Haliey Welch Tells Caroline Calloway How Hawk Tuah Changed Her Life

This past summer, America found its new sweetheart, though she’s a bit more spice than sugar. In June, you surely know by now, a video of Haliey Welch dispensing sex advice broke the internet: “You gotta give it that hawk tuah,” she exclaimed, “and spit on that thang!” Six months later, the 21-year-old Tennessee native quit her job at the spring factory in a Tennessee town of some 900 people and, through some combination of luck and sheer will, turned her 15 minutes of fame into a career, complete with merch and a podcast, now one of the country’s most popular. It was a meteoric rise, but as she told Caroline Calloway, who knows a thing or two herself about viral fame, she got used to it fairly quickly. One thing that hasn’t changed? Her love of animals, hatred of history, and general annoyance with men (except her new boyfriend). Last month, she and Calloway got on a Zoom call to talk about life as an internet celebrity.

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CAROLINE CALLOWAY: Today is actually a very momentous day. I don’t know if you’ve done the calendar math on this. We’re doing this interview on Friday, November 8th, and the video that started it all went viral on June 11th, so we’re almost exactly six months out. Could you walk us through what you were doing six months ago to the day? I saw that you had to be at the spring factory.

HALIEY WELCH: Well, I actually got up at 3:30 in the morning. I had to be there at five. It wasn’t far from my house, but by the time I woke up and got ready and got me a biscuit from the store, it’d be time to go to work. I was watching over the shipping part and then occasionally I’d do the quality check. I had to be at a desk for eight hours sitting still, and I hate that really bad. 

CALLOWAY: It sounds truly awful. So you’d get home in the afternoon if you didn’t have overtime and you’d take a nap. Then what’s the move?

WELCH: Well, I was hard to get out of the house. I like hanging and being left alone and watching TV with my dog. I’m just a homebody.

CALLOWAY: Didn’t you just get a new dog, Bucky?

WELCH: I did.

CALLOWAY: What is a normal day in your life like?

WELCH: I’ll just have interviews and stuff, little things throughout the day. Sometimes I won’t have anything and I can just go to Target. I’m like an old woman. Now, if I’m out in L.A., I will have to wake up and go to meetings or go on a podcast.

CALLOWAY: When the podcast was announced, I thought about the name “Talk Tuah,” which I think is so brilliant. I would love to know how it came about.

WELCH: My co-host, Miss Chelsea, she’s the one that come up with it. Don’t ask me where she got it from. I have no idea. But she’s like, “We should call it Talk Tuah.” And I was like, “Well, okay.”

CALLOWAY: I went through the trouble of coming up with some spin-offs that I thought you could rate on a one to five scale. “Doc Tuah,” where you give people medical advice.

WELCH: Okay, that’s a five. That’s pretty good.

CALLOWAY: “Stock Tuah,” where you give people financial advice and you become the Welch of Wall Street.

WELCH: [Laughs] Welch of Wall Street, that’s a five.

CALLOWAY: And this is my personal favorite: “Glock Tuah,” where you’re an assassin.

WELCH: That right there is a 10.

CALLOWAY: Who is on your team? I am so curious about the internal workings.

WELCH: My closest one is my attorney, Christian Barker. My best friend’s mama, she’s a paralegal here in our town. When all this first started, I didn’t know what to do. There were videos of me everywhere. And she was like, “You need to go get an attorney.” She sent me to Christian and I clicked with him immediately. He was like, “Okay, well we need to get you a team together with some managers, but I got a few people for you.” And my podcasting team, they are through Jake Paul.

CALLOWAY: I wanted to ask about that. I’m pretty sure he was your first podcast guest.

WELCH: Yes.

CALLOWAY: How did you get connected with the Jake Paul podcasting team?

WELCH: We were just meeting a bunch of different teams. I ended up really liking him, because they took care of us in Florida. They were really good to us and they had pure intentions, not just trying to make a dollar off you. So that’s why I chose them.

CALLOWAY: Is this when you went to Jake Paul’s fight in Tampa?

WELCH: Yes, actually.

CALLOWAY: I’m really close to Tampa. Next time you’re here for a fight, we should go out. Anyway, you have two co-hosts, right?

WELCH: Well, really just one. I have Chelsea. And Jamie, one of my managers, he’s in it whenever we’re uncomfortable or we need help talking to whoever we have as a guest, like men. I only just got comfortable talking to men. I don’t know what it is, I can’t talk to them.

CALLOWAY: Bill Maher was such an asshole to you. Asking you how many dicks you’ve spat on– my jaw dropped. 

WELCH: It’s one thing to say it when the person’s not there. But somebody saying that to your face. I mean, what do you even say to that?

CALLOWAY: I also found it really condescending when he lectured you about history. The whole thing was just off-putting. So history was your least favorite subject in school?

WELCH: Yes, I hated history so bad.

CALLOWAY: What was your favorite subject, then?

WELCH: Probably math.

CALLOWAY: I love that you’re a woman in STEM. Amy [Welch’s publicist], please don’t cut me off, but today everything with Brianna Chickenfry and Zach Bryan broke. Have you seen the news?

WELCH: Yeah. Well, I kind of figured something was wrong with her because when I first met her and I’d done her podcast, she was just the sweetest thing I’ve ever met. And then her and Grace O’Malley came on my podcast and I could tell something was wrong. She just wasn’t happy like she was the first time I met her. But she’s a great person and I hate that that happened to her.

CALLOWAY: Team Bri all the way. He brought you out on stage at his show, so you must’ve been hanging out with them backstage. When you were around them together, did you see anything in hindsight that could have been emotionally abusive?

WELCH: He wasn’t really back there with us. But we were with her for a good chunk of time. She was just the sweetest thing. Did you see the diss video?

CALLOWAY: Oh, the diss track? Yeah. Oh my gosh. When you hung out with her in L.A., you said that she seemed off. Did you immediately think it was something with Zach?

WELCH: It was in New York where we’d done her podcast at. But I don’t know, she just wasn’t as happy and spunky as she was the first time. This was in the midst of everybody being like, “Oh, they’re going to break up.” So I was like, “Okay, well I wonder if that’s true.” But they were good at the time, I think.

CALLOWAY: This is amazing intel.

WELCH: I hate to get my nose in it because it don’t have anything to do with me.

CALLOWAY: Do you think that your personality is well-suited to going viral or being famous?

WELCH: If any of this didn’t happen, I think I would’ve been okay. But I think I’ve gotten used to it by now. It was something I had to learn how to deal with at first, but it’s not as scary as it was when I first started.

CALLOWAY: I read that for the first week you were really sad about it.

WELCH: Oh, it was like two or three weeks. Me and Chelsea were both mortified from it.

CALLOWAY: Chelsea was in the original video with you?

WELCH: Yep.

CALLOWAY: So you were still working at the spring factory.

WELCH: Oh, I was just waiting for everybody in there to see it too. I was like, “This isn’t going to be good.” But they thought it was funny. Me and Chelsea would take turns going to each other’s houses, and we would just barricade ourselves in our rooms and watch TV. We did go out to eat Mexican one day. We tucked our hair in our hoodies so nobody would recognize us.

CALLOWAY: Do you remember the first time you were recognized?

WELCH: Walmart. This guy in our hometown, I’ve known him since I was little. He started making hats for me. He was just trying to help me out at the beginning of it. I still go see him and everything, but he started helping me out because he does a hat business.

CALLOWAY: Were Tim and Dee selling competing merch at this time? 

WELCH: I’m not going to lie, their merch was pretty hard. I would have worn it.

CALLOWAY: Did your legal team get them to stop or are they still selling it?

WELCH: We’re trying to be fair with them. But I don’t know, I try not to talk about them. They weren’t very kind to me in the beginning of all this.

CALLOWAY: It sounds like you’re really acting in good faith. I hate men.

WELCH: Men in general, I don’t have an issue with. We need men to make the world go round, I think. A group of men come up to me wanting a picture, that’s not a big deal. But if you deserve to get the cold shoulder, you’re going to get the cold shoulder.

CALLOWAY: Good for you. And how are things going with pookie?

WELCH: Oh, that’s my man. Let me just tell you.

CALLOWAY: How old are you?

WELCH: 21.

CALLOWAY: And he’s 24. We’re thinking this is endgame?

WELCH: Probably.

CALLOWAY: Okay, child bride.

WELCH: I know, I’m young. It won’t be anytime soon. Don’t worry.

CALLOWAY: Is he your first serious boyfriend?

WELCH: I’d say so. He just shits on the last two.

CALLOWAY: You’ve done a really slow rollout of revealing him on the podcast, and the marketer in me loves to see it. I think it’s great to introduce characters that your audience cares about to populate the cinematic universe of Hawk Tuah. But when I was 21, exactly your age, my first serious love, my college boyfriend, made it into my content. I wrote about our time together at university and it really ruined the relationship. There were a lot of other problems going on in my life. I was really getting into an Adderall addiction. I feel like this generation could probably do it better than me when it comes to sharing relationships online, but with all the warmth and care I can offer a stranger, I would say to be careful about that because—

WELCH: I know how girls work. That’s what I’m nervous about.

CALLOWAY: You do a great job dealing with the haters in general.

WELCH: The way I see it, I don’t want to be bitter, but everybody’s entitled to their opinion. They can like me or not. It don’t bother me at the end of the day. 

CALLOWAY: But how did you go from three weeks of watching rom-coms and being deeply affected by it to this attitude?

WELCH: Chelsea and my other friends were like, “All right, you need to get out and quit moping. Everybody else is making money off of you.”

CALLOWAY: Who are your favorite celebrities that you’ve met so far?

WELCH: Wiz Khalifa.

CALLOWAY: What?! When did you meet him?

WELCH: You’ll see the podcast coming out soon. And I met Shaquille O’Neal.

CALLOWAY: Shaq is going to be on the pod too?

WELCH: We need to do that, actually. But no, I got to DJ with him one night in Nashville. He’s a cool dude. Let’s see, who else have I met?

CALLOWAY: You met Matt Rife.

WELCH: Yeah.

CALLOWAY: Girl, you have to stop simping for Matt Rife. He’s so canceled.

WELCH: I think he’s more or less just eye candy. I ain’t going to say I would ever date him. I got the man of my dreams. I ain’t even going there.

CALLOWAY: I’m pretty sure you could have Matt Rife if you wanted him, but I don’t think anyone else does. Okay, I have prepared a fun little game for you. Since history is famously your worst subject—and you are famously good at viral, off-the-cuff responses—I picked some people from history with funny names. I thought maybe I could tell you their name and just based on the onomatopoeia, you could say what you think they might be famous for.

WELCH: Okay, let’s go.

CALLOWAY: Oscar Wilde.

WELCH: Tell me why Christopher Wilde just popped up in my head. Have you ever watched Starstruck?

CALLOWAY: I have no idea what you are talking about.

WELCH: You haven’t heard of Starstruck?

CALLOWAY: I’ve never even heard of Christopher Wilde. What do you think a man named Oscar Wilde does?

WELCH: He bungee jumps off bridges.

CALLOWAY: Brilliant. How about Friedrich Nietzsche.

WELCH: Friedrich Nietzsche, he’s a painter. He painted the Mona Lisa.

CALLOWAY: Voltaire.

WELCH: Voltaire, he invented a car.

CALLOWAY: How about this one? Florence Nightingale.

WELCH: Hey, hold on. I think I know who that is. She was a doctor, right?

CALLOWAY: Yeah, she was a nurse.

WELCH: Was it the Holocaust?

CALLOWAY: So close. I’m pretty sure it was the Crimean War, but I could be wrong.

WELCH: I’m going to have to do my research after this.

CALLOWAY: Leon Trotsky.

WELCH: He’s a fisherman. He owns a boat and goes shrimping.

CALLOWAY: Okay, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

WELCH: He invented chopsticks.

CALLOWAY: Franz Kafka.

WELCH: Franz Kafka, she built the Eiffel Tower.

CALLOWAY: Okay, last one: Banksy.

WELCH: She’s a stay-at-home wife to a mafia boss.

CALLOWAY: You should be a TV writer. That was some high level creativity.

WELCH: I could be a weather woman.

CALLOWAY: You want to be a weather woman?

WELCH: Well, I feel like I could.

CALLOWAY: If this video hadn’t gone viral, were you going to work at the spring factory forever?

WELCH: Probably. God’s got a funny way of working, don’t he?

CALLOWAY: I’m really proud of everything you’re doing with Paws Across America. I feel like you don’t get enough credit for that. 

WELCH: That’s one thing I’m really passionate about. I’ve had animals my whole life, and they’ve always been there to comfort me when nobody else has. They can’t speak up and ask you for help, so I wanted to make sure they got everything they need and find a good home and get the life they deserve.

CALLOWAY: That’s amazing. And how did you decide to get your new dog?

WELCH: Well, I’m really bad about intrusive thoughts. If I see a few ducks on the side of the road, I’m going to take them home. That’s just how I work. But this girl I used to work with a few years ago, I got on TikTok and see she’s trying to get rid of these puppies. I was like, “Well, I’ll just text her and ask about them.” The next morning, I went and got him.

CALLOWAY: What’s his personality like?

WELCH: He shit on the floor six times this morning.

CALLOWAY: Isn’t your other dog blind, by the way?

WELCH: Oh, no. That was a rescue dog we had on the show. That dog was blind, but not my dog. I’d feel so bad if I had a blind dog. If I watched it walk into a wall, I’d probably lose my shit and start laughing.

CALLOWAY: Are there any rumors you want to clear up?

WELCH: Well, we covered the lawsuit and Tim and Dee.

CALLOWAY: I saw a post recently that was being debunked–75,000 people wrote in Hawk Tuah on their election ballots.

WELCH: Evidently, I’m a Russian spy. I’m not coordinated enough to do that, but okay.

CALLOWAY: What’s next for you?

WELCH: All this could end tomorrow and I’d be okay with it. I just want to go out of my way to help animal shelters and dogs and cats. That’s my main goal. Shelters are overflowing and it’s just pitiful. I want to be the one that helps them.

CALLOWAY: I’m really glad that you’re so passionate about animals because it can be thankless.

WELCH: Well, you’ve got people out here with wads of money that they’re never going to do anything with besides hold onto it until they die. They’re not going to give it to people that need it, or animals that need it. That’s just one thing that really bothers me.

CALLOWAY: Do you know how much you’ve raised so far for Paws Across America?

WELCH: Last I checked, it’s almost $50,000.

CALLOWAY: I think it’s so amazing that you’re doing that.

WELCH: Well, thank you.

CALLOWAY: You’re welcome. Well, those are all my questions.

WELCH: All righty. Thank you, Caroline.

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Hair: Virginie Pineda using Bumble and Bumble.

Makeup: Caitlin Wronski using Dior Beauty.

Nails: Rhayne Lodevico.

Photography Assistant: Will Koning.

Fashion Assistant: Mariah Kock.

Production Manager: Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell.