Franklin, Tennessee, February 4, 2025, 3:45 P.M.
Franklin is forty minutes south of Nashville on a good day – one of the million identical townships that orbit every major U.S. city, where car dealerships outnumber pedestrians and every chain eatery has been converted into an antisocial drive-through experience. That is, with the exception of Cracker Barrel. Their brave executives have stood tall against the forces of convenience and refused to alter their rootin'-tootin' table service model. They also will allow overnight RV parking if you're a paying customer, which even Walmart has done away with in most major cities due to rising homelessness and fentanyl shenanigans. Shout out to Cracker Barrel; true allies of the unhoused, enemies of automation, and producers of the most delicious fried apples known to man. Real crackers know what's up!
Unfortunately though, we didn't have time to stop for food today. I'm currently sitting in a rocking chair on the plastic porch of an unfurnished, cookie-cutter home, buried somewhere in a sprawling subdivision in Franklin. The house is a rental property that belongs to Haliey Welch's lawyer. Welch went viral a few years back for disclosing her fellatio technique – otherwise known as hawk tuah, an onomatopoeia for the penile lubrication process – to a horned-up street interviewer who asked her what makes guys go crazy. The clip went mega-viral, probably reaching over a billion social media users within 72 hours. What ensued was a feeding frenzy between Hollywood agents, talent managers and other businesspeople within the digital media sphere, all of whom were desperately clawing at each other for control of the newly crowned 'hawk tuah girl,' who was working a minimum wage job at a boxspring factory less than a week prior. Forced into the bizarre shoes of an influencer after a single drunken street interview, Haliey decided to sign a contract with Logan Paul, who bankrolled her move to Los Angeles and facilitated the launch of a podcast called 'Talk Tuah,' which featured a number of high-profile guests like Mark Cuban, JoJo Sliwa and Wiz Khalifa.
Less than six months later, she was talked into launching a ‘meme coin’ by Howie Mandel's stepson, a known scammer named Alex Larson Schulz a.k.a. Doc Holiday. After she agreed, Schulz put himself in charge of her finances, built a digital trading platform called OverHere’ to launch the coin and established a shell company in the Cayman Islands called Talk Tuah the Moon LLC. with the sole purpose of floating dark money through it after the pump-and-dump scheme that he'd orchestrate using Haliey's likeness just a few weeks later. Despite existing in the online sphere for almost a decade now, a point of pride and joy in my life is not knowing a goddamn thing about crypto. However, it seems obvious that Logan Paul was the connective tissue here. He's widely known for his bitcoin antics, has been sued a half-a-dozen times for scamming his supporters and was surely the only person in Hailey’s orbit who’d have connected her with a guy like Schulz. Yet considering that Paul's home is equipped with an NDA doorbell and phone signal blocker, I'm sure that a well-funded team of Crisis PR consultants had long buried whatever trace remained of their correspondence.
To say that the pump-and-dump scheme — which went down in the November of 2024 — negatively impacted her career would be an understatement. It effectively ended her career, dragging Haliey from the stars into the darkest pit of digital hellfire, cutting her fifteen minutes short with the sort of cutthroat cruelty rarely seen offline. The story itself was broken by scam-watchdog creator Coffeezilla. From there, it became a national news story. Following the surge in press, Haliey lost all of her sponsorships overnight and was immediately dropped by her talent agency. Over the course of the next week, all of her social media platforms were flooded with hateful comments, ranging from light mockery to outright death threats and calls to suicide. A few months later, she tried to address the controversy on the Talk Tuah Podcast alongside her co-host, explaining that she’d been roped into the arrangement by a no-good, scamming sack-of-shit who sacrificed her public image for a quick buck, yet people didn’t buy it. Public reception to her statement was overwhelmingly negative, with 'fan' perspectives generally falling into one of two camps. There were those who thought she was completely lying and 'playing dumb' to save face, commenting stuff like “she knew” or “being a braindead Southern bimbo isn’t an excuse for stealing people’s money. You know what you did.” Then there were those that bought her ignorance plea but felt that she lacked the talent to justify a redemption arc, commenting things like “just put the fires in the bag bro” or “I think it's safe to say that society can move on without the Hawk Tuah girl.” Perusing through the comment section, there seemed to be a lot of gendered anger toward the fact that she ever even became famous in the first place, with a ton of comments venting about the mere existence of influencers, who are generally seen as the antithesis of the selfless, wrench-toiling American workman.
It personally hurt me to see Haliey try, and then fail, to take control of the narrative after what was obviously a very traumatic and surreal experience for her. Not because I’ve been on the receiving end of temporarily career-ending bad press before and have had public statements backfire, but because I felt existentially responsible for her predicament.
Haliey was forced into fame by an exploitative industry that I personally helped to pioneer. Obviously, I wasn’t the first man-on-the street interviewer. Before I even picked up a handheld dynamic microphone, I was inspired by Michael Moore, Joe Goes, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jon Stewart and a guy named Dave Attell, who had a legendary show on Comedy Central called Insomnia. Yet the risk of sounding like a self-important old-head, I’m just gonna go ahead and say it: there’d be no 'Hawk Tuah' without Quarter Confessions, which was my first interview-based video project. The show only ran for a few months back in 2019, yet the success of QC led to an explosion in party-strip interview content across the country and world in a very short period of time, with the show's ethically questionable framework giving way to an even more exploitative crop of viral copycats. For those who missed that chapter, the premise of Quarter Confessions was a simple one. I’d peruse the vomit-soaked streets of the French Quarter in an oversized suit and ask revelers to share their deepest, darkest secret. They were usually drunk and almost always regretted sharing confessions with our cameras, often emailing us frantically the next morning in an effort to get the video pulled. We'd almost always pull the clip, but by then, the damage was usually already done. Marriages were destroyed after husbands confessed to cheating. Jobs were lost after incest admissions and racist tirades. So were scholarships. In one instance, a New Orleans man actually confessed to a murder - stabbing someone to death in prison with the blessing of a correctional officer. I'm not sure where he is now or if the clip was ever used by local law enforcement.
Of course, there was a lot of good fun on Bourbon Street too. In the moment, every interviewee was an enthusiastic, willing participant and it wasn't all bad, especially when it came to New Orleans locals, who are some of the coolest people in the country. However, some of the guilt I'd inherited from Quarter Confessions is what motivated me to take a more journalistic route with All Gas No Brakes and later, Channel 5. Yet by the time I pivoted in a more serious direction midway through 2020, the OG format had exploded. QC's 'straight-man' questioning style and editing flow had been copied and successfully applied by a number of viral web shows, such as Sidetalk NYC, Kobini Confessions, New Orleans Secrets, The 'Excuse Me, What?' Show, and hundreds of others. The collective reach of these QC-influenced shows created a content boom akin to a street-interview gold rush that I witnessed in real time once the country fully reopened after pandemic.
By the Summer of 2021, there was not a single, drunken pedestrian thoroughfare you could walk through in the entire country — be it Ocean Drive in Miami Beach, Fremont Street in Las Vegas or Mill Avenue in Tempe — where there wasn’t an aspiring content creator standing on the corner with a stick microphone, ready to snipe anyone with the liquid courage to speak about their body count, wether they'd "rather eat ass or suck toes," or any number of questions designed to generate maximum embarrassment for the interviewee and poison their digital footprint forever. Earlier, I referred to this type of content as the basis for an 'industry,' because it is. The content creators who prowl around nightlife districts are independent contractors, paid out on a weekly basis by platforms like TikTok and Meta. The algorithm for determining their payout is measured by engagement and watch time. So what kind of content that snatches eyeballs, harvests watch time and generates a hardy barrage of comments? Well, it's content that makes people angry or horny. Humans are twice as likely to engage with content that makes them upset and pornography is the largest source of traffic on the internet. Knowing all this, it's no surprise that this newly deployed fleet of party-strip interviewers are 90% male and almost only interview drunk girls about sex. They are attempting to humiliate real-life women while simultaneously enticing online male viewership, playing to both misogynists and gooners with the sole, cynical purpose of generating engagement for themselves.
It's truly dreadful, and Haliey was just another victim of this industry, sniped outside of a bar in Nashville on a random Friday night. Fresh out of a breakup and off four vodka-cranberries, she was just looking to blow off some steam after a long workweek, she was walking down Broadway Street — otherwise known as the 'Honky-Tonk Highway' — back to her car for a questionable drive back to Franklin. Less than a block away from her parking spot, she's approached by a dead-sober content creator in a durag who is zero'ing in on her like a Palantir drone. He approaches Haliey with a microphone and lets the question rip: "what's one thing you'd do in the bedroom that makes guys go crazy?." The rest was history.
I know that it's not technically my fault. I didn't conduct the interview. I didn't eternally rebrand another borderline-anonymous human being into a fellatio onomatopoeia. I'm not the reason that her future children may be relentlessly bullied in school for something their mother said as a teenager. I'm also not the reason Howie Mandel's stepson is being sued by twelve plaintiffs. Yet watching Haliey's rapid rise and devastating fall, I felt a bit like Joshua Oppenheimer after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Of course, I didn't drop the bomb or shoot the interview, yet I've been tortured by the lingering feeling that without my existence, Haliey would still be living a peaceful life in rural Tennessee and not been given a traumatic masterclass in online cruelty.
So that's why I'm here..
To get right with whatever Higher Power may exist and achieve some sort of karmic balance by giving Haliey a judgement-free, safe space to speak candidly about her situation. There'll be no moralizing, no 'gotcha' questions and no patronizing monologues in this interview. Just a listening ear for someone who has been stripped of their personhood by the online masses and truly deserves the final word. This interview is barely being conducted for research purposes. My only goal is to make Haliey a bit less embarrassed to show her face in public after this thing releases.
She's almost here. I don't know how this interview will go. I've been told that Haliey has no idea who I am, but I owe her one.
Wish me luck.
AC