April 29, 2025 • 54 mins
Let’s catch up with Haliey ‘Hawk Tuah’ Welch since the fallout of the crypto scam that undercut her sixteenth minute. While most didn’t stick around to see what happened, a lot about the crypto world has empowered Team Tuah to keep going — getting one over on the government, a second botched pump and dump scheme, and a suspiciously timed podcast relaunch. To what end? We’ve got some ideas.
See Jamie on tour for RAW DOG! https://us.macmillan.com/tours/jamie-loftus-raw-dog/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaf-I3pdBDpG51TvRPCIfkS08847rolEcVNOqDZCUX8Hq9t9sZlX9idj_DI9NQ_aem_niy1HGU3U4vldbC-KP7JsA
Watch Coffeezilla’s breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiZVDY5jNYM&t=696s
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Coolzon Media. Hello, sixteenth minute listeners. Jamie here with a
special announcement. I am going to be going on tour
across the US in just a couple of weeks to
promote the paperback release of my book Raw Dog, The
Naked Truth about hot Dogs. If you don't know about
Raw Dog The Naked Truth about hot Dogs, let me
(00:23):
tell you. It is a book about hot dogs that
I wrote. It is the only book that I know
that is strictly about the history of hot dogs from
a leftist perspective, meaning that I love hot dogs, but
we have to talk about how they're produced and the
labor that it requires to produce them. I'm going to
be going around the country going to independent bookstores and
(00:45):
giving free chats about the books. If you want to
come out talk sixteenth Minute Talk hot Dogs, you can
come talk to me Jamie in the following cities. Los
Angeles May thirteenth, Louisville, Kentucky, May fourteenth, Cambridge, Massachusett, May fifteenth.
That's going to be a rough couple of days on
a plane. Portland, Maine, May nineteenth, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, May twentieth, Richmond, Virginia,
(01:08):
May twenty first, Petaluma, California, May twenty second, and Larkspur, California,
May thirty first. I will be releasing other dates as
the summer goes on, so feel free to reach out
and complain. I love it. You can reserve your tickets
for free at the link in the description. I'm really
looking forward to seeing you, and of course I am
(01:29):
wearing a little outfit. Okay, enjoy the episode's.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Joy sixteen.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk
to the Internet's main characters to see how their moment
in the spotlight affected them and what that says about
us and the Internet. And just when you thought the
story of Haley Welch aka Hawked to a Girl, the
main character of twenty twenty four, had made her grand
(02:47):
exit from the public consciousness, well, this is the consequence
of me covering main characters of recent history. It's never true.
I'm always wrong. There's more to say. So this is
the first episode that we've done of this kind, but
it's one that I felt was necessary because earlier this
year I did a multiple part series on Hailey Welch,
(03:10):
who went viral last year in a way that is
barely possible anymore after being featured without her consent, as
we get into in that series on a Man on
the Street YouTube slash TikTok channel, in which she became
famous for saying, you must.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Given that hawk dude spent all that night.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
And is she wrong? But for all of what followed,
the clickbait fame followed by the modern template of what
viral fame looked like at this very particular moment in time,
it was a lot and it kind of sucked. But
for those who listened to that series a few months ago,
(03:54):
we have, as you know, undergone a million historical catastrophes
since then, and so I do want to just refresh
your mind a little bit. So come with me if
you dare to December twenty twenty four. Fortunately, we have
been here recently, not just in calendar linear time, but
(04:18):
because we recently talked about this specific period of a
few weeks in our Doctor Ali Luke's episode. But this
is where we left off at the end of the
Haley Welch series. To summarize, twenty one year old Haley
Welch went to the Broadway District in Nashville, Tennessee, Tennessee
being the state she grew up in with her best
(04:38):
friends after seeing a country music festival and were beckoned
over by a man on the street aspiring social media
douchebag bro duo called Tim and D, who asked them
this inspired question.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
What's one move in bed that makes a man go
crazy every time?
Speaker 1 (04:56):
And while they asked this question to men women, and
I will qualify that with many drunk women, always drunk
women who can't quite give consent. Nothing weird going on there.
While most of these women answered with a version of
the same thing, one woman answered it the funniest, and
that woman was Hailey Welch, whose interaction with Tim and
(05:20):
D alongside her best friend Chelsea, lasts much longer in
the original video, but during the age of the TikTok clip,
it boils down to this, I gotta give him that hawk, dude.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
But all that time here.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
And what Haley experiences from this moment on is uniquely
twenty twenty four, sort of a collage of what the
viral online experience could look like at the highest level.
At this particular moment, she gets the classic overnight theme treatment,
one characterized by mere instantaneous online headlines and fame, but
(05:57):
it's long past the day is where this aim is
easily parlayed into where her viral fore mothers landed. You
know what I'm talking about. The twenty ten's moved to
la version of viral fame. The go talk to Hollywood agencies,
do a couple guest spots on sitcoms, and try to
figure out how you might fit into a more traditional
(06:20):
media culture. But that really didn't exist by the time
Haley became famous in twenty twenty four, and in fact,
you could argue that Internet culture had since eclipsed that
traditional media structure. No, by the time Haley's moment came along,
a new path for monetizing virality had been forged, and
(06:42):
while some influencers weren't able to make the jump from
the Internet pandering to Hollywood to the Hollywood pandering to
the Internet era between the mid two thousands and now
a couple dead think of them as the girls who
made the jump from the silent pictures to the talk
if the girls who made the jump from the silent
(07:03):
picture to the talkies were a pair of adult blonde
brothers with very dark spirits. I, of course, am referring
to the Paul brothers specifically Jake.
Speaker 5 (07:14):
Paul, we need to change from Kamala Harris to the
Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Who is the younger brother of Logan Paul. Do you
give a fight, you brother?
Speaker 6 (07:27):
Not in real life.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
You've practiced a little bit.
Speaker 6 (07:29):
Never We've never even sparred. But I was willing to
step in from Mike Tyson when Tyson got sick, and
we actually ran it up the chain in that flot.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Who I promised to mention as little as humanly possible
in this episode, But they just weasele their way into
so many corners of Internet history. Since we have last
recorded this show, they have attended Trump's second presidential inauguration
with THEO Vaughn kill me, Kill me with a gun.
(07:56):
But Jake Paul, who brought Haley Welch and her best
friend and Chelsea along with the entire Hawk to a
crew that had assembled consisting of managers, publicists, lawyers. The
list goes on onto the Better Network, a podcasting slash
sports betting application. Jake Paul knows the online fame game
(08:19):
better than nearly anybody. The polls were a big part
of observing this major change in what influencing looked like.
They started on Vine, an app that no longer exists.
They moved to La when that was the thing to do.
They pioneered the idea of moving a bunch of influencers
into a mansion and then ruining the mansion back up.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
Wow, I never thought I would say this.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Well, welcome home Jake.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Paller's we made it, Mom, we flipped made it.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
Good morning, Jake Pollish.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
What flippant gouc chan.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Today is off to a relating stock. We're moving into
the new team ten.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
It is genuinely hard to find a douchebag influencer thing
that these men have not done. In the mid twenty tens,
they were doing bad rap battles with their fellow influencers.
They shamelessly hawked merch. But as the first Trump administration
dragged on, they were part of this evolving influencer grift.
(09:24):
And I think you'll recognize what I'm talking about here,
the new influencer grift, which consists of this sinister blend
of bad long video podcasts, weird products marketed at children,
pivoting to a hard republican out of nowhere, pay per view, boxing,
sports gambling apps, and of course cryptocurrency. So By the
(09:47):
time Haley Welch came along, Jake Paul wasn't just a
whole new kind of influencer. He had been a part
of creating what this influencer was going to look like.
So no longer in the Team ten house or doing
whatever I blocked from my YouTube feed in the mid
two thousands. At this point in twenty twenty four, Jake
(10:09):
Paul was so busy with being a right wing influencer
that he was actively looking to find other influencers to
host a shitty video podcast on his crypto sports betting
app so that he could spend more time, say it
with me fighting a rateist on pay per view boxing.
And this is the path to fame monetization that Hailey
(10:34):
Welch was launched into, and her first major platform was
a video podcast that strictly featured guests with massive social
media followings and usually video podcasts of their own. This
was and is the podcast known as Talk Toua, which
is objectively a really good name for that podcast, but
(10:57):
that doesn't mean that it was a good podcast necessarily.
Haley at the beginning is very uncomfortable on Mike, and
that is not a criticism of her she literally became
famous a couple weeks earlier.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Make sure you hit follow on Talk to Her wherever
you get your podcast. We're releasing episodes every Tuesday. And
for those of you watching on YouTube, be sure you like,
comment and subscribe.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Subscribe to that thing. No Riz, but this podcast, of
course gets a lot of press because of how close
it happens to her moment of massive virality, and it
even spawns an irony pilled reaction podcast called Talking Talk TOUA.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
Welcome to Talking Talk Toua, the official Companion podcast to
Talk to A.
Speaker 6 (11:38):
I'm Peter and I'm Cam and we're your hosts.
Speaker 7 (11:40):
Here to the only official Companion podcast.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
So Talk to A does what it was supposed to do,
get a lot of attention and sell Jake Paul's Better
Crypto sports gambling app to her relatively young audience, even
if the ad reads left some to be desired.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Do you want to make fifty thousand dollars on the
biggest fight of the year, The Jake Paul Mike Tyson
Fight is finally here and better is giving you a
chance to swim up to fifty thousand dollars simply by
answering five questions about the fight. All you gotta do
is download better.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
I'm sold, but it's only a matter of time before
Haley Welch's team was approached about starting a meme coin
on their own. They were already so adjacent to crypto,
and they were approached by a man named Doc Hollywood.
I'm not joking to use a service called pump dot fun.
I'm also not joking. Pump dot fun is a service
(12:36):
that allows influencers to mint their own crypto coin and
basically make a quick buck. And while casual followers of
Hailey Welch may have found this pivot to crypto to
be very confusing if you were paying close attention to
how her social media had developed since this first moment
of fame and signing with an agency. The scene had
(12:58):
been set for this for months, as Twitter became a
confirmed cess pit for crypto speculators and scammers. Hailey Welch's
team set up a Twitter account for her that exclusively
spoke in crypto memes. Meanwhile, over on Haley's personal account
on Instagram, she was acting like a normal young woman
(13:20):
in her twenties. There was a huge narrative voice difference
between these two accounts, and so a lot of people
asked Haley on Twitter is this you? Is this your team?
Who is this? And in response, there would be front
facing videos of Haley insisting that know this is her,
She's very into crypto.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
It's me, bitch, what do you fucking mean?
Speaker 1 (13:45):
I do want to add that we had to pull
that clip from a previous episode of sixteenth Minute because
all of these videos were deleted, and it will become
clear why in a second. Haley now readily admits that
she was asked to film the videos, but she was
absolutely not running the Twitter crypto meme account because she
(14:05):
didn't know anything about crypto and she's too young to
have any interest in Twitter. But all throughout the lead
up to the early December twenty twenty four launch of
what was known as Hawkcoin, Hailey Welch played along in
spite of admittedly knowing very little about how crypto actually worked,
much less how to or if it's even possible to
(14:27):
work with it ethically, and this led to her, depending
on how you feel, either being willfully or being tricked
into a pretty massive scam by a man named Doc Hollywood.
So let's say this man named Doc Hollywood has convinced
you that you'll make a shitload of money on a
(14:49):
crypto pump and dump scheme. But the only catch is
that you need to post videos of you as if
you totally understand what's going on. This is a strateg
that of course went south very quickly, and if you
want more details about how this exactly went down, go
ahead and listen to earlier parts of this series. I
(15:10):
hope these are things you already know, but it does
feel important to remind you of what actually happened in
this case because in recent months and since I last
wrote about this story, key players involved have begun to
characterize the events that I painstakingly, for some reason, tracked
(15:33):
in the first run of these episodes, and have changed
the narrative to better suit their own interests. Because in
recent months, a lot of the key players in this story,
both Haley and the people who worked in her general
orbit during this time, have begun to mischaracterize the events
(15:53):
I just described, And if you have access to the
original posts and timelines doesn't match up at all. Why
might that be in Hailey's case? I'll give you the
generous reading first. When big weird stuff happens to you
and is covered extensively in the media, that, regardless of
(16:14):
what you did right or wrong, is definitely overwhelming and
possibly traumatizing. Something I think about with Hailey Welch is
that this appeared to suddenly put her in the position
of being the breadwinner for her family and the employer
of her best friend in an industry that not only
she didn't understand, but barely anyone understood, because the way
(16:37):
that online influencing and all of these weird crypto situations
work seems to change every two minutes. If I were
to give a less generous reading, this is something we've
seen from Hailey Welch before, or more specifically, Hailey Welch
and company. As we'll get into in this episode, Hailey
Welch has made it clear that she is interested in
(16:59):
remaining in the public eye, regardless of how compromising the
thing that got her in the public eye was, and
that she's down to exploit others and to be exploited again.
So we're in December twenty twenty four. Trump has just
been re elected. A United Healthcare executive is assassinated by
(17:21):
someone I read the Reddit board. You guys, I apologize
for my enthusiasm, and Jamie Loftus forces her fiance to
take the day off work to see Wicked and Imax,
and for the first and only time in human history
saw straight couples in the theater where the woman was
(17:41):
loudly explaining the plot to the man. It was incredible,
and Miss Hagley talked to A. Welch releases what appears
to be the final episode of her podcast, Talk to
U on Jake Paul's Better Network, which and I always
(18:02):
laugh when I see this is ominously titled how not
to Get Canceled, and then the feed goes completely dark
because Haley Welsh got canceled because it was at this
time that the now infamous hawk Coin, a meme coin
many correctly pointed out should have been called spitcoin. Missed opportunity,
(18:23):
but at least they thought of talk to A. But
hawk Coin was released to a crypto consuming public in
one of the most high profile catastrophic rollouts to date.
If Cryptojournalist's reaction was any indication, I have questions. I
have questions.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
I'm raising my hand copy Zilla.
Speaker 5 (18:42):
Hey, this is one of the most miserable, horrible launches
I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
You've heard this voice on the show before. This is
the voice of Stephen Findeeson aka coffee Zilla, the journalist
and extremely successful YouTuber who was at the four front
of calling out Hawkcoin for what it was, a crypto scam,
which isn't uncommon, but coffee Zilla has a massive audience
and he correctly called out that this wasn't just a scam,
(19:12):
it was a tremendously lazy scam, which, when you add
the most memorable face of the year to it, meant
a lot more press than most common pump and dub
schemes of this nature would pull in. And then he
goes on to make a very viral YouTube video about it.
This then makes it public knowledge that the meme coin
(19:32):
is a huge scam and it all but craters Haley
Weld's fledgling career. But among people who were interested in
this story, the real question was how aware was Haley
that this was a huge scam. But we wouldn't get
the answer to that question for months because after the
(19:53):
crypto scandal, not only is an SEC investigation announced into
the issue, but Hailey Welch and basically everyone in her
orbit go completely silent. They go dark, on social media
for months. Talk to us stops, Hailey stops posting publicly,
(20:14):
and everyone assumes that her moment in the spotlight has
ended in sort of the most humiliating way possible. The
reason largely speculated for this sudden silence wasn't humiliation, though
it was very much the lawsuit filed with the SEC
in New York from people who had been defrauded to
(20:34):
the tune of six figures by Hawkcoin, leading to millions
of dollars in defrauding. But investigating these cases takes some time,
and the Internet famously has no patience, and so almost
immediately we start to see lazy clickbait video essays saying
things like this, what's going on with that hawk?
Speaker 2 (20:57):
She going to jail?
Speaker 1 (20:57):
What happened to Hawk too? Like, No, she obviously wasn't
going to jail, and there was never a chance that
she would have, because it was the orchestrators of the
crypto coin named in the lawsuit the doc Hollywood's not
the young woman being used as the face of the scheme,
and that kind of content is a whole cottage industry
(21:19):
of taking a recently relevant person, often a woman, and
painting them in the worst way possible. And while Haley
absolutely fucked up, she is painted in a pretty misogynist
and slut shamy way and a lot of these videos.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
The hawk to a girl just got violated on Instagram.
You see, she posted a real inviting Trey Young to
be on her podcast, all because he plays for the
Atlanta Hawks, so it would fit well with her brand
and the Atlanta Hawks Instagram account commented saying, we good
as Tray probably wants nothing to do with her.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
And congratulations, you're caught up. This is where we'd left
off with Hailey Welch in our first series. It wasn't
(22:14):
clear what the SEC investigation would yield, whether she would
be made an example of or after the severe roller
coaster in the public eye she'd had in twenty twenty four,
maybe she would just cut her losses and pack it
back into Tennessee and the world as the world does
continued while Haley took what everyone joked was her.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Nap and who I'm gonna go to bed and I'll
see you guys tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Outside of a Twitter post saying that she is completely
cooperating with the SEC investigation. That's the last we hear
from Hailey welch in twenty twenty four, but early in
twenty twenty five, as Trump's second inauguration approaches, something interesting happens.
And by something interesting, I mean something really embarrassing and
(23:07):
very depressing. From January seventeenth, twenty twenty five, three days
before he took office, As Donald Trump was preparing for
his inauguration, those plus to him were also hard at
work launching a new cryptocurrency. I would not be surprised
if you had already forgotten this happened. It was one
thousand press cycles ago now, and it already feels very
(23:27):
quaint compared to what the administration is currently doing. But
Trump launched a meme coin. I mean. Crypto folks seem
to agree that it was a less sloppy pump and
dump than a hawk coin, but that's not saying much.
Coffeezilla can explain it better than I can.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
Trump just launched a meame coin.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Welcome back to the void.
Speaker 5 (23:47):
It is not how I wanted to start my twenty
twenty five Let me tell you that right now. Here's
the tweet my new Donald Trump official meme is. Here's
time to celebrate everything we stand for winning. Join my
very special Trump community. Get your Trump Now go to
get Trump memes dot com. When you go there, you
join the Trump meme which is buying something and hoping
(24:10):
it goes up in value.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
The story within the story that a lot of people
missed as Trump was launching a meme coin was that
during the week of the inauguration, it seemed that virtually
everyone in Trump's orbit was signing up for pump dot
fun and trying to make their own meme coin. Even
the pastor hired to speak at the inauguration.
Speaker 8 (24:35):
Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, Let's talk about him. He is from
one eighty Church in West Detroit. The town's newspaper had
a write up on him via The Daily Beast. Just
hours after he delivered that speech for President Trump, Reverend
Sewell announced the launch of his own crypto token, dubbed Lorenza.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
This one is nuts. You have to laugh at this one.
This is Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, and in this video he
is literally still wearing the outfit he just swore Trump
in wearing. If nothing else, I've never seen someone so
acutely aware that they have twelve minutes of relevance left.
(25:20):
It's very funny.
Speaker 9 (25:21):
I need to do me a favor.
Speaker 10 (25:22):
Right now, I need you to go buy the official
Lorenzo Sewel coin. I want you to be able to
see politics become manifest, not just in a way where
we're praying over political gatherings, but when we're seeing us
become the hands and the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4 (25:40):
Would you help me?
Speaker 10 (25:41):
Would you help us in this endeavor? Would you go
and purchase the coin in order for us to do
what we need to do in the ministry and.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
With the state of the world being what it is.
The Trump meme coin is very successful and basically prints
money for him, leaving some of the world's most noxious
Internet personalities to praise him and essentially enter the Jake
Paul school of right wing grifting, as so many did
in twenty twenty four, ruining the reputation of podcasts permanently.
(26:13):
Oh no, here's an example of someone doing just that.
This is a thirty five year old man named Fase Banks,
who also pivoted to crypto and was investigated by the
SEC for scamming crypto, who I regret to inform you
becomes relevant to our story very shortly.
Speaker 6 (26:33):
And then you get booted out of the Fays House
and your life's falling apart. You're sleeping on an air
mattress and Phase Rugs calling you to check in every
other day and adapt and keemstar. Your only friends got
to get the fuck up and you gotta go do something.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 9 (26:45):
So.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
While some crypto speculators, including people who appeared on this show,
seemed hopeful that the Hawkcoin scandal might mean that Doc
Hollywood and company would be made an example of in
one of the few pump and dumb schemes to make
it all the way to the national news when Trump
was in office doing literally the same thing as hawk
(27:08):
Coin did, a few weeks later it became clear that
there was no way that was going to happen, and
in the meantime, I Jamie lou Loft as Your Little Host,
along with producer Ian Johnson, was trying to see if
there was a chance in hell that Haley's team would
ever let us interview her for this show, and to
(27:28):
everyone's shock, we actually received a reply in January and
Haley's team appeared to consider coming on this show for
two full weeks, which indicates to me that in terms
of media strategy, they must have been really flying by
the seat of their pants. But while the SEC investigation
(27:51):
dragged on, it was also unclear whether Haley Welch was
going to get out of this predicament with her business
relationship with Jake Paul intact, which is a nice way
of saying, whether Jake Paul and company thought they could
make any more money off of her. It seemed unlikely
that Talk TOA was ever going to return on the
(28:11):
Better Network, but I still didn't know why that was.
This became clear in early February when news dropped that
made it clear that not only had Team Hawk decided
against engaging with my sorry ass in spite of the
fact that I bravely paid for their ugly, uncomfortable hat,
(28:32):
thank you very much, but this news also offered an
explanation as to why the Jake Paul relationship fell apart.
I present you the evidence, a leaked, unreleased episode of
Talk TOUA about the crypto scandal. Maybe so. It's a
(29:09):
little unclear exactly when this was filmed, but I would
assume it was sometime in January twenty twenty five. They
are still on the Better Network. Talked to a set
with guests and I hate to say that he's back already.
It is Phase Banks. And while Phase Banks is a
total scumbag who is fully in Jake Paul's orbit, his
(29:33):
being chosen as the guest is not without reason because
while he could at best be described as a crypto
enthusiast who hasn't been under federal investigation in the last
two calendar years, Phase Banks was actually on that famous
Twitter space's press conference, the same press conference that Haileywold
(29:56):
said and who I'm gonna go to bed, the same
press conferen prince that coffee z Illa used to essentially
take down the scam in the first place. He was there.
Here's a clip of him from that moment, responding to
one of the Hawkcoin crypto guys.
Speaker 9 (30:11):
Hayley, I'm gonna talk to you directly right now, because
if you really own ten percent of the supply of
this token and it's locked up for a year and
it's bested over three years, you got scammed harder than
anybody involved. This one hundred percent was a mismanaged mislaunched
like this. This is took what coffee Zilla said. I
(30:32):
would label this as scam as well.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
So in some ways, FaZe Banks's initial criticism of the
hawkcoin scam could make Haley's team putting him on the
show look like an attempt to make her seem like
she's willing to engage with detractors. Of course, this isn't
actually true. FaZe Banks is just another crypto guy, and
(30:55):
like a lot of crypto guys, he is someone who
was involved in any number of alternatively loserish or scary
activities prior to being a crypto guy. Not only does
he stem from the same generation of millennial influencer vloggers
turned crypto dirt bags like Jake Paul Bayes, Banks also
has a long standing relationship positive and negative with the
(31:19):
Paul Brothers, including some romantic history that I cannot commit
to memory to save my life, and after getting into crypto,
developed plenty of experience feigning neutral authority over some bullshit
he's selling like crypto And don't worry, he has been
accused of assaulting a woman. He's a terrible person, So
(31:40):
two things need to be true here, folks. He is
a scumbag, and he is the kind of guy who
would be happy to publicly forgive a crypto scam because
he's the kind of guy to do a crypto scam.
The podcast episode starts like this.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Oh, guys, I'm back with another episode to Talk two,
and I'm here with Banks.
Speaker 6 (32:01):
There he is.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
How's it going?
Speaker 6 (32:04):
It's going good. Life's crazy right now. I don't know.
I say no to every single fucking podcast, ongoing joke
on Impulsive that I stood them up four or five times.
This isn't necessarily my thing, but you're in an interesting
position right now, and I feel like it's my duty
to come on here and talk to you. You seem
like a sweet enough girl, and I feel like I
(32:25):
know more or less what happened with you. We're gonna
get into all that. I brought a couple of crypto
nerds with me. We're gonna sit down and talk.
Speaker 4 (32:32):
H me.
Speaker 6 (32:33):
Yeah, yeah, No, I feel good. How do you feel?
Speaker 1 (32:35):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
I'm so a little shock up about it.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
And I was able to pull this audio from a
re upload of this interview. It's forty minutes long, but
technically this was never formally released on the Talk to
a YouTube channel because it shouldn't have been released until
after the SEC investigation was closed, per in agreement that
the Hawk team had with the phase Banks team, and
(33:01):
at the time this was recorded and leaked, the SEC
investigation was very much not over according to Banks, and
who wouldn't trust Faye's Banks. Haley's team intentionally leaked this
interview to get some sympathy and potentially to push and
benefit from some insider training on the coin, assuming that
(33:26):
the interview would be positively received in the public. I
do believe that. But by February the interview was out
there and Haley's team mysteriously didn't seem to have a
vested interest in getting it offline. So I have seen
this episode and there are some things I want to
share with you about it. The approach. Haley had no
(33:50):
idea what was happening. It's all Doc Hollywood's fault, and
she is like, so very sorry, Please trust her again.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
I'm saying thank you to all my true fans and
all the people that actually watch my stuff and they
keep up with me. We're trying to sort out all
the pieces and stuff to like get all this figured
out and make everything right. Oh my god, I'm gonna cry.
It was supposed to be like a what do they
call it? A long term coin, and the guy that
ran the account he was like, Oh, we're gonna change
like the way everybody thinks a crypto. Crypto is gonna
(34:21):
be a good place. And I feel really bad for
all the people that got affected by it, and it
just didn't go the way I planned.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
And I know you're gonna call me a sucker, but
I do believe some of what Haley is expressing emotionally here.
You don't have to care. But given that, if you
know about this young woman, and I talked about and
spent a lot of time with literally everything she said
in the public in the previous series, this is the
same person who locked herself inside for two weeks after
(34:49):
going viral without giving her consent, and so the fact
that Haley was mortified and scared after the hawk Coin
scandal does make sense to me, regardless of what I
felt was at least partial emotional sincerity on her part.
What's clear here is that this episode is going to
(35:09):
be an attempt to retcon all of the bad press
that this whole cryptoscam is caused and intends to distance
Haley from it. And again, as phase Banks later says,
the episode was not to be released until he approved
and the investigation was closed and it's not just a
(35:32):
roundabout apology ish excuse for how everything went down. According
to Phase Banks and the three extremely random aging hype
beasts that he brought with him, they're still defending crypto
and they are encouraging Haley to do crypto the right
(35:52):
way this time. It is nuts.
Speaker 6 (35:55):
Basically, what Frank just said in normal people terms is
you take every that you made on this and you
mark it by this token, and you lock it up,
you walk away from it. You don't ever see that money,
you can never touch it again. And you say, I'm
not gonna maybe I'm not going to talk about this
every day, whatever whatever, but I'm going to stand on business.
I put my face on this. I'm accepting the responsibility
of this happened, and hopefully you know, everybody is made
(36:17):
whole at some point where you guys do what you
want with this. At this point, this is me kind
of like you know what I mean, And what that
does is it kind of shows your intentions, right, Like
I just want I just want to do right by
by this and everybody who participated in this, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
Throughout this, Haley is sitting there and nodding, but as
the podcast continues. Phase Banks and the random aging highe
beasts are more talking to Haley's off screen lawyer than her,
and it is very, very awkward to watch. They mentioned
in the interview that Phase Banks spoke to coffee Zilla
(36:53):
ahead of the interview and wants to present a number
of questions that coffee Zilla passed along. And I guess
I'm glad that he spoke to an actual journalist, But
this whole time, Phase Banks is sort of posturing as
if he is a journalist and not who he is.
It just feels worth restating I.
Speaker 6 (37:14):
Use that opportunity. I got investigated by the SEC for
fucking like two years over this. It costs me way
more money than I made. It was one of the
most miserable experiences of my life because because that moment
got me into crypto.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Which leaves me with the question what. But this is
clearly a very softball interview that is also intended to
push crypto. Phase Banks and the random guys are moralizing
and the grift is strong. They have it both ways.
They forgive Hayley, as it were, on behalf of other
(37:47):
crypto scammers who have gotten away with it and got
better at scamming I guess, and they're ostensibly asking her
to get better at scamming for next time. This is
something that they describe.
Speaker 6 (37:59):
As stand on business.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
There is a real menace about the phrase standing on business.
Never trust someone who claims to stand on business. So
while this interview is teeming with bullshit, the impression of
the episode was that if it had been released as
promised after the investigation closed and fase Bank's team approved it,
(38:24):
both parties would have felt that it was mutually beneficial.
But the episode quote unquote leaked, and we'll get into
what we mean by that. But before we knew anything
about the circumstances of the leak, Hewleitzer Prize winning reporter
bays Banks was sure what had happened, he tweets.
Speaker 7 (38:48):
So, in an attempt to hear Haley Welch's side of
the crypto scam story, I agreed to do her first
podcast back. I had heavy stipulations, including one, not allowing
markets to be manipulated by leaking this episode's existence before
a resolution was found. Two, her team finding a real
(39:09):
solution regarding the money she made, where that should go,
and what to do with the Hawk project moving forward.
These were non starters, and we were told this episode
would only ever see the light of day if we
explicitly green lit it. These incompetent leaked and or inside
traded the token. We noticed a random spike and volume
(39:33):
on the coin too too, along with random messages asking
us if we did the podcast. Very clearly her team
was not as solid as they claimed to be. They
completely blew it, and we called the episode off right
then and there. Now, today the episode randomly gets leaked.
(39:53):
The price of Hawk is pumping, and they completely fucking
fumbled the bag yet again. What a fuck mess. Poor girl.
It's wonder how she found herself in this position in
the first place. Now, Haley Welch, I'm going to speak
to you direct and say the exact same thing I
said to you on spaces that night. Fire Everybody, your
(40:15):
team's fucking the bleeps.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
There are not swear words, they are in fact slur words.
Fuck Phase banks. But what really sticks out to me
about this leaked episode isn't that this was the botched
ending to an attempted apology tour, but that the Hawk
TUA team seemed so convinced that this was going to
(40:38):
work that not only did they have to weather accusations
of insider trading. They also kept an ad they recorded
for sports betting app game Time inside of the leaked episode.
The apology was monetized.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
All Right, you guys only got one sponsor left because
there are some real wins and they've stuck with me
since every bit of this started. Game Time believes in me, y'all,
and I believe in them.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Game Time's more loyal than most of y'all's man's out here.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Yeah, some of those guys just leave at the first
opportunity they get, not game Time.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
So suffice it to say, the leak does not go well,
and it's unsurprising that one of the first people to
comment on this whole fiasco is coffee Zilla. He releases
a second and to date final video addressing the hawkcoin
crypto scandal more or less right after all of this
(41:32):
happens and the face Banks episode is leaked, and he
puts a lot of context about the leak and research
he had been doing behind the scenes into the video.
Speaker 5 (41:42):
Talk to a Girl's Back with a released podcast that
was immediately disavowed by nearly everyone in it, who said, oh,
we think there might have been inside of trading involved.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
The podcast was not supposed to.
Speaker 5 (41:55):
Go live, they fit it up every step of the way.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
They leaked the podcast, and then they posted it.
Speaker 6 (42:01):
When it was supposed to be canceled. They stopped twice,
and the third was the launch itself.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Because coffee Zilla is capable and willing to actually do research,
there is a lot of useful information in this first
that Phase Banks did reach out to coffee Zilla. Imagine
saying that to someone in seventeen eighty two, but Phase
Banks reached out to coffee Zilla to see if he
could pass along some of his questions, and apparently within
(42:26):
the interview, Phase Banks tried to but none of them
were answered to his satisfaction or even appeared in the
edited leak video that came out. And I would assume
that the reason Phase Banks did that is because it
turns out coffee Zilla was Hailey Welch's team's first choice
(42:47):
for a returning guest on Talk TOUA, likely because having
the sound clips of the person who most successfully blew
up your crypto scam coming onto your turf could have
been a good look for her. But coffee Zilla, after
being reached out to by Haley's lawyer, said no he
(43:07):
explains why.
Speaker 5 (43:08):
Here I want to go through it because yes, we
do get mentioned in it, sort of as the Boogeyman
of crypto. We're going to get you. If you rug
a coin, you know we might come after you.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Coffee Zilla got on there, scary guy. Let me tell you,
don't ever want to have a conversation with him.
Speaker 5 (43:24):
WHOA don't ever want to have a conversation with me. Guys,
I'm not intimidating. I don't know what's the problem here.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
What he goes on to explain, and I'll link this
video in the description because if I have to understand
another crypto concept, my brain is going to start leaking
out of my nose. But what coffee Zilla says is
that he fuws both the leak and the content of
the interview to be very insidious for a couple reasons. First, because,
(43:51):
as fhase Banks offensively explained, he and his three Crypto
Musketeers were told that they would have to give the
okay for the episode to be released, and after they
got wind of potential inside trading within Haley's team, they
didn't want to release the episode. Because I'll remind you,
(44:12):
just before this video was leaked it appeared that someone
with insider information started reinflating or pumping the value for hapcoin,
again assuming that the episode's release would increase its value,
and even the likes of Phase Banks knows it's a
bad look to be within a country mile of insider trading.
(44:34):
Quite that obvious, But what I find to be more
interesting for the purposes of looking at Haley's predicament specifically,
is that coffee Zilla lays out how the victim narrative
doesn't fit the situation when the facts are put together.
So while again I do believe the emotional sincerity and
(44:56):
the upset that Haley is putting forth in this video,
it doesn't seem like the math is mathing in terms
of how much money did she actually receive. After receiving
a leaked document, Coffeezilla learned that Heley Welch's team, who
claimed that she had earned a relatively small upfront fee
(45:16):
but wasn't cut into the millions of defrauded dollars in
the scam, had probably not been telling the truth about that,
and when coffee Zilla confronted Heley's lawyer over DMS about this,
the lawyer didn't even bother to deny it, So.
Speaker 5 (45:32):
This literally drives me crazy.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
And then he goes, where is this from?
Speaker 5 (45:35):
If you don't mind me asking, I say, well, it's
an insider chat allegedly between Doc and the team members,
And then he says, you're right that as it stands,
she may be entitled to whatever amounts. However, she was
supposed to have mutual approval on tokenomics. Her not being
given the opportunity to prove the transaction fee, staffs, and
pre cell identities led to the end result. So literally
(45:55):
he's admitting what that he's been not telling the truth
about how much money they stood to make. You're right,
she may be entitled to millions of dollars from a.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
Scam like what?
Speaker 1 (46:08):
And it's really saying something when Phase Banks technically ends
up being on the right side of this by not
wanting the podcast to be released at the end of
the day, it seems likely that Haley and her team
may have made way more money off of the crypto
scam than they originally admitted to and were evasive when
(46:30):
asked to show paperwork by both Phase Banks and Coffee Zilla.
So the allegations of insider trading ahead of the leak
looks bad and adding that to Phase Banks conceptually and
an ad still mysteriously making it into a leaked video
makes the whole attempt kind of transparent. But I've got
(46:53):
to hand it to her. Hailey ends this episode the
same way she would end episode of Talk to.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
A h I feel like it wouldn't be an episode
of Talk to if I didn't ask my last question. No,
I ask it three times. I'll go around the room.
What's one they've in bed the Mexic woman go.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
Crazy unhinged way to end the apologizing for embezzling millions
of dollars episode no notes, and while this episode was
not technically released, this leak gets a lot of attention.
People were waiting to hear what she was going to
say after this scam, especially after Phase Banks released that
(47:35):
poetic rebuttal. Here are some headlines.
Speaker 7 (47:38):
Haley Welch update Talk to a Girl tearfully addresses crypto
scandal in leaked podcast.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
Phase Banks calls out Hailey Welch for Talk to a
Podcast controversy.
Speaker 7 (47:49):
Hawk to a Girl. Hailey Welch and her lawyer explain
meme coin dumpster fire.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
By the way, a number of these articles do not
censor the r slur, but do go out of their
way to make sure the reader knows that Fase Banks's
job title is CEO of Phase Media, a subsidiary of
Phase Clan, which cannot possibly be a real job anyways.
(48:16):
Coffee Zilla's video on the second round of the Hawktua
crypto scam receives around four million views to date, more
than any individual episode of Talk Toua has ever gotten,
I fear. Here's his conclusion on the situation.
Speaker 5 (48:31):
Hailey Welts's team this whole time has been acting like
so unbelievably dishonest in how they're framing all this to
try to make her look like as sympathetic as possible,
instead of admitting like, actually, we did have some complicity
in this. Maybe we should have asked more questions. We
did stand to make way more money than we've let
on in a lot of these interviews and with journalists.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
And again, I do have a lot of empathy for
Haley at the time she was pulled into this predicament,
as I talked to about at length in the first
round of this series. And sure, Haley is being used
as uponn to some extent, but her whole business operation
is willfully defrauding the public and then working overtime to
(49:15):
deny it unless confronted with irrefutable evidence. So even if
Haley is just the face of that, the situation is
really bad. So if the goal with this leak was
to get some public goodwill around Hailey, this did not work,
and the team once again goes silent until March twenty fifth,
(49:39):
until after the second round of extremely negative press in
two months died down. But this period of silence does
not last as long. Six weeks later, Haley posts to
Instagram for the first time in months with a genuinely
bizarre short.
Speaker 9 (49:59):
Film breaking news.
Speaker 7 (50:03):
Haley the Hawk to a Girl has died. The Hawk
to a girl No one knows finance quite like miss tuur.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Get your ass up, we got stuffed in he ugh, Okay,
I will tell you what happened. In that clip audio medium,
it is captioned what did I miss? And this is
basically a TikTok sketch that she is Haley waking up
from her nap get it, and then dreaming about all
(50:40):
of the different tabloid scenarios and rumors that circulated around
her during this near four month absence from the public eye.
We see her dreaming that she actually is pregnant, that
she actually is in jail, that she actually is dead,
and it ends with her best friend Chelsea saying we
(51:00):
got shit to do. Egot. Commenters are split on this return,
which remains consistent in her work going forward. Of course,
there are a thousand versions of the same bed she
finally woke up from her nap joke, but there's also
a lot of variety. Here are some examples.
Speaker 7 (51:22):
I already forgot about you, tbh.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
You woke up. They can never make me hate you.
Speaker 7 (51:29):
Imagine running a crypto fraud scheme and then coming back
three months later acting like it never happened.
Speaker 1 (51:35):
Yeah, a gradient of reaction. But what this post's very
existence indicated to me without saying it explicitly was that
the SEC investigation was probably over and that Haley was
cleared to post again. And most interestingly to me, this
post tells us she still wants to be famous. But
(51:57):
before we get there, let's close the book on the investigation,
which is finally resolved on March twenty seventh, twenty twenty five.
And you won't believe what they decided.
Speaker 7 (52:09):
Talk to a crypto update. Us SEC closes investigation finds
no evidence against Haley Welch. Hailey Welch tells us quote,
for the past few months, I've been cooperating with all
the authorities and attorneys, and finally that work is complete.
The SEC closed the investigation without making any findings against
(52:29):
or seeking any monetary sanctions from Haley, said James Salah,
Welch's attorney. Because they did not bring any action against her,
there are no restrictions on what she can do in
regards to crypto or securities in the future. According to sources,
Welch is looking to leave this episode behind her and
is likely planning a documentary. They added that the twenty
(52:51):
two year old won't venture into the cryptocurrency or meme
coin projects anymore.
Speaker 1 (52:55):
And with that they got away with it. Leave it.
Hailey Welch and her team to relaunch her career by
if this teaser was to be believed, any means necessary,
and next time on what I Promise is our final
episode on the Hawk to a Saga, we take a
(53:17):
look at what came next, why this relaunch is not working,
and how the falloff lines up with so many who
came before her. That's next time. On sixteenth Minute Sixteenth
Minute is a production of Whole Zone Media and Iheartwoord Apps.
It is written, hosted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
(53:40):
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Grant Crater and Pet. Shout outs to our dog
producer Anderson, my Kats, Flee and Casper, and by Pet
rock Bird, who will outlive us all of five
Coolzon Media. Hello, sixteenth minute listeners. Jamie here with a
special announcement. I am going to be going on tour
across the US in just a couple of weeks to
promote the paperback release of my book Raw Dog, The
Naked Truth about hot Dogs. If you don't know about
Raw Dog The Naked Truth about hot Dogs, let me
(00:23):
tell you. It is a book about hot dogs that
I wrote. It is the only book that I know
that is strictly about the history of hot dogs from
a leftist perspective, meaning that I love hot dogs, but
we have to talk about how they're produced and the
labor that it requires to produce them. I'm going to
be going around the country going to independent bookstores and
(00:45):
giving free chats about the books. If you want to
come out talk sixteenth Minute Talk hot Dogs, you can
come talk to me Jamie in the following cities. Los
Angeles May thirteenth, Louisville, Kentucky, May fourteenth, Cambridge, Massachusett, May fifteenth.
That's going to be a rough couple of days on
a plane. Portland, Maine, May nineteenth, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, May twentieth, Richmond, Virginia,
(01:08):
May twenty first, Petaluma, California, May twenty second, and Larkspur, California,
May thirty first. I will be releasing other dates as
the summer goes on, so feel free to reach out
and complain. I love it. You can reserve your tickets
for free at the link in the description. I'm really
looking forward to seeing you, and of course I am
(01:29):
wearing a little outfit. Okay, enjoy the episode's.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Joy sixteen.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we talk
to the Internet's main characters to see how their moment
in the spotlight affected them and what that says about
us and the Internet. And just when you thought the
story of Haley Welch aka Hawked to a Girl, the
main character of twenty twenty four, had made her grand
(02:47):
exit from the public consciousness, well, this is the consequence
of me covering main characters of recent history. It's never true.
I'm always wrong. There's more to say. So this is
the first episode that we've done of this kind, but
it's one that I felt was necessary because earlier this
year I did a multiple part series on Hailey Welch,
(03:10):
who went viral last year in a way that is
barely possible anymore after being featured without her consent, as
we get into in that series on a Man on
the Street YouTube slash TikTok channel, in which she became
famous for saying, you must.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Given that hawk dude spent all that night.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
And is she wrong? But for all of what followed,
the clickbait fame followed by the modern template of what
viral fame looked like at this very particular moment in time,
it was a lot and it kind of sucked. But
for those who listened to that series a few months ago,
(03:54):
we have, as you know, undergone a million historical catastrophes
since then, and so I do want to just refresh
your mind a little bit. So come with me if
you dare to December twenty twenty four. Fortunately, we have
been here recently, not just in calendar linear time, but
(04:18):
because we recently talked about this specific period of a
few weeks in our Doctor Ali Luke's episode. But this
is where we left off at the end of the
Haley Welch series. To summarize, twenty one year old Haley
Welch went to the Broadway District in Nashville, Tennessee, Tennessee
being the state she grew up in with her best
(04:38):
friends after seeing a country music festival and were beckoned
over by a man on the street aspiring social media
douchebag bro duo called Tim and D, who asked them
this inspired question.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
What's one move in bed that makes a man go
crazy every time?
Speaker 1 (04:56):
And while they asked this question to men women, and
I will qualify that with many drunk women, always drunk
women who can't quite give consent. Nothing weird going on there.
While most of these women answered with a version of
the same thing, one woman answered it the funniest, and
that woman was Hailey Welch, whose interaction with Tim and
(05:20):
D alongside her best friend Chelsea, lasts much longer in
the original video, but during the age of the TikTok clip,
it boils down to this, I gotta give him that hawk, dude.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
But all that time here.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
And what Haley experiences from this moment on is uniquely
twenty twenty four, sort of a collage of what the
viral online experience could look like at the highest level.
At this particular moment, she gets the classic overnight theme treatment,
one characterized by mere instantaneous online headlines and fame, but
(05:57):
it's long past the day is where this aim is
easily parlayed into where her viral fore mothers landed. You
know what I'm talking about. The twenty ten's moved to
la version of viral fame. The go talk to Hollywood agencies,
do a couple guest spots on sitcoms, and try to
figure out how you might fit into a more traditional
(06:20):
media culture. But that really didn't exist by the time
Haley became famous in twenty twenty four, and in fact,
you could argue that Internet culture had since eclipsed that
traditional media structure. No, by the time Haley's moment came along,
a new path for monetizing virality had been forged, and
(06:42):
while some influencers weren't able to make the jump from
the Internet pandering to Hollywood to the Hollywood pandering to
the Internet era between the mid two thousands and now
a couple dead think of them as the girls who
made the jump from the silent pictures to the talk
if the girls who made the jump from the silent
(07:03):
picture to the talkies were a pair of adult blonde
brothers with very dark spirits. I, of course, am referring
to the Paul brothers specifically Jake.
Speaker 5 (07:14):
Paul, we need to change from Kamala Harris to the
Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Who is the younger brother of Logan Paul. Do you
give a fight, you brother?
Speaker 6 (07:27):
Not in real life.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
You've practiced a little bit.
Speaker 6 (07:29):
Never We've never even sparred. But I was willing to
step in from Mike Tyson when Tyson got sick, and
we actually ran it up the chain in that flot.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Who I promised to mention as little as humanly possible
in this episode, But they just weasele their way into
so many corners of Internet history. Since we have last
recorded this show, they have attended Trump's second presidential inauguration
with THEO Vaughn kill me, Kill me with a gun.
(07:56):
But Jake Paul, who brought Haley Welch and her best
friend and Chelsea along with the entire Hawk to a
crew that had assembled consisting of managers, publicists, lawyers. The
list goes on onto the Better Network, a podcasting slash
sports betting application. Jake Paul knows the online fame game
(08:19):
better than nearly anybody. The polls were a big part
of observing this major change in what influencing looked like.
They started on Vine, an app that no longer exists.
They moved to La when that was the thing to do.
They pioneered the idea of moving a bunch of influencers
into a mansion and then ruining the mansion back up.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
Wow, I never thought I would say this.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Well, welcome home Jake.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
Paller's we made it, Mom, we flipped made it.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
Good morning, Jake Pollish.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
What flippant gouc chan.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Today is off to a relating stock. We're moving into
the new team ten.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
It is genuinely hard to find a douchebag influencer thing
that these men have not done. In the mid twenty tens,
they were doing bad rap battles with their fellow influencers.
They shamelessly hawked merch. But as the first Trump administration
dragged on, they were part of this evolving influencer grift.
(09:24):
And I think you'll recognize what I'm talking about here,
the new influencer grift, which consists of this sinister blend
of bad long video podcasts, weird products marketed at children,
pivoting to a hard republican out of nowhere, pay per view, boxing,
sports gambling apps, and of course cryptocurrency. So By the
(09:47):
time Haley Welch came along, Jake Paul wasn't just a
whole new kind of influencer. He had been a part
of creating what this influencer was going to look like.
So no longer in the Team ten house or doing
whatever I blocked from my YouTube feed in the mid
two thousands. At this point in twenty twenty four, Jake
(10:09):
Paul was so busy with being a right wing influencer
that he was actively looking to find other influencers to
host a shitty video podcast on his crypto sports betting
app so that he could spend more time, say it
with me fighting a rateist on pay per view boxing.
And this is the path to fame monetization that Hailey
(10:34):
Welch was launched into, and her first major platform was
a video podcast that strictly featured guests with massive social
media followings and usually video podcasts of their own. This
was and is the podcast known as Talk Toua, which
is objectively a really good name for that podcast, but
(10:57):
that doesn't mean that it was a good podcast necessarily.
Haley at the beginning is very uncomfortable on Mike, and
that is not a criticism of her she literally became
famous a couple weeks earlier.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Make sure you hit follow on Talk to Her wherever
you get your podcast. We're releasing episodes every Tuesday. And
for those of you watching on YouTube, be sure you like,
comment and subscribe.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Subscribe to that thing. No Riz, but this podcast, of
course gets a lot of press because of how close
it happens to her moment of massive virality, and it
even spawns an irony pilled reaction podcast called Talking Talk TOUA.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
Welcome to Talking Talk Toua, the official Companion podcast to
Talk to A.
Speaker 6 (11:38):
I'm Peter and I'm Cam and we're your hosts.
Speaker 7 (11:40):
Here to the only official Companion podcast.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
So Talk to A does what it was supposed to do,
get a lot of attention and sell Jake Paul's Better
Crypto sports gambling app to her relatively young audience, even
if the ad reads left some to be desired.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Do you want to make fifty thousand dollars on the
biggest fight of the year, The Jake Paul Mike Tyson
Fight is finally here and better is giving you a
chance to swim up to fifty thousand dollars simply by
answering five questions about the fight. All you gotta do
is download better.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
I'm sold, but it's only a matter of time before
Haley Welch's team was approached about starting a meme coin
on their own. They were already so adjacent to crypto,
and they were approached by a man named Doc Hollywood.
I'm not joking to use a service called pump dot fun.
I'm also not joking. Pump dot fun is a service
(12:36):
that allows influencers to mint their own crypto coin and
basically make a quick buck. And while casual followers of
Hailey Welch may have found this pivot to crypto to
be very confusing if you were paying close attention to
how her social media had developed since this first moment
of fame and signing with an agency. The scene had
(12:58):
been set for this for months, as Twitter became a
confirmed cess pit for crypto speculators and scammers. Hailey Welch's
team set up a Twitter account for her that exclusively
spoke in crypto memes. Meanwhile, over on Haley's personal account
on Instagram, she was acting like a normal young woman
(13:20):
in her twenties. There was a huge narrative voice difference
between these two accounts, and so a lot of people
asked Haley on Twitter is this you? Is this your team?
Who is this? And in response, there would be front
facing videos of Haley insisting that know this is her,
She's very into crypto.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
It's me, bitch, what do you fucking mean?
Speaker 1 (13:45):
I do want to add that we had to pull
that clip from a previous episode of sixteenth Minute because
all of these videos were deleted, and it will become
clear why in a second. Haley now readily admits that
she was asked to film the videos, but she was
absolutely not running the Twitter crypto meme account because she
(14:05):
didn't know anything about crypto and she's too young to
have any interest in Twitter. But all throughout the lead
up to the early December twenty twenty four launch of
what was known as Hawkcoin, Hailey Welch played along in
spite of admittedly knowing very little about how crypto actually worked,
much less how to or if it's even possible to
(14:27):
work with it ethically, and this led to her, depending
on how you feel, either being willfully or being tricked
into a pretty massive scam by a man named Doc Hollywood.
So let's say this man named Doc Hollywood has convinced
you that you'll make a shitload of money on a
(14:49):
crypto pump and dump scheme. But the only catch is
that you need to post videos of you as if
you totally understand what's going on. This is a strateg
that of course went south very quickly, and if you
want more details about how this exactly went down, go
ahead and listen to earlier parts of this series. I
(15:10):
hope these are things you already know, but it does
feel important to remind you of what actually happened in
this case because in recent months and since I last
wrote about this story, key players involved have begun to
characterize the events that I painstakingly, for some reason, tracked
(15:33):
in the first run of these episodes, and have changed
the narrative to better suit their own interests. Because in
recent months, a lot of the key players in this story,
both Haley and the people who worked in her general
orbit during this time, have begun to mischaracterize the events
(15:53):
I just described, And if you have access to the
original posts and timelines doesn't match up at all. Why
might that be in Hailey's case? I'll give you the
generous reading first. When big weird stuff happens to you
and is covered extensively in the media, that, regardless of
(16:14):
what you did right or wrong, is definitely overwhelming and
possibly traumatizing. Something I think about with Hailey Welch is
that this appeared to suddenly put her in the position
of being the breadwinner for her family and the employer
of her best friend in an industry that not only
she didn't understand, but barely anyone understood, because the way
(16:37):
that online influencing and all of these weird crypto situations
work seems to change every two minutes. If I were
to give a less generous reading, this is something we've
seen from Hailey Welch before, or more specifically, Hailey Welch
and company. As we'll get into in this episode, Hailey
Welch has made it clear that she is interested in
(16:59):
remaining in the public eye, regardless of how compromising the
thing that got her in the public eye was, and
that she's down to exploit others and to be exploited again.
So we're in December twenty twenty four. Trump has just
been re elected. A United Healthcare executive is assassinated by
(17:21):
someone I read the Reddit board. You guys, I apologize
for my enthusiasm, and Jamie Loftus forces her fiance to
take the day off work to see Wicked and Imax,
and for the first and only time in human history
saw straight couples in the theater where the woman was
(17:41):
loudly explaining the plot to the man. It was incredible,
and Miss Hagley talked to A. Welch releases what appears
to be the final episode of her podcast, Talk to
U on Jake Paul's Better Network, which and I always
(18:02):
laugh when I see this is ominously titled how not
to Get Canceled, and then the feed goes completely dark
because Haley Welsh got canceled because it was at this
time that the now infamous hawk Coin, a meme coin
many correctly pointed out should have been called spitcoin. Missed opportunity,
(18:23):
but at least they thought of talk to A. But
hawk Coin was released to a crypto consuming public in
one of the most high profile catastrophic rollouts to date.
If Cryptojournalist's reaction was any indication, I have questions. I
have questions.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
I'm raising my hand copy Zilla.
Speaker 5 (18:42):
Hey, this is one of the most miserable, horrible launches
I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
You've heard this voice on the show before. This is
the voice of Stephen Findeeson aka coffee Zilla, the journalist
and extremely successful YouTuber who was at the four front
of calling out Hawkcoin for what it was, a crypto scam,
which isn't uncommon, but coffee Zilla has a massive audience
and he correctly called out that this wasn't just a scam,
(19:12):
it was a tremendously lazy scam, which, when you add
the most memorable face of the year to it, meant
a lot more press than most common pump and dub
schemes of this nature would pull in. And then he
goes on to make a very viral YouTube video about it.
This then makes it public knowledge that the meme coin
(19:32):
is a huge scam and it all but craters Haley
Weld's fledgling career. But among people who were interested in
this story, the real question was how aware was Haley
that this was a huge scam. But we wouldn't get
the answer to that question for months because after the
(19:53):
crypto scandal, not only is an SEC investigation announced into
the issue, but Hailey Welch and basically everyone in her
orbit go completely silent. They go dark, on social media
for months. Talk to us stops, Hailey stops posting publicly,
(20:14):
and everyone assumes that her moment in the spotlight has
ended in sort of the most humiliating way possible. The
reason largely speculated for this sudden silence wasn't humiliation, though
it was very much the lawsuit filed with the SEC
in New York from people who had been defrauded to
(20:34):
the tune of six figures by Hawkcoin, leading to millions
of dollars in defrauding. But investigating these cases takes some time,
and the Internet famously has no patience, and so almost
immediately we start to see lazy clickbait video essays saying
things like this, what's going on with that hawk?
Speaker 2 (20:57):
She going to jail?
Speaker 1 (20:57):
What happened to Hawk too? Like, No, she obviously wasn't
going to jail, and there was never a chance that
she would have, because it was the orchestrators of the
crypto coin named in the lawsuit the doc Hollywood's not
the young woman being used as the face of the scheme,
and that kind of content is a whole cottage industry
(21:19):
of taking a recently relevant person, often a woman, and
painting them in the worst way possible. And while Haley
absolutely fucked up, she is painted in a pretty misogynist
and slut shamy way and a lot of these videos.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
The hawk to a girl just got violated on Instagram.
You see, she posted a real inviting Trey Young to
be on her podcast, all because he plays for the
Atlanta Hawks, so it would fit well with her brand
and the Atlanta Hawks Instagram account commented saying, we good
as Tray probably wants nothing to do with her.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
And congratulations, you're caught up. This is where we'd left
off with Hailey Welch in our first series. It wasn't
(22:14):
clear what the SEC investigation would yield, whether she would
be made an example of or after the severe roller
coaster in the public eye she'd had in twenty twenty four,
maybe she would just cut her losses and pack it
back into Tennessee and the world as the world does
continued while Haley took what everyone joked was her.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Nap and who I'm gonna go to bed and I'll
see you guys tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Outside of a Twitter post saying that she is completely
cooperating with the SEC investigation. That's the last we hear
from Hailey welch in twenty twenty four, but early in
twenty twenty five, as Trump's second inauguration approaches, something interesting happens.
And by something interesting, I mean something really embarrassing and
(23:07):
very depressing. From January seventeenth, twenty twenty five, three days
before he took office, As Donald Trump was preparing for
his inauguration, those plus to him were also hard at
work launching a new cryptocurrency. I would not be surprised
if you had already forgotten this happened. It was one
thousand press cycles ago now, and it already feels very
(23:27):
quaint compared to what the administration is currently doing. But
Trump launched a meme coin. I mean. Crypto folks seem
to agree that it was a less sloppy pump and
dump than a hawk coin, but that's not saying much.
Coffeezilla can explain it better than I can.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
Trump just launched a meame coin.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Welcome back to the void.
Speaker 5 (23:47):
It is not how I wanted to start my twenty
twenty five Let me tell you that right now. Here's
the tweet my new Donald Trump official meme is. Here's
time to celebrate everything we stand for winning. Join my
very special Trump community. Get your Trump Now go to
get Trump memes dot com. When you go there, you
join the Trump meme which is buying something and hoping
(24:10):
it goes up in value.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
The story within the story that a lot of people
missed as Trump was launching a meme coin was that
during the week of the inauguration, it seemed that virtually
everyone in Trump's orbit was signing up for pump dot
fun and trying to make their own meme coin. Even
the pastor hired to speak at the inauguration.
Speaker 8 (24:35):
Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, Let's talk about him. He is from
one eighty Church in West Detroit. The town's newspaper had
a write up on him via The Daily Beast. Just
hours after he delivered that speech for President Trump, Reverend
Sewell announced the launch of his own crypto token, dubbed Lorenza.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
This one is nuts. You have to laugh at this one.
This is Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, and in this video he
is literally still wearing the outfit he just swore Trump
in wearing. If nothing else, I've never seen someone so
acutely aware that they have twelve minutes of relevance left.
(25:20):
It's very funny.
Speaker 9 (25:21):
I need to do me a favor.
Speaker 10 (25:22):
Right now, I need you to go buy the official
Lorenzo Sewel coin. I want you to be able to
see politics become manifest, not just in a way where
we're praying over political gatherings, but when we're seeing us
become the hands and the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4 (25:40):
Would you help me?
Speaker 10 (25:41):
Would you help us in this endeavor? Would you go
and purchase the coin in order for us to do
what we need to do in the ministry and.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
With the state of the world being what it is.
The Trump meme coin is very successful and basically prints
money for him, leaving some of the world's most noxious
Internet personalities to praise him and essentially enter the Jake
Paul school of right wing grifting, as so many did
in twenty twenty four, ruining the reputation of podcasts permanently.
(26:13):
Oh no, here's an example of someone doing just that.
This is a thirty five year old man named Fase Banks,
who also pivoted to crypto and was investigated by the
SEC for scamming crypto, who I regret to inform you
becomes relevant to our story very shortly.
Speaker 6 (26:33):
And then you get booted out of the Fays House
and your life's falling apart. You're sleeping on an air
mattress and Phase Rugs calling you to check in every
other day and adapt and keemstar. Your only friends got
to get the fuck up and you gotta go do something.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 9 (26:45):
So.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
While some crypto speculators, including people who appeared on this show,
seemed hopeful that the Hawkcoin scandal might mean that Doc
Hollywood and company would be made an example of in
one of the few pump and dumb schemes to make
it all the way to the national news when Trump
was in office doing literally the same thing as hawk
(27:08):
Coin did, a few weeks later it became clear that
there was no way that was going to happen, and
in the meantime, I Jamie lou Loft as Your Little Host,
along with producer Ian Johnson, was trying to see if
there was a chance in hell that Haley's team would
ever let us interview her for this show, and to
(27:28):
everyone's shock, we actually received a reply in January and
Haley's team appeared to consider coming on this show for
two full weeks, which indicates to me that in terms
of media strategy, they must have been really flying by
the seat of their pants. But while the SEC investigation
(27:51):
dragged on, it was also unclear whether Haley Welch was
going to get out of this predicament with her business
relationship with Jake Paul intact, which is a nice way
of saying, whether Jake Paul and company thought they could
make any more money off of her. It seemed unlikely
that Talk TOA was ever going to return on the
(28:11):
Better Network, but I still didn't know why that was.
This became clear in early February when news dropped that
made it clear that not only had Team Hawk decided
against engaging with my sorry ass in spite of the
fact that I bravely paid for their ugly, uncomfortable hat,
(28:32):
thank you very much, but this news also offered an
explanation as to why the Jake Paul relationship fell apart.
I present you the evidence, a leaked, unreleased episode of
Talk TOUA about the crypto scandal. Maybe so. It's a
(29:09):
little unclear exactly when this was filmed, but I would
assume it was sometime in January twenty twenty five. They
are still on the Better Network. Talked to a set
with guests and I hate to say that he's back already.
It is Phase Banks. And while Phase Banks is a
total scumbag who is fully in Jake Paul's orbit, his
(29:33):
being chosen as the guest is not without reason because
while he could at best be described as a crypto
enthusiast who hasn't been under federal investigation in the last
two calendar years, Phase Banks was actually on that famous
Twitter space's press conference, the same press conference that Haileywold
(29:56):
said and who I'm gonna go to bed, the same
press conferen prince that coffee z Illa used to essentially
take down the scam in the first place. He was there.
Here's a clip of him from that moment, responding to
one of the Hawkcoin crypto guys.
Speaker 9 (30:11):
Hayley, I'm gonna talk to you directly right now, because
if you really own ten percent of the supply of
this token and it's locked up for a year and
it's bested over three years, you got scammed harder than
anybody involved. This one hundred percent was a mismanaged mislaunched
like this. This is took what coffee Zilla said. I
(30:32):
would label this as scam as well.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
So in some ways, FaZe Banks's initial criticism of the
hawkcoin scam could make Haley's team putting him on the
show look like an attempt to make her seem like
she's willing to engage with detractors. Of course, this isn't
actually true. FaZe Banks is just another crypto guy, and
(30:55):
like a lot of crypto guys, he is someone who
was involved in any number of alternatively loserish or scary
activities prior to being a crypto guy. Not only does
he stem from the same generation of millennial influencer vloggers
turned crypto dirt bags like Jake Paul Bayes, Banks also
has a long standing relationship positive and negative with the
(31:19):
Paul Brothers, including some romantic history that I cannot commit
to memory to save my life, and after getting into crypto,
developed plenty of experience feigning neutral authority over some bullshit
he's selling like crypto And don't worry, he has been
accused of assaulting a woman. He's a terrible person, So
(31:40):
two things need to be true here, folks. He is
a scumbag, and he is the kind of guy who
would be happy to publicly forgive a crypto scam because
he's the kind of guy to do a crypto scam.
The podcast episode starts like this.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Oh, guys, I'm back with another episode to Talk two,
and I'm here with Banks.
Speaker 6 (32:01):
There he is.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
How's it going?
Speaker 6 (32:04):
It's going good. Life's crazy right now. I don't know.
I say no to every single fucking podcast, ongoing joke
on Impulsive that I stood them up four or five times.
This isn't necessarily my thing, but you're in an interesting
position right now, and I feel like it's my duty
to come on here and talk to you. You seem
like a sweet enough girl, and I feel like I
(32:25):
know more or less what happened with you. We're gonna
get into all that. I brought a couple of crypto
nerds with me. We're gonna sit down and talk.
Speaker 4 (32:32):
H me.
Speaker 6 (32:33):
Yeah, yeah, No, I feel good. How do you feel?
Speaker 1 (32:35):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
I'm so a little shock up about it.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
And I was able to pull this audio from a
re upload of this interview. It's forty minutes long, but
technically this was never formally released on the Talk to
a YouTube channel because it shouldn't have been released until
after the SEC investigation was closed, per in agreement that
the Hawk team had with the phase Banks team, and
(33:01):
at the time this was recorded and leaked, the SEC
investigation was very much not over according to Banks, and
who wouldn't trust Faye's Banks. Haley's team intentionally leaked this
interview to get some sympathy and potentially to push and
benefit from some insider training on the coin, assuming that
(33:26):
the interview would be positively received in the public. I
do believe that. But by February the interview was out
there and Haley's team mysteriously didn't seem to have a
vested interest in getting it offline. So I have seen
this episode and there are some things I want to
share with you about it. The approach. Haley had no
(33:50):
idea what was happening. It's all Doc Hollywood's fault, and
she is like, so very sorry, Please trust her again.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
I'm saying thank you to all my true fans and
all the people that actually watch my stuff and they
keep up with me. We're trying to sort out all
the pieces and stuff to like get all this figured
out and make everything right. Oh my god, I'm gonna cry.
It was supposed to be like a what do they
call it? A long term coin, and the guy that
ran the account he was like, Oh, we're gonna change
like the way everybody thinks a crypto. Crypto is gonna
(34:21):
be a good place. And I feel really bad for
all the people that got affected by it, and it
just didn't go the way I planned.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
And I know you're gonna call me a sucker, but
I do believe some of what Haley is expressing emotionally here.
You don't have to care. But given that, if you
know about this young woman, and I talked about and
spent a lot of time with literally everything she said
in the public in the previous series, this is the
same person who locked herself inside for two weeks after
(34:49):
going viral without giving her consent, and so the fact
that Haley was mortified and scared after the hawk Coin
scandal does make sense to me, regardless of what I
felt was at least partial emotional sincerity on her part.
What's clear here is that this episode is going to
(35:09):
be an attempt to retcon all of the bad press
that this whole cryptoscam is caused and intends to distance
Haley from it. And again, as phase Banks later says,
the episode was not to be released until he approved
and the investigation was closed and it's not just a
(35:32):
roundabout apology ish excuse for how everything went down. According
to Phase Banks and the three extremely random aging hype
beasts that he brought with him, they're still defending crypto
and they are encouraging Haley to do crypto the right
(35:52):
way this time. It is nuts.
Speaker 6 (35:55):
Basically, what Frank just said in normal people terms is
you take every that you made on this and you
mark it by this token, and you lock it up,
you walk away from it. You don't ever see that money,
you can never touch it again. And you say, I'm
not gonna maybe I'm not going to talk about this
every day, whatever whatever, but I'm going to stand on business.
I put my face on this. I'm accepting the responsibility
of this happened, and hopefully you know, everybody is made
(36:17):
whole at some point where you guys do what you
want with this. At this point, this is me kind
of like you know what I mean, And what that
does is it kind of shows your intentions, right, Like
I just want I just want to do right by
by this and everybody who participated in this, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
Throughout this, Haley is sitting there and nodding, but as
the podcast continues. Phase Banks and the random aging highe
beasts are more talking to Haley's off screen lawyer than her,
and it is very, very awkward to watch. They mentioned
in the interview that Phase Banks spoke to coffee Zilla
(36:53):
ahead of the interview and wants to present a number
of questions that coffee Zilla passed along. And I guess
I'm glad that he spoke to an actual journalist, But
this whole time, Phase Banks is sort of posturing as
if he is a journalist and not who he is.
It just feels worth restating I.
Speaker 6 (37:14):
Use that opportunity. I got investigated by the SEC for
fucking like two years over this. It costs me way
more money than I made. It was one of the
most miserable experiences of my life because because that moment
got me into crypto.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Which leaves me with the question what. But this is
clearly a very softball interview that is also intended to
push crypto. Phase Banks and the random guys are moralizing
and the grift is strong. They have it both ways.
They forgive Hayley, as it were, on behalf of other
(37:47):
crypto scammers who have gotten away with it and got
better at scamming I guess, and they're ostensibly asking her
to get better at scamming for next time. This is
something that they describe.
Speaker 6 (37:59):
As stand on business.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
There is a real menace about the phrase standing on business.
Never trust someone who claims to stand on business. So
while this interview is teeming with bullshit, the impression of
the episode was that if it had been released as
promised after the investigation closed and fase Bank's team approved it,
(38:24):
both parties would have felt that it was mutually beneficial.
But the episode quote unquote leaked, and we'll get into
what we mean by that. But before we knew anything
about the circumstances of the leak, Hewleitzer Prize winning reporter
bays Banks was sure what had happened, he tweets.
Speaker 7 (38:48):
So, in an attempt to hear Haley Welch's side of
the crypto scam story, I agreed to do her first
podcast back. I had heavy stipulations, including one, not allowing
markets to be manipulated by leaking this episode's existence before
a resolution was found. Two, her team finding a real
(39:09):
solution regarding the money she made, where that should go,
and what to do with the Hawk project moving forward.
These were non starters, and we were told this episode
would only ever see the light of day if we
explicitly green lit it. These incompetent leaked and or inside
traded the token. We noticed a random spike and volume
(39:33):
on the coin too too, along with random messages asking
us if we did the podcast. Very clearly her team
was not as solid as they claimed to be. They
completely blew it, and we called the episode off right
then and there. Now, today the episode randomly gets leaked.
(39:53):
The price of Hawk is pumping, and they completely fucking
fumbled the bag yet again. What a fuck mess. Poor girl.
It's wonder how she found herself in this position in
the first place. Now, Haley Welch, I'm going to speak
to you direct and say the exact same thing I
said to you on spaces that night. Fire Everybody, your
(40:15):
team's fucking the bleeps.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
There are not swear words, they are in fact slur words.
Fuck Phase banks. But what really sticks out to me
about this leaked episode isn't that this was the botched
ending to an attempted apology tour, but that the Hawk
TUA team seemed so convinced that this was going to
(40:38):
work that not only did they have to weather accusations
of insider trading. They also kept an ad they recorded
for sports betting app game Time inside of the leaked episode.
The apology was monetized.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
All Right, you guys only got one sponsor left because
there are some real wins and they've stuck with me
since every bit of this started. Game Time believes in me, y'all,
and I believe in them.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Game Time's more loyal than most of y'all's man's out here.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Yeah, some of those guys just leave at the first
opportunity they get, not game Time.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
So suffice it to say, the leak does not go well,
and it's unsurprising that one of the first people to
comment on this whole fiasco is coffee Zilla. He releases
a second and to date final video addressing the hawkcoin
crypto scandal more or less right after all of this
(41:32):
happens and the face Banks episode is leaked, and he
puts a lot of context about the leak and research
he had been doing behind the scenes into the video.
Speaker 5 (41:42):
Talk to a Girl's Back with a released podcast that
was immediately disavowed by nearly everyone in it, who said, oh,
we think there might have been inside of trading involved.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
The podcast was not supposed to.
Speaker 5 (41:55):
Go live, they fit it up every step of the way.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
They leaked the podcast, and then they posted it.
Speaker 6 (42:01):
When it was supposed to be canceled. They stopped twice,
and the third was the launch itself.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Because coffee Zilla is capable and willing to actually do research,
there is a lot of useful information in this first
that Phase Banks did reach out to coffee Zilla. Imagine
saying that to someone in seventeen eighty two, but Phase
Banks reached out to coffee Zilla to see if he
could pass along some of his questions, and apparently within
(42:26):
the interview, Phase Banks tried to but none of them
were answered to his satisfaction or even appeared in the
edited leak video that came out. And I would assume
that the reason Phase Banks did that is because it
turns out coffee Zilla was Hailey Welch's team's first choice
(42:47):
for a returning guest on Talk TOUA, likely because having
the sound clips of the person who most successfully blew
up your crypto scam coming onto your turf could have
been a good look for her. But coffee Zilla, after
being reached out to by Haley's lawyer, said no he
(43:07):
explains why.
Speaker 5 (43:08):
Here I want to go through it because yes, we
do get mentioned in it, sort of as the Boogeyman
of crypto. We're going to get you. If you rug
a coin, you know we might come after you.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Coffee Zilla got on there, scary guy. Let me tell you,
don't ever want to have a conversation with him.
Speaker 5 (43:24):
WHOA don't ever want to have a conversation with me. Guys,
I'm not intimidating. I don't know what's the problem here.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
What he goes on to explain, and I'll link this
video in the description because if I have to understand
another crypto concept, my brain is going to start leaking
out of my nose. But what coffee Zilla says is
that he fuws both the leak and the content of
the interview to be very insidious for a couple reasons. First, because,
(43:51):
as fhase Banks offensively explained, he and his three Crypto
Musketeers were told that they would have to give the
okay for the episode to be released, and after they
got wind of potential inside trading within Haley's team, they
didn't want to release the episode. Because I'll remind you,
(44:12):
just before this video was leaked it appeared that someone
with insider information started reinflating or pumping the value for hapcoin,
again assuming that the episode's release would increase its value,
and even the likes of Phase Banks knows it's a
bad look to be within a country mile of insider trading.
(44:34):
Quite that obvious, But what I find to be more
interesting for the purposes of looking at Haley's predicament specifically,
is that coffee Zilla lays out how the victim narrative
doesn't fit the situation when the facts are put together.
So while again I do believe the emotional sincerity and
(44:56):
the upset that Haley is putting forth in this video,
it doesn't seem like the math is mathing in terms
of how much money did she actually receive. After receiving
a leaked document, Coffeezilla learned that Heley Welch's team, who
claimed that she had earned a relatively small upfront fee
(45:16):
but wasn't cut into the millions of defrauded dollars in
the scam, had probably not been telling the truth about that,
and when coffee Zilla confronted Heley's lawyer over DMS about this,
the lawyer didn't even bother to deny it, So.
Speaker 5 (45:32):
This literally drives me crazy.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
And then he goes, where is this from?
Speaker 5 (45:35):
If you don't mind me asking, I say, well, it's
an insider chat allegedly between Doc and the team members,
And then he says, you're right that as it stands,
she may be entitled to whatever amounts. However, she was
supposed to have mutual approval on tokenomics. Her not being
given the opportunity to prove the transaction fee, staffs, and
pre cell identities led to the end result. So literally
(45:55):
he's admitting what that he's been not telling the truth
about how much money they stood to make. You're right,
she may be entitled to millions of dollars from a.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
Scam like what?
Speaker 1 (46:08):
And it's really saying something when Phase Banks technically ends
up being on the right side of this by not
wanting the podcast to be released at the end of
the day, it seems likely that Haley and her team
may have made way more money off of the crypto
scam than they originally admitted to and were evasive when
(46:30):
asked to show paperwork by both Phase Banks and Coffee Zilla.
So the allegations of insider trading ahead of the leak
looks bad and adding that to Phase Banks conceptually and
an ad still mysteriously making it into a leaked video
makes the whole attempt kind of transparent. But I've got
(46:53):
to hand it to her. Hailey ends this episode the
same way she would end episode of Talk to.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
A h I feel like it wouldn't be an episode
of Talk to if I didn't ask my last question. No,
I ask it three times. I'll go around the room.
What's one they've in bed the Mexic woman go.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
Crazy unhinged way to end the apologizing for embezzling millions
of dollars episode no notes, and while this episode was
not technically released, this leak gets a lot of attention.
People were waiting to hear what she was going to
say after this scam, especially after Phase Banks released that
(47:35):
poetic rebuttal. Here are some headlines.
Speaker 7 (47:38):
Haley Welch update Talk to a Girl tearfully addresses crypto
scandal in leaked podcast.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
Phase Banks calls out Hailey Welch for Talk to a
Podcast controversy.
Speaker 7 (47:49):
Hawk to a Girl. Hailey Welch and her lawyer explain
meme coin dumpster fire.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
By the way, a number of these articles do not
censor the r slur, but do go out of their
way to make sure the reader knows that Fase Banks's
job title is CEO of Phase Media, a subsidiary of
Phase Clan, which cannot possibly be a real job anyways.
(48:16):
Coffee Zilla's video on the second round of the Hawktua
crypto scam receives around four million views to date, more
than any individual episode of Talk Toua has ever gotten,
I fear. Here's his conclusion on the situation.
Speaker 5 (48:31):
Hailey Welts's team this whole time has been acting like
so unbelievably dishonest in how they're framing all this to
try to make her look like as sympathetic as possible,
instead of admitting like, actually, we did have some complicity
in this. Maybe we should have asked more questions. We
did stand to make way more money than we've let
on in a lot of these interviews and with journalists.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
And again, I do have a lot of empathy for
Haley at the time she was pulled into this predicament,
as I talked to about at length in the first
round of this series. And sure, Haley is being used
as uponn to some extent, but her whole business operation
is willfully defrauding the public and then working overtime to
(49:15):
deny it unless confronted with irrefutable evidence. So even if
Haley is just the face of that, the situation is
really bad. So if the goal with this leak was
to get some public goodwill around Hailey, this did not work,
and the team once again goes silent until March twenty fifth,
(49:39):
until after the second round of extremely negative press in
two months died down. But this period of silence does
not last as long. Six weeks later, Haley posts to
Instagram for the first time in months with a genuinely
bizarre short.
Speaker 9 (49:59):
Film breaking news.
Speaker 7 (50:03):
Haley the Hawk to a Girl has died. The Hawk
to a girl No one knows finance quite like miss tuur.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Get your ass up, we got stuffed in he ugh, Okay,
I will tell you what happened. In that clip audio medium,
it is captioned what did I miss? And this is
basically a TikTok sketch that she is Haley waking up
from her nap get it, and then dreaming about all
(50:40):
of the different tabloid scenarios and rumors that circulated around
her during this near four month absence from the public eye.
We see her dreaming that she actually is pregnant, that
she actually is in jail, that she actually is dead,
and it ends with her best friend Chelsea saying we
(51:00):
got shit to do. Egot. Commenters are split on this return,
which remains consistent in her work going forward. Of course,
there are a thousand versions of the same bed she
finally woke up from her nap joke, but there's also
a lot of variety. Here are some examples.
Speaker 7 (51:22):
I already forgot about you, tbh.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
You woke up. They can never make me hate you.
Speaker 7 (51:29):
Imagine running a crypto fraud scheme and then coming back
three months later acting like it never happened.
Speaker 1 (51:35):
Yeah, a gradient of reaction. But what this post's very
existence indicated to me without saying it explicitly was that
the SEC investigation was probably over and that Haley was
cleared to post again. And most interestingly to me, this
post tells us she still wants to be famous. But
(51:57):
before we get there, let's close the book on the investigation,
which is finally resolved on March twenty seventh, twenty twenty five.
And you won't believe what they decided.
Speaker 7 (52:09):
Talk to a crypto update. Us SEC closes investigation finds
no evidence against Haley Welch. Hailey Welch tells us quote,
for the past few months, I've been cooperating with all
the authorities and attorneys, and finally that work is complete.
The SEC closed the investigation without making any findings against
(52:29):
or seeking any monetary sanctions from Haley, said James Salah,
Welch's attorney. Because they did not bring any action against her,
there are no restrictions on what she can do in
regards to crypto or securities in the future. According to sources,
Welch is looking to leave this episode behind her and
is likely planning a documentary. They added that the twenty
(52:51):
two year old won't venture into the cryptocurrency or meme
coin projects anymore.
Speaker 1 (52:55):
And with that they got away with it. Leave it.
Hailey Welch and her team to relaunch her career by
if this teaser was to be believed, any means necessary,
and next time on what I Promise is our final
episode on the Hawk to a Saga, we take a
(53:17):
look at what came next, why this relaunch is not working,
and how the falloff lines up with so many who
came before her. That's next time. On sixteenth Minute Sixteenth
Minute is a production of Whole Zone Media and Iheartwoord Apps.
It is written, hosted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
(53:40):
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Grant Crater and Pet. Shout outs to our dog
producer Anderson, my Kats, Flee and Casper, and by Pet
rock Bird, who will outlive us all of five
Host
Jamie Loftus
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