The Joe Rogan Experience - #1629 - Lara Beitz

Episode Date: April 3, 2021

Lara Beitz is a standup comic known for her appearances on Comedy Central's "Lights Out with David Spade", Showtimes' "The Comedy Store" mini-series, and stages around the United States.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Hello. 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 That it's open? Yeah. Whoa. Yeah.

That's awesome. How'd you hear about it? They hit me up. So they just started? Yeah. Where's it at? What street? This is opening weekend.

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. Did you walk around? I walked a little bit.

Did you get any brisket? Not yet. That's tonight. What did you do when you got here? I went and got halal, and then I went swimming. Oh, okay. Cool. Check it out.

Yeah. Wander around. Who are you working with? Fahim. Oh, great. And 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 Stubbs too there it is is this the place? yep where's it at Jamie? downtown

3rd street oh okay east side I think because it's 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 you uh what does tim dylan have to do with that tim dylan's on their page there is he talking shit about them what's he saying uh i think he's talking about the austin scene he yeah he's out here too are you gonna move here a lot um not today you know are you thinking about it see never say see. Never say never. Never say never?

Are you considering it? I mean, before this year, I would have said that I never wanted to leave L.A., but I also couldn't have imagined them shutting Hollywood down until further notice. So I don't know what is going to happen next. The district attorney, I think that's who it is killed the gang task force too that's the new thing because apparently there's not enough crime he's like how do we make it worse oh that's good let's kill the gang task force is that the same task force that was like uh the the dirty one the rampart one oh i don't think so okay i think that's a different one maybe i don't think so

though maybe it was dirty maybe i'm looking into it the wrong way just wondering might be right i might be looking at the wrong way i mean if no one can leave their apartments anyway what difference does it really make you know uh it dot my friend eddie almost got jumped at a gas station two nights ago damn yeah he's pulled into a gas station and he got out of his car and some guys started walking backwards towards his car with hoodies on and he was like what is going on here and then he's like i'm getting back in my fucking car and then they just ran up to his car and he locked the car and took off damn i've been making people walk me to my car after shows because i accidentally caught a preview for the

local news and it was like a woman being put down on her face on the sidewalk while two dudes robbed her. And I was like, well, I can't forget that I've seen that image now, so I guess I don't go places by myself anymore. Yeah, that's the thing that happens when you shut down the economy. It's like crime just, not only did they shut down the economy, but they also handicapped the police officers. Cops are terrified to arrest anybody i was talking to a friend who's uh got a friend that's a fireman who's friends with cops and they were all discussing this apparently that

they just don't know what to do like they have they're scared to arrest people because they're scared that they're going to do something that's going to be abusive and they're going to get filmed and then you know or considered abusive or if someone's resisting arrest and they're just in this weird position where a lot of people hate the police now yeah so cops they don't want to be bothered with shit like sunset is like a drag strip now have you seen people flying down sunstep going 150 miles an hour racing yeah um you have seen that fucking weird right yeah i'm um laughing because i was with dylan sullivan last night and we walked to get food and there were like a bunch of junkies around and they kept just like appearing and i was getting really nervous and then we saw a cop car

across the street and we're like let's go be by the cop and we walked over to stand by the cop and um i was like this is not very this is that's not a very popular mindset right now to go and be near the cops yeah and i pictured someone spray painting like fuck the police and me like doing a carrot mark and saying fuck yeah yeah, the police, because we got so excited to see them. We're like, oh, thank God, the cops are here. Where were you at? Sixth and a different street. Yeah, there's that area around where the Vulcan Gas Company is.

That's a homeless shelter. That's where we were. We were parked right outside of Vulcan Gas Company. Yeah, yeah. One of the guys there tried to steal one of my security guy's car damn the whole place down there is so weird it's it's funky and uh even though it's kind of like semi-dangerous but their version of danger is just so different than the la danger it's kind of cute danger you know it's like just crazy homeless people it didn't feel cute and with

all due respect you're a lot more muscular than I am. I don't think that people will fuck with you as fast as they'll fuck with me. Well, you never know. It's easy to get a gun here. It's a different animal. Yeah, we were parked before an alley. And people just started, like, coming out of the alleys. And I was like, we got to go somewhere else.

Yeah. Well, COVID fucked everything up. The covid fucked everything up the pandemic fucked everything up it did not fuck up austin just fucked up austin less than i mean it fucked la up la is fucked like yeah it's not just fucked like i tell people about it and they're like come on you're exaggerating and then they go and then they call me and go, holy shit, dude. Like it's unrecognizable. Well, and it's fucked because if you're going to shut everything down, you have to give us like a lot of money because rent is so obscene there that I think it's unimaginable for anyone who lives anywhere else in the country. I mean, it's so expensive. I've been on unemployment for a year, which I've never applied for unemployment before in my entire life. Like, you know how hard I work. I'm not a handout person. But if you're going to shut all the comedy clubs, like and I was applying for jobs that I didn't even want on Indeed just to

try to make some money, because my unemployment covers less than half of my rent. And I'm just like, what do you expect me to do? And if I'm in a position where I every month, I'm like, am I going to be, how am I going to not be homeless? I just can't imagine people who have it so much worse than I do. Yeah. And that there are a lot of people like that. And there's also like, it incentivizes people to do crime. It really does. Cause they're like, I, I need to fucking get by i gotta figure this out and so people that were maybe on the cusp of trying to be a good person and maybe fell back into a life of crime it's just it's not good it's just the problem is when you have mayors and governors and these

people that don't they don't have a vested interest in the economy booming like it doesn't matter to them like they get paid regardless you know so if their paycheck was dependent upon the economy of like say if like the governor and the mayor got paid a percentage of the gross revenues for the state like you know 0.001 or whatever the fuck it is like this is how you make your living like everybody has to do well and if you develop policies and you enact laws and legislations and rules especially during this pandemic that cripple businesses like there's a way to keep businesses open and still keep people safe they've done it they've done it in other places right but california for what like if you look at florida's the crazy one right we always look at florida like those people are out of their mind they're crazy they're fucking alligators and hanging out in the streets but florida has like less covid cases per capita they have less deaths

per capita and they're wide open well and we're not at the it's not last april anymore exactly 25 percent of americans have received at least one shot of the vaccine. The most vulnerable populations got the vaccine first, which doesn't make sense to me, but I'm not a doctor or a virologist. It makes sense on one level, and then it's very confusing to me on another level. I'm like, I would think we would want to try it on healthy people first, but that's neither here nor there. They tested it on people before they tried it on the old folks. The idea is the old folks are less likely to survive it if they get it yeah you know but they this was like the finish line i thought i thought like when the vaccine's out we're gonna

pop shit back open so what that's what they did here and that's what they're doing a lot of states that's what they did in arizona the problem is cal problem is California, they've been feeding off that fear porn for a full year, and they don't want to let it go. I mean, they almost want the virus to be completely eradicated. And the real fear is that what happens when the flu comes around? What happens when a less dangerous virus comes around? Are you going to reenact the same rules? Are you going to just keep the economy crippled?

It's going to be Mad Max. Yeah. That fucking place is going to be all tents and guns and fucking dogs. And it's going to be chaos. It's really gnarly. And it's interesting to me how little people allow for incorporating new information and changing your mind about stuff, especially at this point. Because there are people who still are like, comics shouldn't be doing shows in LA.

You know what? Those people all don't do shows. You ever notice that? Those people, you shouldn't do shows? You motherfuckers never did shows. Yeah. Those are all people that their career sucked, and they weren't that good,

and they want people to stay home because part of them didn't like the fact that people were doing so many shows and doing so well. There's not a lot of really good, successful comics that are saying people shouldn't be doing shows it's generally scrubs yeah for sure it's people who did it as a hobby and i don't think that you just weren't successful to have that opinion if you're not a professional comedian like what are you doing unless you also are talking that way to all of your friends who have been working in offices and unless you have a better idea for someone than doing shows like i don't know how you

can expect people not to feel differently about this when we have more information yes we know more about this disease we know more about how it's transmitted we know more about how it's transmitted. We know more about how deadly it is. Yeah. And it's interesting because there's so much misinformation that is being given to us. Like, we know that you don't have to be six feet apart and wear masks and be outside. Like, if you're outside, you're probably not going to give it to other people. At all.

Yeah. And so the more that people know that they're being... You can wear masks. You can do it and be safe they've been doing shows all across the country they haven't had these mass outbreaks that come out of these shows it hasn't happened yeah absolutely i mean i i did vegas and i wore my mask when i wasn't on stage and i didn't get sick and so it's kind of like the more stuff i did and didn't get it, the more I was like, wait, this isn't, I was under the impression that like, if I left my house, I was going to die. Yeah. That's what they want you to think. Have you been taking vitamins? Are you up on your, obviously you look great. You lost a ton

of weight. You're super healthy. I'm very proud of you. That's amazing. It's really cool. Yeah. I take a lot of vitamins, including vitamin D. Are you taking D with an ionophore, like quercetin or curcumin or any of those things? I don't know. Okay, let me get you some quercetin because quercetin, it increases the efficacy of zinc. It gets it into your bloodstream better. So D3, zinc, and an ionophore, particularly quercetin. There's been studies done on quercetin and the way it impacts people's health with quercetin

and zinc with COVID-19. I'll send you a link. Cool. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, they told us that there was a virus killing obese people. I was obese at the beginning of the pandemic. And so I lost weight to not be obese

anymore and now i'm in a healthy weight range and they made obese people eligible for the vaccine and i wasn't eligible for the vaccine i was like are you fucking kidding me can you wear like a fat suit go get vaccinated i got vaccinated as a food worker oh i gave him my comedy store tax form and the lady was like do you handle food and i was like yeah i do i handle food every day so i didn't i handle food too i didn't lie but i didn't super tell the truth but we're not we're not at the point now where we're just vaccinating the people who are most vulnerable like those people have had it for the most part right now we're back to ranking members of society from the most to least important and there's no one i can like talk to about that

and be like well listen i'm getting on a plane i'm gonna be flying i'm gonna you know what i'm like i can't plead my case but i can give them my tax form and get the vaccine so that's what i did yeah it's a weird thing when they tell you that your business is not essential. And that's a weird thing. It's like you're not worthy of the vaccine yet. We're going to... I get it with vulnerable people. That does make sense to me. Yeah. And I do get it with frontline workers.

I get it. But after that, it's like, how do you decide who's getting this? It feels pretty essential to me. Comedy is essential. I think it's mental health. I think it's very good for people. comedy's essential. I think it's mental health.

I think it's very good for people. It's, I mean, making people laugh is, to me, like, I've gone to comedy shows and walked out and felt better.

Like, I just took a drug. Oh my God, yeah. It brought, I didn't, I didn't do stand-up for seven months

and then did a show again and it was like, I came back to life. What was the first place you worked? I don't remember what it was called. Where was it? In L.A.? Yeah.

Did you practice your stuff? Did you go over your material? How did you approach the show? Well, I had written a lot of new material. You know, I had been writing in quarantine, but so much of that made no sense because it was like written by an insane person because I lost my mind in my home. So I'm writing shit that's like specific to my apartment and also writing stuff about like something that was on the news in March.

So by the time I went on stage and like went and looked through it, I was like, this can never be seen by anybody. went and looked through it I was like this can never be seen by anybody so I did some stuff that was like new and then I did some old stuff people say it's like learning to ride a bike it's like learning to ride a bike and then not walking and then standing up and your legs have atrophy like that first set was people were laughing and I had fun but i wouldn't try to sell it to hbo or anything you know yeah my first set i did uh what happened i just lost all sound i lost oh just came back how weird ghosts i could hear you the whole time oh that's so strange um my first set i did uh the houston uh improv with uh moses and henchcliffe and uh we did it in july but then i got paranoid that i was

gonna give it to somebody i was like what if i get it and give it to somebody you know i wasn't as worried about getting it as i was giving it to somebody but um so i said let me just take some time off and then i didn't do it again until um um, Chappelle asked me to do these shows out here. And I was like, fuck, all right, I'm living out here. He's coming out here. I'm going to do some shows. And as soon as I do it, I started doing those. I'm like, fuck, I'm back. That's exactly what happened to me. I did that one show. And then the next night I did another one. And on the way to that show that night, I had this feeling that I like hadn't felt in forever. And it was the joy of going to do it. And I remembered that I used to have that feeling every single night when I would go to the comedy store.

Like when I would go do a show. Because I never took it for granted. Like I was always excited. I was always happy. I always looked around. You always always happy I always looked you always were I always looked around at the mountains and was like damn I'm in LA like I met you know yeah it's happening you're doing yeah so I came back to life and I don't know it's interesting to me because it's like the same people who on like national suicide day will post about how

important mental health is and come talk to me if you ever feel sad this that and the other and now a year in it's like why are people not talking about mental health and why are those same people saying like you're a piece of shit if you go see your friends you know what i mean because like people are killing themselves they are killing themselves in record numbers uh swartzen has a friend who works as a sheriff and said that there's they would get like one suicide a week back in the day and now they're getting five a week and they were just overwhelmed by the the number it might have been one a month and now it's five a week but it's just they're overwhelmed people are they're not counting that

in terms of like the amount of people that have drug overdoses and die because they're overwhelmed. People are, they're not counting that in terms of like the amount of people that have drug overdoses and die because they're depressed. They're not counting that. And they think about the deaths and the toll and they're not counting like how many people's lives have gone from, you know, they created a business, they worked hard for years and years, and then it's just been taken away from them through no fault of their own. Through no fault of their own. And there's no like severance for that. My friend Katie is a nurse in Chicago and she and I have been in contact through this whole thing. And it was I mean, her hospital was teeming with COVID patients.

She said now it's teeming with alcoholics who are having DTs, people who lost their jobs in September and have been drinking themselves to death all day in their homes. She said that she's never seen DTs this bad. Like she said, it's crazy how many people are dying of alcoholism there. Because they did. They stopped having AA meetings. Well, they're on Zoom. They're on Zoom.

But you have to have like the password. You have to like know a guy, you know what I mean? And it's also just not the same thing. And it's so inaccessible that it's costing people their lives. Yeah, it's an it's the undiscussed aspect of the pandemic. You know, it's uncomfortable for people when they think about the cost of the pandemic. They don't think about how many people are going to get sick, how many people are going to be in the ICU.

That's something we have to absolutely consider. But you also have to consider what happens when you shut down the entire economy. Like, what are the other repercussions? And here's the big question, because this is the big experiment. How long is it going to take before L.A. bounces back? Because L.A. is a big fucking fucking city and where's the money going to come from like where are you gonna have the money to open up all those businesses they lost 75 of their restaurants like how is the store and the improv how are they going to stay open for another

year like this because those goofy draconian motherfuckers that are keeping that place locked down they're not going to let it open they're going to maybe let them do some outside shows eventually but like right now indoor shows are out of the question so how long is it going to take it's going to take unless people specifically talk about that in the recall for gavin newsom specifically talk about comedy clubs until they do that they're not people are specifically talking about restaurants so they opened up restaurants again like he's panicking because they're worried about him getting recalled because they've they've gathered enough votes now isn't the comedy store classified as a restaurant it's not no it's not why what makes a right i mean they serve food there what's yeah i think you need 51 of your money to come from food and drinks

versus ticket prices something like that something wacky but it was when they were doing like when comics were doing sets in the window yeah um i don't know what classifies it as a restaurant but the problem is the live performance and the idea of comedy is you're all laughing so when you're like they're telling people not to scream at Disneyland. Do you know that? Yeah. Yeah. They told me when you go on rides, don't scream.

Like, okay, I'm going to mime it. I'm going to. That's, that's so. They also tell you to keep your arms and hands down and no one ever fucking does that. No one ever does that. Right. Yeah. I hope people scream. Just at a protest.

They're probably going to stop people from screaming though. They're probably going to tell people because, you know, look, they don't want an inspector to come there and say hey people are screaming we're gonna shut this place down you know they've disneyland's been closed for a fucking year and they're losing some insane amount of money it's like 300 million dollars a day or something crazy yeah like it's nuts i might have made that number i pulled that right out of my ass how much money is disneyland losing per day while Disneyland's being closed? I think it might be $100 million. I really do.

Isn't that what it costs for a churro at Disneyland? Isn't a churro at Disneyland $100 million? It's less than that. It's less than that. Yeah, there's got to be. Let's guess. Before I say $100 million, what do you say? I'll say $50 million. Okay. you say? I'll say 50 million.

Okay. I like what you're doing. Price is right. Let's go. I just have no idea. A hundred million seems, if you guessed a million, I would have been like, maybe I would have probably guessed half of that. That just seems like so much money.

It's way more than a million. Disneyland is huge and it's really fucking expensive. And then you got Disneyland and California Adventure all in the same park. I can count on one hand the amount of times I've had more than $2,000 at once in my life, so I don't have a concept of what a million dollars is. It's a lot of money. But it's not a lot of money if you're running Disneyland. I mean, that's probably their fucking rent.

What do you got, Jamie? It's giving me just Disney's overall. Disney's a gigantic company, so it's giving me just disney's overall disney's a gigantic company so right it's not breaking it down just for disneyland did you write disneyland is losing yes yes so now i'm looking per day how much is disneyland's daily revenue and then no no no just say how much is disneyland losing per day it's adding it all together with disney the company and how much they lost in china and orlando the TV channels and all this. Did you write Disneyland? Yes.

Fuckers. I know there was an article. Jamie, you'll get it. I know you will. I have faith. There's got to be like a middle ground, you know? Yeah. Like let people do whatever the fuck they want.

Like let people do whatever the fuck they want. And like put those little dots where people can stand a little bit further apart. I think we should have been doing that anyway i've always thought handshaking was disgusting i think we should all stop shaking hands for the rest of our lives when i was looking back at my old material i found two separate bits i tried to write about how shaking hands is nasty before covid i didn't even realize i felt that strongly about it, except that I did. I was always like a fist bumper or like, better yet, don't touch me.

After shows, you don't have to fucking touch me, dude. I've had men kiss me on my mouth after shows. I've had people like grab my stomach after show. I've like, people put their hands on me and try to touch me. And I'm like, we don't, it's germs. Men have kissed you on your mouth? How many? One. One. Took me and try to touch me. And I'm like, we don't. It's germs. Men have kissed you on your mouth. How many? One.

Took me a while to add that up. Well, I tried to fish. I was like, I mean, men have kissed me on my face. One guy kissed me on my mouth. But I was pushing him off of me and yelling, stop. What the fuck are you doing? And the people with him were laughing. And I was like, what the fuck is your problem?

I snapped on him. I yelled at him. And then i didn't shake anyone's hands after that that's the difference between being a woman comic and being a male comic dudes have never tried to kiss me i've never had a guy kiss me i honestly don't even believe you i feel like dudes have tried to kiss you i feel like you've probably been kissed on the mouth by more women 30 or 40 guys uh a couple women have tried to kiss me. There you go. But it's not threatening. You know? That's the difference.

It's not dangerous. That's just because you're into it. Just because you're into it doesn't mean... No, it's not dangerous. Like, they can't really rape me. You know what I'm saying? I feel threatened on your behalf, but I respect your right to feel safe. Thank you very much.

I'm glad that you feel safe. I appreciate you feeling threatened on my behalf. But my point is, like, a woman is not physically scary to me. Yeah. Where a man is physically scary to a woman. Here it goes. Deep info. Okay, here it goes.

12 million per day. Wow, I'm way off. That's just for Disneyland though. 12 million per day based on 2000. God, it was like 300 million. Coronavirus closures cost Disneyland 7.9 million per day based on 2000 god it was like 300 million coronavirus closures cost disneyland 7.9 million per day and disneyland california adventure 4.1 million per day yeah it's damn i didn't realize in orlando so when you start adding it all up it starts getting to be walt disney world in florida

lost 25 million per day it's way bigger though oh interesting Oh, interesting. Magic Kingdom, $8.8 million per day. Animal Kingdom, $5.8 million per day. Epcot, $5.2 million. And Hollywood Studios, $4.8 million. Oof. Okay, I was way off. I was going to go with a billion a day. How about that?

A billion? So what is it, $14? Is that what it said, $14 million a day? That's still a shitload of money. Add that over 365 days, and you've got a lot of cheddar. So that's still a shitload of money add that over 365 days and you got a lot of cheddar so that's three 250 million a week yeah yeah that's billions damn billions of dollars just because someone told them they have to shut that i mean they would have definitely lost money period there's no way to not lose some money everybody Everybody lost some money, but to lose that much money is just preposterous. Well, and then if you think about those workers, think about how much they could possibly be collecting in unemployment.

And it's got to be $100 a week. I mean, it's got to be so low if they were minimum wage workers because you just get a fraction of that. And where can you live on $100 a week? Like, where can you pay rent? What room can you rent? What closet can you rent? I'm not talking about having your own apartment. I'm saying, like, where can you live for that amount of money?

You can't. You can't. You have to live with your parents, and you have to hope they can pay their mortgage. It's interesting, like, what we just did there is basically what's happening in California in terms of fear of covid like when there's a person that ramps it up so high like 100 million dollars a day you came in at

50 million a day right that was your estimate after i came in with 100 million a day meanwhile we're both way off like that's in a sense like what in california everyone's like we're all gonna die everyone's gonna die and then if you're reasonable you're like no only like 30 of us are gonna die and then you're like wait a minute it's not even that 30 would be wild that's what like the bubonic plague killed well that was what a lot of people were seriously worried about really i've had people express to me today that five percent of people that get COVID die. I'm like, bro, that's not possible. That's not true. That's not true.

It's not true. It's less than 1%. And then you also have the problem of die from COVID or die with COVID because most people who die have an average of 2.6 comorbidities. And I think they've recently elevated that. I think it's more than that now, which means they have either diabetes or some other cancer, some other disease that makes them extremely vulnerable. Then they get COVID and then they die of it. It doesn't mean you should minimize the fact they died and COVID definitely killed them because if it wasn't for COVID, they would have probably stayed alive.

But they were not doing good already. And that's a lot of us. That's the problem. And they don't fucking say shit about that. They don't say shit about, you should take vitamins, you should exercise. You took it upon yourself to lose weight. And that's really important

because almost 80% of the people that were hospitalized from COVID were obese. Almost 80%. It was like 78%. That's what my friend Katie said. I asked her what she was seeing in Chicago, and she said that it was obese men and people of color. People of color, it's because of vitamin D.

Really? Yeah, because darker folks, their melanin actually protects them from the sun, but makes them generate less vitamin D. My friend who's a doctor worked in New York and he said he would experience when they were testing folks, he would experience some folks that were black that had undetectable levels of vitamin D because they never went out in the sun and it was cloudy out and they didn't supplement. So they literally had undetectable levels of vitamin D, some of the people that came in there that were sick. So here's a question that I have had on my mind is if obese people were prioritized for the vaccine, why were people of color not also prioritized for the vaccine? Well, what they should have been is given vitamin D, you know, I mean, and not just given vitamin D, but everybody should have been told from the beginning.

Like vitamin D plays a critical role. Eighty four percent of the people that were in the ICU with COVID were deficient in vitamin D. Only 4% had sufficient levels of vitamin D. People that were in the ICU with COVID. And that's a big problem with the entire country because human beings aren't designed to be indoors. This is not normal.

To be covered with clothes. We're supposed to be outside doing shit. That's how the human body evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. So this whole environment clothes we're supposed to be outside doing shit that's how the human body evolved over hundreds of thousands of years so this whole environment that we're living in is terrible for the generation of vitamin d the only other way to get vitamin d is to take it in pill form that's the only other way you either get it from the sun your body generates it or you have to take it there's no other way to get it yeah and it's actually a hormone vitamin d is is a hormone. It's not even really a vitamin. It's a crazy, and it's responsible for so many things. It's responsible for brain function, muscle growth, your immune system.

But they don't tell you that. You don't see Gertzetti on TV saying, folks, this is what we found out. Look at these charts and statistics about people that have suffered from it it's really important to take vitamin d they didn't say that yeah i did all that i went outside and i started taking it and i lost weight i didn't want to and i haven't gotten it good but aren't you happy you lost weight don't you feel like lighter i feel lighter that's exactly how i feel yeah dude well it's like it's the equivalent of like eight bags of potatoes and if i think about what it would be like to carry that around in a backpack like through an airport and then get to set it down one of those take one of those 45 pound plates that's a heavy fucking weight like yeah you put on like a barbell

one of those big ones that's what you lost my ankle weights and my hand weights together are 20 pounds and if i think about carrying that times two or even across a room i would i would be tired and that's what you were doing and i feel so much better i mean i had had back pain from the time that I was a teenager, I'd had joint pain. And I thought that I was just going to have it for my whole life, because I didn't think I was heavy enough that it was affecting my joints. And that pain is all gone. And, and it makes sense to me, because again, if I carry around a heavy bag through an airport, like my back will hurt at the end of the day, if I do that right now.

Yeah. And to have to carry that weight around everywhere I go, everything I do, even just sitting, having that extra weight, like I just don't want it back. And I think part of it might be because I stopped eating flour and sugar, which I've heard are inflammatory as well. So I think part of it might be that. But the other thing is just getting to set down the weight. I feel awesome. I think both are factors. Yeah, for sure. I mean, definitely. It's just logical that the weight's a factor. But for sure, sugar and flour and any processed foods like that cause inflammation. So what did you do for exercise? I play tennis and swim and I do workouts that Stacia Patwell created. She was a comic. She ran a show

at the store and she's a trainer and she started doing these classes on Zoom for female comics and a bunch of us have had before and after transformations where like a bunch of fat comics have gotten hot because of her workouts she's on to something dude she's so fucking funny and she can like work you out for an hour where i'm just like laughing i feel like i'm hanging out with a friend and she has this specific brand of tough love where she'll like she'll call she'll call me a pussy like right before i'm about to drop out of a plank and she'll be like the world has enough pussies don't be a bitch don't bitch out what is her name again stacia patwell s-t-a-s-i-a-p-a-t-w-e-l-l yeah and her instagram is just that it's all one word

jamie will find it she's a fucking monster and she called her thing school of thought t-h-o-t that's hilarious school of thought a beast dude is that her right there yeah she has the transformations in her highlights all right she's so fucking funny dude she's nostalgic for boston in the 90s right now yeah she'll yell at you in her like long island accent and something about it i wouldn't tolerate half the shit she says to me. Nothing better than East Coast in the 90s, I'm telling you. Something that wasn't funny? Oh, there I am. Look at that.

Oopsie doopsie, bitsy's in a bra. Uh-oh. Go to the far right. Look at her. Dude, you lost so much weight. That's crazy. Got my little cats in the background that I adopted so I wouldn't open my wrists in a bathtub.

There we go. There she is. I did not know I was that fat. Boy, do I have egg on my face what what did you think I thought I had 25 pounds to lose and so I set I mean I'm comfortable talking about numbers so my top weight was 180 I set my goal weight at 155 and now I'm 142.5 and I'm not I'm in a healthy weight range so if my body stops like easily losing weight then I'll be like okay this is the weight that my body wants to be but it's still I'm still losing weight and it's not protesting I'm certainly not starving

myself that's awesome yeah so it was just a matter of eating the right food and just forcing yourself to do rigorous exercise. Yeah. I joined a support group for overeaters. And I weigh, measure, and write down every single thing I put in my body and eat balanced portions that were given to me by a dietician. So I measure out like protein, grains, fruits and vegetables, fats. So I measure out like protein, grains, fruits and vegetables, fats. And then my goal that I that I try for is to be in a caloric deficit of about 250 calories a day, which averages out to about a half a pound a week of weight loss. And I don't do it perfectly, but like that's enough where I'm not starving all the time.

I'm satiated. But so it's sustainable. But I'm also starving all the time I'm satiated but so it's sustainable but I'm also like steadily losing weight and it's been I mean I haven't had pizza in a year like I haven't had any added flour any added sugar in um like 10 months well you're a disciplined person you know I really admire your work ethic and I know I've told you this before because you would come to the store with your notebooks. I'm like, look at you. Your notebook is like, you're fucking meticulous. All your shit would be super written out.

And so many comics are so impulsive and sort of scatterbrained. And they don't focus. And I really admire that you're focused. I always admired that. I thought it was cool. Thank you so much. I admire that about you, too. I always admired that. I thought it was cool. Thank you so much. I admire that about you too. So that means so much coming from you.

I admire your work ethic. Yeah, I pretty much like took the energy that I had been putting into stand-up and just applied that same thing to this. Because it's like if you really want to do something, why fuck around? Why waste the effort? Like what would be the point? to do something why fuck around why waste the effort like what would be the point and i spent so long trying to like diet without weighing and measuring and having like an intention that it's like i just put up a shitload of boundaries to where it was unfuck upable because i believe in

taking like little actions in the direction of the thing that you want but it doesn't help me if i'm like i'm gonna try to just eat better which is such a general concept. And then if I'm stepping on the scale once a week, then what happens when my weight is up? Because as it stands now, I'll step on the scale, my weight could be up three pounds. And that's fine. And I don't trip because I wrote everything down. I know that I'm in a caloric deficit and I know it's water or salt whatever I don't understand that stuff but then I step on the scale the next week and it'll be down you know and so I thought that like a weight loss chart went like that but it really goes like that and I think especially for women I mean mine's just been up, down, up, down, up, down. But the general trend is, you know, if you could take the energy that you like, the good that you feel from losing weight

and getting healthy and just somehow or another, like put it in a VR, like put it in someone's head, like feel, just fucking feel this, just feel this ready, put it on like, Oh my God, I feel so good. Like you can get there. You can get there. Like you can get there. But the problem is you can get there but the problem is everybody wants to get there so quick they want to get there immediately they want to take a pill they want to listen to dr oz they want to get there quick you can't fucking get there quick yeah it doesn't work and that the crazy thing is like you gotta get sick the same way or you gotta get better the same way you got sick like it takes time to get overweight and it takes time to lose weight like you if you're going to just starve yourself and lose it all because your body's going to go into deficit, you're going to freak out, your metabolism is going to crash. Then when

you eat, you're going to pack it on quick because your body's getting like, oh my God, we might starve to death. Like I have to slow my metabolism down. Yeah. I think a huge part of it too is like the action has to be the reward. So like I love doing my workouts because she makes me laugh. It's built right into my routine. I eat my oatmeal, I meditate and then I do one of her workouts and it feels good. It feels good for my body. Um, and the same thing with food. Like I don't eat most of my favorite foods from before anymore, but I love everything I do eat because I've learned how to cook stuff. Brown rice, vegetables, proteins. I've learned how to cook food the way that it tastes good to me. And so I'm not doing workouts. I hate, I'm not eating food that I hate. And it's sustainable that's awesome i throw this off the team you got crazy got a little crazy it's sustainable everybody gets electrocuted yeah it's uh it's good to see i'm very happy for you thank you what you you got that heavy fucking

midwest accent that chicago accent right is that where you from where you from i'm from milwaukee yeah it's that same thing that midwest you know just like you could tell you know you know i'm saying i mean it's funny i don't i don't hear it you know like i think you have it less now than when i met you i think when i met you how long have you been at the store um i got passed seven months before covid here's a good story uh laura was on stage once and burt kreischer and i were coming from uh we did a show in the main room then we had a couple of cocktails in the comedian's bar and we're hanging out we were walking by and just on a whim we decided to walk into the or and uh you were fucking slaying and there was like maybe i don't know how many people were in there 10 15 something like that and it doubled by the time your set was over and we were howling

and i remember we came up to you afterwards i even put it on my instagram i put it on my instagram how funny you were and uh and then adam got super excited because he loves you, Adam Egan. We were all talking about it. But those moments are so important to me. When you see someone in front of a small crowd that is on late at night, and that fucking audience has seen everything. They've been there. A lot of those people have been there from the beginning of the night. So they've been there from 8 o'clock.

And here we were, what was it, like 1 something like that yeah it was late and here we were at 1 a.m and you were killing and I was like wow that's it's that's that's the real thing you know that's the real that's those are like the moments of the beginning that like those are the roots of a real career thank you so much it's so funny because um I am so glad that I didn't know that you and Bert were watching because I remember that set and I remember I was trying new stuff and I remember talking to audience members like I tried a punchline and it didn't work and I remember having a conversation with them about it and being like, did that not work? Did you not get it? Like, do you not know what I meant? Or did you get it and you didn't think it was funny? And they were like, we don't really know what you're talking about. And so I explained it and then changed that joke or cut that joke. But I

would never if I knew you guys were watching, I would have done a polished 15 minutes. I would have done my best material. So, thank you. I mean, you're very generous and you're very kind because that wasn't like a, it was not a TV-ready set I was fucking around. It didn't have to be. It was late night at the store.

You're better off not doing a TV-ready set because they've already seen everything polished. They want real. That was one of the good things about it. Why didn't that fucking joke work? You were just loose. You were loose and you were angry. It was raw.

We were laughing hard. We laughed really hard. Thank you. We both talked about it afterwards. I'm like, damn, she's fucking good. I still love comedy i still love watching new people i still love it i love i love the whole i've been doing it for so long but i still love watching the process i still love kill tony i love watching those new people do one minute i I love when they kill. I love it. I love seeing, like it reignites my passion for it. Yeah, I was talking to Dylan Sullivan about that last night,

about how the OR was so fun because you can watch people be so funny and you can watch them bomb being hilarious at like one in the morning and those are the my two favorite things about stand-up are watching people be hilarious and then separately watching them eat shit is hilarious to watch someone tell a joke to a bunch of people and have no one laugh it's hilarious it's hilarious that makes me the most uncomfortable oh my god the worst thing is when you go on the road and you don't pick your opening acts and i started bringing people on the road with me for two reasons one because i wanted someone to hang out with selfishly i mean i wanted

also i wanted my friends to get work you know and i got to a point where i could hire people to come with me but two when someone is terrible and they go on before you, you get confused. You're like, oh, my God, maybe comedy doesn't work. Maybe it's not real. Maybe nothing's funny. Like sometimes you'd be in like Florida or something like that in Tampa and not to single out Tampa. But someone would go on stage. It's so specific.

They'd be so bad. I worked at one time. This guy who's the middle act was so bad that I was baffled. I was like, I don't think there's anything funny there's nothing funny like i had a i had to close myself have you ever been to tampa no the fucking green room's on the third floor so there's three floors so i would close myself in the green room and then have to time out when this fucking guy was getting off stage and then run down to the bottom because i couldn't listen because if you

listen to a bad act it'll fuck your head up it really will because like your timing will be off and it's like there's a thing called i don't know if this is real but i read about it once no i didn't read about once someone was talking about it i never researched it it's called allophrania and the idea was that if you talk to someone who's schizophrenic like if you talk to them long enough it's possible that you could start exhibiting signs of schizophrenia so the i think the conversation was someone was talking about visiting someone in the hospital and that if you there's there's been cases where people go to visit people who are schizophrenic and they spend time with that person and then the the staff starts

looking at them and goes hey are you okay like you start acting fucking weird because you're around this person maybe it's someone you love or care about and you're there with them and they're out of their fucking mind and the the idea and i'll look up allophrania see if that's real it's called a shared psychotic disorder there we go it changes it too okay a shared psychotic disorder is a rare type of mental illness which a healthy person starts to take on the delusions of someone who has a psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia for example let's say your spouse is a psychotic disorder and as a part of that illness believes aliens are spying on them what hey why is this so fucking specific trying to tell me something jamie if you have a shared psychotic disorder you'll start to believe

in the spying aliens but apart from that your thoughts and behavior are normal people with psychotic disorders have trouble staying in touch with reality and often can't handle daily life the most obvious symptoms are hallucinations blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I almost feel like that happens when you watch bad comedy. Like you will absorb whatever fucking craziness that makes them think that material is any good. And it scares the shit out of me. Something new? It can happen in groups of people. Groups of people.

So cults. Or being in a comedy show and watching oh together right yeah there you go that reminds me of another phenomenon they did a study called being sane in insane places where a person who was sane checked into a mental hospital and they had to end the study early because the psychological damage that the person endured was so great that it became unethical so he would be like he would just ask a nurse like hey could i have a piece of paper to like write something down and she'd be like patient engaged in writing behavior like everything or he would be like hey could i talk

about like grounds privileges and the nurse would be like hi james it's nice to see you and then walk away and the dude started to go insane. And the way that I connect that to that is like, the audiences then expect you to suck. The audiences treat you the way that they treated the shitty comedian. And that's the worst part. People know who you are. They know you're funny.

People don't know who I am. At the time when I was in Tampa, they didn't know me either. Because that's the bitch, is when people see a comedian who sucks, and then another comic gets on stage, they don't know who you are either. They assume you're at the level of the person who just went up. Yeah, they're upset. They're not going to laugh at your stuff. Plus, they're not warm.

And they've had a few drinks, and they're just like, what the fuck am I doing with my night? It worked all day? And some mediocre shitheads on stage spouting out nonsense yeah yeah well you got to think also when you think about that study what's it like living with an insane mother or father right like that's gotta rub off on people if you're there's probably people that don't have whatever it is that causes a mental disorder, but then they live with someone who does, and that someone imparts that on them

just by virtue of living in this house where you're with a fucking insane person. Yeah, absolutely. I think it also happens with homeless people. I think that there are people who have been getting treated like they're crazy for so long that it drives them crazy. Because I can't imagine asking someone for something or talking to someone and having the person just like fix their eyes and keep walking, you know? Yeah.

I had a really good friend when I lived in New York who was semi-homeless. He was homeless sometimes and not other times. He was a pool hustler. And I actually met him in a pool hall and he became literally one of my best friends and stayed on my couch a lot of times. And sometimes he would stand on my couch, he would snore so loud because he hadn't slept in days. It was crazy. And I moved to LA. He stayed in New York and I didn't see him for a while. And then went to uh new york to do this thing and uh i went to do this tv thing and he came to meet me there and i just in my mind it was me hanging out with my friend johnny it was normal but for him one of the things that he was

saying to me goes dude i gotta tell you man this is like because there was a bunch of you know crew and all it goes this is like the only time in years where people have been nice to me he goes because i'm with you i'm hanging around like everybody's nice to me and then it made me think like oh this guy gets treated like shit everywhere because he's like basically sleeping in flop houses or these hostels or anywhere he can when he if he can get the money he had a serious drug problem and wound up killing him and i remember i've never forgot that like he was saying like this is crazy man like people would be nice to me here like no one's ever nice to me i remember thinking like why is no one nice to you you're a great guy and then i i'm like how fucking weird is my thinking like

i'm doing a t i you, I was friends with this guy. I was a struggling comedian. He was a pool hustler. And then years later, I'm on a TV show. And I come to New York to film this TV show. And I hang out with my old friend. But he's still the same guy doing the same kind of things. And maybe even worse off.

Because his health is failing. And he's deep, deep into the drugs. And, you know, we're hanging out. And, you know, he's like, I can't believe this. It's like the only time anyone's ever been nice to me. In a long time, people have been nice to me. And I'm like, whoa. Imagine going through your day all day long.

People are barking at you, treating you like shit. You're staying in these homeless shelters or flop houses with all these other crazy people. And they're yelling at you and damn so it's heavy do you have like successful person's guilt like is it weird for you to see people from your past no that's cool no you can't gotta keep. Can't worry about that. Because for sure I've been like super fortunate, for sure. No doubt about it. But I also work pretty hard. It's like, I know that I've been very lucky.

But I also know that I've taken advantage of moments and made the best out of them. Because I'm obsessive and I work real hard. And I think a lot of people have learned from that. I think I've showed a lot of people that are in my life and a lot of people are like, like you got to work. Like that's how you get things done in this life. You can get by on talent and you can get by on, on, on brashness. There's a lot of things that you could pull off in this world where you can kind of like skirt the system but really you're better off working too like even if you have all those things and I've always kind of been impulsive and kind of

crazy but I also work I work really hard at everything I do I've always done that so I don't because of that I don't really feel that guilty yeah you know but I do feel obligated to help I've always felt like especially as I've gotten more and more successful, I felt more and more obligated to help. Like I'm always trying to help friends. I'm always trying to help people. I'm always trying to like, that's one of the things that I've done that tried to do really well with this podcast is like boost people's signal that I think are really good and really funny or interesting or whatever. Like I think it's very important to me. Yeah. I have the vast majority of my Instagram followers because of you,

because of that because of that instagram post that you did hilarious wait until after this but um let me tell you one more story about my friend yeah yeah yeah uh i was on a television show called news radio and i was on it for it was 99 episodes we wound up doing right but um i was two of them i wasn't on one of them was the pilot and the other one was another episode where i had one part but it didn't work so they cut it out it was an ensemble cast there's eight people in the cast so my friend was arrested and he was uh they put him in a mental institution and uh he's so he's in this mental institution and uh he's uh watching tv he's like yo yo yo

my boy's on this show my boy's on the show i'm gonna show you my friend so he's watching news radio it was the one episode where i wasn't on so it gets to the end of the episode and he's a fucking he goes bro i'm in paper slippers he goes i'm in this fucking mental institution with all these legitimate crazy people. He goes, I'm not crazy. I'm just on drugs, right? And I'm hanging out with these fucking crazy people. And at the end of the TV show, the credits roll, and you weren't on the fucking episode.

And they're like, yo, go get your medication. Go get your fucking medication. You don't know anybody on TV. We were crying and laughing. We thought it was so funny. The one episode where he was in a mental health institute, the one, he was only in it for a week. That one episode was the one episode where I wasn't on the show.

That's hilarious. That sucks. He could have just been like, no, I know that guy. Like a different dude. When he died, it was like the saddest I've ever been in my life. It was so sad. I found out from my friend Tommy, who I'm still friends with, who lives back in Connecticut.

And he told me, and I was just devastated. I just couldn't believe it. I hadn't talked to him in a couple of weeks. And he died of an overdose somewhere. It's horrible. It's just so sad. Just so, just, like, gripping sad where you're just like, there's nothing I could ever have done. I tried so hard to get him off drugs so many times.

You know, and this is, like, background. I didn't even smoke pot back then. I would just, like, occasionally have a drink, but I was, like, pretty, like, straight edge. I was, like, super obsessed with being successful and working out all the time. And, and he was my crazy drug addict friend, you know? Yeah. That's, I'm so sorry. And there is nothing that you can do to save someone else from their own addiction. No, no, there's nothing you can do. I mean, you just hope you hope that one day like, you know, people, they take turns in life where they say, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm not gambling.

I'm not doing that anymore. I'm not doing whatever it is. You know, I'm not doing coke, whatever the fuck it is. Sometimes people just stay. They just hit these plateaus and then they're they're done with it. You know, I always hoped and I always hoped. I always hoped that he would just one day go I'm done I'm gonna get my shit together you know yeah and there's no like predicting who's gonna get it and who's not

like there are people who go in and out of recovery and then one day it clicks um my dad was like quitting stuff for my whole life and and and eventually got sober in jail when I was 12 and was sober for the rest of my life he was sober for the next 12 years until he died when I was 24 and I don't think that anyone ever really expected him to stop drinking you know so it's like worth having hope for people but also my mom didn't argue him into finally quitting drinking. I didn't beg him into finally quitting drinking. Nobody convinced him except for like his own misery of like losing his family and then being in jail. You know.

You used to party hard. yeah yeah what made you um do you think it's a genetic thing yeah i do i think it's a genetic thing i think that there also can be an environmental component you know i i know that some things that I liked about it were it made me feel comfortable talking to people crowds have always been kind of draining for me large crowds especially if it's like people I don't know and I felt like I could talk to guys for the first time when I started drinking but then I couldn't stop drinking once I started drinking. So I would be like laid out on a bathroom floor with the guys I liked, like stepping over me to pee, you know, it just got real. That's how it always went. I'd feel

there'd be like a moment in the night where I was like, Oh, yeah, I'm fucking hot. And then I'd have like throw up in my ear and be fucking pissing someone's futon so it just was always real rough and there was a period of time for like years where I woke up and started drinking and drank all day and was a blackout drinker every night um and then I actually had a boyfriend and I quit drinking for him and then I started again and it just was always like it always went back to the same place like I tried quitting what I tried quitting every year since I started I started drinking pretty much daily when I was 17 and then got sober when I was 29 and haven't had a drink or a drug since. But my bottom wasn't when I stopped. When I stopped was just when I was done. It's an

interesting thing. But my last drink was actually just like a couple sips of a friend's beer. And then I just was like, I just something clicked and I knew I couldn't do it by myself and I was willing to accept help I was willing to do anything I was willing to do whatever it took and so um I did I got help it was free what year was this around uh January 21st 2014 wow you know it by the day. Yeah. That's great. I only have like a, other than the birth of my children in my head like that, I have like the day I started comedy, day I was married, that kind of shit.

Yeah. But that's a big one. I don't know when I started comedy and I don't know when you got married, but that's my date. Yeah. I started comedy Augustust 27th 1988 and i think back to that day all the time because i almost pussied out wow yeah me too do you almost pussied out yeah what happened with you i um called yeah you had to call the comedy club ahead of time to ask for a spot the comedy cafe in milwaukee i don't think it's with

us any longer i think it has passed away but um yeah you you called ahead of time to get a spot on the open mic and then you could do a set for five to seven minutes and so i like typed my set out word for word on the computer practiced it in front of a full-length mirror a million times um and wanted to cancel but i would have had to like cancel to cancel and i'm not a bitch so i did it and you were drinking back then yeah oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah they yeah um yeah i used to go on stage blackout drunk it i would not have any of the success that I have right now if I hadn't stopped drinking because I would blackout. And yeah, I went on and I told my jokes and some of them hit and some of them didn't. But I got that.

I got the fix. I got that feeling of like telling a joke to a room full of people and having them laugh at it. And I've been hooked ever since. How did you remember your material if you're blackout drunk i wasn't blackout drunk at that moment oh other times i don't know and sometimes i didn't i mean i fucked up a lot you know there were times where i like went on stage and i would repeat my jokes that i had just said um i would ask my friends like how'd my set go? And they'd be like, you are shit-faced, you know? Like, you're drunk.

It looked like you were really drunk, you know? I knew generally if I couldn't remember it that it probably wasn't that good. Generally. Yeah. Generally, I'm like, well. But, I mean, that's like the difference between then and now. It's like what you were talking about. Now, if you have an opportunity, you make the most of it. Now, if I have an opportunity, I make the most of it.

I show up early. I'm polite and professional. And like nobody wets their pants. And I maybe get another shot of the thing later. You know, you get to move on to like the next level, on to the next step. Back then, I remember in Milwaukee, there was a headliner who thought I was funny and wanted to see if he wanted to bring me on the road and so he got me a feature set at a show a one-nighter and um I went and did it and got blackout drunk and don't remember anything he said to me

on the ride home but i do know he never brought me on the road with him you know like i know i'm not on tour with him right now is he on tour i don't know oh i don't know i don't think i i don't think i've spoken to him since maybe he'll see this and maybe he will his name was james irvin barry all right james irvin barry he was very nice i was very drunk it was not his fault it's a weird thing that genetic propensity for alcoholism because i've seen it in people where their parents are drunks and they just can't fucking help it i've seen it and some people like to think that it's all willpower but i'm not

so sure i don't have that thing i can have a drink or two and i can not drink for a month it doesn't bother me but i've seen it where like one drink and then they get fucking shark eyes it's like blink they flip over and they like you know gerbils you ever look in a gerbil's eyes no i never looked at a gerbil's eyes dead they're dead eyes like like some people their eyes just go they black out they get glazed over and they're not there anymore like oh charles not here anymore yeah charles is gone now this fucking shark boy like is their eyes just glass over yeah i mean i was never there when it happened but that's exactly how my friends describe me they'd be like i looked at you last night and you weren't there that's exactly how they describe me it's

what it seems like when someone's blacked out drunk it's so it's such a weird thing like that that some human beings like for whatever it is with alcohol it sinks like that was always like the big problem with native americans they would give them alcohol and ronda patrick was explained dr ronda patrick was explaining this to me that there's there's actually a gene yeah and that some folks depending upon their ancestry if their ancestors grew up without alcohol they would have no protection from is that true find out that's true that is true is it right yeah it seems like i'm bullshitting i always have to pause that is true and there's and i believe it's less of an enzyme that your liver produces that helps you process alcohol women have less of it as well but native americans yes yeah because they didn't have that as a part of their you know

their ritual. So it's for thousands of years. Oh, it's this thing. That's what it is. Even though you can hear me, I can't hear me. It's this fucking. Hello. Hello.

Jamie, this thing is a piece of shit. Do we have another headset? You want this? Yeah, let me try that one. Oh, there it goes. It came back. My bad. There might be a short in the wire.

Here, I'll give you that in case. Okay, thank you. I think it's probably this little deck more than it is the headset itself. Yeah, that's a weird one. It's weird with the pot, too. I've seen some people, they smoke pot, and they just lose their fucking marbles. There's this guy named Alex Berenson. He wrote a book called tell your children and i had him on um with this uh this guy who's a cannabis doctor from canada mike hart and they were

debating whether or not cannabis is and tell your children is basically about some people when they smoke marijuana have psychotic breaks and and schizophrenic episodes and i've seen it i know people that have lost their fucking marbles with weed and i know at least one guy whose whole life went on a downward spiral after joey diaz gave him an edible like legitimately on the podcast by the way he he has crazy edibles i don't even feel like that's fair to edibles because I hear him talk about the milligrams and I see normal people's reactions to it. Yeah, I've taken his edibles. They like tricks people into taking them, doesn't he? Oh, yeah. He lies about what the dosage is.

He's such a savage. He's such an interesting person. He would take an edible that's 500 milligrams and he would take it out of the wrapper and put it in a wrapper that's 50 milligrams it's so rude it's so rude it's so fucked up it's so fucked up someone's like he's done it he did it to tom on like an airplane didn't he oh yeah yeah yeah tom was so mad at him yeah ah i'm gonna start drugging people that's funny it's only funny when it's joey you'd have to go along with it you don't think i could pull it off you definitely could put off but i'm just saying like if you're not doing the drugs yourself the thing about joey is he's doing the same dose like he's dosing you but he's also taking exactly what you're taking and

more i think i could pull it off more because i don't do drugs because anytime i get like a gift box from a weed company i give it to my friends and i feel like i could easily be like oh here and have one that says it's like 10 milligrams and like ruin frank castillo's week yes you could well frank could probably take it. Steve. Okay. Frank Castillo could take it, though. He knows how to smoke some weed. I know he smokes a lot of weed. He could put it away. He'll be all right.

I don't know if he could put it away without making a fool out of himself. He smokes a lot of weed, but he also will not be able to process anything that you're saying. He doesn't wear it well. He doesn't wear it like a gentleman. I'll say that. wear it like a gentleman i'll say that wear it like a gentleman yeah joey the thing about joey is though it's not just dosing you he will dose himself like he he takes what you're taking like yeah but he's built like a brick house yeah i mean he yeah he's 300 pounds call me the other day joe i'm down to 290 congratulations but he could just all that mass he could put away some fucking chibichus and those stars of death those are 250 milligrams that's a big dose and he would just down two three

of them i've seen it it's like shocking i've seen him eat three of them. I've seen it. It's like shocking. I've seen him eat three of them. And you're like, you get nervous. Like, I got to get out of here. Isn't like 10 milligrams a respectable dose or like 30? For a pussy. Isn't that like the normal range for someone who's like got a family and is trying to like fuck his wife on a Friday night? You know what I mean? Like a normal person.

Yeah, if you don't. He's not normal. Joey's not normal. But the thing that we always would do is get dosed up when we get on planes. Getting on planes, getting high was always the real way to go. Dude, your material about getting high

and going to the airport and flying gives me panic attacks. It's so true. There's nothing I would less want to do than be fucked up at an airport. But that's the point. The point is it makes it an adventure. So instead of it being this boring thing that you have to do, now you're barely keeping it together.

It's like trying to walk a tightrope while you're blindfolded, with one eye's blindfolded and one arms tied behind your back and and you got a fucking splinter in your foot like i'm never bored at the airport i'm always overstimulated at the airport i'm always overwhelmed there are so many people doing so many different things from so many walks of life there's so much going on you got to be alert you have to be alert you got to go through the lines and stuff. People tell you what to do. There's very little margin for error before a TSA agent will correct your behavior. That's why it's fun to be stupid high when you're doing that.

Because you have to keep it together. But one time, me and Duncan, we were going to film a television show. And we got fucking obliterated. Same thing. A giant edibles went to the airport totally missed our flight we were talking me and duncan just we could talk for hours me and duncan were just sitting there in the airport and then we realized dude when's our flight and we looked up and our flight had already left no our flight was gone that's so stupid it's a classic stoner move so we had to take another flight. We flew all night.

And then we went to work in the morning with no sleep. We had to film the show with zero sleep. And the show that we were filming was about the Center for Disease Control in Galveston, Texas. So we're down in Galveston, like still high, right? Like no sleep at all, trying to stay awake, drinking coffee, talking to this guy who's telling us everyone's going to die. So this guy was talking to us about, we were talking about weaponized diseases. And his, essentially the guy at the Center for Disease Control was telling us, it's not weaponized diseases I'm concerned with.

It's live, it's just viruses mutating and jumping from livestock to people. And he's explaining that to us. And we were so high. And then we were in this building where they were working with ebola and all these i mean the center for disease control at galveston is like they work with like some of the worst hemorrhagic viruses and all these terrifying diseases they're all in this fucking building in texas and they're they have these crazy ventilation systems and people are in spaceuits and they're walking around dealing with these things yeah it's all down there so here's duncan and i missed our flight high as

fuck wandering around galveston next to a vial of ebola trying to stay awake listen to this guy talking about how everyone's gonna die like what makes that story like just get funnier and funnier the longer i picture it is thinking about how many times they say the name of the fucking flight in the airport they announce that they're gonna we're gonna start boarding to galveston boarding has started to galveston we're pre-boarding to galveston. Now first class to Galveston. Where Jamie is? They say the name of the flight 20 times. How did neither one of you hear it that many times?

It's worse. It's worse. Jamie is right where the gate was. We were right... We weren't far away. We were right there. We were just talking. Dude, did you see this thing?

Like Duncan's telling me on some documentary he saw. Why didn't anyone prod you? It was just us. talking dude did you see this thing like duncan's telling me on some documentary he saw him why didn't anyone prod you like just us we didn't have like people that were going with us but i mean someone working at the gate nope no one worked at the gate give a fuck about us by the time i went to the lady though like that fight flight's long gone. Shit! It's just classic. She's like, not only did it leave, it left two hours. We also boarded and a different flight left. Yes, we had to fly to Houston and they would have to drive from Houston to Galveston. It was a disaster.

It was hilarious, though. But it's funnier that way to think about it. You know, just think about how ridiculous it was. How far is Houston to Galveston? I want to picture every part of this process. You renting a car, one of your high asses driving it in the middle of fucking night. Yeah, I think by the time we got there, we probably weren't too high. We're definitely a little high.

But we tried to sleep on the plane. Maybe we had like 30 minutes of sleeping in the hotel or something like that when we got there. But not much. It was a disaster yeah that's one of the reasons why people think pot's bad for you you know yeah yeah because they miss flights because you get forgetful when i would uh when i would get high and i used to get high every day even though it gave me horrible panic attacks horrible panic attacks gave me panic panic attacks and it gave me puke burps and i would smoke with like the guy i had a crush on like the guys i had a crush on and would get high as hell would be so aware of like

every molecule of my body would be so self-conscious and then would start like deeply belching and the guy's like oh what the fuck who's fucking hell i would drive and i would go 14 miles an hour i would stop at a stop sign for half an hour because every i just couldn't be sure of the distance and i was like well maybe that car is far away maybe it's close your guess is as good as mine but i do know that i would rather wait for it to pass than go now and have it hit me right i just couldn't tell oh my god it was it was hard it made life really hard puke burps that's that's not good like mints don't cover that up deep bassy mortifying all the time all the time oh was it a weird adjustment becoming sober um it was like

pretty immediately awesome i didn't realize how hard it was to maintain like a lifestyle of active addiction for as long as I did man it was just a load off to stop having to be fucked up 100% of the time it really was bounce right back I don't know about my body um my relationship with stand-up changed uh a lot because I was like before I would go on stage i would try to drink as much as i could fit in myself because i was so nervous and now i just get nervous like it didn't it didn't it never made the nerves go away it just made me be nervous that i was gonna look drunk so i was still nervous when i went out but i was like i hope i don't look fucked up and now i'm just nervous it's weird because i have like really bad stage fright but i also don't care that much i'm just so used to it that i just walk through it and i'm just like

oh this is the part of my lizard brain that makes my heart pound out of my chest as if i'm gonna go to war right now um it's such a weird nervousness too. I think I like it. I hate it. I feel sick. I get dizzy. But I think I'm addicted to it. Because my resting heart rate is 47.

Really? Is that low? Yeah, it's really low. Has it always been that low? No, it's low now that I'm in shape. And if I work out, I can get it up to like 100. When I'm working out, it's low now that i'm in shape and if i work out i can get it up to like 100 when i'm working out it's around 100 when i go on stage it will go up to 140 and so on my fitbit you can see like a spike like you could you could look at the chart and you would know

what nights i had shows you would know how many sets i did it just like yeah my heart pounds out of my chest i think you're you get addicted to overcoming it like the feeling of elation when it's over and you do well like yeah yeah so there's like those three highs there's like the high before you go up which I feel like I'm gonna be sick I only know that I'm not gonna throw up or faint because it's it hasn't happened yeah um and then there's the high of like being on stage and it going well. And then there's the high after of like the relief and of having had a good set.

And that I think is, I like the one on stage and I really like the one after too. Yeah. It's, it doesn't go away. Do you still get nervous? Yeah. Yeah.

You don't, I've never noticed that. You've never seemed nervous to me. I can handle it. I know what the feeling is. I can't handle it. I know what the feeling is. If I hadn't done the work, though, like if I'm not prepared.

I've had shows where I've kind of like just sort of showed up and went on stage. It was not good. The difference between like having an hour or two to go over my material and think about what i'm going to do like that's you don't have to do that right but if you do that you definitely feel better and your performance shows it like and those are the nights where new material gets born when i go i like spend a couple hours and go over my notes and really not just write but go over what I'm going to do. Like there's, there's different stages, right?

There's like writing new stuff, but then there's also going over your stuff, like sitting there and going, oh, I haven't done that one in a while. Like, oh yeah, that will tie into this. And then sometimes like if I have a big show, like an arena, when I do arenas, I write my shit out. So I'll get there way early and i have um index cards and i write out bits and i'll write out key parts of the bits i'll go over my whole fucking act i'll be there for an hour and a half writing on index cards so that way like i got it drilled into my head even though i've done this set hundreds of times or at least 100 you know whatever i've i'm i'm in shape comedy wise i'm ready i still i want to be

super fucking ready i want to be warmed up ready to go yeah and that's so soothing to me what i'll do when i'm at a show just before i go up when i'm nervous i'll write out my set list and i'll do it i'll do it over and over if i don't have anything else i need to write i'll just keep writing it because it helps me memorize and it also calms me down. It makes me feel like I'm doing something. My very low, like manageable, easy action, low bar goal that I set for myself is 30 minutes of writing stand up a day. Because if you do that, like that's a new hour a year. Because 30 minutes a day is if we say like three pages, three times seven,

21 pages a week. And I'm talking about my like double spaced notebook pages. And usually in a half an hour, I can crank out six. So three is like being very conservative. That's 21 pages a week, times 52 weeks. That means that just like one 20th of what i write has to be usable on stage 1 20th and that's about what it is i would say about a 20th of what i write is usable long term on stage most of what i write gets thrown out burr uh said once five minutes a week or uh five minutes a month rather if you do five minutes a month you get an hour in a year yeah so that's about looking at that way a little bit more oh yeah that's doable yeah it's totally doable it's totally doable but how many people don't even do that yeah everybody

doesn't that's the thing it's the problem with comedy is that no one tells you that you have to do stuff yeah like comics are their own boss because they really can't not be their own boss because most of us are dysfunctional yeah but the problem with that is like you don't you're not a good boss of yourself right if you're a good boss you'd be like hey you fuck this is your project get it done yeah you're fired you're fired Jetson a lot of us flunked out of school a lot of us were were class clowns. You know what I mean? And, and it is such a simple thing. I also think that we're like, impatient. And part of the writing is like, I, I set a timer for myself. And then if I'm like on a roll, if I'm working on something,

and I'm enjoying, I'll certainly work longer than 30 minutes, that's just to get me seated with my notebook and a pen in front of me but when I do that then like a lot of that time is spent just me staring off into space trying to think of something to say a lot of it is spent just doing like free association writing it's not all spent writing a juicy like yeah great new bit and I think that comedians dread writing because they don't want to deal with writing shit and they don't want to deal with staring off into space not being able to think of anything so they try to think of something before they sit down to write and that's not what works for me personally and they have a laptop so then they just start

fucking going on youtube or watching porn or looking at websites or like louis ck told me he has a website he has a laptop that's not even connected to the internet that's smart yeah it doesn't doesn't the wi-fi is disabled that's smart just can't yeah i tried to write on a laptop again recently because it just is more efficient and i can't i can't do it really yeah it's too fast i need to be able to slow down because it gives my brain time to think of more things and it's also can you type good with those nails you got some serious i can't do jack shit with these. I've never had nails this long in my life. They are new.

They seem odd for you. They don't feel right. There was a miscommunication with my nail tech. And they weren't supposed to look like this. Dude, your hands look slimmer. That's because my nails are comedically oversized. No, but your hands look slimmer too. You haven't just lost weight in your body.

You've lost weight in your hands. I've lost a couple notches on my watch. I won't lie to you. But it's your hands themselves. Thank you. Yeah, I didn't realize I had such a fat body. I've lost two inches of height. I think I lost an inch of fat off the top of my head and an inch of fat off my feet.

How do you lose height? I don't know. I thought I was... Maybe you had fat imaging your discs. Straightening out your posture. I thought I was 5'7". I don't know who I was kidding, but then I measured myself. Then I got into a healthy weight range for someone who's 5'7". I don't know who I was kidding, but then I measured myself. Then I got into like a healthy weight range for someone who's 5'7".

And I was like, I still feel like I'm a little bit fat here. And I measured myself and I had 10 more pounds. I was like, son of a bitch. So that was, yeah, I've been 5'5 this whole time. What did the nail lady say to you? I wonder what my agents think when like, because I definitely was doing slates and saying hi i'm lara bites i'm five seven i'm based in los angeles and then one day i started being like hi i'm lara bites i'm five five i'm based in los angeles what happened like what happened i shrunk i measure myself yeah um maybe your whole body just shrunk

you want to talk more about my nails you said yeah what how did what it was the communication error uh i would like them to be oval and this color and she was like what length and i said medium and they're pointy and i would call these long yeah but she took for a hoe it took i don't know what i don't know how to take that well if you wanted like i don't know what, I don't know how to take that. Well, if you wanted like. I don't want to be a hoe. I just wanted to have nice nails. But they're fake, right? Yeah. Fake nails. I don't know.

I had to look at them for that long. It's like, it's a hoe prop. Yeah. I, you know, I'll tell you what. I got a hair in my eye. And you couldn't get it out with the nails? I couldn't get it out with the nails my friend who um took me was like oh do you wear contacts oh shit those are gonna be a bitch to get out and i i managed you know but

then i got a hair in my eye and i was like am i gonna have to like call someone like i can't get it out i could see it and i couldn't yeah i don I could see it. You need a Q-tip. Yeah, I don't know how. Can you put a Q-tip in your eyeball? I guess you could. That's sketchy. I just brushed it with my finger, and then eventually I got it out. Was it an eyelash or an actual hair?

It was a hair. How long was it? That long. Wasn't part of it hanging out? If part of it was a hair how long was it that long couldn't it like couldn't wasn't part of it hanging out well you could just kind of get it part of it was hanging out i would have gotten so the whole hair yeah it was it like wrapped and went up and i was trying to drag it out and it went like more into my eye what were you doing that it got so in your eyeball there i was petting my cat oh it's a cat hair yeah oh that makes sense that makes sense yeah that's gonna cost me that's gonna cost me some gentlemen

admirers cats yeah you think so yeah but it was a calculated risk i had no companionship for like months of quarantine and i was like i just gotta adopt some cats and honestly it took a lot of the pressure off because I was like really wanting a companion and now I'm like I'm good I'm good for a while longer cats I got cats is that a thing where guys don't like girls with cats I think it's a thing I also have read that 30 percent of men are allergic to cats and I think that there's definitely like a stereotype of like a single woman with cats I think also a lot of people let the litter box get pissy and their house smells like piss. I clean the litter box twice a day. Part of my morning routine, part of my bedtime routine. Yeah, I believe you.

I see the way you write. Double spaces. Yeah. Very orderly. Are you OCD? My dad was and it's genetic. Oh, is it really? OCD? My dad was, and it's genetic. Oh, is it really?

OCD is genetic? Yeah. I haven't been. I don't know, because I don't know what it's like to be in a regular person's brain. I know that I have tendencies, I'll tell you that. I don't know what it's like to be in a regular person's brain. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if there are regular people.

Laura, I don't think that's a real thing. I mean like without OCD. Oh, okay. I don't know if there are regular people laura i don't think that's a real i mean like without ocd oh okay i i don't know i've never been in another brain good point so i don't know yeah do you wash your hands incessantly i don't wash my hands incessantly i do think about things that i've touched although i just pretty much um don't know. That's the handshake thing, right? Yeah. That grosses me out. Has it always grossed you out? Yeah. Your whole life? Um, I don't know. Probably not before I like knew what germs were and stuff. Although, yeah. And I don't know what that is. I don't know if that's like, because I'm being touched by another person. I don't know if that, or if it is'm being touched by another person. I don't know if that, or if it is the germs.

I think it's, I think it's both. I think that especially now having not shaken hands very much for a while, I think that it is strangely intimate to hold another person's hand. People like touch their penises with their hands. That's what I hear. That's like so fucked up that you would even expect me to hold that. So gross.

And they probably don't even wash their hands. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. Even if they do, then they touch a door that was touched by someone who touched their penis and didn't wash their hands. And maybe I don't want to touch that. So I keep a hand sanitizer in my purse and I'll go for it before I eat. I get it.

Yeah, I'm not too worried about a girl touching her vagina and then touching my hand well girls don't touch her vaginas to use the restroom to pee they check it no they don't they open it up look in there put a mirror in front of it take a picture send it to their friends that That's a separate issue. Oh. Okay. Yeah, germs are weird, right? It is weird that you can get germs from someone's hands. You're touching their body. You're literally an ecosystem of germs.

You touch someone's body and you get... I used to never worry about that. I used to do shows and after the show shake everyone's hand and take pictures with hundreds of people i would do like i did the chicago theater it was like hours and hours of people in line taking pictures we were all laughing and just taking pictures of people for hours and just shook everybody's hand wow and now you think about that today like god a recipe for so many diseases like how did you not get sick but i think it boosts your immune system i would oh i'm sorry no good i would just be so exhausted by that that's such a long time does that drain you are you an extrovert do you feel recharged

by that or is that like just felt just like thankful that people would come to the show i stopped doing it though because too many really crazy people would come and it started getting to the point where this could go sideways. Yeah, dude, your crazy fans have hit me up. So I can't even imagine what you have seen. How have they hit you up? I'm even afraid to say it because what if they're watching because they for sure are.

Okay, you don't have to sure are. We'll talk later. They've hit me up in my DMs. And they want me to say stuff to you. Okay. Please don't. Don't tell Joe about that time I kissed you on the mouth. No, it's like dumb shit. It's like they want your number and stuff.

Like obviously. Well, that's reasonable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah no it's like dumb shit it's like they want your number and stuff oh like obviously well that's reasonable yeah yeah yeah it's weird the fan thing is weird do you you must deal with like you know i don't want to say who it is but there's a girl that used to go to the comedy store that stopped putting her name down on the list yeah because she had this one rabid fucking stalker that wouldn't stop and it made me so angry you know that she was so nervous that she had this one rabid fucking stalker that wouldn't stop and it made me so angry you know that she was so nervous that she had to take her fucking name off of the lineup yeah well there's a man there who had to do the same thing really yeah god damn but that's a thing you know yeah i hope it that that doesn't happen me, at least for like a long time.

I hope I get to enjoy some time where that's not that. Yeah. Did you ever have people come up to you that say like, I go to all your shows or? Yeah. I like it. You know, I've just had like sweet fans, you know? That's cool. Something that has happened that I'm like so tickled by and confused and is so weird to me is like there have been guys who have seen me and are too nervous to ask me for a picture or like too nervous there have been two now so not like a ton but where

they're too nervous to like talk to me and one of them i saw and the other one like told me at a later show that he that he like stood and was ready to like introduce himself but then got too nervous and the idea that people would be too nervous to meet me is like uh very flattering to me at this point it's way better than the forced kiss though yeah yeah yeah i've had crazy shit happen i had you know i had someone grab my stomach i had i was drugged at a show i was i was roofied while working a club when when you were sober yeah whoa yeah where was this uh It rhymes with crappers. Oh, in Burbank? Holy shit. Yeah, dude.

It was gnarly. How long ago? It was gnarly. It was two years ago, maybe three. I don't know. Time is weird now. Two or three years ago. Yeah, I was like fine.

And I was in the green room. Do you have any idea who did it? I have no idea who did it. and I was in the green room. Do you have any idea who did it? I have no idea who did it. And I even called to see if they had, because they have what looks like a surveillance camera in the green room. And I called to see if they would check the footage.

And she said that that's the one that's not hooked up. Oh, great. She said that famous people felt it was too intrusive, so they disconnected it. And she wasn't like, but we'll reconnect it because I totally give a shit she like gave me the third degree she was just like you have no idea who did it well if it was me i would want to know so you have no idea did you accept any drinks from anyone and i'm like

damn yeah one of the comics got me a diet coke because he was going to get himself a coke and i asked him if he would get me a diet coke and then hours later this happened like he didn't drug me it wasn't one of the comics you know I mean I don't know I don't know who it was but it was I went in like a second from being totally fine to being on drugs like I know what it feels like to be on drugs I fucking love being on drugs and I actually had a great night besides how violated I felt because I was like four years sober at that point and I was just like dude I went home I stayed up until three o'clock in the morning with my roommate I like ate ice cream and laughed on the balcony I had the time of my life i was like how did i ever stop doing drugs this is fucking awesome it felt like opiates and um yeah and then the next day it was a roofie did you get tested no i didn't get tested and the next day i had a hangover for over 48 hours are you sure it wasn't

ecstasy or molly or I have no idea what it was. Why do you think it's a roofie though? Because I did some Googling and the date rape drugs, it's the most common ones feel like painkillers. And I've only ever taken two pills of Vicodin for my hand. How was your hand? My hand's great. Yeah. This was, uh, before this was one of my failed surgeries. Um, and, and it felt like that. It felt like those two pills of Vicodin. So it felt like a painkiller. Yeah. And that's supposedly what roofies are like. Yeah. And it didn't feel like ecstasy.

Have you done ecstasy? Yeah, I've done ecstasy. I don't know. No, it didn't feel like ecstasy. My experience with ecstasy is I felt like hot and then I felt cold and I felt really cool. I felt like I was so cool. And I didn't feel like I was so cool on this. I just felt like cool, daddy.

I felt like I was cool. I felt like I was so cool on this. I just felt like cool daddy. I felt like I was cool. I felt like I looked cool walking. I thought roofies make you not know where you are, what you're doing. I mean, I don't know. And I also think that roofies interact with alcohol. And I think that I did not have any alcohol in my system. So I think that that's why I was fine. I think that's why I was able to stay up. I also don't know what the dose was. I was a bigger girl. I might have not finished my drink. I mean, you know, there's all kinds of stuff.

I don't know. That's kind of crazy that someone is running around just dosing comedians. It's actually happened to a lot of people because I had some bits about it that I was doing for a while. And I had a lot of people come up to me and tell me that they'd had the same thing happen, men and women. Yeah, I've talked to guys and girls that have said they've been dosed. Yeah. Yeah, it's spooky.

Yeah, I mean, I know men who have been raped with the date rape drug. By a guy or a girl? By a girl. Hmm, did they really though? I mean, I think so. If they had a drink and don't remember what happened after that and woke up naked next to a fucking crazy chick who did the same thing to their friends oh yeah so she just does it to people yeah wow i don't understand girls don't have to do that how it works anyway unless someone's mentally ill

and it's a control thing and it's a power thing and it's because the person has no control or no power i totally believe it. Yeah. Because also, I mean, why would they make that up? Why would a guy make that up? People make things up. Maybe he's just trying to commiserate with you. I hadn't told him this. Oh.

So he told you first? Yeah. And then you're like, well, guess what happened to me? No. I don't remember my story in any way in relation to his story. Let's find out what the effects of, is it rohiph, how do you say it? Rohypnol. Rohypnol.

Let's find out what the effects are. Can I run and use the restroom? Oh, hell yeah. Okay, cool. Want to take your headphones off first? Yeah, that's good. You know where it is, right? Yeah. Okay.

What's it got? You ever been roofied, Jamie? I don't think so. You probably wouldn't even notice it. No. If somebody tried to dose you with weed, it'd be their fucking loss. It'd be a waste of money.

Ha ha. You'd be like, ha ha. For people who don't know, Jamie is impervious to edibles for whatever reason. He can get high if he smokes weed, but you've eaten about 1,000 milligrams at one point in time? According to the last time I brought this up, I may lack, and our web MDs in my DMs told me I may lack an enzyme of some sort in my liver. I may want to try... Crack crack you know something to bond it to sort of like vitamin d needs something maybe i am that's what goes into lacking of something i don't

know do you miss it like do you i've heard the stories of like you and everyone saying what happens to them when they are they've eaten x'm like, weed doesn't do that to me. I wonder what that's like. Let's see. And I just am like, I don't feel anything. Heavy doses of weed might as well be acid. It's like, I mean, without the visuals, it's a heavy psychedelic. You know what it does?

If you close your eyes, like a heavy dose of weed, when you close your eyes, you have like a light show, like this crazy. For me, I always describe it as like i've seen neon cartoons fucking like when i'm like a close i one time i remember um i took an edible and went on a plane and i closed my eyes and i was just watching this cartoon play out it was like old timey like early mic Mickey Mouse days kind of cartoons, but they were neon and everyone was fucking like all the cartoons were fucking like dogs were fucking people. People were fucking mice. Completely different than your description of like DMT. Obviously. Yeah. Way different. Is it different than mushrooms then? or like yeah yeah because my for me mushrooms have always been like uh i see like iconic imagery like i see like pyramids and mayan ruins and hieroglyphs and shit like that and and and weird

visualizations and and geometric patterns and like i always feel like i can see the fiber of life appearing before me. It shows me some key. You know how when you would play Quake, I don't know if you ever played it before, where you turned off all the textures? Did you ever do that? Yeah, I've played that shit now. You know how guys will make maps,

and you could go to the, especially Quake 2 and Quake 3, Quake 2 in particular, you could go and see how they were making the maps and it's almost like oh you see the structure of everything i don't move it's like when i've taken mushrooms there's been times where i thought i had a better understanding of the structure of the things that i was seeing whether it's people or buildings or even outside and trees and everything just like looked i understood it more like i could see it more i don't get that with weed with the with edible weed i just get this like bizarre exposure to reality like really bizarre like all like hyper aware of all of my vulnerabilities hyper aware of of everything hyper aware of just

so that one time i went did 1300 milligrams i was at a concert 1300 so you were in a dome and there were visuals like you're explaining like that maybe that would have done something but i did i do remember a very specific moment during it i was focusing in on uh something in the background of the music and i was asking my friends like do you hear that and they're like what the fuck you talking about i'm like there there's a sample in the background there it's a it's like a melody i've heard and for my when i was younger or something i was freaking out like no one hears this no one and then for three four or five months before that song ever came out fully i could never hear

it again and i was always wondered then i finally figured out what it was and it was like the sample from the fabulous johnson brothers or something oh and it's like way behind it's like deep in the background of the music and like i just heard it the layers of sound that they put together with some songs it's like you don't fully appreciate it until you like hear it break and there's some pulled apart some uh some young djs have made on tiktok oh she's probably locked out do you get locked out yeah she shut the door too if i just realized uh doing that showing like where how uh drake's producer has taken this like maybe whitney houston very like four second sample reversed it

pitched it up really high and then they slowly fade into the song you recognize you're like i never knew that was whitney houston how would i have ever gotten there but they show you in like 30 seconds oh really cool we're talking about music man cool here's the rohyphenol stuff just okay since she's back um side effects. What is Ruhifnol? Why is Ruhifnol called a date rape drug? Amnesia is an expected pharmacological effect of benzodiazepines. Oh, Ruhifnol is a benzodiazepine? Ruhifnol causes partial amnesia.

Individuals are unable to remember certain events that they experience while under the influence of the drug. However, this effect is particularly dangerous when Rohypnol is used illicitly to aid in sexual assault. Victims may not be able to clearly recall the assault, the assailant. How is it taken? It can be taken by mouth, whole tablet. Rohypnol is not approved for medical use or manufactured in the United States, and it's not available legally.

Really? So, maybe it wasn't that. Because it says it causes amnesia. Maybe someone did give you a painkiller. Yeah, I really don't know. Somebody dosed you. Okay, drowsiness, sleep, dizziness, loss of motor control, decreased reaction time, impaired judgment,

lack of coordination, slurred speech, confusion, aggression or excitability, loss of memory of events while under the influence, stomach disturbances, respiratory depression at higher dosage. Yeah, I experienced zero of those. But aren't there, if you look it up, aren't there other things that people drug people with? Well, it sounds like a painkiller. If you, if you've had painkillers and it was like, when you were on a painkiller. Yeah. That's, I mean, I, that seems like a really reasonable

way to connect the dots. Yeah. Cause I think that's the whole reason why assholes give it to people is because they can't remember anything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was talking about being sober in my set, and so I wondered if someone was just fucking with me. I didn't feel like... I mean, I know that I wouldn't know,

but I didn't feel like anyone was targeting me to rape me because... They were ineffective. Yeah, they were ineffective. I just went and got my check i called my friend and was like i need you to pick me up right now and then i got my check but you stayed awake picked up yeah see that's the thing you stayed awake and you remember it what do i know but i've never yeah the only painkillers i've ever taken is uh i had knee surgery and uh i got a morphine drip when I was in the hospital.

Damn, that sounds awesome. It was wild. Yeah. Because you could just hammer it anytime you want. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. I've seen my mom on morphine and it looks like a good time. I mean, she had had surgery. She wasn't just like on the couch.

Yeah, me too. Yeah. I was on this perpetual motion machine because it was ACL surgery. So they want you to keep your your knee moving so they like it straightens your knee and straightens it out and bends it and straightens it out and it's just constantly going while i'm in bed post-surgery throbbing just hammering that morphine thing it's pretty wild i've done that but i took, I had another knee surgery. And I took, they gave me something, I forget what it was either Vicodins or Percocets. I can't remember. But I took one.

And I felt so stupid. I was like, I'd rather be in pain. Like, this does not react well with me at all. Yeah, I had those two pills. And then I have turned that down every other time that I've because I'm I'm addicted to it I mean let's be honest like off of those two it's just the way that my brain works you know but even when you got dosed you didn't start using again like no you understand there's another drug that people apparently say is also a date rape drug uh ghb yeah it does have some similar uh effects as you sort of say yeah that's a liquid one too right yeah and i've heard of people getting dosed with that too okay increases levels of dopamine in the brain that sounds right

to me yeah uh loss of inhibition they start within 5 to 20 minutes taking the drug three to four hours it lasts ghb causes a loss of inhibition relaxes people boost their sex drive and promotes feelings of euphoria but side effects include memory lapses drowsiness clumsiness dizziness or headache lower temperature tremors nausea and diarrhea did you poop your pants at all i didn't poop my pants no i had i had a wicked hangover i had a hangover for over 48 hours did you um get hangovers when you would take pills back in the dis a um i was never like a pill person um i got hangovers from alcohol every single day so when you had like your hand surgery, did you worry about taking pain medication? I just took ibuprofen. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Cause I, I wouldn't have, I thought about it, but I, it wasn't worth it. If I had, I mean, I definitely believe in letting doctors do their

jobs. And if I had, you know, a spinal surgery or a knee surgery or something else where the doctor was like, no, you need some serious painkillers, then I would take them. But if it's something where like I have the choice. Yeah, I do know guys have done that and started using again. I do too. I do too. It's scary shit, right? Because you don't want to be in fucking agony from a surgery, but then it's like, you don't want to also go off the deep end and ruin your life too. The problem is opening the door, right? I'm guessing. Yeah.

You know, I'm not an addict, but I would imagine the problem is opening the door. Yeah. And letting those pills in again. Yeah. They suggest having someone else hold on to them and, like, dose them to you where you can't, like, find them or get to them. But the thing is, like, addicts are smart about getting their hands on drugs that they need you know that they want so it's like even if it starts off like that people are easy to talk into shit too like i feel like if i had someone give me my medicine had a friend dosing it out to me and then i was like you know what this is

getting to be a pain in the ass i'm not like loving this i'm not worried about it i can just take them it would that would be the end of the conversation and they would give them to me wheel your way in absolutely next thing you know you're lying on your couch lying on my couch relaxing cats are walking on your face it's that simple yeah it's fucking weird human beings are so weird when it comes to substances to perturb our consciousness

like people love to do it they love to find something and you know with you maybe now it's working out or maybe it's like going on stage like there's part of it is just the art form that you love and the thrill of performing and make people happy and laugh.

But there's probably a little bit of a drug thing there too. Oh, with me, it's still the food. The food is, I think about food all day long. I have a constant countdown clock till the next time that it's time for me to eat. And the only difference- You have a countdown clock on your phone? In my head.

Oh. I'm always thinking about it. I get sad while I'm eating every time I eat because the meal's going to end. I spend the whole time I eat bummed out because it's going to end. And then I'm constantly counting down to the next time I get to eat. And it was like that before. It was like that when I was eating whatever I wanted to the only difference is I'm not eating 20 times a day now you know what I mean so you just always have loved food yeah I mean yeah it's interesting because like with addiction it's less about like enjoying than wanting I've always wanted a lot of food from like the time I I mean there are pictures of me

as a baby like stuffing like the biggest bite in my face that I could I was born fat I mean I just have yeah from the time I was a little kid I think I just liked getting out of reality from the time I was a little kid I was a daydreamer and then I was an eater and then I was a drinker, you know, and now I like meditate and try to be present. But I also have a life that I like more now than I liked my life when I was a little kid. So I can be present now. What kind of meditating do you do? I do 20 minutes a day where I just meditate.

I mean, I focus on my breath. Sometimes I'll do a body scan. A body scan? Yeah. You can start at your tips of your toes or the top of your head and then just focus in on like relax your scalp, relax your forehead, relax your eyes, relax your nose nose and you just spend time on every part of your body um just relaxing it is is what i do did you learn this method from someone

yeah but i can't remember who or when but something that really changed the way that i looked at meditation was um jim Shin, who I'm sure you know. Or you don't at all. And that's fine, too. He ran shows at the Comedy Store. And he and our friend Greg were, like, talking to me about it. And they said that you can have your thoughts racing the entire time you're meditating and have that still be a perfect meditation. Cause I was always obsessed with like, I'm doing it wrong. I suck at this.

I keep thinking stuff. I can't do this. It's too frustrating. And then I would quit. And once I accepted that I could think the whole time, then I was ready to like do it. Cause I'm such a perfectionist that the idea of being bad at something, like, I don't, I don't to like do it. Because I'm such a perfectionist that the idea of being bad at something, like I don't want to do it. And now I really like it. And now when I have a thought come into my head, as they do, I imagine it just like releasing out through my chest like steam and just going up. I meditate lying on my back.

Do you ever do breathing exercises? I hate breathing exercises. Really? I've done them and I don't like them. Why don't you like them? I've done like, cause they, they make me panic. I don't like them. They make me feel like I'm short of breath. I, they do. They make me feel like I'm short of breath. I've done the one where you breathe in through the nostril and then breathe out through it and then do that. Oh, covering each nostril? Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

I don't like counting because then I just get too – I don't like it. Yeah, that's my favorite. I like counting. No, I feel like I can't get enough breath then. I do two different ways i either do uh box breathing which is like five seconds in hold for five and then release for five and i do it in this cycle or i do six seconds in six seconds out that's the one i do the most because that's the one i do in the sauna why why i don't do five and five and i don't know it's just like i started doing just six in six out

and i i found a way or if i do it on a regular basis and just thinking about my breathing i can get into this weird trance and a couple of times i've done it where i think i've achieved like some bizarre psychedelic state and uh i haven't been able to do it recently like last time i did it was months ago, but I still do the breathing thing, but I think maybe I'm using it too hot. I think maybe if I lower the temperature to, like, 170 instead of, like, 185,

I'll be able to relax a little bit more, and I'll be able to achieve that state again, because I think the times I've achieved the state, I was using a sauna that didn't get as hot. Damn, and you don't faint? No. No, I've been doing it a long time, though. I was using a sauna that didn't get as hot damn and you don't faint no no I've been doing a long time though I've been I've had a sauna at my house I used to have a sauna at the old gym or the old studio in uh LA it has a gym attached to it with a sauna and uh so I would do sauna all the time and I would crank it to like 200 to 20. Wow. Have you ever fainted just as a person in life?

No. Wow. No, no, no. I've fainted. Cool. That's really hot. Yeah, I'm obsessed with control. I don't think I'd be into fainting.

I've never even been knocked unconscious. You've never been knocked unconscious? Nope. Wow. That's crazy. How not? I don't know. Wow. You've been knocked unconscious? How not? I don't know. Wow.

You've been knocked unconscious? No, but I'm not a fighter. I never fought professionally. I thought you were going to say like, oh, I get knocked unconscious all the time. No, I've fainted a lot. I've never been knocked unconscious though. I've been dropped where like my legs gave out. The last fight that I had, last kickboxing fight, I got hit with a left hook and my legs just stopped working they went like this week whoa it was weird like they

shut off did salvia that's a crazy feeling it's a crazy feeling when your legs just clock out we're like oh shit strange that's a that's one of the strangest drugs you used to be able to buy salvia at head shops i don't know if you still can but i was like and i remember doing it going this is fucking bananas so you could just get this at the store like because they missed it you know they just didn't regulate it there was so many drugs that were like completely illegal and this one that was like holy shit there's a video of ari okay ari shafir did salvia at brian red band's house and they made a video out of it. And Ari was only under for 10 minutes. He swears to God that he lived months of a different life doing Salvia.

He had friendships. He had relationships. He lived for months. And I don't think he's lying. No, I don't think so either. I'm telling you. When you see him next, ask him the question. Ask him about it, and he'll tell you.

It is a wild story because he describes it in deep depth. He's like, I'm telling you, man, I was living there. I was living for months and months. And then I came out of it and I was like, oh, my God. And he was like, how long has that gone? They're like 10 minutes. I was like, what the fuck? Like he lived another life for months

like the way he describes it it's too vivid i believe him oh absolutely well and hallucinations watch watch he's gonna hit it he takes his big giant hit and then he sits back and and look at him he's just hanging on there and then eventually yeah there he goes he was thinking it didn't do anything but eventually it just takes hold of him remember that did happen he took one hit

there he goes oh that's what it is right he took one hit and there he goes. He does it again. Yeah. Oh, that's what it is. Right. He took the second and now he's gone. Now he's gone. So this is one minute into a four minute video. Yeah. But by the time we're two minutes in, he's freaking out.

Put the mic closer. Yeah. Look at Tripoli. Look at Tripoli. So he lived a whole life there. Help me. I'm not. What are you telling me? What are you telling me? I'm like, please stop. Please there. Tell me. I'm not going to tell you. What are you telling me?

I'm not going to tell you. What are you telling me? I'm not going to tell you. Please stop. Please stop yelling. Stop yelling. Stop yelling. Please don't blame me.

Please help me get up right now. How are you? Look at Tripoli with the sunglasses on. That is so hilarious. He does not want that. That is so hilarious. That was when Red Band had the studio at his house so he's talked about this on theo vaughn's podcast he also wrote it out that's on like a reddit post from a long time ago but probably the more recent and talking about it

so he talked about the months that he felt like he was yeah explained it yeah like he lived like i don't think it's true but I don't not think it's true. Well, the thing about hallucinations is they occur in the same part of the brain as sight. So if you hallucinate, you are seeing the thing. So I absolutely believe that a drug could unlock a door in the brain that's best left locked, and he could have all those experiences and fully have had them time is an illusion um i fainted in the high school cafeteria once and was shooting through space with stars like coming at me for years i mean just for years and i opened my eyes and saw the

blue streamers and i knew where I was right away, but I was like, I couldn't believe I was still there. So I haven't had it where I had other experiences, but I've had that feeling of a lot of time passing and then coming back and feeling like I traveled through time, essentially. Is that the only time you've ever fainted? No, I've fainted a bunch. Really?

Yeah. What makes you faint? I fainted from low blood sugar. I fainted from getting too hot. I fainted from getting too nervous. I fainted from drugs. And I think that's it. Nervousness has made you faint?

Yeah, I fainted after I gave a speech in high school. Yeah. And I think there was one Yeah. I fainted after I gave a speech in high school. Yeah. And I think there was like one other time I fainted from being nervous. Yeah. Wow. At least you didn't faint before. I wish I had fainted before. I wouldn't have to give the speech.

I delivered my first line and then my first line was, I am a servant. And I forgot everything else. And then my first line was I am a servant And I forgot everything else And then I fainted Yeah I was so pissed I practiced so fucking hard for that thing And then I just Everyone looking at me

And I blacked out Don't you think though that kind of prepared you For doing stand up Like having such a crazy experience Of nervousness And like you got You got your first experience of nervousness and like you got you got your first dose of what it's like to face that fear I think it's a miracle that I've never because I I threw up before a piano recital when I was a little kid too and I think it's a miracle

that I've never fainted or thrown up before a show because I've been I've been so much more nervous before shows because they've actually mattered. They've been important. My piano recital was, I wasn't going to get into Juilliard if I played Simple Gifts well when I was seven, you know? Maybe that's why, you know, you didn't faint or throw up because it matters to you. It's like this part of you you that's like this isn't just nervous it's also important i do feel unstoppable with comedy unstoppable is a good word yeah i feel

like it's my destiny that should be the name of your first special i like that laura beats unstoppable our bites bites like biting um name wrong no it's um it's just so much worse if it's lara bites that's why i want you to know it's so much worse i've said it right but i've said it wrong too yeah just the way it's spelled yeah it looks like bites yeah it's um awful it's the worst name it's not it's not the worst name it's only okay for a comedian i couldn't do anything else that's not true you could be like a ceo of a bank lara bites why not you could be a teacher you could be miss bites oh my god a teacher is the last thing i would be your kids would make fun of you it would i would have to spend my entire that would be such a purgatory to spend

the beginning of my life and then the rest of my life being made fun of by kids at school. Would it be though? If you're a nice teacher. Your kids will roast you anyway. They're kids. Yeah. That's true. Laura bites.

They'll definitely do it behind your back. Yeah. Have you thought about changing your name? Like Laura Mencia or something? Yeah, dude. I really like planned to get married at some fucking point here when I was a kid, but I guess that's not going to happen. How old are you now?

I was going to change my name so fast. I'm 36. Dude, you could still pull it off. I could still get married? Yeah. Well, yeah. I'm not fucking dead. That's what I'm saying.

80-year-olds get married. You're saying like I was saying you couldn't. Now you're arguing with me. But I can't. I can't change my name now, though. OK. You mean for stand up? Yeah.

You certainly could. What are you talking about? That's so matter of fact. I don't know. What if tomorrow you just were like Joe Johnson Who gives a fuck maybe I will Maybe I'll change it

To spite me? No To be Joe Johnson? I'm gonna be Laura Bites I'm gonna change my name I would be so pissed if you did that Just make me ungoogleable You could absolutely do that too Just make me ungoogleable you could absolutely do that too just make me ungoogle just change my name people like what are you doing proving a point i guess yeah i mean eliza is just eliza now she was eliza schlesinger forever yeah when

sebastian manasalco not anymore just sebastian i guess that's true. You can just be Laura. But everyone calls me Laura. Oh, but it's L-A-R-A. It's Laura. It's Laura. Yeah. Yeah, my sister's name's Laura. I know the difference.

Yeah. Thanks, I appreciate that. Why don't you just call yourself Laura? There's no other Lauras. I guess that's true. That's what I'm talking about. I don't know. I don't know if I... Please welcome Laura.

Yeah, but that seems um potential you think i got it yeah i don't i don't want to shit on sebastian or eliza because i have a lot of respect for both of them um right well roseanne pulled it off yeah she used to be roseanne I don't have Roseanne energy. Yeah. I guess I could cut it. But like how would I begin that today? Just change my Instagram? Right now. At Lara? Just Lara. It's too short.

L-A-R-A. No it's perfect. I bet if you looked on Instagram right now before the show airs I bet you could get it. I bet nobody has Lara. Maybe. Jamie? Checking checking i don't know how to really check lara just just at lara if you search it though it's searching better not be some fucking dumb bitch i think there's lots of sluts who have my name there is uh yeah verified account actually really what god damn it it's laura i don't fucking know. What does she do? Let's see.

She's a... Ruins my plan, I guess. She's an artist, musician. Shout out to Lara. Wow, she looks cool. Yeah. She's kind of hot. Spanish.

Damn. Well, that's that. That settles that. I don't know. She's got you. She's hot and she wears glasses. It's a win-win. Wait, is that...

That's her handle? Yeah. Yeah, at Lara. Damn it. How about that? She's got 102,000 followers, Lara. Damn. Well, I guess there you have it.

Maybe when you blow up, you can buy it from her. It's a lizard bitch. What about bites? What about just bites? You saw appetizers. Yeah, it's, when you have like Schlesinger, Manasalco, those are tough names. Yeah. Yeah.

I always wonder how many people have searched Laura Bites, like L-A-U-R-A-B-I-T-E-S after my shows or something. I wonder how many potential fans have just fallen through the cracks. Well, they'll get it now that we talked about it for 10 minutes. Yeah. At least some of them will. Yeah. When you do your first special, I think Unstoppable is really like a genuinely good name.

It's funny. I really like that. Unstoppable. Yeah. Why do you feel unstoppable? Because I'm not, I've never been good at anything else. And everything else I've tried to do, the door has shut in my face. You know what I mean?

And with comedy, the doors are just open. Like it just keeps working out. Stuff keeps happening. The next thing keeps happening. Everything points to this being what I'm supposed to do and there have been other things i've wanted in my life i wanted to get married and have kids i want you can still do that you keep saying i don't want it anymore i don't care about it anymore i want it back then okay yeah what if you meet some new guy now i don't know covid how i don't know likes cats

um i don't know i i like i like not having to run shit by another person i like being able to make my food the way that i like it and season it the way i like it and not have to worry about fucking bozo's high blood pressure or the fact that he doesn't like fucking fish or what what he wants to watch what he wants to do and also there's just like i feel like i talked to you at the store about this um before covid like there's the issue of the fact that the relationships i've been in since doing stand-up i've had the same fight over and over with my boyfriends which is they're just like i can't always be your last priority and I'm like well you can't come before any of the shit that you come after so I don't know what to tell you that leaves us in quite a position because you're

you know like you are my fifth priority and that's the best I got and it's just yeah fifth stand up working out eating food sleeping boyfriend it comes even before friends and family which frankly isn't healthy but I'm willing to offer that but that's the best I can do you can't be honest though you can't come before all my basic needs well it's sad when someone gives up those priorities and then puts a guy in first place then it winds up not working out and you've wasted so much time yeah dude well and this is also like you know when i was in chicago and like working 40 plus hours a week at a day job doing 34 shows in a month at night so like literally bringing my comedy clothes with me to work changing in the bathroom into like a mini skirt and then like seeing my co-workers and being

like oh I'm going they must have just thought I like partied a lot because I always went from work to a show and then getting home and it's 11 12 sometimes one and having to you know put some food in my face and go to sleep and wake up at six and do it the next day like I'm sorry that I can't pencil in date night motherfucker like I'm tired as hell you know and they would get mad and I and I for a while would be like if you want to see me like come to a show and so i can't fault them when the fact is like i was unavailable what about dating a comedian is that out of the question i mean do you know any you know what i mean like i know some comedy couples that work tom and christina right yeah that works great um natasha leggero moshe kasher that works great yeah rich voss and

bonnie mcfarland that works great those are three really funny couples where they're all really funny yeah and it works i mean it's possible but my friends who do comedy who are as funny as i am can date like women who are way hotter than i am and so they do that they date women who are like way younger and hotter than i am because women like love it when guys are comics but i can't date anyone any hotter than ever you know what i mean you can't date anyone who's not as funny as you either. I can date someone who's, I can for sure, I plan to date someone who's not as funny as me. I only date people who aren't as funny as me, as a matter of fact. Yeah, fuck yeah. There's like five, there's like five dudes who are funnier than I am.

And half of them are fucking mentally ill, incredibly damaged, emotionally unavailable. You know comics, you know? Wait a minute, you just say half of them? Yeah. Only half of them are fucking mentally ill, incredibly damaged, emotionally unavailable. You know comics, you know? Wait a minute, you just say half of them? Yeah. Only half of them? You're optimistic. I like it. You're looking at the world through rose-colored glasses.

I would date a comedian. I would date a comedian if he was also the other things that I want someone to be, which is not a drug addict and not a bum. Nice to me. Good communicator. That's probably it. Disciplined. Someone you respect.

Yeah. You don't want him to half-ass your career. But I'm flexible on that. I don't necessarily have to. You'd be okay with him half-assing his career? If he's doing a good job. I couldn't. Good job of half-assing it? No.

doing a good job i could job of half-assing it no no because someone who half-asses it isn't gonna sympathize with what i'm doing right that's what i'm saying the thing is like you are really dedicated yeah i can't be with someone who's gonna get in my way yeah i've seen you before you go on stage you're going over your shit you're like really yeah it's all that matters to me so that's why it's all that matters to me everything else is like take it or leave it a guy i if it happens it happens you know that's really reaffirmed for you after this pandemic right yes yeah everything else i could do without everything else i could live without so how many years did you do it before the pandemic um like 10 10 years yeah that's the thing is like for a lot of comics like that's such a big year the the the year where

like when you're getting your shit together and you just started working and you're really kind of moving and shaking and going on the road and then all of a sudden the year's gone and you're you're like starting up the engine again and moving you know no momentum anymore you have to start from scratch in a lot of ways obviously not scratch but you know you're you're getting your feet on the ground again and getting back in comedy shape and it's it's a rough year for a lot of folks yeah for sure but it's it's happening and it's going to keep happening um i think it's going to be fine for me a lot of people are super fucked i think i'll be fine i think you're right though i think a lot of people deserve

to be fucked though there's a lot of people that were kind of half-assing comedy to begin with yeah just knocked them down and they might not get up yeah and that i know i know a lot of people who are like i don't know if i want to keep doing stand-up maybe i want to do something else and i'm just like then it's great that you got this opportunity to find out that you don't want to do stand-up anymore i know a bunch of people who who quit who are like i think i actually want to do this instead and i think that that's fine tim dellon said it best we were talking about he goes it might be a good thing to weed a few people out that's exactly how he talks not a bad thing not a bad thing yeah 100 and it's better to get weeded out when you're a few years in than when you're a few decades in

dude i've been getting i don't know why i've gotten two messages in like the last week from kids one was from a 12 year old and the other one was from a 17 year old. And both of them were these adorable little messages that are just like, hi, I, my dream is to be a standup comedian. Do you have any advice for someone who's starting out in comedy? And it was all I could do not to be like,

don't do it. Do something else. Do something else. You're probably too healthy for this job. If you're, you know, if you're sending like a nice respectable message to an established comedian and you're 12. Little sweethearts though. It's probably not going to work out.

Good for them. Good for you, you little fuck. It made me think of my nephew and I responded and I was nice because i was like if my nephew wrote a message to a comedian yeah and wanted a response i would want someone to respond to him you know what i mean that's very nice of you i'm nice to kids i'm not that nice to adults adults i'm like yeah if i think somebody could really be funny i give them a shot i'll i'll talk to him and i'll tell him yeah listen you just got to do it but if you're going to do it, you got to really do it. It's not an easy thing to do.

There's a reason why the real numbers, I don't know. I would guess. I'm just going to take a wild guess. I don't think there's 500 of us in this country. Right. Like real legitimate professional stand-up comedians that make a living doing comedy. I don't think there's 500. I think there's a lot of people that are trying it,

and maybe a few thousand trying it, that are out there hustling, trying to make it happen. But ones that actually make it, there might be 500. Let's be real generous and say there's 1,000. There's 330 fucking million people in this country. There's 1,000 professional comedians? That's nuts. It's like akin to, there's a thousand professional comedians that's nuts that's it's like akin to there's specialties in like orthopedic surgery that have a thousand you know it's a it's a

bananas number it really is crazy yeah and then you think like how many of those people can sell out of theater how many people sell out of clubs the number gets smaller how many can sell out of theater the number gets real small really small how many can sell out an arena there's like 25 maybe 10 when i say dudes i mean people yeah humans yeah it's not that many it's like to get to the level of like being a legitimate professional it takes so much trial and error and the emotional pain of bombing is so fucking ruthless on your self-esteem and how you feel about life and some people just can't take the hit but if you can take the hit if you can keep going and if you're like you or you're like

i feel unstoppable like who you're like i feel unstoppable i am fucking unstoppable that's what i'm saying i'm your friend and i've bombed more times than i could possibly estimate i've had people say no to me more times than i could possibly estimate i've not gotten stuff more times than i could possibly estimate but it's just like with the writing if 1 20th of it works guess what bitch i got a new minute you know if 1 20th of it works then guess what i'm passed at that club or i'm on that show or fucking whatever and it's crazy how many people who have been doing this for years are still looking for shortcuts like i can't imagine what you get hit with because i get so many messages every time i got passed at a club in hollywood i got so many messages from people who were like how'd you get past who do I email I'm gonna move there who and I'm just like the answer 100% of the time is I did the open mic

enough to be in front of the booker and I had a good set that I don't know a shortcut I've waited outside of comedy clubs I waited outside of the laugh factory in Chicago for fucking two weeks in the freezing cold got left work early to stand out there for an hour to go up on the open mic and do a clean three minutes the next week like I could go on and on and on but I followed the fucking process I didn't know a guy you know and we have this idea that like especially in the the Midwest or like, you know, in places that are not the coast, people have this idea where it's like, it's all about who you know. But what they don't tell you is like, but you meet those people by working hard and

showing up and being tenacious and not quitting and telling you're funny and being funny. You have to be good. You have to be undeniable. That's what I tell people. Like, what's the secret? Be undeniable. And if you're not undeniable, become undeniable. That's what you have to be undeniable that's what i tell people like what's the secret be undeniable and if you're not undeniable become undeniable that's what you have to do like that's how you'll get work that's all these things will happen i get annoyed when people ask me to be on my podcast or

when people ask me if they can open for me i'm like i don't even know you like no you can't open for me that's so crazy fucking joey diaz and ari shafir and duncan trussell and tony hinchcliffe and ian edwards i got savages opening up for me murderers you you want to open up for me get the fuck out of here like just go get your shit together go go get it but you don't just go around asking people ask you that's my best advice to people. Just be undeniable. And it's possible. You can do it. Or you can't.

I mean, I don't know who you are. I don't know what your level of resolve is. I don't know what your personality is. It's not something I recommend to people. I tell everybody to have a podcast. Like, go get a podcast. Go do it. It might work out.

Shit, I was terrible in the beginning. Just keep going. It might work out. Shit, I was terrible in the beginning. Just keep going. It might work out. It's easy. I think it's like that trifecta that you referred to before of like a little piece of luck, hard work, and talent. And if you have the hard work and talent, we all get enough little pieces of luck along the way that we're ready for it. You know? that were ready for it, you know?

I've been lucky to have bookers watching me when they've been watching me, but I backed it up with talent and working my ass off. Yeah, and you made the talent. Like, I'm sure you were terrible in the beginning. We were all terrible. I was fucking terrible. Of course. The audacity that I had when I was 21

to think that I could be a professional comedian, I want to go back in time and smack myself in the face. Who the fuck are you? I didn't think I could. I did not expect to make it this far. I started it as a hobby. I'm as shocked as you are. I can't fucking believe that.

I can't believe it. I made fun of guys in Milwaukee who were talking about becoming professional comics. I was like, you'll no sooner be a professional comedian than I will turn Italian. Like, it's just not, you're not, you know? I thought that that was for someone else. But it's like just one little action at a time, one little thing at a time.

Yeah. I started out with Fitzsimmons. We started like a week apart from each other. I love him too. I was with both of you the last night. The last night the store closed? Yeah So sad Yeah

I don't think it's ever going to be the same I was with you guys when you found out that your kids' schools were cancelled through the end of the year Yeah It was fucking horrifying It's so weird because they didn't mind not getting up for school early And not having to drive But they were a little weirded out But after a couple weeks you could see it wear on them, like standing in front of a fire.

And then I saw how bad the teachers were doing it and how uninspired they were. It was so infuriating. Listen, these teachers, I mean, just not caring at all. Like they didn't have to, like they didn't. And the kids were so disconnected. I was like, we got to get out of here. And in Texas, one of the great things was they actually go to school here like and when they found out they can go to school they were like

what and both my kids caught covid yeah um one kid got it from an after-school uh sports activity and then she gave it to my wife and she gave it to my other kid and it was nothing they had a headache for a day you know because a little for kids it's nothing yeah i get it that the teachers wouldn't want to get it but now especially now like oh my god you can get vaccinated you can we know about health and wellness and but moving here has been it's been amazing it's a different thing yeah my sister's family has had it my sister works at the school. They all live in northern Wisconsin. And they all got it.

Her husband got it. He was on the couch watching football for a day. Like they were all sick a little bit. You know what I mean? I mean, it really depends on what your health is like when it happens to you. You know, some people, they get it when they're really run down and then they're fucked and it's not good but some people they get it when they're feeling great and just oh my real estate agent had it she didn't even know she had it she had to get tested three times she's like he's sure she went in again she was trying to go to a wedding in

st john's and they just kept testing her they tested her three times she's like i guess i got it she stayed home for a week just like that's so weird nothing not a single symptom nothing yeah it's wild i guess my nephew actually is having more health problems but i don't know the details of them but he was yeah how far away from the uh infection um like after i mean it's it's just been. How long after? Just now? Just recent? They had it, yeah. They had it in the last month. There's a lot of things you could tell him that he could take to help. You know, a lot of it is inflammation. It helps. Fish oil helps. CBD helps for a lot of people. There's a lot of different vitamins and nutrients that can help bring your immune system back into into line again yeah so many people don't even take vitamins which is really crazy to me i don't understand how you can go through life without taking vitamins

yeah i don't know why not i mean it seems like an easy enough thing unless you're totally broke you know but even then like how much is a multivitamin how much do you spend on cigarettes how much is spent on booze you know yeah well and i feel like how much is a multivitamin? How much do you spend on cigarettes? How much do you spend on booze? You know? Yeah. Well, and I feel like that is lumped in with like, I consider it like a food cost. Like it's one of those things where it's not negotiable for me. It's nutrients for my body, you know?

Unstoppable, Laura. That's going to be the name of your special. Yeah. Or something funny. Yeah. It's weird. Cause they like had it where my sister like half her family had it and the other half didn't get it yeah and then like a few more of them got it she has four kids it's weird so they it wasn't even in their the actual household and i've heard

crazy things like i lived with someone who swore that the COVID molecules hung in the air for up to an hour after a person walked by. Who said that? So your breath would... My old roommate. The roommate I had at the beginning of this. Someone was terrified? Yeah, she was terrified. She wasn't leaving the place.

And I thought that no one was leaving their apartments. And I stayed inside for three months. Didn't touch another human being. Didn't fucking do anything. I went on a hike with someone and they both got super mad at me. And I like, I was like, I'm going to move out. And I told him the next day. So it was a separate conversation, but I was like, I'm moving out.

So you went on a hike and your roommate got furious? Yeah. And, um. We had an advantage that we were testing everybody. Yeah. At the studio. We're testing every day. I've been tested hundreds of times.

I've been tested a lot too. And when I have worked weekends, like when I worked a weekend in Vegas and it was indoor, and I quarantined before and after and I got tested. I flew to Wisconsin and I quarantined before and after and got tested. Didn't go around other people until I'd been tested you know and so that's what I'm talking about where it's like I think that you can be careful and still live a little bit of life so that we don't all end up killing ourselves some people don't want to not be scared though I think that there definitely is

I think that part of what like was keeping my roommates inside was agoraphobia. I think they just didn't want to leave the house. I think they had other anxiety issues. And I think that this was an excuse or this was part of it. Yeah, well, it has been a testing moment for a lot of folks for their mental health. It's a resting moment for a lot of folks for their mental health. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. When did you? I was nervous at first.

At first, I was really scared. At first, when I remember me and my family went to this grocery store, people weren't even wearing masks yet. We were stocking up on food. That was back when Fauci was telling people not to wear masks because they didn't have a good enough supply. So he was lying and say, masks aren't important.

Don't wear a mask. I was like, oh, you don't wear a mask? And after a while, I was like, wear two masks. I'm like, what happened? What's happening? We were stocking up on food and everybody looked spooked. Like all the people looked spooked.

Because nobody knew what it was. So in the beginning, I didn't know what it was. And then a couple of my friends got it. And it was not that big. It was, you know, people that were, like, my age that were healthy that got it. They coughed a little bit. And then, you know, a couple months later, it was like I knew quite a few people that had it. And I'm like, well, this obviously is not what i thought it was and then i started relaxing like i said i did a set in july

but then i was worried about giving it to someone else that wasn't healthy that was my fear yeah i was like i can't do this and then plus i was doing the podcast all the time it's like that would just wouldn't be fair like so my priority was just do the podcast, wait for the dust to settle, wait for it all to either get herd immunity or go away and just keep being pretty. I was pretty careful. But then after like nine, 10, I started getting annoyed at people that were still scared. I'm like, why are you at the same level of fear? Like, this is this is driving me crazy. And how come you haven't done anything about your fucking health?

We've been locked up for 11 months. You're still eating fucking donuts every day and waiting for a vaccine. Like, what are you doing? What are you doing? A hundred percent. Yeah. And then want me mad at everybody who's not scared anymore. Jesus.

Fat Twitter got so mad at me. I tweeted. Fat Twitter. They got so fucking mad at me dude for what what did you say I tweeted something to the effect of like just saying what happened you know I was obese at the beginning of this

they said a virus was killing obese people so I lost weight and now obese people are eligible for the vaccine and I'm not and people were like this comedian would rather fat people die than wait her turn for the vaccine. This comedian hates fat people. They just like came after me.

I'm like, where the fuck did you come from? Where the fuck did you come from? They came from the same place that your roommate came from. They're fucking scared. And when you're fat, you are more vulnerable. So you're probably more scared. Also, you're stuffing food down your face and you know you're doing harm to your health. And you're just looking to shame people and get angry and blame people.

There's a lot of people that it becomes a sport to just attack people and pile onto them on Twitter. And to completely distort what you're saying. What you're saying should be like a message of hope. Like, hey, here's me i mean you put it all out there too you got your fucking stomach hanging out you're showing all these pictures you're not shy at all you're saying look here's me at the beginning here's me now like just a human yeah no not a not you know there's nothing special just a regular human who put in the work yeah you can do it too well and there's the i see a lot of

like um body positivity posts in like my instagram feed and the narrative is you can be living your absolute best life and be morbidly obese and i haven't had that experience you know i can't i haven't had that experience yeah I feel better and I don't think that that is me worshiping thinness I feel better and also like fat people do get treated worse than thin people in this society I thought that we didn't make eye contact with strangers as a culture and so many more people look at me now so many more people look me in the eye now like leaving my apartment complex to walk to my car just out in the world and that fucking feels better that's aside from like the physical weight loss it feels better

to be treated better and that's kind of bittersweet because i also am getting a lot more attention from men which makes me kind of hate them. But I also get it because the one physical attribute that's universally attractive across all cultures is a smaller waist to hip ratio because it indicates that a woman is fertile, but not currently pregnant. Men are attracted to women who look like they could get pregnant in the same way that like we look towards bright colors because it might be a piece of fruit on a tree like people look toward exactly yeah and so that's not people being dicks unless you're you know i know but people want to pretend that it is they want to look past what we understand about evolutionary biology and apply some shallow

intention to it but it's just natural yeah it pisses me off because so many of the people who are so easily offended and so quick to like attack other people are people where i'm like you're on my side we're on the same side like we shouldn't why are you fighting with me when like you didn't have my back when people were calling me fat in my comments if you're really for like body positivity like where the fuck were you then you weren't supporting me you know you came out of nowhere to shit on me as soon as i got thin like i where have you been where have you been where have you been you know yeah no it's a it's a weird time because there's a lot of people's opinions that get broadcast to a lot of people now.

And a lot of those people, you wouldn't really probably care about their opinions if you were just talking to them. But when they get together in these little bully groups and they go and attack someone, this comedian wants fat people to die and would rather them die. For sure. They're just crazy. Just mentally ill people which is something she would never say to me if she met me of course not yeah no but that's not what it's not even real life it's just like some bizarre like uh a portal where people can just blow shit

through and splatter someone's face it's like you have a rock and you see a glass window you just want to throw it it doesn't make any sense it's like you have a rock and you see a glass window and you just want to throw it. It doesn't make any sense. It's like the way people communicate on Twitter. It's like, are you really that outraged that a girl is expressing that she used to be fat and she lost weight and now she can't get the fucking vaccine because they're giving it to fat people?

You're really that upset? That's what's pissing you off? There's a lot of shit in the news, honey. Go out there. Go out there. Pay attention. Pay attention to the world. There's a lot of shit in the news, honey. Go out there. Go out there. Pay attention. Pay attention to the world. There's a lot of fucked up things going on.

If that's what's occupying your time and then you're you're replying and going back and forth for hours about this and probably checking your phone incessantly. Just go run up a flight of stairs. Just do some sit ups. Yeah. Water. What do you think is a solution to that? Just do some sit-ups.

Drink water. What do you think is a solution to that? Because that's, I think, like the biggest problem that's facing this country right now is just how much fighting there is between people. And people who I don't think would disagree with each other. In real life. Yeah, we're not that different. I know that that's cheesy and it's a cliche, but everything is just in such a pressure cooker. There has to be a solution. I mean, what do you think it is?

I think people should stay the fuck out of those kind of situations. Don't communicate with people that way. It's a terrible way of communicating. It's the worst way to express an idea it leaves so much to interpretation it's so limited and it's not how human beings are designed to communicate we're designed to do it like this it's one of the best things about podcasts is what we're you and i are doing is not much different than what we would be doing if we just sitting across a dinner table talking right we would just be talking this just like, looking at each other in the eye.

That's how people are supposed to talk. Yeah. That's how you find out who a person really is. That's how you find out how they really express ideas. This shit where you're just writing things out and tweeting things and you're doing it so people like you or pay attention or you're virtue signaling

or you're trying to attack people and you're misrepresenting their original opinion and you know you are. You're just doing it because you can or you're doing it because you think that somehow or another they've said something that offends your group because you've got this tight group of people that also like to be fat. It's nuts. It's crazy. You're doing it to win. There's a guy named Alan Levinowitz, and he's been on the podcast before,

and he had a really great expression. He said it's like processed information. And much like processed food is bad for you, processed information is bad for you too. And he was saying that like Twitter and these kind of things, that's what it is. It's processed information. And that resonated with me so hard because I'm like, oh, of course. That is exactly what it's processed information and uh that resonated with me so hard because i'm like oh of course

that's that is exactly what it's like because real food is like you know real food you know like meat and vegetables and stuff that's supposed to be good for you and it's got vitamins and it's not some thing that's pumped full of preservatives and it'll last on a shelf for 10 years and it's you know that's that's what's shitty for you you know process seed oils all this crap that's what's shitty for you and that's what gets people super unhealthy well this process information gets people super mentally unhealthy totally well and like we have relationships with people at the store who do not agree with us politically like i have friends who i don't agree with politically and it has never turned into a

screaming match it's never turned into us just insulting each other or calling each other pieces of shit it hasn't even turned into us yelling at each other and that's what's like so hard about and I and I have relatives too we're like we don't see eye to eye politically, but we love each other. Yeah. And we don't just fight when we see each other. Yeah, I have plenty of friends that I don't agree with politically. After my first TV set, I swore that I would never read YouTube comments again. And I intend to keep that promise to myself. Yes. It's just not productive.

It doesn't do anything good. I don't internalize the positive feedback. I memorize the negative feedback for the rest of my life. And it's just useless. Yeah. It's not good for you. What's his face? Fucking Hannibal Lecter.

Fucks his name. Anthony Hopkins. Thank you. He had a statement that's really interesting he goes I don't read what other people

think about me because it's not my business yeah that's like yeah I really like that principle that what other people

think of me is none of my business yeah Laura I gotta wrap this up thank you so much yeah thank you appreciate you always a pleasure

if you want to move here we're gonna have a beautiful comedy club soon I you want to move here we're gonna have a beautiful comedy club soon i do want to move here oh okay no i don't do what you want to do but uh it's gonna be an awesome place and tell everybody where you're at again um sunset strip comedy club yeah and then may 6th through 8th i'm gonna be to be at Comedy at the Carlson in Rochester, New York. And August 12th through the 14th, I'm going to be at Mark Ridley's Comedy Castle in Royal Oak, Michigan. And do you have larabeats.com? Do you have a...

No, I have Instagram at larabites. Spell it. L-A-R-A-B-E-I-T-Z. Okay. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Always good. Bye.

Bye, everybody.