In part two of our Tay Zonday series, Adam Bahner gets into his political awakening, and how it affected his relationship to his family, his creative work, and himself. Wanna get radicalized? Wanna get radicalized AGAIN? This is the episode for you.

Follow Tay Zonday here: https://www.instagram.com/tayzonday/

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There are few internet videos more iconic than Tay Zonday’s ‘Chocolate Rain,’ but it took over a decade for the song to be recognized for the politically charged ballad it is. How did we miss it? In part one of our Tay Zonday series, Jamie gets into the history of political music, the naïveté of the early Internet and the ‘post racial Internet,’ and Tay shares more about how he grew up and into one of the most misunderstood cultural figures of his generation.

VOTE FOR WE THE UNHOUSED IN THE WEBBYS BEFORE 4/17!

Webby Awards People’s Voice

Follow Tay Zonday: https://www.instagram.com/tayzonday

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After eight long years of research, Dr. Ally Louks posted to Twitter about completing her Ph. D : "Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose." The Elon-fueled right-wing internet freaked out. In an exclusive interview, Jamie speaks with Dr. Louks about the experience of reclaiming the narrative around a nasty online backlash to better educate anti-intellectuals on the sense we ignore the most.

Follow Dr. Ally here: https://x.com/DrAllyLouks

Read Dr. Ally's original thread here: https://x.com/DrAllyLouks/status/1861872149373297078?lang=en

vote for "we the unhoused" for a webby before april 17th!: https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2025/podcasts/shows/public-service-activism

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Where do you go from pivoting your brand to nihilism? Horny, my friends. WILDLY horny. In our final installment of the Sentient Horny Brand series, Jamie speaks to the mind behind Duolingo’s chaotic, wildly horny social media presence Zaria Parvez. Remember when you couldn’t get the owl giving birth to sponges off your feed? Remember when you didn’t even WANT to? That was her, and getting there was a wild ride.
We talk about her journey from nearly taking down a Christian school to changing the way that Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumes advertising, one shitpost at a time.

Follow Zaria here:
https://www.instagram.com/zariaparvez

Join us on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SixteenthMinute/

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Picture this: it's 2020, you're clinging to sanity, and a frozen steak your mom used to eat after school called SteakUmm is now tweeting in the hopes of turning you into a socialist. But... what? Can one be radicalized by hot dog grade meat? Is what's being sold here an idea or microwaveable meat slop? In our penultimate installment of the Sentient Brands series, Jamie gets into the weeds with the mind behind the SteakUmm account, writer and social media director Nathan Allebach. Spoiler alert: we do, indeed, live in a society.

Follow Nathan here: https://beacons.ai/nathanallebach?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaaw8UJ_ctC-xxP2HrkYDPA5-9p2LBtn_w_NQsXsZhvZeBBYwiEzyZ6LooY_aem_Dm_8G9fFWhqyK0YAyD1JzQ

Read Nathan's history of sentient brands: https://www.vulture.com/2019/06/brand-twitter-jokes-history.html

Follow Yedoye Travis: https://www.instagram.com/yedoye_/?hl=en

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In part two of our 'Sentient Brands on Social Media' series, Jamie speaks to the GOAT of online joke writing -- the great Amy Brown, who defined the Wendy's brand on Twitter, then got radicalized and left Twitter in a blaze of bullying Elon Musk. We take a look at the brief moment where getting replied to by a cheeseburger could get you on the national news, and take a look at how a girl from Ohio goes from "Amy from Myspace" at the mall to a generation-defining social voice. Next week: nihilism and piss!

Follow Amy here: https://bsky.app/profile/amybrown.xyz

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In part one of our ‘Sentient Brands on Social Media’ series, Jamie speaks with Serenity Discko, the original media writer behind the teenage edgelord Denny’s Tumblr account. But worry not, we go DEEP — Jamie sets the stage by tracing back our history of parasocial relationships with brands all the way back to World War I. Buckle in, the brands are getting angry, the brands are getting horny, and the brands want to be your best friend.

Follow Serenity’s work here: Serenity Discko

Watch The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis: https://youtu.be/eJ3RzGoQC4s?si=_eHsM0hadnUQA3Cr

Read The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-attention-merchants-the-epic-scramble-to-get-inside-our-heads-tim-wu/8632123

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This week, Jamie talks with Adam Aleksik aka The Etymology Nerd about how relying on algorithms to communicate is changing the way we talk and scream at each other, and the inevitability that your nephew is going to grow up to say "seggs" without a shred of irony.

Learn more about Adam's work here: https://www.etymologynerd.com/

Pre-order Algospeak: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/468266/algospeak-by-aleksic-adam/9781529949148

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