A memecoin is a cryptocurrency that, like most cryptocurrencies, has no inherent value. It is created to represent an internet meme, and its value is tied very loosely to that meme’s popularity; you could think of it as like owning stock in, say, a knock-knock joke. The most famous memecoin is Dogecoin, which was boosted by Elon Musk and refers to an internet-famous dog.
More recently, people have fixated on a coin called Hawk, as in “Hawk Tuah,” the meme of the year. The coin was created by a team of crypto people and by Haliey Welch, the cute, blond 22-year-old woman who brought us that phrase over the summer. You may know this part of the story: In June, a man-on-the-street interviewer approached Welch, out on the town in Nashville, and asked her, “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?” She replied with perfect comedic timing, in a thick Tennessee accent: “You gotta give ’em that hawk tuah and spit on that thang.” This was very funny and went viral on TikTok and elsewhere. (Bryce Harper, the married and Mormon first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, imitated it on national television.) In the months that followed, Welch built an online brand as a relatable country girl turned “queen of memes,” selling trucker hats, meeting Shaq, launching an app named after her boyfriend, appearing in a bit on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and so on.
Now she’s in hot water because Hawk’s value went almost immediately to pennies—but not before some insiders were able to turn a quick profit. In an effort to quell the outrage, Welch and the people she had worked with on the coin hosted a live broadcast on X in early December. Welch made a short, chipper statement at the beginning, and then an assortment of men talked for nearly an hour. The first, a crypto-world figure who went by Doc Hollywood on X but has since wiped his account, ranted at listeners, challenging them to consider whether they truly understood the importance of Hawk. “Hawk Tuah is a cultural meme that everyone knows here in America,” he said. “So, if you want to be part of this meme community—dope.” Welch piped up near the end of the stream simply to tell everyone that she was going to bed. “Anyhoo,” she said, “I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
But she didn’t reappear the next day. Instead, she vanished from the internet for weeks. She stopped releasing new episodes of her podcast, Talk Tuah (great name), and was quiet even as some of the other people involved in the coin made public statements about its spectacular failure. Then, news broke last week that a handful of people would attempt to sue her foundation (listed in the complaint as the Tuah the Moon Foundation) and various other parties, and Welch published a statement. “I am fully cooperating with and am committed to assisting the legal team representing the individuals impacted, as well as to help uncover the truth, hold the responsible parties accountable, and resolve this matter,” she wrote on X on Friday.
The people around her talked about the coin as a “community-building tool” and “a movement.” It was a fake currency that was artificially tied to a brief (and crass) display of charisma that took place months ago. The notion that the online-creator economy could somehow transmogrify this incident into profit for a whole “community” of strangers—that those strangers had come together around the meme in some meaningful way, and that it would be able to change all of their lives—is magical thinking that has to be unique to our times.
The original Hawk Tuah joke was good, but it was such a slim piece of IP. How much could really be milked out of something like that? It was just a moment, hardly anything. Yet it was inescapable. There was so much Hawk Tuah this year. How much of it was real? As it turns out: not as much as it seems.
The way Welch has told the story on her podcast, she initially spent weeks hiding from the Hawk Tuah meme, barricaded in her bedroom, streaming rom-coms. She was embarrassed by the joke, which she had told while drunk, and horrified by the number of people who had seen it. A friend persuaded her to come out of her room only because other people were profiting off her—selling bootleg merch and getting views on their own videos that used the clip. It would be silly not to get her own piece of the pie, especially because the pie might soon be gone. By July, she was everywhere.
I became more interested in Welch in August, when she threw out the first pitch at a New York Mets game. She was there to raise money for an organization that gives service dogs to disabled veterans, and of course did not make any reference to oral sex. But people were furious nonetheless. Sports journalists and rude Mets fans were apoplectic, screaming that she had cursed the team and ruined the season. The gist was that Hawk Tuah was tacky and unbecoming for America’s pastime (though no one seemed to mind when Bryce Harper did it).
Welch responded to this with good humor. In the weeks that followed, she consistently posted about the Mets’ magical playoff run and cheered them on with bizarre Photoshopped pictures of herself as Mrs. Met and Tom Seaver (which people, again, hated). She posted a photo of herself watching the Mets on TV in a hotel room and a video of herself watching the Mets on a phone while in a bar (“She’s so me for this,” I texted my baseball group chat). This was surprising—part “Kill ’em with kindness,” part troll. I came away with the impression that Welch might be an amusing, smart woman with an open mind who had allowed life’s twists and turns to make her into a sincere baseball fan.
This was my projection, and other people had different ones. Though Welch never talked about politics, some embraced her as a MAGA icon: The earliest homemade Hawk Tuah merch paired the catchphrase with images of Donald Trump. But Trump haters were curious about her too, and they celebrated when she declined to come out as one of his supporters. (After a Trump impersonator showed up to her meet and greet on Long Island, she told a reporter for New York magazine that she’d deliberately avoided being photographed with him.)
Perhaps because Hawk Tuah was so little to work with and there was no broad agreement about its cultural significance, the business strategy seemed to be to throw things at the wall and see what stuck. In October, I spoke with Welch’s manager about interviewing her and then emailed to ask him what events she had coming up. He replied with a litany: “We are going to be dealing with Halloween with her costumes at Spirit Halloween (1600 stores). Shooting new episodes for her podcast #2 Comedy and #5 overall, Launching her jewelry line—The Haliey Welch Collection—an international mobile game, and a Meme coin. More to come …”
Around this time, I watched a bunch of episodes of Welch’s podcast, Talk Tuah. The earliest episodes were stilted and amateurish, but kind of interesting. In one, she sits on her front porch with three hometown friends and awaits her grandmother, or “Granny,” with whom she lives. Granny arrives in an old Ford sedan, and Welch teases her for referring to the rosé that the group is drinking as “liquor”; they rehash the surprise of Haliey’s sudden fame while Granny pets a dog. The episode ends with a drive to Taco Bell.
Welch is eminently likable, and her guests respond well to her easy openness and folksy manner of speaking (she uses the word “conversate” and the phrase “I don’t guess”). They want to know more about her, and so, over the course of the show, the Hawk Tuah IP expands mostly through further discussion of it and of the way that it changed Welch’s life. For several episodes, she teased the reveal of a secret boyfriend, whom she referred to only as “Pookie.” I felt genuine suspense waiting to find out who he was (and how he felt about the Hawk Tuah phenomenon). He turned out to be a plumber named Kelby (he thought it was all great; he felt a little uncomfortable at Soho House).
I did not watch the episode “I Told Mark Cuban About Pookie’s Pickle,” so I can’t tell you what went on there. But every episode I have watched involves a meta-discussion of Welch’s newfound fame and the hostile reaction that Welch has gotten from certain corners of the media, particularly from men. Talking with the television personality and former Playboy bunny Holly Madison, Welch says that an antagonistic interview with Bill Maher took her “for a spin.” In an episode featuring the Barstool Sports personality Brianna Chickenfry, Welch talks about her surprise that Barstool Sports’ founder, Dave Portnoy, said that nobody would listen to her podcast, because nobody would care what she had to say. “Kiss my ass, Dave,” she tells the camera.
After the presidential election, there was much discussion of the role that podcasts had played, as well as some half-sincere consideration of whether the Democrats might need to find a “liberal Joe Rogan” to help them win votes next time.
My co-workers and I speculated briefly that Welch could fill the role—she was politically uncommitted and seemed to have the attention of young men. This was suggested by New York magazine, which noted the presence of a group of eighth-grade boys outside her event, as well as by her affiliation with the famous YouTuber Jake Paul. (His company, Betr, produces Welch’s podcast.) The list of sponsors that bought ad space on her show also implied a predominantly male audience, if one slightly older than 12 (20 percent off a Manscaped razor with code TUAH).
But the closer I looked at Welch’s empire, the stranger it seemed. The first episode of her podcast has about 2.7 million views on YouTube; the Mark Cuban episode has about 276,000. Talk Tuah debuted near the top of Spotify’s and Apple’s podcast charts, but fell quickly off both of them. There are no fan accounts dedicated to documenting her every move—just a few engagement farmers who stopped posting months ago.
The most telling thing was the comments on her podcast episodes on YouTube. Virtually nobody is responding to anything that she says in the videos. Instead, for almost every episode, the comment section is full of people pretending to be huge fans and making ludicrous claims about the power of the Hawk Tuah meme. For instance, “I was sick with an incurable disease but then i turned on talk tuah i was healed almost instantly.” Others claim that broken bones healed or that a dead man levitated out of his coffin. A standout described losing an eyeball to a rubber bullet at a protest against then–Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány in 2006, then having it restored by watching Talk Tuah. Another that I am still thinking about: “Im an infinitely old cloud of sentience … The only thing that sustains me and maintains all the laws that hold the universe together is watching the talk tuah podcast.”
The crucial fact of life online, taking stock at the end of 2024, is that it is harder to tell whether anyone is serious. It may also be irrelevant. What’s the difference between jokes and lies, between fandom and mockery, when a view is a view and a sale is a sale?
Another common bit in the Talk Tuah comments is that the viewer is seated and listening while eating their daily Lunchly, in reference to a Lunchables dupe launched by Jake Paul’s brother, Logan, and the YouTube star known as Mr. Beast: The snack is mostly famous for being gross. When Jake Paul appeared on Talk Tuah, Welch pitched him the idea of a line of pickles, and he amiably agreed to invest. “You could do some damage in the pickle arena,” he told her. “We make it into another meme where people are watching the podcast, eating Lunchly, and eating the pickles.” Whether this was something that anybody would actually do—or something they would just say they were doing as a joke—did not seem to matter to the business plan.
Later, when onlookers were basking in the bizarreness of the memecoin situation, they circulated an X post in which someone claimed to have lost all of their money. “I am a huge fan of Hawk Tuah but you took my life savings,” the person wrote. This was almost certainly not true, but was taken as a symbol of the state of American culture nonetheless. Then it found its place in history when it was immortalized by @dril, the longtime avatar of the internet’s id, who wrote, in reference to the memecoin meltdown, “@HalieyWelchX wheres my money . you ahave ruined my life. im being followed by the governors men. please open DM. Love the pod.”
That, along with whatever money she’s made this year, is likely what Welch will have to show for her misadventure as an internet celebrity. And honestly? Not bad.
