Joe Rogan Experience #1629 - Lara Beitz
Lara Beitz (guest), Narrator, Joe Rogan (host), Lara Beitz (guest), Lara Beitz (guest)
In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Lara Beitz and Narrator, Joe Rogan Experience #1629 - Lara Beitz explores lara Beitz On Comedy, COVID Fallout, Sobriety, And Radical Self‑Discipline Joe Rogan and comedian Lara Beitz talk about doing standup during COVID, how different cities handled lockdowns, and the broader social and economic fallout from prolonged restrictions.
Lara Beitz On Comedy, COVID Fallout, Sobriety, And Radical Self‑Discipline
Joe Rogan and comedian Lara Beitz talk about doing standup during COVID, how different cities handled lockdowns, and the broader social and economic fallout from prolonged restrictions.
They dig into crime, homelessness, and mental-health crises, while criticizing fear-driven policies and the way nuance gets lost in online discourse.
Lara discusses losing nearly 40 pounds, her obsessive work ethic around food, exercise, and writing, and how that same discipline fuels her standup career.
She also opens up about serious alcoholism, a drugging incident at a club, multiple fainting episodes, and why she now feels ‘unstoppable’ in comedy despite industry and personal setbacks.
Key Takeaways
Relying solely on lockdowns without economic support or nuance fuels crime and despair.
They argue that shuttered economies, weak political incentives, and constrained policing have pushed marginal people toward crime, homelessness, and mental-health crises, especially in cities like LA, while states like Florida kept more open without clearly worse health outcomes.
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Metabolic health and vitamin D matter enormously for COVID risk, yet are underemphasized.
Rogan cites data that ICU patients and hospitalized COVID cases are disproportionately obese and vitamin-D deficient, especially among people of color, and notes public health messaging has focused on restriction and vaccination more than exercise, weight loss, and supplementation.
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The “hidden pandemic” is suicide, addiction, and relapse exacerbated by isolation.
Stories from a sheriff and hospital nurse friends highlight big spikes in suicides, severe alcohol withdrawal, and deaths from alcoholism and overdose, worsened by AA moving to Zoom and being less accessible, which policymakers rarely tally alongside COVID case/death counts.
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Sustainable body transformation comes from structure, not crash efforts.
Lara lost ~38 pounds by joining an overeaters’ support group, weighing and logging everything, following a dietitian’s plan, maintaining a modest daily calorie deficit, cutting flour and sugar, and doing regular training she actually enjoys (tennis, swimming, Zoom workouts).
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Treat creativity like a job: small daily quotas add up to an hour a year.
Her rule is 30 minutes of standup writing daily—often much of that is “bad” or tossed, but even if only 1/20 of pages become usable, that’s a new hour annually; she and Rogan stress that most comics don’t meet even this minimal, consistent standard.
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Sobriety didn’t just remove alcohol; it transformed how she works and performs.
Beitz describes past years of daily blackout drinking, going on stage wasted, and losing opportunities; getting sober in 2014 immediately improved her reliability, memory of sets, and ability to capitalize on chances, even though stage fright is still intense.
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Online outrage is “processed information” that warps reality and incentives.
They compare Twitter pile-ons—like fat-positivity accounts attacking Lara for joking that losing weight made her ineligible for obesity-priority vaccines—to junk food: highly processed, addictive, and unhealthy, bearing little resemblance to nuanced, in-person conversation.
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Notable Quotes
“You gotta be undeniable. And if you’re not undeniable, become undeniable.”
— Joe Rogan
“I feel unstoppable with comedy. Everything else in my life, the doors shut. With standup, they just keep opening.”
— Lara Beitz
“They told us there was a virus killing obese people. I was obese, so I lost weight… then obese people got vaccine priority and I didn’t.”
— Lara Beitz
“COVID fucked LA. People think I’m exaggerating, then they go there and call me like, ‘Holy shit, dude, it’s unrecognizable.’”
— Joe Rogan
“The action has to be the reward. I don’t do workouts I hate or eat food I hate—that’s why it’s sustainable.”
— Lara Beitz
Questions Answered in This Episode
How should public health messaging balance lockdowns and vaccines with stronger emphasis on weight, fitness, and vitamin D without sliding into stigma?
Joe Rogan and comedian Lara Beitz talk about doing standup during COVID, how different cities handled lockdowns, and the broader social and economic fallout from prolonged restrictions.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What concrete policies could mitigate the mental-health and addiction fallout from pandemics, rather than treating suicides and overdoses as invisible collateral damage?
They dig into crime, homelessness, and mental-health crises, while criticizing fear-driven policies and the way nuance gets lost in online discourse.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
For artists and freelancers, what’s the right trade-off between personal safety and economic survival when governments shut down venues for extended periods?
Lara discusses losing nearly 40 pounds, her obsessive work ethic around food, exercise, and writing, and how that same discipline fuels her standup career.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Is it possible to design social media platforms that discourage pile-on outrage and ‘processed information’ while still allowing robust criticism and debate?
She also opens up about serious alcoholism, a drugging incident at a club, multiple fainting episodes, and why she now feels ‘unstoppable’ in comedy despite industry and personal setbacks.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can aspiring comedians practically adopt Lara’s and Joe’s discipline—daily writing, constant set refinement, and long-term thinking—without burning out or becoming paralyzed by perfectionism?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays) Hello, Laura.
Hello.
Welcome.
Thank you.
What's happening?
Thank you for having me.
So you said you're in town working at, it's called the Sunset Strip Comedy Club?
Yeah.
Is this the first weekend?
Yes.
That it's open?
Yeah.
Whoa.
Yeah.
That's awesome. How'd you hear about it?
Um, they hit me up.
Did j- so, they just started?
Yeah.
Where's it at? What street?
This is opening weekend. Um, I don't know.
Oh, wow. You don't even know where you're going?
No.
Did you just get here today?
I got here yesterday.
Oh, did you walk around?
Uh, I walked a little bit.
Did you get any brisket?
Not yet. That's tonight.
(laughs) What did you do when you got here?
Um, I went and got halal, and then I went swimming.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Cool. Oh, check it out.
Yeah.
Wander around. Um, who you working with?
Um, Fahim and-
Oh, great.
... and Laura and, um, Amir K., and I can't remember the rest of the lineup, but yeah, that's it.
Yeah, Fahim did some shows with me and Chappelle at Stubb's too. There it is. Is this the place?
Yep.
And where's it at, Jamie?
Downtown, 3rd Street.
Oh, okay.
East Side, I think. This is East 3rd Street.
Nice. Does it say how many people it seats?
It does not.
Nice.
Yeah, the guys who run it have been really great. They've been really nice.
That's fucking awesome. I'm excited.
And they love you.
Uh, what does Tim Dillon have to do with that? Tim Dillon's on their page there.
Uh.
Is he talking shit about them?
It's an Austin comedy, I think.
Uh-
Oh.
... I think he's talking about the Austin scene.
He, yeah. He's out here too. Are you gonna move here, Laura?
Um, not today.
(laughs)
You know?
Are you thinking about it?
We'll see. Never say never.
Never say never. Are you considering it?
Um, I mean, before this year, I would have said that I never wanted to leave LA, but I also couldn't have imagined them shutting Hollywood down- (laughs)
Crazy.
... until further notice, so I don't know what is gonna happen next.
The, uh, district attorney, I think that's who it is, killed the gang taskforce too. That's a new thing, 'cause apparently there's not enough crime. He's like, "How do we make it worse?"
Oh, that's good.
"Let's just, let's kill the gang taskforce."
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