent you also become aware very quickly that Los Angeles is indeed a small town. 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, trademaster of non mess of partially attempted things that didn't really value, stack or get executed in a foundational way, including being taysonday 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 two 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, hey, check out my company's Instagram and nothing has been posted for two months. It reflects poorly on you, or people assume it is an unserious endeavor and you are an unserious person. Like, it would almost be better to just not have an Instagram at that point. And I could list a hundred different ways that rigging a content economy where evergreen content infrequently uploaded content never has organic reach and is not able to thrive is grotesquely ableist and unfair towards people who struggle to speak, people who struggle 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. Did I just say my Internet? I'm saying it like an old man. On my Internet, every piece of content got a fair shot. Upload once a day, upload once a year. It was the land of opportunity. Although it's not even accurate to describe what we experience in 2025 as the Internet. Every social network that you might seek to build an audience on algorithmically demotes external links. You can't link to outside content. That's definitionally an intranet. Like the early dial up services in the 80s and 90s, Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online, they were closed networks. Those are intranet, 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 10% of the population who make the best algorithmic Kunta Kinte's Yes, I went there get 90% 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 of drug cartels who have us singing Norco canciones. And I love today's influencers. 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. And that's what I fear. It becomes this thing where young people go, well, I can't afford a house, I can't afford college, I can't afford to pay off these predators mandatory health care bills. Where I look at the Invoice and it's $450 for a bandage. But it's okay because I'm gonna be on the influencer grind and I can blow up any day. No, it's not okay. You better start listening to some boots. Riley. Start singing. We got the guillotine. Sometimes I swear that mode just kind of takes over. I don't even know where it comes from. It only happens when I'm by myself in complete isolation and hit record. Maybe that's what Tayson Day is and Adam is just this noise that. But yeah, I should release more music. I don't even know what to do with music releasing now, which is kind of frustrating because I am making and recording the best music I have ever made. It's just hoping it 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 an independent artist 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 AI models. This is of course completely unrelated to getting your artist tracks onto Spotify, itunes, et cetera. At least unrelated to fans playing those tracks back. But most of these intermediaries do not offer these services a la carte. It's a take it or leave it quid pro quo. Distributors also face some pressure from platforms like Spotify to secure derivative and AI rights. Because Spotify wants a future where there can be unlimited remixing by DJs and mashups that don't pay the original artist. So that is my independent music ecosystem. Grievance number one. AI and derivative rights with terrible economics that are impossible for independent artists to opt out of. My grievance number two is bad deals 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 these shorts platforms because music tracks are being integrated with video, but the percentages being paid to distributors are awfully high relative to my understanding of that actual cost. Grievance number three amounts to YouTube in 2025 being a product design hot mess for independent musicians. Short history lesson I believe there was a in 2009 when major music label music videos were approximately 80% 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. Viacom's unresolved billion dollar copyright lawsuit against YouTube also affected sentiments at 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 2,3 billion views regularly on their Vevo music videos, we've seen the rising domination of mobile viewing and algorithmic feeds that prioritize watch time, session time, click through rates, et cetera. That's one reason you see content creators who make longer gameplay videos like Markiplier and Dashie 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 volume in 2009, with thousands of content creators making entire businesses out of parroting popular music videos and and after 2012 they just became one of the lowest earning content categories is important context for YouTube's product design afterwards. The problem YouTube is trying to solve is that music is tremendously disadvantaged at creating the user behavior and advertiser behavior that is most profitable for its business. That means my grievance one and grievance two make the artist give up their AI rights, their derivative work rights and submit to unfavorable social platform distribution terms. Most distributors are asking for that before they'll anoint. Your own YouTube channel is your official artist channel which causes the channel subscribers to merge if you have one that was auto generated, which I do right now. My main YouTube channel is 18 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 Music 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 system 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 meaning, 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 rhymes come out the Dr. 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 60 milligrams to 40 milligrams of Vyvanse because on 60 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 larynx 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 that question am I better off knowing that because Tay Zonde was just doing what came naturally in the moment? It was T Zante 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 Your 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 casserole of transcendent capability fused with profound disability. I'm both borderline savant in my information aggregation and retention speed while measuring as learning disabled and some cognitive battery tests because my brain sucks at translating the parallelism with which it experiences truth into the dogmatic serial declarative that majoritarian neurology chains 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 prose, 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 5 year old. Bad people took the ice cream. We want 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, get hit by falling SpaceX debris. But I think I had hoped at this point in my life that outside of random misfortune fortunes, I would have reason to be confident in a safe and provided future. Some people have that, then they'll post vlogs 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. 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. It was this exceptional eye of the storm before ferocious backlash. People who had to live under Jim Crow for 70 years looked back at reconstruction and marveled and said, yeah, Mississippi had a black senator. Yeah, it actually happened. People look back at the viral video era now and go, yeah, you could be weird, you could be niche and you would be syndicated all over the world by platforms that did 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 act 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 70 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 the me if I say no to make me free There goes mother good again. But I should end this, but it's been interesting for sure.

[Tay Zonday]

Thank you so much to the wonderful Tay Zonday for his time, his thoughtfulness and just being himself. You can follow him at the links in the description it's hard for me to say anything here that Tay or Adam hasn't said himself with far more eloquence, but I really loved hearing the experiences of someone who went viral in 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 struggle 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 Spiral 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 gonna 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 16th minute away from our character of the week format and take more time between scenes 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 is developed more closely because stories like Tay's almost serve as a canary in a coal mine for where we were headed in 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 were dragged into Internet fame or any kind of fame unwittingly or rooted in mockery, Tayzonday in 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, TAE Zonday, your 16th 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 2024, Hayley 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 2025 of her. And that's next week. But as a send 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.

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh Danny boy the pipes, the pipes are calling from glen to glen and down the mountainside the summer's gone and all the rose is falling it's you, it's you must go and I must fight. But come ye back, back when summer's in the meadow or window Valley's hushed and white with snow.

[Tay Zonday]

16Th Minute is a production of Poolzone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive Executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our Supervising Producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad13. Voice acting is from Grant Crater and Pet Shout Outs to our dog producer Anderson. My cats Flea and Casper and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye. It is Ryan here and I have.

[Jamie Loftus]

A question for you. What do you do when you win?

[Tay Zonday]

Like are you at fist?

[Jamie Loftus]

Paw thumper? A woohooer?

[Tay Zonday]

A hand clapper?

[Jamie Loftus]

A high fiver?

[Tay Zonday]

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[Jamie Loftus]

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[Tay Zonday]

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[Jamie Loftus]

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[Tay Zonday]

Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide and every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn [e-mail] credit card Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, Dietz and Watson's been making meats and cheeses the right way since forever. What's that mean? It means never cutting corners. Ever. It means cooking, not processing. It means our Virginia brand ham that's cooked to perfection, then twice baked to layer the flavors. It takes more time, but you can taste the difference.

[Jamie Loftus]

We come to work every day to do it the right way.

[Tay Zonday]

Even if it's the hard way. Because if it's not right for us.

[Jamie Loftus]

It'S not right for you.

[Tay Zonday]

Dietz and Watson It's a family thing.

[Jamie Loftus]

Since 1939, Amazon One Medical presents Painful Thoughts do they ever actually clean the ball pit at these kids play gyms? Or is my kid just swimming in a vat of bacteria catching whatever cootie of the day is breeding in there? A cootie that'll probably take down our whole family. Luckily, with Amazon One Medical 24. 7 virtual care. You can get checked out for whatever ball pit itis you've contracted. Amazon One medical healthcare just got less painful.