OK, so let's unpack this. You know, usually when
we talk about, like, winning the lottery, there's
a very clear established system for it. Right,
like buying a physical ticket. Exactly. You go
to a store, you buy a ticket, the numbered balls
pop out of a machine, and, you know, you match
them, you win. Yeah. You stand there with a giant
cardboard check, smiling for the cameras. It's
a very structured, almost mathematical event.
Yeah, very predictable. But in the digital wild
west, that structured lottery system just vanishes
entirely. The winning ticket is completely accidental,
the payout mechanism is pure chaos, and the person
holding the ticket, well, they rarely even understand
the game they've just won. Which brings us to
June of 2024. Specifically, a street corner in
Nashville, Tennessee, and a woman named Haley
Welch. Right. So welcome to a brand new deep
dive. We have a very specific mission for you
today. We were looking at a single comprehensive
source, which is the Wikipedia page for Haley
Welch. And depending on how online you are, that
name might not immediately ring a bell. Yeah,
right up until you hear her 2024 Internet moniker,
which is, of course, the hawk to a girl. Right.
So the mission here for you listening is that
we are going to use this one Wikipedia article
to completely deconstruct the modern life cycle
of viral fame. Yeah. We want to show you exactly
how a random like five second street interview
transformed a factory worker into a multimillion
dollar brand, a podcaster and eventually the
center of a major financial scandal. It's wild.
It really is. We're not just exploring what happened,
but why it matters. Think of this. as your blueprint
for how internet culture creates, scales, and
sometimes entirely breaks its overnight celebrities.
So the origin story is perfectly mundane, which
I think is what makes the scale of the fallout
so crazy. It's June 11th, 2024. Haley Welch is
out in the Broadway district of Nashville. Just
a normal night out. Exactly. She and a friend
are approached by two guys, Tim Dickerson and
Darius Marlowe, and they run a YouTube channel
called Tim and DTV. This is your classic Vox
Pop channel, you know. The man on the street
interview format. Yeah, an absolute staple of
internet content farming. They stand around with
a microphone, ask provocative questions to strangers,
and basically just hope for a funny reaction
to feed the algorithm. And the interview actually
starts off surprisingly pain. They ask her a
pretty standard internet question, like, what
makes you wifey material? Right. And according
to the creators, Welch actually encourages them
to spice up the questions. So Marlo takes the
bait and asks, what's one move in bed that makes
a man go crazy every time? And Welch. Delivering
this in of a very strong Southern accent, drops
the line that basically broke the internet for
a month. She says, you got to give them that
hock to and spit on that thing. With hock to
a being, as the article medically notes, an onomatopoeia
for spitting for lubricatory purposes. It's just
it's like catching lightning in a bottle. But
the bottle is a street microphone. That's a great
way to put it. But when a video like this goes
viral today, it's not like a traditional broadcast.
It's like open source code. The very next day.
June 12th, Marlowe uploads the clip to TikTok
and the internet immediately strips the original
creators of their ownership. Right, the decentralization
of it. Yeah. Millions of anonymous users just
rewrite the code. They grab the video, scrub
the Tim and DTV watermark right off of it and
repost it. They remix it, meme it, distribute
it until the original context is entirely gone.
Which brings up a big question. Does the creator
of the viral moment own it or does the person
who provided the spark? Well, what's fascinating
here is the sheer futility of trying to control
that open source distribution. Dickerson and
Marlowe estimated they filed at least 50 copyright
claims in just the days after they first published
the clip. Wait, 50? In just a few days? 50. They
were trying to use traditional legal mechanisms
like takedown notices and intellectual property
claims against a massive decentralized swarm.
Good luck with that. Exactly. And while they
indicated they were happy for Welch, they were
deeply upset about not receiving credit or financial
compensation for her fame. I mean, I get it.
It showcases the messy reality of viral ownership.
You can set the stage, ask a question, and film
the content. But once the collective internet
decides something is a meme, it belongs to the
algorithm. The creator becomes entirely irrelevant.
The internet just takes the raw material and
runs with it. Yeah. But, you know, while millions
of anonymous accounts were fighting over engagement
metrics and I .T. rights, the actual human being
in the video was having a very different, deeply
personal reaction. Yeah, we have to pull back
the curtain on Hayley Welch's life before June
11th to really understand this. This context
is what grounds the entire narrative for you.
She was from Belfast, Tennessee. She was raised
by her paternal grandmother, and she worked in
a bed spring factory, a bed spring factory, just
totally normal blue collar life. Right. And she
later shared on comedian Whitney Cummings podcast
a very raw detail about her background. Her mother
was a crack user and Walsh herself was born a
crack baby. She has no contact with her mother
anymore. Wow. So, I mean, imagine you're walking
out of your blue collar shift at a factory in
a small town. You check your phone. and suddenly
50 million people are watching a five second
clip of you from last weekend. It's terrifying.
That is the terror of modern hyper -visibility.
Her initial reaction wasn't to celebrate at all.
The source quotes her saying she spent the first
week literally hiding in her house. Yeah, she
was mortified. She was so mortified she wouldn't
go anywhere except to her factory job. She was
experiencing the absolute shock of being perceived
by the whole world without her permission. But
then comes the turning point. The moment the
entire trajectory of her life shifts is when
she sees unofficial vendors selling merchandise.
Shirts, hats, stickers with her face and her
catchphrase are popping up everywhere. She realizes
that total strangers are financially capitalizing
on her identity. And her reaction to that was
purely pragmatic. What did she say? She said,
if everyone else is making money off of it, I
might as well too. Wow. That is the moment she
pivots from being a passive subject of a meme
to an active participant in her own monetization.
OK, wait. I have to push back on this idea of
her as a brilliant brand architect in that exact
moment. Yeah. I mean, she didn't film the video.
She didn't own the copyright. She was a factory
worker hiding in her house. Was it really her
actively architecting a brand, or was it a swarm
of agents and managers swooping in to exploit
a confused 20 -something before the internet
moved on to the next shiny object? You know,
that is a crucial distinction. The speed of the
pivot strongly suggests the latter, an influx
of professional capitalization machinery. Just
look at the whiplash -inducing timeline here.
Yeah, let's look at the dates. She quits her
job at the Bed Spring factory on June 27th, barely
two weeks after the street interview. She partners
with a local apparel brand to start selling official
merchandise. And within a couple of weeks, she
makes over $65 ,000. $65 grand in a couple of
weeks. Exactly. That is an incredible injection
of capital, likely way more than a year's salary
at the factory earned in a matter of days. You
don't stand up a national supply chain and merchandising
operation from your living room in Belfast, Tennessee,
without professional operators stepping in to
steer the ship. Oh, absolutely not. Yeah. And
those operators immediately pushed her toward
traditional cultural validation. The internet
fame's bills out of the phone and into the real
world with surreal speed. It really did. Two
days after quitting her jobs at June 29th, she
is pulled up on stage with massive country star
Zach Bryan during his Nashville concert to sing
Revival. Which is huge. Huge. A few days after
that, she's hanging out with Shaquille O 'Neal
during his DJ set. By July 2nd, she officially
signs for Hollywood representation with an agency
called The Penthouse. And then by August 15th,
she is standing on a Major League Baseball mound
throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at a
New York Mets game. But establishing a brand
in a few months is one thing. Maintaining relevance
is an entirely different beast. When your fame
is based on a five -second clip, the algorithm's
clock is ticking very loudly. You cannot just
remain a meme. You have to transition into a
platform. That desperation to outrun the algorithmic
death cycle leads directly into her next phase,
which is attention diversification. Okay, here's
where it gets really interesting. How do you
diversify attention? You build a media empire.
Right. So in September 2024, Welsh launches her
own podcast called Talk Toa under Jake Paul's
Better Company umbrella. Right. And what really
stands out to me here is the guest list. I mean,
this is someone whose fame was measured in months,
and she is pulling massive names. Her first episode
features Whitney Cummings, and she gets billionaire
Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban. Yeah, and rapper Wiz
Khalifa and Jojo Siwa. It just demonstrates the
sheer currency of attention in today's world.
Traditional gatekeepers care far less about your
resume or your pedigree and far more about your
reach. If you have the eyeballs, billionaires
and platinum recording artists will gladly sit
across the table from you. It's a symbiotic relationship.
They get access to her massive, albeit chaotic
viral audience, and she borrows their legacy
credibility to legitimize her new platform. But,
you know, when you have that much hyper focused,
white hot attention on on you, you also become
an empty vessel for the internet's weirdest impulses.
Because her name was trending so heavily, she
became an unwitting magnet for viral fake news.
Oh, the fake news cycle was intense. Yeah, and
I want to be super clear here to you listening.
We take absolutely no political stance on what
we're about to discuss. Yeah. We are strictly
and impartially reporting the facts from our
source to highlight the mechanics of engagement
farming. Right. And engagement farming is essentially
when bad actors create fabricated, highly controversial
content simply to harvest clicks, likes and shares,
which they can then monetize. Welch's trending
name was the perfect bait for that. Right. So
in September 2024, a fake screenshot of an NPR
article goes massively viral on Twitter. It claimed
that former President Donald Trump had canceled
a guest appearance on her podcast because of
an assassination attempt in Florida. Totally
fabricated. 100 % fake. Yeah. Then, in November,
a fake CNN screenshot goes viral on Instagram,
claiming that more than 75 ,000 write -in votes
were cast for Hawk Tooa and Talk Tooa in the
2024 United States presidential election. Again,
completely untrue. Totally untrue. But it proves
how her brand was hijacked. She was no longer
just a person. She was a cultural shorthand that
anyone could use to game the algorithm. And if
we connect this to the bigger picture, her own
team was also engineering incredibly surreal
moments to keep the engagement farming going
on their end. They knew they had to keep feeding
the machine. Which explains the totally bizarre
detour onto Howie Mandel's podcast. Yes. She
takes a live DNA saliva test during a five -minute
segment where the results allegedly showed she
was ninety 27 .7 % Ashkenazi Jewish. Which is
such a weird segment. Super weird. And the efficacy
of that test was heavily questioned by the Jewish
website, Jewlicious. And Welch herself claimed
she had absolutely no knowledge of her family
having any heritage like that. So why? do a live
DNA test. Because it creates a new headline.
Exactly. It spins up a new cycle of TikTok clips.
And then in November, she launches a dating advice
app called Pookie Tools, partnering with Ben
Gans. Pookie Tools. Yeah, Pookie Tools. Gans
is the founder of an AI automation platform called
Ultimate AI Studio. And you have to ask why an
AI app? because tech valuations and software
multiples are vastly higher than selling t -shirts.
Oh, that makes total sense. Welch's team was
throwing everything at the wall. Merchandise,
a high production podcast, viral stunts, an AI
dating app. They were desperately trying to build
a diversified portfolio of attention to outrun
the incredibly short shelf life of a viral moment.
But moving that fast and aggressively entering
complex markets that you don't fully understand,
I mean, that inevitably brings immense risk.
You are essentially building a skyscraper on
a foundation of a five -second meme. Yeah, the
foundation is weak. Which sets the stage perfectly
for the climax of this entire narrative, the
crash. Because in the modern influencer economy,
the crash almost always comes in the form of
decentralized finance. So true. In December 2024,
the empire building takes a very dark turn. Welch
launches a cryptocurrency meme coin on the Solana
blockchain called the HAWK token. Right. Let's
break down the mechanics here, because understanding
the how is crucial for you to get the full picture.
The Solana blockchain is known for incredibly
fast, incredibly cheap transactions. Because
of that, it has become the casino of the crypto
world. Anyone can create a meme coin in minutes
for a few dollars. Exactly. And these coins have
absolutely no underlying utility, no business
model, and no intrinsic value. Their entire valuation
is based purely on hype and attention. And when
an influencer with millions of followers launches
one of these tokens, the followers rush in to
buy it, hoping to get in early on the next big
thing. This massive influx of buying pressure
causes the price of the coin to skyrocket artificially.
And the numbers for the HIK token are just staggering.
The coin hits a market capitalization of nearly
500 million dollars. Half a billion dollars.
Created out of thin air, purely based on the
hawk to a brand. But here is the mechanical reality
of meme coins. For someone to make millions of
dollars selling at the top, there have to be
thousands of regular people buying at the top.
Right. In finance, this is called exit liquidity.
The influencers trusting fans literally become
the exit liquidity for the insiders. Which is
exactly what the data suggests happen next. The
token violently plummets from a $500 million
valuation down to $25 million in a matter of
days. A catastrophic collapse. A collapse that
wipes out the investments of the regular people
who bought in at the peak. And the fallout was
instant and severe. Investors immediately started
filing complaints with the U .S. Securities and
Exchange Commission. The Internet just exploded
with accusations. Yeah, calling it an exit scam
is a classic pump and dump scheme. You even have
prominent cryptocurrency journalist Coffeezilla,
who specializes in tracking blockchain fraud,
publicly accusing Welch and her team of insider
trading. He showed blockchain data of wallets
allegedly connected to the creators dumping massive
amounts of the token at the peak. It was a huge
mess. By the end of December, a lawsuit is officially
filed in the United States District Court for
the Eastern District of New York against the
creators of the HIW coin for unlawfully promoting
and selling unregistered cryptocurrency. Looking
objectively at Welch's defense based on our source,
she actually wasn't named directly in that specific
lawsuit initially, but she did respond to the
massive public litigation. What was her response?
Well, she stated she took the situation extremely
seriously and fledged full cooperation with the
legal parties involved. But her core defense
was essentially one of total separation and ignorance.
Oh, of course. She claimed she only received
a marketing fee for the token and that she never
made a single dime from the coin itself. Crucially,
in May 2025, she made a public admission stating
she knew, quote, essentially Zio about crypto
when her coin launched. OK, I have to push back
hard on this because this defense is the crux
of the whole modern influencer economy. At what
point does an influencer become responsible for
the financial ruin of their followers? It's a
great question. You cannot plead ignorance saying,
oh, I knew. essentially zero about crypto, when
your name, your face, and your parasocial relationship
with your fans are the precise mechanisms driving
that $500 million valuation. If you take a marketing
fee to sell a highly volatile, unregulated financial
instrument to your fans, aren't you mechanically
accountable for what happens to their money?
This raises such an important question about
the market reality of monetizing trust. You see,
the defense of, I just lent my name to it, is
a relic from the old celebrity endorsement model
of the 1990s. Yeah, totally. Selling a bad t
-shirt or a subpar perfume is one thing. The
customer still gets a t -shirt. Attaching your
heavily trusted, intimate digital brand to a
financial mechanism designed to extract wealth
is entirely different. Exactly. When you monetize
the trust of your audience in the crypto space,
you are acting as a financial catalyst, regardless
of your personal technical understanding of the
blockchain. The sheer speed of Welch's rise meant
she acquired massive liquid influence before
she had the infrastructure or the financial literacy
to wield it without detonating her own community.
So what does this all mean for you listening?
Just look at the dizzying timeline we just walked
through from June 2024 to early 2026. It's unbelievable.
In less than two years, Haley Welch went from
working in a bed spring factory in Tennessee
to a ubiquitous viral meme to a top charting
podcaster interviewing billionaires. She becomes
the subject of a 2025 documentary, appropriately
titled Ductua. Oh, right. The documentary. Yeah.
She books a television guest role on the show,
Chad Powers, and she ends up at the center of
a massive half billion dollar crypto collapse.
It is the absolute extreme of the American dream.
Fast forward to decentralized and heavily distorted
by the Internet. We've spent this time examining
how a single human being and the machinery around
her monetized a passing phrase on a street corner.
But I want to leave you with a lingering question
to mull over, looking toward the immediate future.
Play it on us. If a real person's five -second
clip can be infinitely hijacked, revixed, and
financially exploited by anonymous actors and
algorithmic trends today, what happens tomorrow?
We are entering an era where AI can generate
photorealistic video and audio instantly. If
the Internet's machinery can build a multi -million
-dollar empire and a half -billion -dollar financial
crash off of a five -second street interview,
what happens when the algorithm no longer needs
a factory worker from Tennessee to provide the
spark? What happens when AI can generate the
perfect viral moment entirely from scratch, bypassing
the human being altogether? How does anyone evolve
past a digital caricature when the caricature
can be entirely fabricated? Yeah, the digital
Wild West is about to get a lot wilder. You might
have bought the winning lottery ticket of internet
fame today, but tomorrow, the machines might
just print the tickets themselves. Thank you
for joining us on this deep dive. We'll see you
next time.