Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - haliey welch: how hawk tuah became a household name

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Let's do some discourse on that thang. To start our series on 2024's Main Character Haliey Welch, AKA Hawk Tuah Girl, we're taking a closer look at how a Tennessee twenty-something with no social media and a factory job became a household name in a matter of weeks in 2024. Jamie looks at the culture of TikTok and YouTube man-on-the-street surveillance channels, and tracks where the channel that catapulted Haliey Welch to fame failed to get proper consent, what their business model is, and why Haliey decided to go into business for herself. Next time: the debt TikTok owes to Girls Gone Wild, and why Talk Tuah got more downloads than this podcast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. It's Black Business Month, and Money and Wealth podcast with John Hope Bryant is tapping in. I'm breaking down how to build wealth, create opportunities, and move from surviving to thriving.

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Listen to San Diego FC, Behind the Flow, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcast. Quozo Media. Hello, 16th minute listeners. I hope everyone is doing all right in the midst of the reboot of dystopia,

the reboot of the reboot even. Jamie, just checking in here really quick to remind you that I am going to be doing two tour shows with the Bechtelcast this week, if you're listening the day it comes out. I will be in San Francisco. Francisco on Thursday with the Bechtel cast. We're covering the movie Titanic, so it's going to be very dumb in the best way with discourse also. So if you are in the San Francisco area, please,

please attend. If you're not able to afford it, reach out to me on Instagram and we'll figure something out. If you're not in the San Francisco area, you can also buy live stream tickets to our show this Sunday, which is sold out in Portland, Oregon, and we are covering Shrek. Do I have three tubes of green body paint on the way. Um, yeah, I think I do. So you can buy tickets to live stream that show at the links in the description. And with that, here is the much anticipated Hawk to a series of 16th minute. Dick sucking. Sucking Dick. To put it in the parlance of the terminally online, it's like, no big deal. Like, sucking dick and cock. Like, I'm just like, oh my God. Time and place.

Many have done it, but the ways in which it should be done has been widely contested throughout history. While a lot of surviving texts on fucking from the distant past are bone-chilling, here's something from a Victorian sex guide from 1894. Most men are by nature rather perverted, and if given half a chance, would engage in quite a variety of the most revolting practices. These practices include, among others, performing the normal act in abnormal positions,

mouthing the female body, and offering their own vile bodies to be mouthed in turn. Or this. She will lie perfectly still, never under any circumstances grunt or groan while the act is in progress. But as women's magazines became more popular throughout the 20th century,

how to best suck dick was a frequently discussed topic in compette publications that only occasionally prioritized the pleasure of anyone who wasn't a cis man. Here's something from a vintage issue of Cosmo. A familiar deterrent to female pleasure is the ejaculate itself. What to do with it? Certainly a woman is entitled to have a simple distaste for the smell,

the consistency, or the act of receiving seamen in her mouth, without any complex emotional difficulty being invoked to explain her reluctance. Or the kind of shit I would read in my friend's mom's bathroom in the 2000. At the peak of the sex in the city craze, where the closest thing to erotic I could conceive of as a child was how that girl from the cover of the Animorph's book could turn into a hawk. Here's some advice from that time. Try standing up against a balcony sex. There's a reason this booty style is a staple of every porno flick and X-rated photos spread. Me 11 years old and nodding my head, yeah, all I have to do is find a balcony.

Advice on how to best make something come out of pee-pigrated quickly to the internet, and while it often produced hilarious and even instructive results... So what you're going to do is just suck his dick. That's like you said you were going to do. And no shortage of porn, you'd be hard-pressed to find a mainstream internet character whose identity was tied to this specifically that wouldn't involve, transcending the stigma of admitting that you watch porn online, which I'm sure you've never done.

And I would never. But in the same period of time, advice on how to do things like Sucking Dick and Cock became more publicly acceptable to talk about, a strain of catchphrase comedy continued to morph from medium to medium in popularity. I'm talking...

But what I really would like to know is, what is your opinion on how it's done in FAPA Fooie? Dynomite! Did I do bad? Boy, that's the story of my life. No respect. Tell her no respect. If you take your dog for a walk and you both use the tree at the corner.

You might be a red neck. Get her done. Going all the way back to I Want You with Uncle Sam pointing at you on a recruitment poster, catchphrases have always been a handy, if hacky trick in marketing or propaganda. Or, as the case may be, both. You get the idea. And the internet didn't change that very much, but it's the makings of iconography, or, as the churn of news cycles grows faster, main characters. So now we have catchphrases like, very demure, very mindful.

Leave it alone. Kiss me outside, how about that? While access has unquestionably expanded as the internet has grown more commonplace, making the people who can personally benefit from this style of comedy has expanded. Someone says something funny, and then they expand past that phrase or not. And whether that happens or not isn't always necessarily their fault. Sure, some people just don't have the desire to keep the bit going, reminding me of recent 16th minute episode. But others have a blockage to a larger career hampered by cultural prejudice, bad timing,

or often trusting the wrong people with their newfound clout. But until very recently, these two worlds never combined. Catchphrases made their way from the mainstream to internet culture easily, and so did sucking dick. Just ask the grapefruit lady. But it was only a matter of time that these two combined. But perhaps not before we needed it the most. During a time of unrest, long after the mainstream to internet fame machines like James Corden and Ellen DeGeneres were dismantled for those people being assholes. And even Fallon can't really hack it in this department anymore.

Here he is fighting for his life beside the Rizzler. It looks good? Twizzler for the Rizzler. All right. Let's see. Okay. I'm going to have that two big booms. Boom!

Boom! Okay. No. Sucking Dick and catchphrase comedy's grand integration would bite its time. Until a new economy had reached. for the overnight star, one beyond the basic cable reality show, the lifestyle blog, the ill-fated late-night show. No, no indeed. Sucking Dick and catchphrase comedy would transcend directly from words into a whole new currency. And that phenomenon began on June 10th, 2024,

by one Haley Welch of Belfast, Tennessee. What's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time? Oh, you got to give him that hawk to and spit on that thing. Haley Welch, the Hawk to a Girl. Your 16th minute starts now. I'm not so bad when you turn up in lights, but I can't be perfect all of the time. Don't make me a start, but take it too far. Then give me one moment. minute of fame

60 minute of fame 16 minute of fame 16 minute of fame One more minute of fame Bye I'm not so bad but you can hear my mind You're never try

to say you're so goodbye Welcome back to 16th Minute, the podcast where we take a look at the internet's characters of the day and see how their moment affected them and what their moment says about us and the internet. And this week, I unknowingly bit off a little more than I could chew, something that has certainly never happened before and definitely won't again. But indeed, what began as a lighthearted attempt to profile a young woman from Tennessee who went viral for talking about sucking dick after a bar crawl in Nashville has since become a life-consuming algorithm-shattering operation, one that has overshadowed my own engagement.

I'm dead serious. The morning after we got engaged, I told the man I'm going to marry the love of my life, no, I can't take today off, babe, I need to watch all 12 hours of talk toa. But I did find that while I didn't speak with Haley Welch, for reasons that will become obvious, but in short, she's still haunted by a black cloud of potential legal action and an uncertain future. I realize that I can't even guarantee that her 15 minutes of fame are up. But there's no doubt that she was the main character of the internet in 2024, and I haven't really seen anyone else try to take a closer look at how this fame developed. Because while there's no shortage of media about Haley, I haven't found anything that's

comprehensive or doesn't seem to have an explicit agenda of either lifting her up for personal profit or ironically pushing her down because it's easy. And the more I learned about Haley, the more I found that she's not just very human, but she's a fascinating case study for the specific exploitations and scams that a vulnerable subject is going to be tempted by and, when not surrounded by the right people, can be talked to it into doing some pretty bad stuff. This multi-part series is going to be a look at this saga, about a 22-year-old growing up in an unstable environment in the deep south during a time where American culture grew increasingly polarized, politicized, divided by class, and completely online. And even though I haven't

personally talked to Haley, in the six months or so of her hyper-relevance, she did a lot of interviews, both in the mainstream, in centered-to-write media outlets, and on her own social media accounts, from Instagram to X, which she calls it, so I will too, Snapchat, TikTok, and her own podcast, which at one point was much more successful than this one. Talk toa on the better network, otherwise known as the media arm of a Jake Paul-led sports gambling company. And so at many points in this episode, I'm going to let Haley weigh in, because I'll say it, I'm a bit of a completionist. And I believe I am the first. and only person to have watched every single second of Talk Tua.

When the hell did you have Bobby Lee on the podcast? What? That's Ken John. Hey, it was far away in my podcast. Is that Photoshop? I don't know. Did you have him on your podcast? Oh, I don't think.

Do you know who that is? I don't know who he is. Who is that? He's the leader of North Korea. Yeah. I know he was something named. Oh, and I actually done a Zoom in North Korea a few weeks ago. Huh.

It is unquestionably been a wild year for Haley. This time last year, she was working at a factory in her hometown, and right now, it's still a popular question of whether she's going to be brought to court or becoming the face of a pretty egregious crypto scam. I have questions. I have questions. I'm raising my hand. Hey, guys.

What copy, Zilla? Hey, this is one of the most miserable, horrible launches I've ever seen in my life. Okay, then why the fuck are you on? But to begin, if I may get on Jamie's Little Soapbox. While it would be easy to take this opportunity to dunk on Haley, and I'm not even saying people haven't done that in a funny way they definitely have, this is a more complicated story than we're giving it credit for. And I figure if I'm showing empathy to X-in-cells on this show,

I feel like it's my responsibility to try and understand where she's coming from. Because in one sense, it would be infantilizing of me to suggest that Haley has no idea what she's doing, that she isn't aware that she is participating as the face of a crypto scam is at least risky, if not outright wrong, but I also know that it's a cultural tendency to take a young woman who fits a number of stereotypes

and push the entirety of an illegal scam onto a person who at this time last year was in a working class job and had never been on a plane before. So for this series, I will need you to join me and having more than one thing be true. Haley is an adult, and she's young, vulnerable, and navigating a completely new environment

full of people with a vested interest in misrepresenting things for personal profit. Something that becomes clear if you take the time to listen to, not just what Haley says, but to how others speak to and represent her. I have no idea what is going to happen with Haley and this crypto fallout.

I have no idea if, like many are speculating, and is very common in crypto scams. She completely gets off the hook for this. Maybe she'll want to continue to try to maintain this fame, or maybe the whole thing will have been traumatic enough that she'll want out. It seems like she and I have considerably different politics, very different stances on big stuff like AI and fucking Elon Musk and NFTs. You name it.

I think she's pushed some pretty noxious shit. But I don't think that she is the puppet master here. She's the face, and thinking the problem is solved by making her disappear doesn't accomplish anything, regardless of what you think about her. Everyone who empowered this kind of scam will do it again. And if Haley's association with the Paul brothers is any indicator, people who have been put through the same ringer she has are all too happy to do it to someone else if there's money in it for them.

The threshold for mockery and failure is so low. And honestly, this might even be the parasocial relationship that I have forged with Haley from watching 12 hours of Talk Tua and a bunch of other interviews from some of the most successful and boring podcasts ever committed to the form. Like, hearing Whitney Cummings say this at the end of the pilot of Talk Tua made me want to blow my head off. This is what a podcast is. I always leave a podcast being like, was that anything? But like, it's just a normal conversation. two people kicking it. But that's the internet, right?

No one has the time or the desire to get to know a person. And that's fine, you've got a life, but that you'd still make the time to tear down a stranger as a sign of the end times without interrogating why you even know she exists. While there's a million end time reasons that that is, whether it's surveillance TikTok channels, hanging outside bars and hoping to find drunk girls

to exploit for man on the street content, whether it's the algorithms trained to boost that content which makes more of it, whether it's opportunistic talent agencies who see dollar signs in a person like Haley and have little to no interest in the safety of their clients because the agents and the internet understand them to be disposable. I digress. We're going to try to see Haley Welch as a person. Someone who grew up with not very much in suburban Tennessee,

who is funny and wanted to cap them. on this moment, but I think is unquestionably in over her head. She's someone who, if nothing else, has become convinced that grifting is one of the only ways to get out of the class you were born into in America. So let's see what we can piece together here. Return with me, if you dare, to June 24. June 11, 2024. Hunter Biden is convicted on three felony counts, of possession while under the influence of narcotics in Delaware. A crashed aircraft in Malawi is discovered after a plane goes missing, finding all passengers dead.

And a YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok channel called Tim NDTV posted a video with a pretty drunk 21-year-old Haley Welch on Broadway Street in Nashville after she and her friends went to CMA Fest a few nights before. The longest version of this interview is on YouTube, where the two. Two hosts, Diarius Marlowe and Tim Dickerson, ask all manner of drunk girls the same question they do to Haley. Here are some examples. What's one move in the bedroom that makes a man go crazy? Backshot. Any.

Any. It happened. Any. You just got it like that. Whatever move you got. I got a question for you. What's one move in the bedroom that I make a man go crazy? No, what I do is what I sit on the and I spin around with it's still inside. Oh, my gosh. And Haley wasn't even alone in giving the sage advice to never give a dry blowjob. There's not a specific movie, you just got to have a good...

You got to spit on it and make it win. You got to spit on that thing. Come on now. I ain't got a toll for no reason, okay? But late in this video, enter Haley Welch and Chelsea Bradford, friends who are interviewed together. And if you're listening to this episode, I'm assuming you've seen this clip. But just in case, Haley is a white girl with blonde hair. wearing a black dress and a prodda necklace and is standing with her best friend Chelsea, who would go on to become a big part of her personal brand.

Darius Marlowe, at Black Man in his mid-20s, is doing the interview wearing a red hoodie and is visibly more sober than every woman that appears in the video. And the interview honestly starts kind of boring. How do you get over a breakup? Get smoke as a fuck like we're doing right now. Y'all get over a breakup right now? The only way to get over a breakup. Number one is get under another.

Amen. So you got a side piece? Maybe. Maybe I got three. Maybe I got seven. How many is on your roster? There's only one not won't, but until he's serious, I'm a boo-uh. So how many you got on your roster right now?

Maybe four. One, just at one. How many of you got on your roster? None. You're trying to add one to it? Add one? Yeah, you're trying to add one more to it? And that's me?

Maybe, I don't know. So I can get your number? Yeah, you can. Okay. There you go. You got it? Wow, these guys are really cool, smooth operators and so forth. I really think it takes a man with Riz oozing out of his pores to need to buy an entire camera

set up and wait across the street from bars in order to get a woman to give him her phone number under duress. These guys pissed me off. The interview continues for a while. mostly with Chelsea explaining what her type is, while Haley tries to flag down their other friends from across the street, where it seems like a different man is bothering them. I can't. Then Haley rejoins the conversation. Leave a message to your last body.

I love you, pookie, forever. They must be doing the right thing. What can I say? Okay. Been the car whips off this day. Haley then walks off to go help her friends get out of the situation with the other guy, while Chelsea drunkenly flirts with the host. Then Haley comes back, and the host asks for a 360 of their bodies,

which they do not seem comfortable with, and this goes on for a while. Chelsea asks the host for a dirtier question, and Diarius pulls out one he's already asked. This is where we get the moment. What's one move in bed that I make a man going to? crazy every time one what's one move in bed that make that makes a man go crazy every time that you do that i do yeah that makes a man go crazy every time does not reply in bed hey let me this is for her what you got to answer this you got it what's one move in bed that

makes a man go crazy every time oh you got to give him that huck to and spit on that thing you I don't get you. I think you got to demonstrate. Hock, dudes. Fit on it. If I see you. All right, anymore. Oh, yeah.

But just for Haley's future defense, because she's not the one who asked for this question, let's hear that last word from her again. If I see you about for you for age of all, yeah. If I see this on my for you page, I'm going to cry. The interview continues, even though at this point, Haley is fully facing the other way and barely engaging, trying to keep an eye on her friends. It ends in the video with Tim and Dee, including Chelsea, saying, Okay.

Post it for all right. Grace the camera. She said we better post it. From what I can gather and what these gibronies describe as their process, in a later video they post called the hawk truth, fuck me, there was not a formal agreement signed between Tim and D's subject and themselves. And again, how is one able to consent to appear on someone's YouTube channel while they're really drunk? These guys are not journalists. They're using people for entertainment. But there are a lot of layers here. Tim and D are black social media personalities. And there's

a demonstrable history in any pop culture of white people taking and profiting from work pioneered and explicitly created by black artists without ever properly crediting them. We've talked about it on this show before, whether it's stealing Jalea Harmon's renegade dance and turning Addison Ray and Charlie D'emillo to white girls into the famous ones associated with it. We've talked about the unlicensed use and profiting off of Kevin Dodson's, Hide Your Kid, Hide Your Kid, Hide. your wife local news appearance. The list goes on and on. And so when I first heard that Tim and D were frustrated that they were not credited as Haley Welch's jumping off point platform, I wanted to hear them out. Because it is true that when the Hock Tua meme, and by that I mean just this

very short version of the interview. What's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time? Oh, you got to give him that Hock Tuh and spit on that thing. You get me? I'm not. I'm I'm trying to get to see what that'd be like, right there. Look, being that giant, that's that. Went turbo-viral. A lot of people did scrub Tim and D's watermark from the video as it went viral. And Tim and D claimed that they filed a number of copyright claims. But, but my thing is, if your business model is lurking outside bars to see if women will talk to you

so you can both profit from their likeness and try to get their phone number. numbers, which these men do all the time in their videos. So how many kids are you on, Carolina? I'd like two or three children. I'm looking for two or three children. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. Should we get married then?

We should. We should. We should. I'm already in your heart, baby. I can tell you like me. I don't care about your watermark, right? Let's put a pin in that. Whether the fellows are watermarked or not, this mysterious blonde from Tennessee was an instant viral and mainstream hit. We all know, right? Genius is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not.

It's Black Business Month and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in. I'm Will Lucas spotlighting Black founders, investors, and innovators, building the future, one idea at a time. Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth. I don't think any person of any gender, race, ethnicity should alter who they are, especially on an intellectual level or a talent level to make someone else feel comfortable just because they are the majority in this situation and they need employment. So for me, I'm always going to be honest in saying that we need to be unapologetically ourselves. If that makes me a vocal CEO and people consider that rocking the boat, so be it.

To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In sitcoms, when someone has a problem, they just blurt it out and move on. Well, I lost my job and my parakeet is missing. How is your day? But the real world is different. Managing life's challenges can be overwhelming. So, what do we do?

We get support. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have mental health resources available for you at loveyourmindtay.org. That's loveyourmindtay.org. See how much further you can go when you take care of your mental health. Hello, puzzlers. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land? Jeopardy-truthers who say that you were given all the answers believe in...

I guess they would be Kenspiracy theorists. That's right. Are there Jeopardy-truthers? Are there people who say that it... It was rigged. Yeah, ever since I was first on, people are like, they gave you the answers, right? And then there's the other ones which are like. They gave you the answers, and you still blew it.

Don't miss Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings on our special game show week of the Puzzler podcast. The Puzzler is the best place to get your daily word puzzle fix. Listen on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the Movie Pass era? Where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9?

It made zero cents and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech podcast, there are no girls on the internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines. Like the visionary behind a movie pass, Black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of Movie Pass the company that he founded. His story is wild and it's currently the subject.

subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe's shirt, they're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a Black founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me,

and they're not going to describe someone who looks like you. I created there are no girls on the internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to there are no girls on the internet on the IHirt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You're getting your podcasts. Hawk Tua goes mainstream in a way that few memes do nowadays. It's impressive.

And while it's true that Haley fits the bill for a viral star willing to engage for all the biased algorithmic reasons, it's still unusual for something. to break through this significantly in 2024. But during that first week, she didn't come forward and claim the clip as her own. And her friend Chelsea, who apparently encouraged Haley to talk to Tim and D on the street in the first place, felt massively guilty about it. This is from episode two of Talk Tua, recorded on Haley and her granny's front porch in Belfast, Tennessee.

It was rough. I literally locked myself in that bedroom for like two weeks. I went to work and then I'd come straight home. I wouldn't even go to the store and get gas. I was like, everybody in their mom knows me around here. I was like, I can't do it. They're going to like, was that a Mexican, though? Yeah, dressed in hats and hoodies.

So I don't know how the releases with these kinds of videos work. And again, question the ethical nature of convincing a drunk person to sign a release if they even do that. But based on Haley's reaction, which is consistent in other interviews, it is clear that no one from Tim and D's team were following up with her to make her. to make sure that she was comfortable with her drunken likeness being posted across platforms for anyone to see. Haley wouldn't offer up her own identity until July 1st, when she hard-launched her media personality and brand

after a two-punch appearance. On June 29th, she appeared at country star Zach Bryan's concert in Nashville on stage. And then, on July 1st, She formally launched her official social media presence, which nuked any impostors who had intentionally or mistakenly been identified as Hawk to a girl. So much had happened in the massive scramble to capitalize on a meme that its subject hadn't yet claimed in those interceding weeks. Writer Max Reed clocked the classics. Someone got the obligatory Hawk to a tattoo.

There was custom truck vinyl. And there was a slew of false rumors about who Haley really was. Since Busted Myths play on what are now popular narratives surrounding the overnight internet sensation, one claimed that she was a preschool teacher who had lost her job over the video being posted. Another falsely said she was a local bartender. Others falsely said she had signed with UTA.

But the first few days of July are critical for Haley. First, she posts the clip of her at Zach Bryan, launching a new Instagram account that quickly garnered overrunnered over. a million followers, as well as an official TikTok account. In the coming months, she would expand to X and Snapchat as well. And there's also Haley's first podcast appearance on the Plan Brie Uncut podcast hosted by Brianna LaPaglia, who was, at the time, country star Zach Bryan's girlfriend. And if you're 22, you know that's no longer true. If you don't know that,

it's outside of the scope of this show. What is within the scope of this show is that Planned Brie Uncut and LaPaglia herself are linked with Barstool Sports Podcasts, which at the time was a clear indication to me that Haley Welch was never going to answer my DM. Anyways, this is Haley's real release into the world as a media personality, and it's a pretty successful launch as a controlled introduction of her. She discusses the weirdness of the last three weeks of her life to Brianna in a really relatable way.

All right, guys, welcome back to another episode of Planned Bree Uncut. I have someone that was harder to track down than Osama bin Laden. We have the hook to a girl. Haley here. Oh my gosh, thank you so much. This is your first podcast ever, first, anything ever. Yes, ma'am. Oh, my gosh.

How do you feel? Are you nervous? I'm a little nervous. She was scared coming in, but she wanted to come on a podcast that was with a woman first. So I'm like so grateful it was me and that you chose to come on this one. Yes, ma'am. This is something that comes up with Haley again. again that I found pretty endearing and relatable, she's more comfortable around women and

generally trusts them more. Good rule of thumb, if you ask me. And also, she and La Paglia don't miss the opportunity to talk about why this clip happened in the first place and how Haley felt about Tim and D. He only told us he was a YouTuber. He never said anything like about, you know, Instagram, TikTok, nothing those sorts. I was like, oh, well, I'm never going to see this again. Sure enough, I saved it again. And the next day, July 2nd, it's announced that Haley now has professional representation with a management company called The Penthouse and got a write-up in the Hollywood Reporter. It's possible she went with this company because they had offices in both Los Angeles and Nashville,

which is an hour from where Haley lives. From the article. The world's gone crazy for Haley. I'm glad our team can help guide this rocket ship. All the podcasters are right. Spend five minutes with her, and you'll see why she is America's sweetheart. The penthouse founder, Johnny Forster, said in a statement. The announcement included a hint that she'd be launching more social media endeavors soon,

and it also retained an attorney, Nashville's Christian Barker, who had the following to say. Haley has risen to fame with her cheeky humor, known to her friends as the female Theo Vaughn, but after getting to know her on a greater level, I think her small town grassroots story and how a chance to encounter on Broadway took her on this unexpected path to start them

will resonate with millions. We are proud to represent her on this journey. Then on July 3rd, Haley posted a video to Instagram about the three best and worst parts of going viral, revealing both that she'd quit her day job at the end of June, that paparazzi had been outside of her home for weeks, and she ends on this point. And by the way, there's one more thing that's really pissing me off.

Any of you selling or purchasing merchandise online, it's not from me. It's not approved by me, and it's counterfeit, and I'm not making a damn dime off of any of it. But I just hired a manager, and I hired an attorney, so we're coming for you, but don't worry, I'm launching my merch store very soon, and you'll be the first to note to get your official pop-to-up merch. From me. And here's where Tim and D come back in, because while there was no shortage of unlicensed Hock-Tua merch making the rounds by this time, you might remember a popular design was Hawk Tua 2024, which is a teaser for how obnoxiously politicized viral moments become during

election years. What's important, though, is that Tim and D TV were also monetizing Haley's image. So we'll return to the life and times of an increasingly. increasingly chaotic year for Haley Welch in just a moment. But first, when we come back, Tim and D try to get theirs. We all know, right? Genius is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not.

It's Black Business Month and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in. I'm Will Lucas spotlighting Black founders, investors and innovators, building the future one idea at a time. Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth. I don't think any person of any gender, race, ethnicity should alter who they are, especially on an intellectual level or a talent level, to make someone else feel comfortable just because they are the majority in this situation, and they need employment.

So for me, I'm always going to be honest in saying that we need to be unapologetically ourselves. If that makes me a vocal CEO, and people consider that rocking the boat, so be it. To hear this and more on the power of black innovation, the ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I always had to be so good, no one could ignore me. Carve my path with data and drive. But some people only see who I am on paper.

The paper ceiling. The limitations from degree screens to stereotypes that are holding back over 70 million stars. Workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree. It's time for skills to speak for themselves. Find resources for breaking through barriers at tetherpapersealing.org, brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council. Hello, puzzlers. Let's start with a quick puzzle.

The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, What is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land? Jeopardy Truthers, who say that you are given all the answers, believe in? I guess they would be conspiracy theorists. That's right.

Are there Jeopardy Truthers? Are there people who say that it was rigged? Yeah, ever since I was first on, people are like, they gave you the answers, right? And then there's the other ones which are like,

they gave you the answers and you still blew it. Don't miss Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings on our special game show week of the Puzzler podcast. The Puzzler is the best place to get your daily word puzzle

fix, listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the movie pass era, where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9? It made zero cents, and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech podcast, there are no girls on the internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines, like the visionary behind. Behind a movie pass, Black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of movie pass the company that he founded.

His story is wild, and it's currently the subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans. They're wearing Kobe's shirt. They're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a black founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a text is. founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me and they're not going to

describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the Internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. episode of this show. And we're back with the life and times of Haley Welch, aka the Hawk to a girl. By early July, Haley had ostensibly made the decision to capitalize on a viral moment that had left her housebound for well over a week earlier that month, a decision that frustrated the man on the street YouTube channel who had originally posted the clip, Tim and D. TV. So we're going to go on a little side quest because two of the issues that Haley Welch singled out, when going public as hawk to a girl in early July

was her annoyance at being posted at a time she was drunk and others capitalizing on her by printing merch that she was not involved in. Tim and Dee did both of these things and had more success than you might think complaining that Haley didn't give them enough credit for, and I repeat, posting a video of her very drunk online saying something funny without giving her compensation

or checking in for her permission. The two did post their own Hock Tua merch on their merch store, even using Haley's image on them. And their defense at having done so is incredibly weak. I was able to find that by the end of June, Tim and D were in fact selling Hock to a merch, and here is their self-posted defense in their video, The Hawk Truth, for doing so, riffing off of an early interview with Haley. Like selling, like if you were selling merch, right, which you are, I'm saying that would annoy me. I think if other people were selling it, right?

So she was with your face on it. That was one thing I found pretty interesting. Yeah, like the guys to interview us. Yeah. Nah. Nah. No neck jane. Yeah.

Uh. Uh. Uh. But to get into that merch, man. We was one of the last ones to come out with merch. Second, that shit went viral. Everybody on TikTok shop going crazy, bro. We only had our merch up for like a week.

No more than two weeks. We ended our, started our shit on like June 23rd. End that bitch on like July 8th. You know what I'm trying to kiss the wave. Like, we was just trying to be apart. And the merch was just a promotional thing for the video. So their argument is, as many others would become, well, we wanted to get in on it because it's our video.

And besides, it was only up for a few weeks. The fact that Tim and D can make money on this business model at all is ridiculous to me. But they were really trying to make money off of this. Look, man, hey, we just dropped our official merch. Link would be in description. Tim and DTV.com, we got the best out, best quality, best price, best everything. Y'all go copy it, link in the description, best out, subscribe for most.

Road to a hundred k. And so on July 3rd, 2024, the same day that Haley expressed her frustration at others profiting from her likeness, Tim and D got a spotlight in the motherfucking New York Times. The guys behind Hawk to a girl would like a little credit. At the end of the day, nobody would know who she was if we didn't bring it to light and post it, Mr. Marlowe said. A lot of the audience who hadn't seen us before think we grew off this one clip. People were treating it like we are nobody's and didn't already have a platform. I'm not going to check who wrote it, but this is a straight up bad article.

The writer behind this piece could not be bothered to watch the full interview, which was available on Tim and D's YouTube channel over a week before the day of publication. in which many of the guys' statements in the New York Times piece can be disproved on their own YouTube channel. From the article. Eventually, they recalled, Miss Welch encouraged Mr. Marlow to, quote, spice up the questions, end quote. Mr. Marlowe complied, asking, what's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time,

the prompt that catapulted Miss Welch into internet fame? But not only was this a question they had asked virtually every other one, woman they spoke to that night, it was not Haley Welch who asked for a spicier question. That was Chelsea Bradford, as their own video demonstrates. Come on, you got to get a spicy one. You want a spicy one? Yeah. What's one moving, bet, that make a mango...

But more to the point, the New York Times does not bring up the question of consent here. You know, the paper of record that didn't report on Israeli war crimes, that New York Times. The article continues to lay out the plight of the gun. guys. Soon, they said, they began to hear from bigger fish in the media pond, complex, barstool sports, only fans. To the pair's disappointment, though, these inquiries were only to find out how to get in touch with Miss Welch, who had become the subject of a firehose of online rumors about her job and the fallout from her viral moment. Miss Welch debunked many of them in an interview with Brianna LaPaglia of Barstool Sports. Such is life in the viral content mill.

YouTube rehash of what happened between them, Haley, and Chelsea, they share screenshots of a number of DMs, mainly with Chelsea in the days that followed their original video that reveals a number of things. First, that Chelsea had reached out to them four days after the video was first posted, saying that she had been blocked by them on TikTok and just wanted to see what was said in the video. She messages them on June 15th. Not sure why you blocked me on TikTok when you literally have a video of me posted on there? I don't even care about it anymore. I just want to see what you're posting.

I'm terrified I said some shit that I don't remember and I know you're going to post it regardless, so just unblock me. Cry emoji. The guys reply, Potential opportunity for her or both, if you're interested. In their verbal explanation

of why they did this is the following. We're going to come up to her? I don't think that's how that happened. No, that's not how that happened. She most definitely walked across the street. Across the street. We were minding our business. It was at the end of the night.

I had the camera in my hand. We were looking at clips. We was like, man, do we have enough? Yeah. It was like, what? Two. Late as hell. And they came around, seeing the camera,

and try to see what's up. Hold on. He didn't want to tell them the rare reason why they came up. Yeah, yeah. We're going to get to that. We're going to get to that. We're going to get to that. Hey, I think he posted the full video on YouTube this past Sunday.

But he only told us he was a YouTuber. He never said anything like about, you know, Instagram, TikTok, nothing those sorts. So I was like, oh, well, I'm never going to see this again. So just so y'all know, before anybody is in a video, we let them know, yes, it's for YouTube. Y'all subscribe. We are YouTubers. But we tell them it's Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, all that. That's exactly what we say.

I mean, for every platform. If it's going on YouTube, wouldn't you expect it to go on every other platform? It's going on social media. We show everybody, Instagram is our biggest platform, because that has the most following, most engagement, the most views. So we show the Instagram and we show the Reels tab as you can pop up the clip that we're literally showing them and telling them our Instagram handled. But Haley and Chelsea didn't agree to the video, something that becomes clear. Tim and D make straw man arguments that contradict each other frequently. If the girls didn't want the video up, they should have reached out to the guys.

But when Chelsea did reach out to them, for some reason, it's too late. And besides, on TikTok, they didn't follow the girls, so they never saw the message, making Tim and D blameless for not knowing that Haley or Chelsea had wanted the video down for days, much less have the men profit from it. They claim if the girls had reached out before the next morning, truly 12 hours later, when they posted the clip, they would have agreed to blur the girls' faces. But that seems unlikely as I couldn't find an example of them ever having done that across their content. Tim and Dee also said that they offered Haley money.

In the video, they say they offered $10,000, allegedly. But the screenshots they share don't seem to back this up. From what I could see, the screenshots they share while they're making that claim, are only offering to include the girls Venmo handles on screen if they agreed to make another video with Tim and D. sharing that outlets like Complex and Playboy had reached out to them asking for more collaborative content. And supposing they did offer that $10,000, it was long after the video had blown up. This whole situation is just like a mess in the way that people in their early 20s are a mess. I'm not saying there wasn't mutual mess involved.

Another thing I learned was that Haley had admitted to contacting Tim and G's channel from a burner account she'd created, requesting that the video be taken down because she was embarrassed. And when the pair released merch from Haley's face on it, Chelsea did ask them for a free t-shirt. But ultimately, for me, these actions absolutely pale in comparison to the perceived entitlement that Tim and Dee and content creators like them have when it comes to people whose formal permission they don't have to exploit. I'm sorry, these guys are losers. Because for every fake show of support they show for Haley. You know what I'm saying? We were supporting them.

As we said in our New York Times article, there was the first people to interview us. We said we want the best for them. And even though they was doing all the podcast, talking shit, we didn't feel bitter about anything. You know what I'm saying? Because at the end of the day, it was almost like she was our child, our baby.

Like, she came from our... She came from us. You know what I'm saying? What? It's met moments later with dismissal and mockery. Well, they might argue that you're making money off of it. Oh, but what about that video they first posted when all this shit started? I didn't get any money off of that. Yeah.

So I can suck my left lip. Yeah, you should definitely. Oh. Oh. The disrespect is real around here. Your left look. The left lip. Oh.

What happened to the right one? In the screenshots they share, Chelsea is having these conversations with the guys prior to early July when Haley got representation, not Haley herself. And Chelsea is replying. playing pretty civilly to them. The only perceived mistake she makes is wanting the shirt they made of the viral moment. When they were asked to collaborate with Tim and Dee in exchange for a small bit of the revenue on merch that was already live, Chelsea responds to them on June 22nd. She'll be capitalizing on it herself. Playboy got a hold of me already, and I've read her everything you said, and she don't want y'all benefiting from it because of how y'all did her

before it got as big as it did. If she asked you right now, to post the whole interview, you would anyway. And based on the fact that these guys didn't get consent in any formal way and were belligerent and evasive when confronted, I don't think Chelsea is out of line here, nor was it unwise for Haley to retain her own representation. Because, well, yes, it is super silly for hawk to a girl to have professional reps in some ways. It's been completely obscured that this fame was something that happened when she was very drunk at the suggestion of her friend that was posted without any sober or written consent and the moment initially mortified

and embarrassed her. So after a period where her identity was being claimed by others and paparazzi had found her family's home in Belfast, she found an attorney and a manager in her area. And this is another thing that has come up on our show multiple times. Both Kevin Dodson and Tessica Brown, the Gorilla Glue Girl, quickly retained representation after their viral moments, Not just to reclaim and clarify their image, but to protect them from an entertainment world that they didn't have experience in and hadn't really signed up for. I would put Haley Welch firmly in this category. Although, of course, by July 2nd, people were already tiring of the meme.

Yeah, most of the responses are classic. Hawk to a girl, oh my God, society is freaking cooked. This has happened since time immemorial, and anyone who says, it is cordy as fuck, especially if you follow it up by saying, Anne the Simpsons predicted it. Shut the fuck up. The only contact I've seen Haley ever make with Tim and Dee following this story was an Instagram DM following the launch of her podcast TalkToa in September of

2024, a DM which the guys admit they never replied to because they didn't know if they were okay with her offering them exactly what they asked for. attention and an appearance on her popular podcast after saying she wasn't comfortable with how she became famous. Yeah, and I was like, that was the only part of the conversation that was funny. He keeps dropping more videos as like the weeks go on and I'm like, no, you called me after he dropped the next one and you were like, Chelsea, this is bad. You were like bawling your eyes out and I was like, fuck. So I left work real quick and I was like, I'm coming over and I came over and we didn't leave the house for a minute. He dropped that second one. Which one was it? Which one?

One was the second, was what I love you, Pookie, or the cobwebs? The cobwebs. That's the one you were the most worried about. So this begs the question, what do Tim and Dee want? You'd think that if the two really thought they had a shot at the rights to the catchphrase or to Haley's likeness, they would be after the management team that appears to have advised Haley to cut them off, but they are clearly upset with her specifically. When I was talking to her, I was giving her the Instagram.

They know it's for you two. You go to Instagram, like, I mean, it's just comments. And at the time, we had, around what, 92K? They knew what they were getting into. We showed, yeah, we had, you know, proof to show that, hey, man, this can go viral. You're not just, we're not no Joe Smow's out here doing this for fun. It was out of our control. So we just thought, hey, we might as well give credit where credit is due.

Like, it's them. You know what I'm saying? We were trying to give them that, you know what I'm saying? They wanted the fame. That's why they got in the video. They wanted the clout, they got the cloud. The cynical answer is, I think, that it's Haley's name that's relevant. And ripping on her is likely to get more views.

And if that's the logic, they were totally right about that. The Hawk Truth is Tim and Dee's second most successful YouTube video ever, right after the original Hawk toa video. So after I'd gone through all of this, I was trying to get to the bottom of why exactly did Tim and Dee feel that they were entitled to Haley's success other than the fact that they posted the video because ethically, I don't think they have a case whatsoever,

which is probably why they're pleading that case doesn't seem to have yielded very much. But why do they think they're entitled to this success? And why was Haley's attempt to reclaim her own likeness so upsetting to them when they were passively benefiting from something that she said? Probably because the people whose media they're modeling theirs on

didn't usually have those problems. So for the moment, we're going to leave Haley Welch in early July, right when she hard-launched herself as a media personality, who very much intended to lean into her 15 minutes, and we're going to take a look at the exploitative media environment she was born from. This Thursday, we talked to special guest Courtney Kocheck and trace the origins of confronting drunk women on the street for personal profit.

That's Thursday on 16th minute. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and IHeart Radio. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. Voice acting is from Grant Crater. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson,

my cats flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird. We'll outlive us all. Bye. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you.

Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. you get in your podcast. It's Black Business Month, and Money and Wealth Podcast with John Hope Bryant is tapping in. I'm breaking down how to build wealth, create opportunities, and move from surviving to thriving. It's time to talk about ownership, equity,

and everything in between. Black and brown communities have historically been last in life. Let me just say this. AI is moving faster than civil rights legislation ever did. Listen to Money and Wealth from the Black Effect podcast, Network on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA.

Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Check out Behind the Flow, a podcast documentary series following the launch of San Diego Football Club. San Diego coming to MLS is going to be a game changer because this region has been hungry for a men's professional soccer team. We need to embrace this community. Listen to San Diego FC, behind the flow. on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.