Hawk Tuah Girl Posts, Then Deletes Podcast With Crypto Influencers—What’s Going On?

Haliey Welch, the “Hawk Tuah” girl who went viral last year, has awoken from her long “sleep” following the disastrous launch of her Solana meme coin in early December. And things are as chaotic and confusing as ever.

Welch appears to have posted a new episode of her “Talk Tuah” podcast on Thursday, more than two months after the last episode was released shortly before her meme coin catastrophe. Strangely, though, the episode no longer appears on her YouTube channel—seemingly deleted as abruptly as it went up.

But if the idea was to scrub it before the internet could get its eyes on it, then it wasn’t fast enough, as leaks of the episode are now circulating on social media.

The new episode features a conversation primarily with Richard “FaZe Banks” Bengtson, the crypto-native founder and CEO of gaming organization FaZe Clan, who brought along a pair of industry pals: DeGods creator and meme coin trader Frank (real name: Rohun Vora), and content creator and influencer Threadguy.

In it, Welch recounts her experience of agreeing to launch a meme coin, how things went wrong with the deployer holding 80% of the supply and the token price immediately plunging to near-zero, and the immense backlash that mostly forced her offline in recent months.

“I’m still a little shook up about it,” Welch admitted at the top of the show.

Broadly, it’s a friendly conversation about missteps around the meme coin situation, which resulted in a lawsuit against Welch’s business partners—and Welch is playing ball with the lawyers taking aim at her one-time allies. Welch suggests in the interview that she didn’t really understand what she was getting into, which her guests agree sounds accurate.

Following the leak, Banks wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that he agreed to do the podcast under “heavy” stipulations, including that the episode not be leaked to manipulate markets, and that her crypto team find “a real solution regarding the money she made, where that should go, and what to do with the HAWK project moving forward.”

Banks claims that Welch’s team assured them that the episode wouldn’t be released unless his side approved it. But chatter around the upcoming episode started circulating in recent days, as Banks notes; indeed, Decrypt received a heads-up days ago about the recording from a source. Banks said that they “called the episode off right then and there.”

He further alleges some shenanigans around the now nearly worthless HAWK token on the back of the episode “leak” fueling hype.

“Now today, the episode ‘randomly’ gets leaked. The price of HAWK is pumping and they completely fucking fumbled the bag, yet again,” Banks wrote. “What a fucking mess. Poor girl, it’s a wonder how she found herself in this position in the first place.”

Indeed, the HAWK token more than doubled in price on Thursday afternoon, but has since cooled, up just 9% on the day to a current price of $0.00078 per data from CoinMarketCap.

Decrypt reached out to Welch’s spokesperson for details on the episode launch and response to Banks’ comments, but did not immediately receive a response.