Joe Rogan Experience #2367 - Jesse Welles

Joe Rogan talks with viral protest folk musician Jesse Welles about how he turns big news stories into catchy punchline-driven songs, sparked by the United Healthcare CEO shooting. The conversation sprawls into the for-profit healthcare 'racket,' lobotomy history (Rosemary Kennedy), the violent settling of the American West and scalp bounties, war as a money racket (Smedley Butler), false-flag operations from Nero to the Gulf of Tonkin, and conspiracy theories around Las Vegas and Oklahoma City. It closes on the music industry as a vampire-filled racket, the freedom of being an independent artist, and the unsettling rise of AI-generated music.

• Welles admits he held an 'unpopular opinion' that celebrating the United Healthcare CEO's murder was disturbing.
  00:05:15
• Welles explains his songwriting method: write 2,000 words of research, boil it to 300 sung words, make it rhyme.
  00:06:19
• Rogan reads the graphic account of Rosemary Kennedy's 1941 lobotomy, performed without her mother's knowledge.
  00:19:50
• Rogan strongly recommends Smedley Butler's 'War Is a Racket' as the blueprint for understanding the war-profit machine.
  00:50:55
• They cover the 1933 'Business Plot' to overthrow FDR and install Butler as dictator — no one was prosecuted.
  00:56:09
• Discussion that 12 of 14 people in a governor-kidnapping plot were government agents.
  01:12:41
• Welles reveals he was signed to a label at 22 and walked away to stay fully independent.
  01:59:27
• Rogan plays an AI-generated indie song made in seconds and admits it's 'better than most of these songs.'
  02:17:03

• Welles' United Healthcare song notes only 2% of people win a coverage dispute.
  00:08:54
• Ibogaine trials with soldiers in Texas show ~80% success for one dose, 90s% for two, for quitting addiction.
  00:28:12
• Historic scalp bounties of 150-200 Mexican pesos equate to roughly $8,200 per scalp today.
  00:35:54
• Around 94% of the world's heroin came from Afghanistan during the US occupation of poppy fields.
  00:50:24
• Nancy Pelosi is cited as being worth an estimated $400 million.
  00:57:11
• Claim that WWI soldiers avoided aiming at the enemy, so war movies were made to condition them to shoot.
  01:35:27
• Operation Northwoods: the Joint Chiefs signed off on a false-flag plan Kennedy vetoed.
  01:38:32
• Welles' United Healthcare video racked up roughly 6.7 million views.
  01:55:11
• John Mellencamp personally emailed Welles to invite him to Farm Aid.
  02:14:28
• Welles wrote about a hundred songs in 2024 and released them all independently.
  02:20:16

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