On this date in 1973, Jennifer Welch was born in Dallas, Texas, where she lived until moving with her family at age 7 to Oklahoma. Once described as “the liberal’s answer to Joe Rogan” for her podcasts focusing on political and cultural issues, she also has her own interior design company.
Welch says she was raised by two atheists. “We never went to a church service unless it was a wedding or a funeral. I have had this experience of being raised in the so-religious suburbs of Oklahoma City. Like the people that you saw with their hands raised praising at the Charlie Kirk funeral, those are the people I went to high school with.” (Rolling Stone, Sept. 30, 2025)
She ran the snow cone machine and retrieved golf balls from the driving range at her family’s “funplex” entertainment center. Her dad also trained racing pigeons. She competed in Lincoln-Douglas debate in high school and “honed her argumentative skill on the pom squad, where she coordinated routines with cheerleaders who believed Ms. Welch, an atheist, was doomed to spend an eternity in hell.” (New York Times, Dec. 7, 2025)
In college, Welch found “comfort and companionship with gay men, because they had had to fight the same system that I had to fight, and they just had more grit. They had been persecuted by the same people that told me and my mother and my father and my siblings that we were all going to burn in hell. Having never been indoctrinated, and then living around a bunch of people that have been indoctrinated was a very weird upbringing, and it drove me into [being] a very left, very grounded, very fact-based person.” (Ibid.)
She launched Jennifer Welch Designs in the early 2000s, offering full-service residential and commercial design that gained recognition for stylish, comfortable interiors and celebrity clientele. Welch’s son Dylan was born in 2002, after which she married his father, a criminal defense attorney, in 2005. Their second son, Roman, was born in 2006. They divorced in 2013 and reconciled for a time in 2015. “Happily divorced” is how Welch later described it.
Her professional relationship on Bravo TV’s reality show “Sweet Home Oklahoma” with Angie Sullivan stemmed from their sons’ friendship. Sullivan, four years older than Welch, evolved on the show from conservative Republican to shedding her religious beliefs. The last straw, Sullivan later said, was the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned abortion rights nationwide, making her “so fucking mad at white women.”
The show aired for two seasons, ending in 2019. They reunited professionally in 2022 with a podcast titled “I’ve Had It” that covered a wide range of topics, some lighthearted, some not. One eponymous recurring segment features discussion of whether they’d “had it” or not with something, such as people taking too long to pull out of a parking spot when someone was waiting to pull in.
The fierce politics didn’t vanish. When Erika Kirk, widow of murdered right-wing religious activist Charlie Kirk, commented at a DealBook summit in New York City that “What I don’t want to have happen is young women in the city look to the government as a solution to put off having a family or a marriage because you’re relying on the government to support you.”
Welch responded: “You are an opportunistic grifter who weaponizes your gender to demean women, and you are a walking, talking, breathing example as to why nobody, number one, wants to be a Christian, and, number two, wants to be a female hypocrite such as yourself. … Your deceased husband was an unrepentant racist and a homophobe, and women are a lot more empathetic than you are, Erika.” (Yahoo! News, Dec. 9, 2025)
“I’ve Had It” is updated twice a week and its shorter counterpart “IHIP News” twice a day as of this writing in 2025, the year they published their memoir “Life Is a Lazy Susan of Sh*t Sandwiches.” They have several million followers, including 1.3 million on YouTube and nearly 1 million on Instagram.
The switch from reality TV to podcasting attracted a surprising audience to “I’ve Had It” — young, queer people. Welch and Sullivan had assumed their audience would primarily be middle-aged white women but analytics showed the majority to be LGBTQ+ community members.
“For us, a lot of these issues are not political, they’re moral,” Welch says. “It’s a moral issue for us to support marginalized people and lift them up, especially as mothers. I just think it’s really inhumane to judge people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity.” (The Oklahoman, Aug. 4, 2023)
