Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2367 - Jesse Welles
Uploaded: 2025-08-19T17:00:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2367 - Jesse Welles' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2367 - Jesse Welles' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-19. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2367 - Jesse Welles

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!
The Joe Rogan Experience
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!
Cheers to you.
Nice to meet you, man.
Good to meet you.
I've enjoyed your songs.
How did you, uh, well first of all, how long have you been doing music?
Um, I think most of my life, you know?
Um.
Did you grow up in a musical family or is it just something you picked up on
your own?
No, I, everyone worked and made art when they weren't working.
Oh, okay.
But, uh, no music, really.
But that, I liked, I liked music.
Like what kind of art did your family do?
Like my mom would always paint.
She put like murals on the, on the walls of the house and stuff.
And my old man's a mechanic.
Um, and he would be tinkering around, making all sorts of fun stuff, usually
with his welder and whatnot.
So, I mean, they were, I felt like they were artistic folks, you know?
Um, but they didn't, they didn't necessarily, uh, do music.
You know, they're, they're smarter than that.
And so, um, I only know of you from the videos that you put up on Instagram.
Yeah.
And specifically, I think it was the United Healthcare guy was the first one.
Yeah.
Right.
Which was really good, dude.
It's, it's the lyrics, you, and the timing of it all, you captured the moment.
And that song to me was like, yeah, that's what the fuck is going on.
Right.
That's what's really going on.
They don't give a shit about you and they're just trying to make money.
And that's why when this guy got shot, there was this reaction from people.
Yeah.
Which is very rare when someone gets assassinated when people celebrate.
Right.
When someone's not like a mass murderer or something.
It was bizarre.
It was bizarre.
It's, it's, I mean, it must mean something is, if people are celebrating.
Yes.
Somebody's death.
Yes.
Something is wrong.
And all kind of, across both sides of the aisle, it's not a political thing.
It is a human thing.
Yeah.
They're like, these people, they take your fucking money, you pay them.
And then when something comes up, you don't get covered.
And there doesn't seem to be any repercussions.
And to fight it, you have to go to court.
And you usually don't have the money to go to court.
And they have a lot of fucking money.
Right.
And they, you know, have been doing this for a long time.
And now they're using AI to make sure that they pay less.
So they're using AI to approve cases.
And the numbers are even lower than they were before.
So United Healthcare always had a lower number than industry standard, right?
Yeah.
Now it's even, with AI, they're going to be able to chop it down to even lower.
It's like, at what point in time does this become against the law?
Like, at what point in time is this like, it's a con game.
Like, you're paying, you're thinking you're going to get covered.
And they're like, nah.
The system would have to be revolution.
I mean, you can't have health for profit at that point.
You'd have to socialize the medicine at some point.
Which I agree with up until a point.
The problem is human nature.
And like, if you hurt your shoulder and you need to get an operation on your
shoulder, you
want to go to a guy who does the Lakers.
You know what I mean?
Right.
You want to go to a guy who is like, this motherfucker is the cream of the crop.
He is dialed in.
He's been doing this forever.
He's super focused and motivated.
And he drives a fucking Mercedes, right?
Right.
And the reason why he drives a Mercedes is he makes a lot of money doing what
he's doing.
You don't want someone to not feel appreciated, not have the motivation to
continue to get
really great at their craft.
Like, there's a thing with just human beings.
There's a financial motivation that people have because it's a quantitative
thing.
It's a, you can see it on a ledger.
You know that you're making more money because you're doing this and you're
working harder
and you're getting this reward, whether or not it makes sense or not.
As soon as you eliminate that and everybody gets the same amount of money and
then you lose
all the killers.
Right.
You lose all the...
No, all I mean is that you just don't want to have to go to an urgent care and
it costs
$500 to get a pack of antibiotics.
One hundred percent.
Well, that's a giant scam.
So, but that's a scam that so many folks are stuck in, you know?
That's the only part of the scam.
You know, the healthcare scam, it goes so deep.
There's so many different layers to this fucking horrible den of vampires.
Right.
You know, because it's whenever you can make profit off of people and you're
involved in
a corporation and then the corporation has an interest for...
It's stockholders want more money every year.
They want more money every quarter.
So, that's what they try to do.
That's their focus.
And when you're doing that with people's lives and people's health, like that,
that should
be illegal.
That's where it gets fucked.
I suppose that's why folks were...
You know, it was upsetting to see...
You know, I felt like I actually had kind of an unpopular opinion about it and
that, you
know, why are we celebrating somebody's death?
Like that seems far out.
Just to celebrate the murder of somebody with a gun.
Not only that, I believe unrelated to him in his case.
Like, I mean, how far out is that?
And so, I didn't want...
You know, I make these tunes, but that one in particular, I was like, how do I
even...
How do I address this?
What do you even say?
So, that...
So, how do you approach something?
Do you sit down with a pad and pen or do you start writing?
Like, how do you start singing?
Well, step one is avoid the work.
So, I went for, you know, some long jogs.
I wrote a song about Amazon instead and put up, like, Amazon is Santa Claus and
I kept sitting
there and it kept getting, you know, the situation was snowballing with the
United Healthcare thing
and I was like, okay, you got to write.
And at that point, it's a research project.
You know, let's write 2,000 words so that we can have 300 to sing and boil down
the essence
of the issue and make it rhyme and put a jolly tune behind it.
That's really...
That's kind of how that goes about.
That sounds like super similar to stand-up comedy.
Yeah, I think...
You boil it down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Get every...
And...
And you don't...
It's just punchlines.
So, find the punchline of everything.
Find the punchline of everything.
I never had the attention span to tell too much of a story or anything like
that.
So, I like just keeping it in punchlines.
So, I always like, you know, Mitch Hedberg and Stephen Wright, we're so good at
that.
Just come out and lay out a bunch of punchlines immediately.
Yeah.
If one doesn't land, on to the next one.
Well, their whole...
That was the daunting thing about their act, which is so impressive, is that it's
all non-sequiturs.
So, every subject is new.
Yeah.
Every time they open their mouth, it's a new subject.
Right.
Which is kind of crazy.
It's a crazy way to do comedy.
Yeah.
But when you're an absurdist, it's probably the best way, because it's an
absurd way to
think.
Right?
You're just going from one subject to the next, and each minute burst.
Yeah.
You know?
Somebody asked me if I want a frozen banana, and I said no.
But I want a regular banana later, so, yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, like, such a ridiculous joke.
I used to love listening to him, in particular, when I was in traffic, because
it would, like,
chill me out.
Yeah.
Like, if I was headed to the airport in LA, and it was just fucking clusterfuck
on the
highway, I'd just throw on some Mitch Hedberg and just start giggling.
It was just silly.
You know?
He's one of the coolest.
Yeah.
He was awesome.
He was awesome.
He was awesome.
Let's play that song.
Jamie, can you find that one?
The United Healthcare song?
I want to play it, so people know what we're talking about.
So people...
You paid for it all, though you may be unaware.
You paid for the paper.
You paid for the phone.
You paid for everything they need to deny you what you're owed.
There ain't no you in United Health.
There ain't no me in the company.
There ain't no us in the private trust.
There's hardly humans in humanity.
Now the procedure that you're needing ain't the cost-effective route, and only
two percent
of people end up winning a dispute.
So if you get sick, pray to God for health, cause your doctor's gotta pray to
United Health.
Way back in '77, Mr. Richard T. Burke started buying HMOs, putting federal
grants to work,
made 50 billion buckaroos.
Last year, the Warren Buffett of health and Jeff Bezos of fear.
Now CEOs come and going, one just went the ingredients you got, bake the cake
you get.
But if you get sick, cross your fingers for luck, cause old Richard T. Burke
ain't giving a fuck.
Commoditized health monopolized fraud.
Here's the doctors we own and the research we bought.
And on the pharmacies and a lot of the meds.
They should start buying graves to sell us when we're all dead.
There ain't no you in United Health.
There ain't no me in the company.
There ain't no us in the private trust.
There's hardly humans in humanity.
There's hardly humans in humanity.
Fuck yeah, dude.
That's a great song.
That's a great song.
And it's interesting to me how few people are doing what you're doing.
I don't know of anyone else.
I'm sure there probably is a few people out there that I miss,
but I don't know of anybody else who takes things that are in the zeitgeist,
these big stories that come up and turns them into a catchy tune and does it in
a way where you laid out,
you know, really the problem and the whole thing, like you said in Punch Lines.
Yeah, you know, there's a lot of folks doing it right now and more every day.
But there was, I mean, there's a precedent for that kind of work.
Especially as far as like Woody, Woody Guthrie was really the, I was reading,
I was reading a Woody Guthrie biography and my old man was in the hospital.
He had just had a heart attack and we didn't know like what way it was going to
go or whatever.
Anyway, I don't know, just seeing him all hooked up to that stuff and thinking,
if he were, if, if he died, I, I've hardly, I've hardly had any time to even
know him.
He's hardly had any time to know anything.
We don't get very long down here and I'm reading this, this Woody Guthrie
biography and I was just like,
Oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do this.
I'm, you know, I'm gonna sing the, sing the news.
Um, cause that's really what, what Woody was kinda, was kinda doing in his day.
Uh, because there was, there's folk music around him and he'd team up with Pete
Seeger and he was on radio programs and he could have played.
He had the, he had the choice.
He could have played standards.
He could have played country western music and stuff like that.
But he liked making folks laugh and he liked telling it how it was.
I like both those things.
I saw Woody Guthrie live when I was a little kid in San Francisco.
Uh, Arlo or Woody?
I think Woody.
Yeah.
Which one was alive back then?
Was it Arlo?
Yeah, Woody died.
Okay.
So it must've been Arlo.
So it was 19, let me guess the year.
I was 11.
Yeah.
So maybe, yeah.
10 or 11.
Yeah.
No, it was San Francisco.
So it had to be, I lived there until I was 11.
So it was probably around nine or 10, now that I think about it.
But yeah, he performed live.
God, I wish I could remember more of it.
Yeah.
I mean, Arlo played, Arlo played this kind of, he went a little more surreal
with it, which
is super groovy, but he carried, you know, he carried on the torch for his old
man.
So Woody died in what year?
67.
67.
Yeah.
67.
He got the, he got a Huntington's disease and was laid up in a home for quite a
while.
He lost the ability to speak and everything.
What is a Huntington's disease?
Some, a rare genetic disorder.
I don't really know what it does other than, um, yeah, look, he was, he's
pretty young.
Breakdown of nerve cells in the brain.
Yeah.
His mother also suffered from the same illness.
Yeah.
So, what causes that?
I don't know.
You kno