Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - why the SEC ignored the hawk tuah scam feat. john reed stark

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

We all know that Haliey "Hawk Tuah" Welch was the face of a memecoin crypto scandal, and most know that the SEC excused it wholesale. What we don't fully know is why it was so easy to get away with it -- in our grand Hawk Tuah finale, Jamie speaks with former SEC enforcement attorney John Reed Stark about how the state of cryptocurrency can do more than sink a fledgling influencer's career, it can tank a whole economy.  Follow John Reed Stark's work here: https://www.johnreedstark.com/ Come see Jamie on tour for Raw Dog starting next week! https://us.macmillan.com/tours/jamie-loftus-raw-dog/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaf-I3pdBDpG51TvRPCIfkS08847rolEcVNOqDZCUX8Hq9t9sZlX9idj_DI9NQ_aem_niy1HGU3U4vldbC-KP7JsA BEFORE MAY 9TH, send a voice memo of your experience being the main character to: [e-mail] for your chance to be on an upcoming episode of SIxteenth Minute!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, the same it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole. The unwanted sorority is where black women, fims, and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leah Tretate. Listen to the unwanted

sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CoolZone Media. Hey everyone, Jamie here with two notes at the top of this week's episode. First, I am going on my book tour across the U.S. to celebrate the paperback release of my book, Raw Dog, The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, next week. and I'm really excited to see everybody. Please come out if you live in these areas.

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That's all. And now, the grand, grand, grand, grand finale of Haley Hocke to a Welch. I'm not so bad when you turn up the lights, boy. I'll get perfect all over time. Don't like me a star. to find that can't be one more

more more six minute of fame 60 minute of fame 16 minute of face one more

minute of me I'm not so I'm not so bad when you say Welcome back to the main internet in the spotlight affected them and what that says about. And this week. And this week, we finish our look at Haley Welch, aka Hawk to a Girl, the main character of the internet, to see how their moment in the spotlight affected them and what that says about us and the internet. And this week, we finish our look at Haley Welch, aka Hawk to a Girl, the main character of 2024. After a shockingly fast run in the public eye between the summer and winter of 2024, Haley went from an unknown who was confronted in the street by wannabe girls gone wild-style influencers to the face of a crypto scam run by Howie Mandel's scumbag son-in-law.

And whether you like her or not, that sounds very overwhelming. And if you want to catch up on what happened with Haley after this halt to her career, which was marked by an SEC investigation, a disastrous digital press conference. Anywhoo, I'm going to go to bed, and I'll see you guys tomorrow. And a long, subsequent digital silence, please check out our previous episode, where you'll learn what was happening behind the scenes in these months of alleged silence. Speculation ran wild that Haley would go to jail as a result of the investigation. A few places speculated that she was pregnant.

or dead. And many thought she would either voluntarily or just end up having to return to her normal life in rural Tennessee, where this time last year at the time of this recording, she was working in a local spring factory. And while it appeared that not just Haley Welch, but her entire team were careful not to say anything publicly when the investigation concluded, this didn't stop them from banking. Phase banking, one could even say, a future episode of Talk Tua, while still on Jake Paul's better podcast network at this time, that seemed to want to serve as a what went wrong kind of thing. I would say calling it an apology would be a huge stretch as we unpacked in our last episode,

but more of an attempt to express some light remorse and get the public back on her side. Although this episode, as we discussed, still included ads for Cryptosports, worth betting apps and seemed to reach the conclusion that Haley should be open to trying crypto again, but this time she should do it smarter. But this episode leaked in early February, allegedly by Haley's team nearly two months before that SEC investigation closed, and it completely blew up in their faces. Not only is Faye's Banks, a fellow government-investigated crypto-grifter, furious that this episode of Talk Tua came out beforehand, the public was not buying the attempted Miaculpa

in the slightest. So Haley and Team went dark online again until late March. The week that TMZ published the following headline, Hock toa girl off the hook for hawking meme coin. Incredible journalism. And that is where you join us today. So let's hawk back Tua. In late March 2025, when the second act of Haley Welch's career was hard-launched in the hopes of gaining not just the forgiveness of the public that her team had defrauded a few months earlier in an egregious crypto scam, but also recapture the same excitement that existed around her in the early days of the Hawk to a meme. She first teases this in a poorly rendered comedy sketch that she posts to her Instagram, in which she reenacts all the false rumors that

existed around her during the four months of SEC-induced silence. Breaking news, Haley Wilts is a shocking. Haley Welch dead. The hawk to a girl has died. But what is suspiciously missing from this sketch is any direct mention of said crypto fraud investigation. The only reference to crypto or a scandal of any sort, is a short monologue joke clip pulled from Stephen Colbert. The results of the investigation, which were no surprise during a Trump administration

that had literally started selling their own meme coins pre-inaguration, were announced two days later, and the stage was set for an attempted hawk to a comeback. And boy, were their attempts. Haley and Company, which at this point appears to be somewhat reduced, it is unclear the size of the team, but definitely consists of her, of her best friend Chelsea, who is also her co-host on the Talk to a podcast of a lawyer and possibly some managers and publicists. But during this period of time, when they have not been cleared to speak publicly,

they are wading in the wings to parlay this into whatever the next chapter is going to consist of. And what I mean by this is that it was revealed in late March that they were filming a documentary the whole time from an Emmy-winning streamer documentary factory called Bungalow, who have released documentaries about a lot of stuff, but including some pretty serious topics. 13 days in Ferguson and Little Richard I Am Everything being their two most successful projects. So it's clear that Haley's team cannot wait to push Haley Welch and Hock Tua back into the public eye after the SEC investigation closes.

And so in the days to come, there are a bunch of very random feeling announcements made. There's the formal announcement of the documentary. I hope you all been enjoying the crazy stories about my life unfold on social media. first I was dead, then pregnant, now I'm wanted by Interpol and in jail. Luckily, we've been working with Bunglo to start spilling the tea, and the truth is actually even more bizarre than you think. There's also the announcement that the TalkToa podcast will return with the confirmation of what I had suspected because of not receiving my TalkToa Change My Life shirt. They had, in fact, severed ties with Jake Paul and the Better Network. Willie Welch and Better Holdings Incorporated have mutually agreed to end their partnership

regarding the Talk to a podcast and wish each other well in their future endeavors. Better and Welch said in a shared statement. The podcast will instead be produced by Welch's own company, 16 minutes. And as you'll hear, the word produced is quite generous. But weirdest of all, Team Welch announces that she is going to have a, cameo in an upcoming Glenn Powell project. I truly do not know any other details about this and find it very bizarre, but here is a bad AI-generated YouTube celebrity news channel insisting upon it. Halle Welch is reportedly back on the scene and doing her thing in La La Land.

The 22-year-old meme queen, who shot to fame as the Hawk Tua girl following a viral TikTok video, filmed a cameo for Glenn Powell's upcoming show in Hollywood this past weekend, according to TMZ. So, yeah, Haley's team is really throwing stuff at the wall here, which, to be fair, isn't incredibly different from how her career was being run at the peak of her relevance. But a Flash in the Pan star making a cameo in a B movie, that's kind of a classic. That's the tale is old as time. But of these announcements, the only thing given a date and a guaranteed release, was Talk Tua, and I couldn't help it wonder.

I couldn't help it wonder. What was the new approach to the podcast going to be, and would anyone still want to listen to it? Because the more time that passes, and unfortunately, this is very common in these stories that we cover on this show, people were moving on. At the time I'm writing and recording this,

coffeezilla isn't making video, about Haley Welch anymore. And while I'm sure those videos would get decent engagement, my guess is that he hasn't bothered because, algorithmically, when it comes to crypto malfeasance, he's got bigger fish to fry right now. Here are just some random clips from the last three months of his content. Pump and dumps! Why are they legal?

Today, Elon Musk and Joe Rogan are going to tell us the answer. The whole meme coin thing is bananas. And we're going to just jump into it now. I want to say it's an auspicious day. Not only are the Epstein files about to be released. We also released Andrew and Tristan Tate. They're free to leave Romania, all because, according to the Financial Times, the White House and government officials have been pressuring Romania

to let these poor persecuted influencers go. Today I discovered there are AI ads running on YouTube of me scamming people with AI and crypto. Truly my worst nightmare reimagined. I thought it couldn't get worse. And again, I would genuinely recommend his channel if you're interested in better understanding how these scams are being pulled off. And I would also recommend my fellow Cool Zone media friend Ed Zittron on better offline.

But the point is, while a really good reporter, CoffeeZilla is as beholden to the algorithm as anybody. And it's possible that with so much else going on in the world that Haley Welch isn't the algorithmic bait that she was six months ago at the time of this writing. And it feels horrible to have written that down and to say that. It feels so reductive and it bums me out and I started this show because I think that that is a very sad tendency. But if you were a person whose numbers are beholden to relevant current events, Hawk Tua didn't carry the same cultural relevance it did by the time that the SEC and Hock Coin settled in March 2025

as they had just a couple months earlier. And that's for a number of reasons. Haley's career burned bright and fast, and she didn't have a history as a public figure prior to Hock Tua and didn't have anything else for people. to glom onto. And even less likely, she went viral and some might argue went more viral than usual because it was an election year. And if the result of that election year is enthusiastically pulling a scam that someone in the White House would do just a few weeks later, that's a lot of

noise to yell over. And it's only if you want to. When I was finishing our first series on Haley and the Hawk Tua saga, she was still, for lack of a better phrase, taking a nap. And it was intentionally unclear whether she wanted to forge ahead with a career in social media or if she was going to take stock, say, hey, this year was fucked up, and then buy a house and pack it in as soon as the SEC declared her innocent. A part of me kind of hoped that she would. A lot of people, myself included, thought it seemed pretty. pretty clear that Haley was being used by some pretty lazy half-assed schemers, whether that be Howie Mandel's failed musician son-in-law turned crypto-moron, or Jake Paul,

a man who bravely kicked an old rapist's ass on live TV and wasn't even proud of it for the right reasons. The speculation around Haley Welch was complicated, but by the time Talk toa R relaunched on April 8th, 2025, people had moved on. Haley hadn't gotten any better at interviewing. The set independent of Jake Paul's Better Network was completely unedited and low-fi. And while I'd say the only improvement on the show is fully putting Chelsea in the second chair, good call, it is still a really boring show. I'm sorry. Okay. Well, welcome back to another episode of Talk to him. It's been a hot minute. since we've been back here, but now we're the official owners to talk to her.

And we may or may not have flew to London to get a very special guest for you. We got KSI. Yo, yo. And as before, the more experienced in-media guests kind of start to interview Haley when she fails to interview them. And unfortunately, the guest whose name you just heard, like Faye's Banks, does warrant some introduction. KSI, or J.J. Olatunji, is one of these fucking guys, too. He started online as a popular gaming streamer, has a history of sexist and racist comments, and of course, eventually parlayes the millions of mostly children consuming his slop into a string of influencer staples.

This means professional boxing, alternative rivalries and business partnerships with various Paul brothers. This means insidiously marketed products to children. And of course, this means promoting a pump and dump crypto scheme in early 2024. KSI is one of the world's most popular YouTubers. But yesterday, he accidentally exposed the pump and dump crypto scams that he promoted. They've been hidden for two years, but only came out when KSI logged back into his old Twitter account, saying, does this still work? work. And if you're wondering, was that coffee Zilla busting KSI? Yeah, I don't know how he does it. He's busted everybody. But crypto scams of any kind don't really come up in the return of TalkToa,

which as Haley is quick to mention, is now owned by her company, not Jake Paul's. This, I know it's going to annoy Jake Paul. Oh, definitely. But I'm glad you're free from his grasp. I'm not able to flourish and be, well, one of the best podcasts. A butterfly. A beautiful butterfly. What's the beef with Jake Paul? I mean, it's been going on for years, man.

With all due respect to KSI, and my understanding is there is very little due. The commenters on the new Talk Toa episode on YouTube appear to be in agreement that his appearing on her show is a sign that Haley's career may be on its last legs. The podcast was filmed in London and the winking in reason that KSI is the guest appears to be because he has a fairly long-standing

feud with Jake Paul in spite of the fact that he is in business with Logan Paul on two of the most disgusting products on shelves today. Those being prime energy. This morning there's a new warning

for parents and kids about energy drinks. Maybe you've seen prime energy on social media? Yeah, Brandy Smith explains why the drink is getting so much negative attention. Schools are actually banning it. And lunchly, the luncheables with mold. Look closely because Mr. Bees is disgusted by his own product, Lunchley. And it got worse when this woman bought Lunchley to try it for the first time.

And there was mold inside. This is molded. That's mold. And as will become relevant, KSI is on the similar Paul Brothers path. of starting as a famous gaming streamer. And by the way, I thought it was funny that he talks about playing FIFA in a video game as if he is a professional soccer player himself. Does streamers do that?

What was the first thing you got like really known for? Ooh, FIFA. What is FIFA? So FIFA is like a football game or soccer game where I know you pass the ball around the pitch and then you put it in the net. Oh, do you come up with that? No, I did not come up with him. Oh, I was like, what?

You just played it. No, so I played the game, yeah, yeah. And then I'd just make various videos on it, and it just went viral. I found that very distracting. What I was saying is that KSI has done celebrity boxing, first against Logan Paul at the Staples Center in L.A. in 2019. But really outside of knowing that he is also one of these guys, and that it appears that the new strategy of the podcast

is to bring on people who will not challenge Haley and also do not like Jake Paul. There's not much to say. The rest of the interview is about KSI's career, some awkward flirtation, and Haley speculating on what's next for her without addressing why she was in trouble in her career to begin with. folks the podcast is boring and the episode itself is devoid of any remaining sponsors except for surprisingly

haley's pet rescue non-profit haws across america honestly surprised they're still going i hope they're doing good things but that is all there is to report about the returning episode of talk toa and worst of all the episode ends like this. Thank you. Oh, thank you for coming on. Thank you so much. Of course. Is it even Talk Tua?

If Haley doesn't ask KSI what he does in bed to make a woman go crazy? I was not impressed with the return of Talk Tua, and I was not alone there because as I'm writing this, around a week after the episode launched on YouTube, it only has about 60,000 views. compared to the height of 2.8 million views while on the Better Network just six months ago or Coffizilla's 4 million views for criticizing her just two months ago. The episodes of the podcast that have come out since have done even worse

and while they do reveal more information about what Haley and Chelsea were pursuing during those months of the SEC investigation interim, including a reality show, There's not much to go on. But as a loyal listener, I have consumed every goddamn second. And I wanted to just share the sentence that made me laugh so much from guest Chanel West Coast. But I really wanted to collaborate with Drake.

I just did Drake's dad's podcast like two weeks ago, actually. His dad? His dad is a podcast? Yes, his dad is the funniest guy ever. You guys have to meet him. That is the worst brag I've ever heard in my life. But that's about all I have to say about the podcast outside of that. and that video only got 12,000 views in two days.

So, Haley's company, which I will remind you is called 16 Minutes, now owns the IP or TalkToa. But if this is any indication, does that mean anything? Honestly, I don't think so. And so while it's safe to say that Haley has technically survived the court of public opinion, in that she didn't experience a legal consequence. I'd be surprised if she manages to get the relevance she had back without the support of a big internet piece of shit Goliath

like a Paul brother propping her up. While I very much doubted that the Hawkcoin team would get into much trouble given the administration and the increasing lack of regulation around crypto, I did want to understand how this was possible. Because for the time being, this is a grift that has reached the highest levels of government. So are we going to see more of it? And how besides staying the fuck away from crypto can we protect ourselves?

When we come back, Investigator John Reed-Stark explains why there was never a chance in hell that Ms. Haley was going to jail. 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. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly-registered. correctional programs that mimic military basic training.

These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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. Smokey the bar. Then you know why Smokey tells you

when he sees you passing through. Remember, please be careful. It's the least that you can do. It's what you desire. Don't play with matches. Don't play with fire. After 80 years of learning his wildfire prevention tips, Smokey Bear lives within us all.

Learn more at smokybear.com. And remember, Only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA. State Forest Service, your State Forrester and the Ad Council. 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 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 IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to 16th Minute. I fell asleep on a plane this morning and was woken up by the person next to me because I was literally manspreading.

What? Who am I? when I go to sleep. Embarrassing. I am sorry to her. And here is my interview with John Reed Stark. My name's John Stark.

I'm an attorney, a cyber attorney. I've been practicing law for 35, 40 years now. Went to Duke Law School, then started working at a law firm. And then I joined the SEC in 1991. And then I went on a detail

to the U.S. Attorney's Office and did street crimes, guns, drugs, and domestic violence for a little bit. Then I came back to the SEC and started doing cyber in 1994, became the Special Counsel for Internet Projects at the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission in the Division of Enforcement. And then started teaching securities regulation and technology at Georgetown Law School around that time. And after that, it just kept growing and growing and growing. And in 1998, they decided to create an office, and I was the founder of the office, the

Office of Internet Enforcement, who was the first specialized group in the history of the SEC, and that was 1998, and I was made the chief, and through that office to a great group of attorneys enforcement lawyers, and ran it for about 11 years, a little more than 11 years, and then I left there to lead the office of Strauss-Freeburg, which was a day. Data Breach Response firm, a cybersecurity firm, a digital forensic firm, and ran their DC office for most of the next five years. And then Strauss-Freeberg got bought by Aeon. So I left and started my own firm, John Reed-Start Consulting, in 2015. Sort of does anything. I don't have anything to do with crypto. I don't have any financial interest in crypto, nothing short, nothing

long. Started writing about it in 2017 because I was doing a lot of ransomware cases. And I realized but for Bitcoin, there would be no ransomware. Ransomware is when a firm gets attacked and they have to pay in order to get to decrypt their data or to stop a company, a cyber attacker from name and shaming them from publishing their data. So yeah, you realize that suddenly these payments, which were growing. So I started writing about it in 2017 when President Trump, Maxime Waters, and Hillary Clinton had one thing in common. They all hated crypto and thought it was a terrible thing and ridiculous and we're on the record saying that they didn't want anything to do with it.

So I thought it was a nonpartisan issue back then, but it's not anymore. First of all, thank you so much for being on our Hocktua episode. I really appreciate it. In the last couple of months, you know, as Trump has become, you know, nothing but pro crypto, of course it's not really talked about very much that this is a change. Can you sort of walk me through what that change looked like and why it happened? Yeah, it was something that I predicted a couple years back because the crypto communities, if not for the fact that they love crypto, I love the community.

And there's a lot of irony in crypto, which you, I think, would appreciate more than most people. For example, right, crypto was created to decentralize. After the financial crisis of 2008, crypto was said, let's take away the power from the big banks and let's find something where we can go peer-to-peer ourselves. We don't need these big banks in the middle. Well, what do we have today? We've replaced the big banks with a bunch of big crypto companies. So that's the number one.

The number two one, the president talks about this new Bitcoin reserve, that strategic reserve that the government's going to have. But if you look into the details, what's in that reserve are assets, crypto assets that have been seized in accordance with asset forfeiture laws. which any libertarian will tell you, asset forfeiture laws are the most anti-libertarian laws you could have in the sense that this is crypto taken from people who've been arrested. They haven't been convicted of anything, and their crypto was seized. So like any other asset forfeiture, it's never an area as a former criminal prosecutor

that I thought was appropriate. So anyway, you can see lots of different ironies in crypto. But the idea was that, I think, initially that this crypto was going to undermine the dollar, that it's no private currency has ever worked. And the intermediary is critical for the consumer, and it's critical for the government. There's about a dozen or so anti-money laundering laws that essentially tell you that you have no right to financial privacy. And I don't like that, and you don't like that. No one likes that, but this is the reality. The Anti-Money Laundering Act, the Bank Synclercy Act, the USA Patriot Act

after 9-11. This is how the government gets bad guys. They cut off the ways that they can use and spend money. And that means that you go into the bank. And if you withdraw $10,000, more than $10,000, that'll trigger a suspicious activity report. If you do something weird, that'll trigger a suspicious activity report. And your activities will be reported to the financial crimes enforcement network. And a criminal prosecutor or the SEC might start looking at all your financial records because of that. And that's just, That might be something you disagree with, and I respect that. So you can go to the government and say, hey, let's change those laws.

But those are the laws that are on the books right now. So crypto essentially bypasses all of those laws. So as someone said in one of my spaces the other day, I love crypto. I can take $5 million worth of it and go on a plane and go anywhere in the world that I want. And no one will know the difference. And so, yeah, well, that's not supposed to be allowed. So that's why, you know, so I think with respect to crypto, most people were against it. it's created incredible amounts of crime, drug dealing, child pornography, human sex trafficking,

ransom attacks. North Korea has stolen more than $6 billion worth of crypto and is using it to finance their nuclear weapons operation. Why care about it? What utility does it have? It went away tomorrow. Would anyone care? You compare this moment with regards to crypto, but just also with the SEC and where the economy is at in general to the 1920s. Can you tell me a little bit more about that because I know that that sets off alarm bells and virtually anyone who knows about the stock market crash? Sure. If you look at any of the financial crises, whether it was the subprime crisis or the depression

after the 29, here's what happened in the 20s, right? There was everybody, everything was unregulated and buying socks and bonds was like, you know, buying clothes a target. There was nobody protecting you or anything. So what happened was there was this terrible crash and it impacted everyone and created this big depression. So the government sort of said, you know what? When it comes to investments, we're going to be different.

It's not going to be like buying anything else. So they enacted the 1933 Act, the Securities Act, 1993, which essentially said, hey, if you're going to raise money for an investment, you have to register with the SEC. Then they passed the 34 Act, the Securities and Exchange Act of 34, and they said, hey, if you're going to create a platform to transact in these investments, then you have to register with the SEC and you have to be subject to audit, inspection, examination, net capital requirements, all kinds of disclosure, licensure of your individuals. So that's what 34 Act said. And then the 40 Act said, hey, if you're going to bundle all this stuff in a mutual fund, or if you're going to give people advice about securities and about. investments they should buy, you have to register as well. So all of these big registration, which are incredibly onerous, it's very difficult to register with the SEC, whether it's an offering

or whether you're a platform or anyone else, you're going to subject yourselves to this financial colonoscopy at the whenever the SEC wants, either routine or for cause. But it's been pretty good. If you generally go back to all since that time, there have been a few bumps in the road, but generally the economy has flourished. And this sort of environment of heavy regulation has kept most people honest and has also given the consumer, the customer, all sorts of avenues if they get scammed. You know, they can reach out to the SEC. They can read out to state regulators. They can reach out to the FBI. Everybody has jurisdiction over these entities who are, so if they wake up in the morning like the Celsius Block 5 Voyager FTX investors did

and they can't access their money anymore, imagine the panic that they felt. And you can read The Celsius, Celsius especially, the investors submitted these affidavits, and you can read how terrible it is. That was what my life was like at the SEC for the 20 or so years that I was there. I talked with investors who'd lost their life savings all the time. And you start to realize there's no standard composite or profile for those kinds of people. They can be sophisticated. They can be unsophisticated. What they have in common is that they let their guard down.

Maybe they got greedy. Maybe they wanted to get rich quick. maybe like the Madoff investors, they only wanted 1% over prime. They weren't greedy. So they had comfort in that. That was something that really struck me about when I was speaking with Molly and Ed a couple of months ago about crypto, how, you know, the majority of crypto users, it's not quite an active desperation, but it's someone with a little bit of pocket cash trying to turn a little money into more money because it's hard to exist. and how many like normal people end up getting scammed. That's the point, Jamie, is it's always the working person who gets scammed in the end.

Everybody else gets away with it. The best example, you know, I live in Washington, D.C., in the DMV, and I'm a Washington Wizards fan, and I've been a Wizards fan for whatever, 30 or 35 years. It's been torture, okay, for myself and my family. The good news is I know all the people who work at the Wizards games, because I've been going to these games forever. So my son and I are in the elevator and we see two of the security guards and they're like, hey, Mr. Sark, I saw you on 60 minutes because I was talking about this stuff on 60 minutes a few months ago. And I said, yeah, yeah, did you watch it? And they're like,

oh, well, you know, I didn't see it until the end. You have something about crypto. What, what were you talking about? I said, well, you know, it's a dangerous investment. There's nothing to it. There's no substance to it. It's all fear of missing out. And they kind of looked at me, both of them. And they were like, but we heard it was a great thing to get into. We, we, so we both invested. And I was like, all right, guys, look, I'm not here to tell you what to invest in or what not to invest in. But do you understand what it is? Do you know what it is that you're buying? And they both are like, we have no idea. And I said, well, start with that. Right. Start with that premise. If you don't know what it is and you can't articulate what it is, then don't invest in it.

That seems like a pretty basic notion that people have completely forgotten about with this emperor has no closed notion of crypto. I'm curious, you also write in your editorial about, and something that I'm trying to understand better, too, is, you know, just three months ago or three or four months ago is having conversations about Ms. Hocktuah, Haley Welch, who had a meme coin launched on her behalf. She was the face of it. She was pushing it. And there was a rugpole. It seems like there has been a lot that's happened since then because when I was doing these interviews, people were like, well, maybe she will be made an example of by the SEC. You know, like this could be because it was getting so much press, maybe this is a chance for someone to be made an example of. So, I mean, from your perspective, what has been happening with the SEC in the last couple of months that's giving you such pause?

Well, it's really incredible. And I'm not being hyperbolic. I'm not exaggerating. I'm a bit of an SEC historian, having worked there for 20 years and taught securities regulation for both at Georgetown and Duke and really study the agency. The about face that the agency has done on crypto and this radical turnabout is unprecedented in SEC history. So I'll give you some of the basic things that they've done. First of all, in the last three or four years, the has brought over 200 enforcement actions. The SEC is like any other civil litigants. They bring cases when somebody violates the securities laws and their civil actions. You can refer it to criminal authorities, which in our office we often did and have parallel actions. The SEC is a civil agency. So they bring their cases. They bring them in federal court in front of Article three judges, which are judges set by the Constitution who have life tenure. And they get to rule on whether the SEC is right or wrong about whatever they think, whether they think something is a security, whether they have jurisdiction, those things all go to judges. So the SEC had filed

over 200 of those enforcement actions. And in my mind, they have won every single one of them. Okay, now that is unprecedented. Now, you might say, well, John, I don't necessarily believe you. Well, I spoke at the SEC Roundtable recently, and I put together an 89 page. statement. And in those 89 single space is a section that where I go over every single case the SEC has litigated with respect to digital assets. I explain what the ruling is. I pull out the excerpts. And I'm telling you the SEC is one every time. Telegram, Kik, LBRY, Krakken, Coinbase, Finance, win after win after win after win. So, and they've been, and these were filed, that there were 80 or 90 of them filed under Jay Clayton, who was President Trump's original

SEC chair appointee. He's now the new U.S. attorney for New York for the Southern District of New York. But 90 of those cases, 80 or 90 of them were filed under a Republican administration. So then a Democratic administrator came in and they created a crypto unit. They even, then they started bringing these cases in, oh my gosh, was the SEC winning. It's one thing to win the cases when you're at the SEC. We won, I think, all of our cases, I was at the SEC. But I never had cases against big law firms who were being paid tens of million dollars to fight against me. But that's the way it was at the SEC. The SEC would bring these cases. These people would hire former SEC enforcement directors. They would litigate these

cases with volumes and volumes of motions, massive discovery. And judges, as a result, whether they were citing a motion to dismiss, which is when the SEC files a case, someone might say, you know what, no matter what you say, we didn't violate any law. So this case should be dismissed. That's the motion to dismiss. Then later on, after discovery, they say, look, no matter what you found, there's been no violation, that's summary judgment. So the SEC was winning on motions to dismiss and summary judgment because all these defendants were saying digital assets are not securities.

And judges were all saying, yes, they are, whether they're initial coin offerings, whether they're simple agreements for future tokens, SAFs, whether they're staking products, whether they're lending products, whether they're celebrity endorsement products, whether they're intermediaries trading digital assets, whether they all should be registered as exchanges, as broker dealers, as clearing firms. SEC's winning every single time and the judges are writing these opinions that are 100 pages long, like the Cracken decision, 100 pages long. 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. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life. emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning.

Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. No, 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.

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. 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 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, right? 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.

In sitcoms, when someone has a problem, they just blurt it out and move on. 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. Not for nothing. I mean, this happening under, not just like a Democratic and a Republican administration, but literally under a previous Trump administration. It just like, I don't know. It's brain breaking. Right. So here's what happened. So the SEC is on a role. They're suing everybody. Every day there's new decision. Every day there's a new lawsuit. All of these companies are running, are fighting back. And it's kind of interesting because the SEC action. used to be a scarlet letter, you know, if you were hit by the SEC, don't expect to do business

with anybody ever again because, I think of that kind of thing. Well, they were wearing it like a badge of honor. Like this rogue SEC has come after us. Their regulation through enforcement, they're using all these strange little catchphrases. But this is how the SEC brings cases. There's no such thing as regulation by enforcement. There's just enforcement. You bring cases, insider trading, derivatives fraud, muni bond fraud, foreign payments fraud. Whatever it is, you bring it under their anti-fraud provision. So the SEC are winning all these cases. All of a sudden, President Trump wins re-election.

Acting chair, Mark Ueda, takes over at the SEC. And he and Hester Purse, both of whom I knew when I was a staff attorney there, especially Hester Perce. I knew her pretty well. They had been dissenting on all these cases the SEC was bringing. But the SEC, the majority of the SEC commissioners were saying to bring them. And again, they were winning everyone in court. All of a sudden, Mark Ua comes in, three things have, four things happen.

Number one, he dismisses all the appeals. Any appeal the SEC had, anything like that, gone. Number two, he dismisses or pauses every single crypto-related enforcement action. Period. Gone. Number three, he closes every major crypto investigation, maybe even more. I don't know how many he's closed because it's not public. But the ones that are public, they're all, you know, so excited because they're all suddenly

they've transformed. I mean, I think this story we're covering is probably a part of that wave where it just went away in February. Exactly. So Haktua swept up in that wave. And then the third, the fourth thing, so appeals, active litigation, investigations, that's three different categories, all gone, Zippo, disappeared as if they never happened. Then the crypto unit, which the SEC had beefed up and celebrated with all kinds of fanfare,

is shut down and is given a new name called the cyber unit. The head of that crypto unit, who was the head of litigation, who had won all these cases, was on all the litigation. He was transferred to the Office of Information Technology. I don't know what he's doing there. He's like fixing printers or picking out drivers for printers. He's gone. He's disappeared.

Gone. There were two co-heads of the crypto unit. One of them disappeared. Gone. At least 20 or 30 people in the crypto unit disappeared, gone. I don't know if they've retired. I don't know what they're doing. The new cyber unit she spoke at our conference last week. And she's a very nice lady. Laura Delandria, I think is her name, or De Laird. Delaird, I'm not, I'm not pronouncing it wrong. And she really spoke about what they're not doing, which is, you know, we're not bringing these kinds of cases. We're not doing this kind of work. We're working towards retail investors. I'm not sure what she meant by that. But all I can tell you, and then the SEC started issuing these regulatory pronouncements. Some of them they just would put on Twitter on X. And they said one of them was meme coins are not securities. Boom, over, done.

So any meme coin, and that was done, you know, I don't know, a week or two after President Trump and Melania Trump had launched their meme coin. So the SEC said, these are not securities. That blows my mind. Yeah. Let's be clear here, though. You know, President Trump campaigned to be the Bitcoin president. He campaigned to throw out Gary Gensler.

He campaigned to make the United States the crypto capital. of the world. And he's, he's, this is a promise made and a promise kept. You can't disagree with that. He was very clear what he was going to do. These crypto firms, they weren't winning in court, but they spent about 200 million to win the elections. And they did. They did it brilliantly. They destroyed anyone who was anti-crypto. Just about everyone. I mean, I think Elizabeth Warren survived. A few of them survived, but most of them did not survive. And so this is, the president's mandate. You can't disagree with that notion. I don't like it. You know, I think it's bad for the world. But it's, yeah, he's certainly been successful at it. He said this is what he's going to do,

and he's doing it. So, you know, and he's doing it through the SEC. Now, the SEC historically has never done this kind of turnaround on anything ever. So it's very, and meme points is a perfect example. Now, one thing about meme points that I would say, so, Recently, there was an article, it was just about everywhere, about if you bought the president's meme coin and you were one of the top, I know, 220 purchasers of his meme coin, then you would get access to a special party he was having and get a tour of the White House. Now, you know, here's the irony of this. Again, more irony, which, again, I've studied you, so I know how much you love irony, okay?

So this is another great one. So my view has always been crypto has no utility, that if it went away tomorrow, blockchain is a bunch of bunk, a bunch of nonsense. You know, you spoke with Molly White, Ed Zittron. You read the concern.com tech letter. The blockchain is just a glorified append only limited writer spreadsheet. It's not an iPhone. It's not transformative.

It's not innovation. None of this is innovation. However, I might be wrong about utility because the reality is crypto is emerging with utility. Number one, okay, it has utility for criminals, but I don't know if that's a bona fide utility. But the president is now created a utility because he's saying, hey, buy my meme coin and you're going to get access. Whether that's lawful or not, I'm not an expert in any of that. But he's created a utility for his meme coins. Now, the Hawk toa meme coin, I don't see, every one of these is a facts and circumstance case. I don't see that having any utility.

But if she did it, if she just said at the beginning, the top, 200 people will get to meet me and come watch my podcast live, then you can sort of say, I mean, here's the thing, Jamie, is that the SEC now believes suddenly out of nowhere that crypto is a collectible, okay, that it's just like a collectible. It's not this mathematical computational equation, okay, this blather of code, an unsolvable problem of code, is a collectible. Now, I can tell you, I can give you three quick reasons why it's not a collectible. Number one, because when I talked about it on 60 minutes, having no utility, I was talking about the XRP token. I got death threats. My family got death threats. They said they're going to burn

my house down. If I were talking about Rolexes and Pokemon cards, I don't think I would have gotten that reaction. So that's number one. Number two, if you go to your brokerage account, right you're whatever it is robin hood or wherever you're buying your your secure investments you'll go to the tab and you'll see you know stocks bonds um maybe options and then you'll see something that says crypto so you don't see Pokemon cards beanie babies and american girl dolls on that pull down screen okay so that's the second reason yeah the third reason is is that every single article three judge that has ever reviewed this idea of whether a digital asset is a security in whatever iteration, be it, ICO, simple agreement for future tokens,

staking, lending, all those things I mentioned before, has said it's a security. And so, and those Article III judges, Mark Ueda as acting SEC chair can't disappear those decisions. They're on the books. So the SEC has just chosen to ignore them, to abandon, to abdicate its mission of investor protection. I talked about the crash and the depression that followed in 29, and the SEC was created to protect investors. They're not created. They're not supposed to protect collectors. So their idea is, hey, these digital assets, they're collectibles. It's caveat emptor, and it's a walking dead post-apocalyptic marketplace where there's no protection, anything goes, and it's all driven by FOMO. There's no

earnings. There's no balance sheet. There's nothing you can look at. You can't get their 10 Q's or their 10Ks or other SEC filings because there aren't any. So it's just FOMO. You're just betting that someone else is going to be dumb enough to buy this and it's going to go up. Yes. That's it. And so, gosh, that's so, so in short, crypto is being effectively treated by the SEC right now as if it's Beanie baby. Yes. Or American girl. I'm not sure. Beanie Baby's American Girl dolls or Pokemon cards. That would be the three categories.

People are being kind of professionally disappeared from that we're working in the Biden administration just a couple months ago. Has there been, I mean, I know you have sort of been at the forefront of this, but has there been a lot of people speaking out? And if not, why? You know, oh, there's a good reason. This is actually a very easy question. Every single SEC lawyer, most of them go out into private practice when they leave the SEC. And they work for a big law firm or they work for a company, whatever. But most of the time they go work for a big law firm.

And big law firms make huge amounts of dollars from all these digital asset companies. And so you have a fiduciary responsibility to your partners. So you won't hear a lot of lawyers unless they're law professors or just you've got to find someone who's, independent and objective to hear what their opinion is on crypto. I'm independent and objective. You can disagree with me, but I don't make a nickel from my opinion, not a penny, not a dime. All I get is grief from having this opinion. Nothing more, right? You called me to ask me to do this. And I'm always very reluctant for, I'm sure you can attest. I'm always reluctant because it's like, you know, I'm chasing windmills here. And I'm all alone because none of my former SEC colleagues who were perfectly happy to tell me,

to whisper in my ear, you're absolutely right about crypto. None of them are in a situation where they can say, where they can speak out. So very few lawyers will speak out against it. And from a political standpoint, it would be suicide to speak out against crypto. Only if you're the most, one of the strongest politicians will you survive. Because the crypto lobby is incredibly well capitalized. They've already set aside one or 200 million for the midterms. So fail not at peril. If you get out and speak against crypto and you're a political congress. I mean, why not just say, hey, if it's innovation, I'm all for it and I want it to be done the right way. That's a, that's a way to avoid getting these people from putting a target on your back. Solid deflection. Yeah. But it's so funny.

You say it's innovation, but in the rest of the sentence, you say it's an American girl doll or a beanie baby. So you can't have it both ways, but they want it both ways. So, and so they'll masquerade it as innovation. And they'll use that as their sort of subterfuge to get you thinking, well, you know, and, you know, you can't really blame the president because he came out and he said he was going to do this and he's doing it. So as much as you might dislike what he believes in, the reality is he made it very clear this is what he was going to do. And these people have been cut loose. And they're running wild in Washington and they own the city. They really do better than any other lobbying group in the history of the world. And Molly White, I know you mentioned her. She's done some very meticulous

studies on all of this. And it's mind-blowing. But, you know, that's the way our political system works. So, again, that's not my area of expertise. Maybe that needs to be fixed. Everyone seems to agree that it should be. But right now, these people petal extraordinary influence, and you don't see it. If you watch Patrick Boyle on YouTube did this really great thing on crypto, where he just went over every campaign that the crypto lobby was supporting and showed how You wouldn't really know that they were supporting them. So they do this brilliantly. I mean, they wrote their, they wrote their own playbook.

Again, you know, you got a hand to them. You know, they wrote their own playbook. They were losing in front of these judges over and over again. And they found a way to win. And they won big. They won huge. They got rid of Sherrod Brown in Ohio. They spent $40 million.

If this remains unchecked, if most people who could potentially speak up against this feel like their hands are tied or their future is sabotaged by speaking up about this? What are we looking at? Well, you know, if you're a financial historian, you know that all this is, crypto is one big Ponzi scheme. I don't see how anyone can argue against that because again, it's, but what if it was an American girl? Well, I get, I get it. But in terms of Ponzi schemes and a Ponzi scheme is just where you're just buying again, trying to beat out everyone out, and it's like a game of musical chairs. You don't want to be the last person holding it.

So if the Ponzi scheme keeps going, sooner or later, all Ponzi schemes crash. They crash typically when things get bad. If we were to have a recession, maybe, for example, because of these tariffs, the country goes into a depression. But the economic news has been very good lately. But suppose the country goes into a depression, people generally, this is what I saw, lot at the SEC. When things get bad, people will flee to safety and they will move out of their most risky alternative investments. And everybody agrees, no matter how fanatical you are about

crypto, that it's a risky alternative investment. You can't get anyone to not admit that. It's like gambling. So as soon as things go south with the economy or the economy hits a recession, You know, with all the ransomware attacks growing and growing in sophistication, when I taught at Duke Law School, and there was the colonial pipeline ransomware attack where the colonial pipeline was shut down, you couldn't get gas in North Carolina. You couldn't get home from the airport, couldn't get a taxi, couldn't get an Uber car, couldn't get a rental car. There was no gas anywhere. And I got to tell you, it started to get a little scary, you know, not just economically, but suddenly you were thinking, you know, the police can't get to my house, you know, And it just happens just over a few days. So if these ransomware attacks hit infrastructure or hit hospitals, when those things kind of start happening, I think governments like the National Security Division will wake up at the Department of Justice and say, we've got to stop the crypto because that's what doing it all. If North Korea is able to build these nuclear weapons facilities purely because of crypto,

which it seems like they are with the $6 billion that they've stolen, think about that's the greatest theft in the history of the world. The banking regulators, the FDIC, the Fed, the Office of the Comptroller of the currency have been very, very strict about allowing banks, traditional financial institutions, from doing anything having to do with crypto. The crypto firms called this Operation Chokehold. And I think that's a fair name. But I think it's a fair name because it's exactly what made sense. You know, the banking regulators, they didn't prohibit these entities from doing them. But they said to them, if you do anything involving crypto, we're going to come in and examine you. And there's no way to, you know, these crypto are such dark markets. You don't know

who any of these depositors are. You don't know what's going on in these marketplaces. You don't know where on this pricing. So the chokehold was perfectly legitimate. Now, the Trump administration has come in and all of those guardrails from the Office of the Comptroller to the currency, from the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and from the Federal Reserve, have all been lifted. Okay, so suddenly banks can get in the business of selling crypto. Morgan Stanley, for example, I read an article, I don't know if this is true, that 15,000 of their brokers are going to be cut loose to sell crypto. So if you're suddenly, like, what can a broker say to you to buy crypto other than buy this crypto? It's an asset I don't understand, but it might go up because a lot of

stupid people buy it. Anything else that said, if you say it's a store of value, that's not true. If you say, it's got great potential. That's not true. If you say it's an innovation, that's not true. If you say it's a great market, that's not true. But they're kind of, you know, brokers are great at selling products to the elderly, to the people who don't understand, and even to the big institutions. So these bogus investments are going to be peddled everywhere, just like subprime derivative instruments. And that can, as a contagion, spread across the global financial marketplace. So those are the various scenarios, a big ransomware attack, a financial contagion, or just a recession. Any of those three things will trigger a pendulum swing in the other

direction and maybe the SEC will wake up and decide not to abdicate its mission of investor protection because, you know, they'll realize that, oh my gosh, investor, we're here to protect investors. Yet they're, again, they've labeled these people as collectors. And that's really not right. And everybody knows that's not right. It doesn't pass a straight face test. We have to protect people because not just to protect themselves, but it also creates systemic risks. So you might just say I was on a panel just a few weeks ago at George Mason University. And one of the professors is like, go ahead and do with what your crypto, go have your fun. I don't care. It's not going to impact me. And that's just wrong. You know, it would impact you because of the crime

associated with it. And it'll impact you when it all comes crashing down. and your 401k has suddenly worked half of what it was, or your 529 for your kids is worth half of what it was, and you're freaking out because how are you going to afford to retire, how are you going to afford to pay for your kids' education? And then you want accountability, and you're going to say, where was the SEC? And you're going to, like you say,

the SEC was watching Beanie Baby and Pokemon movies and not considering the reality of their mission which is to protect investors. And that's a sacrosanct mission that they've just abandoned for political reasons that, you know, historically, whether you're Republican or Democrat, it's really unsettling and disturbing to be, to watch that. Thank you so much to John Reed Stark. You can follow his work at the links in the description. And before we get into the concluding thoughts on this second Hock-Toa series, this is Jamie, from the future the day before the podcast comes out telling you one last thing somehow,

which is that as Haley Welch continues to hard launch herself back into the mainstream, she's been doing the rounds in press with a new publicist, not the one that got her into the crypto scam. And one interview came out during the writing of this episode that I think is worth mentioning. So in addition to the fact that Haley is indeed returning to celebrity poker and already has at the time I'm recording this, which there's that, there was an interview published on May 2nd in Vanity Fair with writer Chris Murphy, an article that even features a photo shoot of Haley wearing a little white lace dress in what I absolutely am certain is an Airbnb rented for the photo shoot. It is the fakesest looking place in the world. And I wanted to

share two bits of this interview that are relevant. So first, Haley does do this interview with her new publicist at her side and appears to be allowed to talk about the crypto scandal in public for the first time. From that, Chris Murphy asks, what have you learned from that experience? Do you have anything to say to the people who lost their money? Haley replies, I would say personally, what I learned from it, let's see. I don't know. I just feel really bad for anybody that lost money. All my comments, if you read those, people are like, oh, well, I lost a lot of money in this.

Now my kids have to go without stuff. I don't know. It makes me feel like really sorry for it. Chris Murphy asks, after the crypto scandal, you went off the grid. What were you doing for those three months? Where were you? Haley replies, oh, I hate to say this, but this was a much needed mental health. Just what do you call it?

A mental health break, I guess, is what you can call it. Okay, so I think it's interesting that there is a a lot of sorries in here, but of course, the sorries don't have to mean anything because the SEC investigation is closed. No one, including Haley, is required to make this right on behalf of people who lost money. So her reply is, sorry. And the interview closes with Chris Murphy asking why, as someone who is so sorry about the crypto scam, why Haley Welch is about to head to Las Vegas to play celebrity poker. Here's that exchange.

Chris Murphy says, you're playing in a celebrity poker tournament fresh off the crypto scandal. Do you have anything to say about those optics? Gambling after some people lost their money on your coin? Haley does not reply here. Her publicist does. Replying, say the question again?

Sorry, I'm just confused. Chris Murphy says, some might say that it's not a great look to be gambling so soon after a money-related scandal. I'm just wondering if Haley has anything to say to that or has a response. Once again, Haley's publicist replies, oh, we're going to skip over that one. Ay, y, y, y, okay, that's it for future Jamie. Let's close out the episode.

And that, I promise, is the last you're going to hear of Haley Welch on this show for my own mental health, if nothing else. At this point, she has made it clear that she is not ready for her 50s. minutes to end. But man, if the best guest for your comeback is the third most successful co-creator of the luncheables with mold, and if the numbers and attention that the return pulled in, it's going to be a difficult road ahead. So while I do believe that Haley Welch is very much a sign of the times, a young woman who had no social media aspirations or aspirations to fame, being launched into prominence against her will, signs that shady-ass managers who immediately capitalized of and disposed of her, defrauding regular people out of hundreds of thousands of

dollars in the process. But even as an individual, there is a kind of desperation to this comeback that is hard to watch. And call me naive, and I'm sure that plenty of people on the Reddit board will. But I still think that this is his story about class more than anything. Because it's hard to deny that Haley is a certified scammer or at best scammer accomplice at this point. And unfortunately, coming from a low-income family in Tennessee, I think the financial security and not having to return to her job at a spring factory

is just as relevant to the story as the idea that she might be kind of hooked on the attention and might not be ready for the big moment to end. There is more than one thing going on here, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to just get your clicks. But the 15 minutes are probably over. And as we talk about on this show every week, the 15 minutes being over has a way of breaking someone's brain. But careers have highs and lows,

and I can't say with confidence that Haley doesn't, have a second act in her. We've seen it before and many people. Life is long, right? But for the time being, the most depressing part of all of that is even with these already diminishing returns, I don't think that Haley or any of the parasites that remain on her team are going to stop chasing whatever the latest influencer grift is. It seems like they're in too deep. And the reason I think that is because there's this one part of the KSI interview

on the return episode where Haley all but confirms this. You ever think I can box? Would you want to box? I actually do want a box. Really? You got to give her some tips. Yeah, I need some tips. Or you can just train me. Who would you want to fight?

They brought up bad baby, but that is no way in hell. It's like the world's biggest memes against each other. Oh, my, that would be... Personally, I like her. I don't think I could. I thought I had to have somebody I just despise. Ah, yes.

The next attempt to keep her fingernails wrapped around the right-wing grifting machine. Sports betting via celebrity boxing. This interaction bumped me out for a number of reasons. The first being that this cheeky question from Haley almost exactly mirrors how she foreshadowed that her team was about to pull a massive crypto scam a few months ago. This is from the episode of Talk Tua with Mark Cuban from back in November. Oh, yeah, if I launch a meme coin, can I give you some tokens?

Yeah, I'll give you my wallet. Okay. Are you sure you're going to launch? I don't know. I'm not a big of fan about meme coins. I love crypto, but you can make some money from it. There's no doubt about it. No doubt about it.

It's exactly the same. And while the crypto sports betting industry, Her former employer better, being a pretty solid example of it, is a firmly modern act of desperation for a person who's been professionally disgraced, or, as in the case of many women, professionally disgraced and then humiliated in a very gendered way. Even though that is all true here, celebrity boxing as a means to hang on to relevance predates internet culture. And maybe I'm saying this just because I saw,

I Tonya in theaters 14 times, but I really do believe this. And her opponent across the ring, fighting out of the blue corner, wearing the stars and bars, and also choosing not to disclose her weight. She's a world-class figure skater, a two-time Olympian, a world bronze medalist, and United States champion, the charismatic and unpredictable Tanya, TNT Hardy. This is Tanya Harding, a one-time American Olympic figure skating forerner who was extremely unbelievably talented, but was thought to lack the precise femininity associated with figure skating. She was a little bit rough around the edges and lacked the money to get the quote-unquote right outfits and social graces. She had a difficult life.

She was raised by a single mom and was in an abusive marriage. marriage, one that culminated in her then-husband Jeff Galooly hiring the worst hitman of all time to take a crowbar to who was painted in the media as Tanya's primary figure-skating rival at the time, a woman named Nancy Kerrigan, who, by the way, was in the same tax bracket as Tanya, but was just thought to be better at being feminine. The world is hell. Tanya's involvement in the planning of this attack was, and I don't know, minimal if anything. But it didn't stop this from ruining her career. She was banned from competing professionally in figure skating for the rest of her life.

And this affected her ability to not just live with dignity, but to make a living at all. To quote my favorite movie, I-Tanya, starring Margot Robbie. Once I was banned from figure skating for life, I didn't have a lot of options. I did what I had to do to just stay in the public eye and pay the bills. I was the second most known person behind Bill Clinton in the world. That meant something. and people still wanted to see me. So I became the lady boxer.

And so Tanya turned to one of the only ways that she could make money on that name, because she was no longer a name that could sell products like Nancy Kerrigan could, and she wasn't allowed to participate in figure skating professionally at all. And so she had to get creative. And there was this show called Celebrity Boxing that started in 2002. Let's get ready to rumble. This was a franchise version of something that had proven to make for a pretty successful pay-per-view event all the way back in the 90s

and would usually pair up two people who were once very culturally relevant for some reason but now we're slightly less so. A great example is a bout between former 70s teen idols Danny Bonaducci and Donnie Osmond. Celebrity boxing, not for nothing, is a show that started airing on Fox around the same time that Girls Gone Wild, the show that would provide a template of humiliating drunk women that would lead to the Tim and D YouTube channel that Haley Welch popped off on, was at its peak of popularity. But celebrity boxing was a place where, as Tanya's character describes, notorious figures could take a last pass at monetizing their name

by facing off against either another celebrity or a known boxer, and more often than not, have their ass kicked. And because most of these figures had been somehow publicly disgraced already, deserved or not, because plenty of these, are deserved. Tonight you will witness an extraordinary boxing match between two celebrities who until six weeks ago

had never set foot in a boxing ring. Let me introduce you to our first fighter tonight. In the Red Corner, comedian and star of the hit BBC 2 series, The Office, Mr. Ricky Jervais. This is where Tanya Harding ends up in 2002. And in a twist that made me so mad and sad, Tanya has matched up.

against a woman named Paula Jones, who was also dragged through the mud in 1990s tabloid culture. Because Paula Jones credibly accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment. In May of 91, Bill Clinton harassed me on the job and then basically told me, let's keep this between ourselves. I just pretended that it didn't happen. And what's worse, Paula Jones stepping into the ring was saying, to be because Amy Fisher, a.k.a. yet another 1990s woman who was publicly disgraced

in spite of being a victim of sexual abuse called the Long Island Lolita was not able to attend. The winner by technical knockout, Kanye TNT, Hiday! Were you surprised that Paula, who's never competed at any level like this and has never trained for sports at your level

was able to go into the third round. Oh, she did really well. I knew that both of us could come in and get to know each other a little bit and, you know, it wasn't a cat fight. It was out. It was more like a boxing match, but have fun all at the same time.

And, you know, I knocked her down a few times. That's all I mattered. This is a clear pattern when you look at the history of celebrity boxing. You're hard-pressed to find a man competing who isn't either trying to recapture relevance, has been credibly accused or convicted of a sex crime or both. And with women, you're more likely to find someone who has just been publicly shamed

in an extreme way, whether you think they deserved it or not. Men are trying to bounce back from something that they did. And most women are people that others will pay to see punched in the face. What's clear is that this is not what Tanya Harding wanted for her life. It was a choice that she made out of a need to survive. She wanted to not be publicly humiliated in the first place, just like Paula Jones or Amy Fisher didn't want. And like Haley Welch, Tanya was from a working class family and didn't have anyone looking out for her financially or emotionally. And like Haley Welch, Tanya Harding did fuck up at different times. Unlike Haley Welch, she was a generational athlete. But you can talk to me about that at a bar.

I love talking about Tanya Harding. And while there are new venues for celebrity boxing today, I will remind you how successful the Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson Netflix match was last year. The gender dynamics kind of remain the same. The men are credibly accused of sex crimes and washed up. The women have been publicly humiliated and their faults are generally connected to survival. but all of it is out of some desperation. It sucks.

It is very American. Haley is willing to sign up for this, not because she is secretly wanted to box for her whole life, but because it is a way for her to make money and keep her name out there. And regardless of whether it works, whether it's humiliating, or whether it matches up with how she wants her life to go. And maybe it'll be fun. I hope it is.

But from where I'm sitting, it's just the next grift. So Haley Welch, I'm going to take a shot in the dark here. Your 16th minute ends now. And for your moment of fun, here is KSai describing Los Angeles as a state, not a city, and there are at least five people in the room, and no one pushes back. Goodbye. You've been to the U.S. a few times, right? Way too many times.

Do you have a favorite state or anything? Favorite state? Definitely not L.A. I do not like L.A. I can agree with you on that. I agree. I feel like L.A. has just gone downhill over the years, man. 16th Minute is a production of Pool Zone Media and I Hard Radio.

It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Lofus. 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 who will 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? 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 I-HeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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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