The Digression Sessions - Ep. 175 - Andy Haynes! (@IMAndyHaynes)

Episode Date: December 14, 2015

Hola Digheads! On this week's ep our guest is comedian and writer, Andy Haynes!Andy has performed on Conan, Jimmy Fallon, and he's had his own half hour special on Comedy Central. Andy did stand up for a couple of years in DC and was back in town for a few shows and was down to pod. We talk about his new found sobriety, relationships, and the ever growing mountain of show biz ishhh. Very insightful and cool ep. Also, Josh's guest cohost for this week is comedian, Sean Joyce. Sean runs Underground Comedy DC, which has showcase shows on Fri & Sat at the Big Hunt in DC and open mic nights at various spots in DC every night of the week. Check them out. Thanks for listening, all! Do us a favor and rate and review us on iTunes & Stitcher plz!  Follow your boys, Mike & Josh, on Twitter and Instagram.  Josh - @JoshKuderna on Twitter and @JoshKuderna on Instagram Mike - @MikeMoranWould on Twitter The Pod - @DigSeshPod on Twitter The Pod's Facebook page - Dig Sesh on Facebook For live stand up and improv dates, check out - DigressionSessions.com/Calendar

hey everybody i'm josh kaderna and i'm mike moran and you're listening to the digression sessions podcast a baltimore-based comedy talk show hosted by two young, handsome stand-up comedians slash improvisers. Join us every week as we journey through the world of comedy and the bizarreness of existence. As we interview local and non-local comedians, writers, musicians, and anyone else we find creative and interesting. Yes. Who's the guest this week? Andy Haynes is the guest on this week's program comedian andy haynes who you can find on the internets uh he's on instagram and twitter he is at i'm andy haynes and he has an album out as well which you can get on itunes and wherever you get your albums uh it's also on Spotify. He encourages you to check

it out on there. It's called Greatest Hits. And Andy says it's not representative of him now, but it's still a solid album. And I think you should check it out. I like it a lot. And Andy is based in LA right now, but he's from Seattle. And then he did stand up for a couple years in DC. And he was back in town doing shows at the big hunt which is one of the venues that underground comedy dc has shows at they have professional shows uh fridays and saturdays at 8 p.m in dc and you should check those out and they also have open mics uh every night of the week and you can check that out at underground comedy dc.com and the guy that out at undergroundcomedydc.com.

And the guy that runs those shows is a comedian named Sean Joyce. And wouldn't you know it, he's the guest co-host on this episode. Wow. What synergy. Much synergy. Huh? Whoa. No, I love Sean. Sean's so funny. He's a hilarious comedian in his own right as well. And he's co-hosted a couple other digression sessions apps as well, including interviews with Sean Patton and Jared Logan. So check those out as well. But yeah, Andy was in town doing shows with Sean. And I hit Andy up and he was down to do an interview.

So it was really, it was cool to talk to him. It was kind of, I don't want to say like serious, but just kind of frank conversation about sobriety and battling addiction and failed relationships and kind of what it takes to be successful in comedy and what the next, you know, phase is as far as a career in stand-up because most people that kind of pop from doing stand-up do things other than stand-up which is weird so and when you get to that spot in your career where somebody says well what do you want to do next what's your show what's your what's your idea um andy talks about that threshold and kind of what it takes to get to that next spot as far as being on a show or writing a show or creating something that's your legacy essentially um but

no it's really interesting and uh talking about sobriety as well you know like coming from uh a family of uh addicts and things like that it was uh it was an interesting conversation so we did this at the big hunt in dc before the show in the basement and uh i that. It was an interesting conversation. So we did this at the Big Hunt in DC before the show in the basement. And I really enjoyed it. It was a good conversation. I hope you guys enjoy it. Like I said, check out undergroundcomedydc.com and check out Andy if he's coming to your town because he's a hilarious dude. And now some stuff to promote for me, Josh Katerna. This week, I will be at Ragtime on Wednesday, hosting the free show there. Always good comedians there. And then Thursday, I'll be in Baltimore, and I'll be headlining the Raleigh's Oyster Bar. I'm excited for that one. That's a good show. So come to that. And then on the 18th, I will be at the orthodontist. So come see me there. Check out digressionsessions.com slash calendar for all the upcoming dates. My usual co-host, Mr. Mike Moran, who is not on

this episode, but you can find him on Twitter. He is at Mike Moran Wood. And he has a show coming up this Wednesday as well. He will be at the Coco Lane Bar in Ellicott City, Maryland. And it's a four-year anniversary show there for that show that they run every Wednesday. So check that out. And I think the intro is over here, but I'm going to play a track from Andy's album because we reference it in the interview and when talking about past relationships and stuff. And it's a really funny joke about how when Andy moved to New York, he brought his girlfriend, and that's like bringing warm beer to a bar. So yeah, I'm going to play that track real quick right here,

and then we'll get into the interview. So thank you guys so much for listening. Hope you dig it, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye. And I don't know if you guys knew this. New York already has girlfriends. You don't need to bring a girlfriend to New York. They got it covered. Bye bye. Everybody's just spilling cold beer all over the place. And you have to sit there and pretend like you love warm beer. Thanks, I brought my own.

I wish there would have been a bouncer at the door to New York that was like, Hey, you can't bring that in here. You don't want to. Is it recording? Yeah. We're rolling. Awesome. We're in it.

Andy Haynes in the Big Hunt basement. Here we are. This place is scary as fuck. It's even weirder without the lights on. Just the fluorescent lights is pretty weird. Yeah, like this is the kind of basement that you don't want very well lit no no because once you can see everything you're like yeah I kind of thought that's what it looked like yeah when it's dark I just assume it doesn't just hope yeah they

say they say like Vegas is Vegas in the daytime it's like a hooker without its makeup on. And I think it's the same kind of logic. Places like this, you want them dark. Just because I'm sure they don't get a lot of time to dust the 1,000 wires and cords and all the insanity. And even if they did, I don't think they're too concerned. Who's going to dust the dingy basement? It's going to lose its binge yeah it's weird that dc has such a um because it's like there's kind of like well i guess you know punk rock really

like thrived in this city yeah and then there's all these bars around town that are kind of like gnarly and satan themed right yeah like this one yeah this one's like hell yeah there's a lot of that around this city because i lived in adams morgan for two years oh dude you nailed it thank you sir i got a diet coke you guys sean yeah because you're sober right i am besides the the marijuana's an occasional mushroom i don't do anything now really no yeah i i'm like real, real sober now. Interesting. Yeah, it turns out you can abuse marijuana. Really? Yeah. Turns out you can do it way too much.

Was that, what happened there? Was that just a self-policing thing? Like, I'm just doing this a little too much. I mean, I wish it would have been like, oh, I'm just doing this a little too much. But it was like, I went through a divorce, which probably would have happened weed or no weed. Yeah. But I was just kind of reckless. And I wrote through a divorce, which probably would have happened weed or no weed. Yeah.

But I was just kind of reckless. And I wrote for a sitcom for two years. And I was like not a good employee. And that's like a dream job. Was that a ground floor? Yeah. Yeah. And then I also like I was just kind of a dickhead.

Even on weed it wasn't that i like sobriety in the alcoholics anonymous sense isn't like i get fucked up and i um and i do dumb shit i mean that's a big part of it that's like a result like a symptom of it but what it really comes down to is like i'm a selfish asshole and i do as much drugs as i can to not feel like a selfish asshole right to not like and by selfish it's not that you like take things you do that but it's more like you think about yourself all the time you're just self-obsessed and how the situation's going to benefit you not even necessarily that it's just that like the consciousness of yourself is like okay i mean benefiting yourself is nice but a lot of you know like there's a saying and it's i'm the biggest piece of shit in the center of the world

and that's kind of alcoholism boiled down right and so you drink because you're like oh like i feel like shit all the time yeah so why don't i do something oh like alcohol cool like i don't feel anything yeah and i just did that with weed because alcohol, you know, I did the same thing. But, you know, you can't like if you smoke, if you drink the equivalent of an eighth of weed, which is how much I smoked by the time I was quitting weed a day. Yeah. Jesus Christ. If you drank that much, you'd just be homeless or in jail. But with weed, it was just like I was kind of like forgetful and not very present and never really knew what I wanted. And just kind of like lazy, not in like I cleaned my house all the time, but I didn't necessarily like finish writing jokes or, you know, go out to social engagements and things like that.

Yeah. So you're just kind of floating in the ether. Yeah. And I'm 33. Like I did that shit. I had fun, but now I need to like do i need to buy a house and right meet a lady that'll let me pump some children inside yeah yeah that's adult when you pump them children if ladies like that description i don't think they like that description but

pumping some babies inside of them you probably don't want the girls that are accepting of that description from the beginning please children into me yeah nobody's like into that you can get to a good mom you can get to a point where you're allowed to talk like that with your mom you're with your with your lady yeah who's yeah you're yeah your baby mama yeah that after a couple years you can start you can start talking that way people that will accept that talk first conversation you don't want to be with those people you gotta pay them that's trouble yeah uh you get into that there was some talk of vegas earlier paying for sex no i haven't done that ever i've i've definitely like it's never been like seeing a lady on the street and been like you know i could go for that but what

it's been is like i've been in vegas and you see like a thousand dollar hooker and you're like i get it i'd do that why not like that's like i probably don't need to do it but like just the sex you could probably have would be pretty awesome and like it's not like she's like getting ready to like she's not saving up to go to yale it's not like i'm changing anything about this lady's life. No. It's her job and she probably is great at it. You know, and whenever they like release her family from the like Serbian jail that she's.

Right. Anyways, you know. Yeah, we understand. Yeah, it's all part of the circle of life. Yeah, there's just some ladies that like, like I've never ever, even in my most successful days, ever been with like a, you know, like a smoking hot 10 fucking puts on eyelashes, like all that shit. Like a Hooters waitress ad type of girl.

It'd be fun, man. It would have been fun to play football in the South and bang some ladies like that. But that's never been my story. I hook up with a lot of feminists who I have to be have to be like yeah i don't care that you don't shave i think i think i always think like uh do i convince myself that that is what i prefer or that i prefer an intelligent feminist type of girl because that as you describe the fake eyelashes and hooters advertisement it doesn't strike me as appealing.

Yeah, no, it doesn't. But from a purely animalistic, right? I think the main reason why I've never hooked up with a girl like that is because I have zero, zero tolerance for bullshit.

Of course. Right. Yeah. And so like every time I've been close with a girl like that, she's been like, Oh my God, like guns and roses. And then I'm like, I gotta get the fuck out of here. I don't even have to god like guns and roses and then i'm like i gotta get the fuck out of here i don't even have to get the guns and roses just the oh my god but i'm like

this is enough and i you know i'm not a guy that just like i i'd say that i i try to be pretty feminist in my mindset like you know like i believe i don't think it's the thing about me is i'm not like i don't do these things like with a vocal like i'm a feminist i wouldn't say that necessarily but like i like oh my i want my girlfriend to be my partner sure and things like that i i want to like fuck the shit out of like a real like hot babe but i don't necessarily like want to like invite her over yeah or they're two separate things or pump some kids into her yeah you know hopefully god willing i don't pump any kids into a abroad like that but you know there's no yeah there's no uh road so short um so did you spend a lot of time in vegas or just no no i uh i go out

there a couple times a year because it's so close to las vegas or so close to los angeles i've never been i never been to vegas until i moved to los angeles okay and then it was like a three and a half hour drive and the first time i ever went was like a novelty yeah and then it became kind of like oh i like this like yeah i do like like two days of like smoking a bunch of cigarettes i don't even smoke cigarettes wherever you want yeah and just like kind of like you know like putting on a suit one night um i like gambling i yeah i like to play blackjack saying you're going to the tropicana yeah one sentence and uh i also don't go to the tropicana the tropicana is a shithole yeah tropicana is a shithole but it does have that's where the laugh factory is so you, you know, you could end up there.

If things go well. Yeah, exactly. No, I like, I don't know about a lot of people, but I really like kind of shitty things once in a while. Like there's something cathartic. Like it's one thing. I think it's like very alcoholic of me. Like most people like have a beer and they're like, ah, but for me, cause I can't drink and I can't smoke cigarettes. I can't smoke weed.

I, I do smoke cigarettes in Las Vegas, but I don't smoke them like on the reg because I, they're going to kill me. Yeah. Um, but there's something nice about like a shitty buffet and sad people losing all their money and just everybody's there for these like horrible reasons.

Yeah. And I like, you know, I like like to party which is fun there yeah it's weird being sober because like nobody else everyone's fucked up yeah and there's people like yelling about like just like let's get fucked up yeah and every 10 feet there's those guys with the cards like y'all want to see some titties some titties one guy got me he was like how about a finger bomb a single mom y'all want a finger bomb oh that's a great slogan yeah and it worked we finger bombed no i uh i really liked smoking weed in vegas too you can't smoke in the open but like you know like smoke a blunt on my hotel room patio and then go out to the club it was great or like get really high eat edible and go to like play blackjack for four hours fucking awesome that is that's the best part i think of las vegas is drinking outside

as you're walking around yeah that's so that's the first time i experienced that yeah this is nuts yeah new orleans you're just like why can't why can't you just do this it doesn't seem like that's the problem no where you're drinking no it's not yeah it just feels you feel like an adult too you're like well why can't i have this outside yeah you're right oh it's not yeah it just feels you feel like an adult too you're like well why can't i have this outside yeah you're right oh right oh this is just a beer and i can walk around with it yeah even in well vegas you know vegas you can have glass bottles too new orleans you can't it has to be plastic but go plastic cup or something yeah but even still that's fine yeah it's understandable i don't want glass in the street yeah that's fine people seem to hand

it's not about the glass yeah it's about the alcohol yeah exactly exactly um so andy so i know that you did stand up uh here in dc for a bit but you started in seattle yeah technically like did my first open mic so i did about nine months in seattle okay and then i visited dc like because my dad lives in the annapolis area. So I came out here with no idea what it was like. And I just was going to visit for a month before I moved to San Francisco. That was the plan. And I just liked it so much. I came into DC for an open mic and I was like,

oh, wait a second. And I also had this really horrible girlfriend at the time and I am a coward. So I didn't know how to break up with her. It's the worst. So I just didn't go home for two years. It was great. So did you live in Annapolis?

I lived here. I lived in Adams Morgan. Oh, yeah. That's right. Gotcha. I lived like five blocks from here. And she was your girlfriend the whole time? That girl?

Yeah. No, no, no. She was definitely not my girlfriend the second that I told her I wasn't. I mean, she, for a long time, thought we were going to still get back together. She one time surprised me out here. She flew out and was like, hey, I'm just here, and I want to tell you that I love you.

She's from Seattle? Yeah. She called me crying from the airport. And I was like, what? She was like, I'm here. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And then that was kind of the end of. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You know, and then, you know, that was

kind of the end of it. We're still friends now, though. She's still pretty nuts, though. Oh, that's good. Yeah, I grew up on Ken Island, so I went to Annapolis all the time. Oh, yeah. I just was talking about, with my dad, one time I was like playing golf on Ken Island the day before I had to go to Iceland. Oh, really?

Or like all of Europe, but I was stopping in Iceland. And I i had to go to iceland oh really or like all europe but i was stopping in iceland and i like went to go uh get a ball and uh it was uh just like walked like straight through a patch of uh poison ivy and i was like fuck i'm gonna be in iceland with poison ivy this is the worst planes it ended up being fine okay good poison ivy poison ivy's the worst yeah i had it the summer like all over both of my arms it's just the worst because it doesn't go away right no it just spreads too yeah it's on other parts of you and then like the oils get on your towels and shit like that and you have to make sure you pat dry it's a real motherfucker yeah it's gross i hate it it's

terrifying i hate it um what fuck what was i gonna say okay so yeah so you end up in dc for a while and then what's the move after that well uh here was here for i was here from november 2005 to february 2007 and um i was like still in pretty good contact with all my comedy friends from seattle and they started to have like these amazing shows back in seattle and it was like this um it was kind of like right as like alt comedy was becoming like a thing i guess you know like the comedians of comedy had come out and um that kind of stuff and so my friends were all throwing that show and i went back to visit and it was just like holy shit this is awesome like right i went skiing one day and then that night i did like an awesome show and i was like oh like so i went skiing one day and then that night i did

like an awesome show and i was like oh like so i went back to seattle for about a year and a half and then um rory scoville didn't rory scoville who i was friends with here had moved up to new york and he just was like hey we found this apartment it's got three bedrooms do you and scott want to move in with me and jordan who now his wife right and we were like yeah that sounds great so that's how I moved to New York because somebody just found an apartment and was like do you want to move here like yeah and we actually me and Scott had planned on

moving there solo like each of us single except both of our girlfriends in Seattle had different thoughts and they came with us and the only couple that's still together is Rory and Jordan what's Scott's last name Moran Scottott moran he makes uh the modern modern comedian oh yeah yeah he actually like directs a lot of comedy specials now too yeah yeah was that uh was that the girlfriend that joke is about the uh the warm beer yeah that's her that's the warm beer girl theresa

phelan clements wow soon to be married to Paul Schneider. Is that the improv guy? He's an actor. He's like in the assassination of the coward, or the assassination of Jesse James by the Coward River Ford. He was in the first two seasons of Parks and Rec. He wrote or directed,

he starred in that movie All the real girls which was like one of zoe deschanel and danny mcbride's first movies sounds pretty good he's like had an awesome he's got like one of those really like awesome careers where like he's an artist but he like occasionally like dip his toe into like mainstream things into being successful in mainstream yeah and then you know like just randomly we kept in touch and i always kind of felt bad for her because i like brought her to new york and then we broke up and she was kind of in new york by herself and then she sure enough just like just nailed it just has like a super rich fiance and like i think he like probably pays most of the bills she just runs

like a non-profit just does what she wants she's great though i mean i totally blew it i if i could go back that that'd probably be one of the many girls that i blew it with that i would be like let's just get married because she was stellar jesus but i treated her like warm beer living learning it's such a bummer i think that that's like a i don't know if that's just like a male thing or like a modern kind of um like our generation thing but like nobody is happy enough with just like a good partner you know like do you always think there's gonna be something better it's like she's good but somebody great's like it's not even that it's just something different right you know like if i was like with the hottest like dominican

chick i'd be like but there's's like this Swedish chick, you know. She's just different. And also I just think, I think we still haven't cracked the shell on like how to deal with the fact that we want to, like we were talking about earlier, we want to have sex with lots of people. We want to share a home and build a family with a very small window of people. Right. But still fuck a ton of people. Yeah. But still fuck a ton of people. Yeah. And I think, you know,

best thing is, is you find like a smoking babe who's got a good head on her shoulders or a babe that you find smoking, I guess. I think it goes away though when you get older. I hope. I think as you get older, you start to, that,

I mean, it depends. I mean, it depends on like how, maybe how like addictive your personality is and how much outside you know reassurance you need from things yeah i've definitely gone to like some sex addiction like not classes uh meetings just to be like am i a sex addict because i kept on finding myself dating these like women that were just totally wrong and i

like knew it from the very like like, you don't know it, know it. Yeah. But like, when you look back on it, you're like, Oh, like all the signs were there that this was going to go horribly,

but you're like, but she's hot. And yeah. And you know, she's like, she does these interesting things. And then, but like the whole time they were like sociopaths and monsters.

Right. And then you're like, but it'll be different. And then, you know, or it's like, it's fun yeah and uh yeah boobs yeah and uh they always get you boobs will get you boobs and butts i had

a school a counselor when i was a freshman in college and i started dating this girl like it was like two weeks in and i was describing her and the counselor was like so these are all the red flags are there so this is all red flags right and i'm like yes and she's like, so these are, all the red flags are there. So this is all red flags, right? And I'm like, yes. And she's like, so what do you think about just not dating this girl? What do you think about just passing on her and just waiting for something else? And I'm like, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard. Of course I'm dating this girl.

Yeah, insane. Yeah, I love it. It's the best. I wish I would have had a counselor like that in college. It didn't do anything. I didn't listen to it. Although, but the thing the thing is though then those lessons came you know then i would later on they made sense to me later on i was able to take that advice but the first round of hearing all of it i ignored all of it yeah and i used to feel that way i used to feel

that kind of need to like move on from like girl to girl even from like short relationship to short relationship which i do i'm 35 so i feel as i've gotten the past few years i feel like it's it's fading away yeah i'm definitely like in a like the last i guess I got divorced. How long have I been divorced? I've been separated for like a little more than two years now. And those two years have been kind of just not reckless, but like, you know, a lot of like short things and casual hookups and things like that. And it was fun. But now I'm kind of back in the mode where I want to get in a relationship. And I'm trying to be conscious of like, all right, like what am I going to do to like,

first of all, pick the right person, but also like not fuck it up because it's like going from pretty like aggressively single, like, and just doing whatever the fuck you want. Then being like, oh, okay.

So now somebody's feelings are involved. Right. Right. You know, like that's, it's hard, man, because you just,

especially like, I, I don't think DC's too different because people are young and moving around a lot here but um you know i've always heard dc's described as hollywood for ugly people um i've heard that also but i think that you know it's like one of those places and la is very much like this where we're career is above everything else careers above family love all that shit and um it's hard it's hard to be like oh i'm gonna like make these sacrifices i'm not gonna go out on certain nights because like i need to see this person i have a day job

i probably will as long as i can be a writer i'm gonna be a writer which means i'm gonna have a day job yeah which also means that i need to do stand-up at night which leaves me about from like 10 or 11 p.m till i fall asleep to see somebody right and weekends but who knows like if i'm traveling for stand-up right right so it's like that's not ideal for you know having those things i think the best possible life is that you get an acting job because those those things pay a lot yeah and then you can kind of fuck off for a couple months here with whoever puts up with you right right so then does that limit your dating pool then to other comedians will you ever do that again well i've dated a lot of comedians yeah but like seriously because uh two or three seriously i mean alice included my

ex-wife right um but i would probably do it again if it was the right chick i mean now i'm just kind of looking for somebody who kind of wants the same things i want right which is like a family and things like that like i know a lot of there's always this like kind of like people are like what comedians shouldn't date comedians and it's like why because like because like our worlds are small competition it's competition but it's competition, but nobody ever says that about doctors. Nobody's ever like, doctors shouldn't date, lawyers shouldn't date.

I think the only problem with dating comedians versus non-comedians is that when you break up with them, they don't go away. Yeah, they're like co-workers. Yeah, whereas if you're dating someone that is not involved in comedy, when you break up with them,

you were running into them on your own terms really, or it's very random and rare and they kind of just fade away and they're, they're, they're pretty much gone and you don't have to deal with them all the time. Whereas if you date a comedian, I mean they're, they're going to keep as long as they're continuing along their career, they're going to keep popping up over and over again and dating other people that you're friends with i would just date shitty comedians

this might just like people who always be the alpha who you don't have faith in yeah yeah this is like a phase for you yeah you're dead yeah you cannot last you want to do something else pretty soon so we'll we can date that is a that is a scheme that is guaranteed to blow up in your face oh there's so many Anytime you do plan something out that carefully, the opposite will happen. It will ruin you. You're like a psychopath. Yeah.

You do that. Yeah. Right. They're probably not going to like really have the guts to stick this out. So yeah. Like she's got, um, she's got lupus.

So, you know, like, yeah, it should be good. She'll be dead soon. Yeah. No problem.

This is perfect. Yeah, this is perfect. We'll have the babies and the nice time. Now the lupus so you know yeah it should be good she'll be dead soon yeah no problem this is perfect yeah this is perfect we'll have the babies and the nice time now the lupus will kick in then we'll trade in i'll look like another yeah yeah you'll yeah everybody will be on your side grieving yeah yeah it'll be good yeah single father oh that is nice dude that is a good idea widower pussy get out now that you're saying it it's starting to make a lot of sense yeah we're talking through it give her a couple years of great life yeah and like if you like like pale girls like you know perfect all the better pale pale girl i do like a pale girl i know yeah who doesn't yeah some people are uh they get fixated on the like nice olive skin i like an olive skin i like all the all the colors of babes

that's true um except like fake tan sunburn lady yeah that's the orange is gross but um you know like a on this most recent season of uh fargo christine malati chris christian malati like who plays the sheriff's wife who's dying of cancer oh yeah still a babe you know stage four babe she's got stage four babe she's terminal babe got that tb um yeah man it's uh you're very honest in your comedy too it seems like everything that that happens in your life somehow makes it onto stage anyway. Probably to a fault.

Yeah. Yeah. Is that a problem for the people you date? I haven't really had too much of the problem with that. I realized recently that my family in the Northwest came out to see me over Thanksgiving weekend. And I say that my siblings are gay and i realized that my brother maybe necessarily doesn't talk he's my stepbrother and it's his step family my step family and they're kind of more like working class like blue collar people sort of more and don't ask don't tell kind of thing like they all know but

i think i don't know if i actually like was supposed to say that in front of them and i felt like oh like that's like and then like the other stuff with um with other girlfriends there's been some jokes i've had that were probably like a little too close to home and then with my ex-wife um through my divorce i talked about everything and now looking back on it like it probably didn't need to because it didn't make me look too stellar. Right. You know, like there was just like I divulged all the information. Yeah. Thinking like, oh, I'm going to look like a real like open wound up here and never get it out. You know, and I think everybody in Hollywood was kind of like, dude.

Yeah. Yeah. Like we all know each other. So, yeah, I'm trying to be better about that as you know there's stuff i do now that i probably wouldn't tell people about right you know yeah i think there's different levels of comfort for the audience too some things are so personal when they come out it can make i feel like it can make the audience pull back because they're like all of a sudden in it with you and it's some things are so intense

not necessarily anything that you were talking about but no but i like i used to have a joke about being molested i got molested when i was a kid it wasn't like a big deal in the sense of like i wasn't like raped or anything like that and i used to have a joke about it and every single time it wasn't like a cool kind of young hip audience the audience would be like even if they laughed at it they would be like afterwards like oh right jesus there was a yeah there was a comic in dc that had a joke about it but it was the the joke was such a simple joke and it was just almost like wordplay level of joke and it's like you i was like you just brought up being molested for wordplay joke like there's like almost no payoff for it and everyone is just for the rest of the set like oh my god i wonder what happened to her like i yeah and i think like people sometimes when i

told that joke it was so silly that people would think that i was kidding and being insensitive about being molested and then there was also the people that were like this guy got molested that's kind of like gnarly shit to talk about there's some people that can get away with it i mean i think like amy schumer has like nine or ten jokes about being like blackout drunk and like getting fingered but everybody's like oh that clearly didn't happen yeah you're like yeah yeah yeah but uh for me they don't i'm not famous enough for them to be like oh he's joking yeah and i think there is also it's why it's just different when you're an adult and you're saying like i'm look i'm joking around about this that this happened to me it's not okay for people

to do this but i'm joking around but then when you're when anything that happens to you when you're a kid i feel like is people just have a different level of sensitivity to it yeah and i think i mean part of me wants to be like to like forge the waters or whatever and just be like we got to talk about this right like i think it's like one in three kids gets molested and sure like i would like to take away the taboo of that but then also it's like i don't really want to do that work yeah to be honest because that's like a you're committed like like those people that really like dig into that life like you can't have like a dark joke like that and then have a light set no you have you have to follow me on twitter guys cultivate a lot of your

kind of um you have to cultivate a lot of your audience that way and it's like i'd ideally be a lot more kind of broad i mean i want to be smart and funny and stuff like that but i would like to be able to reach more people and i think a lot of that is like now i tell a lot of jokes that they might have some darkness in them but like if you look at from just like three years ago where my hour is now it's like usually the only time i tell like a really dark joke is like when i'm kind of just not thinking about what the next joke in my set is and it just comes to me right because i don't really want to tell those kind of jokes anymore yeah i'd rather everybody be happy right i feel that way i feel

that way too even with anything that's i don't have a problem i don't necessarily get very dark but i have things that are kind of controversial or where uh i'm more of a bad guy yeah in what i'm saying and it's like i think this is very funny this is actually how i feel but if i'm going to be the bad guy this time they can't be you know self-deprecating with all this other stuff yeah and then you just like have to decide well who you're going to be like you can't be it's tough to be two different people not to say that you can't do it but yeah yeah i mean i think for the longest time when i was learning how to do stand up i would have four minutes of really fun like pretty uh harmless material and then i would have another four minutes of like what i thought was like my foray into being the next stanhope right and so people

would be like oh this guy's fun he's. And all of a sudden I'd be like, you guys ever see a dead baby? People are like, who are you? Right, exactly. And I think, you know, it sucks because you don't want to compare yourself to other people and also you don't want to like,

like I think something cool with standup is most people find it out on their own, you know? Right. I don't, I'm not one of these people that's like against somebody taking a class because I think there's a lot of things that could be taught. I agree with that.

Like everybody's like, you take a fucking class. It's like, yeah, like, you know, like we could also be doctors and not take classes, but it took 400 years to figure out how to like do the things, you know, like why don't we like speed this up

and learn from what other people learned. Right, there's very simple mistakes that people make when they're starting out and it's you can just cut out all of them if you have a person telling you that those things are yeah those are not things that you're going to keep doing you'll learn on your own eventually eventually you'll get rid of all that stuff but you might as well know to not do it in the first place i wish that i would have started squeaky clean like i consider it i consider any, if you look at the greats out of any art, and there's all these people who can break this,

so it's different for everyone. But if you look at great artists, historically great artists, they started as classically trained. And you play your scales every day. You play your scales, you play your scales, you play your scales, until they're like second thought, and then you can start improvising then you can start doing that stuff and we don't do that with stand-up we just kind of like jump into it and we listen people in the room and uh when i started in seattle there wasn't very many people that were inspiring me and i they

were all a bunch of road dogs and so i just started being like a road dog. I started really dirty right away. Yeah. But what I was going to say is if you have like an intention about you and if you have like a through line, you will make it so much faster than somebody that's just trying to kind of figure it out. Like if you look at a guy like Mulaney, I remember when I first saw him, I was working in the D.C. improv. He was opening. Jay Larson was middling and DC improv. He was opening, uh, Jay Larson was middling and Mike Birbiglia was headlining and John was emceeing. And he was kind of like all of us. Like he was just like,

he kind of like had a couple of jokes that were like right on. And he had a couple of jokes that were like really dark and he had, you know, like, and it was like, whatever, I didn't really think much of it. And then the next time I saw him,

he'd kind of figured something out. He'd figured out his voice and his intention and what he was willing to talk about and not willing to talk about and it was like explosive i mean he's supremely intelligent and very talented yeah but i think anybody who decides like okay this is kind of my through line you don't have to make a conscious decision but you can kind of be like what's my brand you know right like what and not in like a shitty way it's just like we're all dumb animals at a certain point and there's just certain things that work you know yeah like somebody looking at you says like i get this guy i know what he is yeah it makes it easier to ingest the material that that person's putting out and you can be as like righteous as you want

to go ahead be like talk about whatever the fuck you want to do. Do performance pieces. But don't ask anything of the audience because they've only signed up to just see you and give you initial reactions. They might later on be like, that's great. But you're going to have a harder road. So it's up to you.

But for me, I want to I would love to say important things and change people's opinions, but I would also like to buy some furniture and have a retirement built and things like that. And also, I think in Hollywood, I want to be a great stand-up. I want to be a stand-up that has hours and things like that. I think I'm still, honestly, I'm 11 years in right now i still think that i have a like so much fucking stuff to learn yeah just because it's like it you you can see it there's nothing arguable about it i've done some

great stuff but i'm not like able to just do whatever the fuck i want to and there's people that yeah at year five and year three michael shea got snl when he was like two or three years in he figured it out immediately right um but to do things that are lasting which i think is like kind of like what we forget is that stand-up will lead us to opportunities to do stand-up and to make specials like that but it also like somebody's gonna ask you what kind of tv shows you want to make and what kind of movies you want to write and what kind of characters you want to play and those are the things that like beyond your stand-up also are like your legacy you know like i would love to write on a tv show that people are going to look back and go like oh that was like a really great tv show and like it's like yeah it was important to people yeah it was

important to people i i haven't done that yet yeah i've written on some things that paid a lot of money and they were fun and i had really amazing moments on ground floor right and i've had some amazing moments on clip shows that i thought were complete garbage yeah but it's like you should be intentional you should look at this like i mean we all kind of hang out and we are open micers and we're all just smoking cigarettes and getting high and fucking around right but like if you have some intention and you kind of have an idea of what you want to do and you start to kind of like, okay, how do you write this? What do people like about that? You know, just little things like that.

I mean, I got my first TV writing job because I took a UCLA writing course. You know. And just kind of figured out like structure wise how to write stuff. No, I just wrote a sample script. I got it because of stand up. Oh, okay. But the fact that I took that class was the reason why I had a sample script. Gotcha.

I tried to write like 10 sample scripts before that i had no idea what i was doing so right it took me sitting there with like professors going this doesn't work this works yeah and then you know so on and so forth right kind of like how you were saying you got to know the rules basically before you're breaking them yeah exactly um so what happens like when did you learn that lesson like when you end up in, cause you end up in those meetings. So they're like, Andy, what do you want to do? And you're like, uh, I want to do good standup. I think I really learned it maybe a year ago when I decided to get sober.

I kind of looked back on the last 10 years and kind of saw the way I'd approached it all. I didn't have any favors. I will say that like nobody's ever. And because I haven't, I'm not trying to like. I will say that. Like nobody's ever, and because I haven't, I'm not trying to like shit on my own career. I'm not trying to say woe is me, but nobody ever looked at me and said, this is the guy.

Yeah. It was all just work and work and work. And I got some great opportunities that they went well. And then after that, it was like, they didn't really lead to much because I didn't have anything. Like the first time I ever got asked, I remember I got last comic standing.

I was a semi-finalist it's like 2008 i'd never i didn't think i was going to get it so i wasn't prepared at all i had no idea about anything i didn't know how showbiz and they asked in a thing they were like what are some pilot ideas you have and i just started thinking of pilots like i was in that yeah i was like a show about like a correspondence office in the third world and i can just wrote that down and it was like and then like i remember the first time i ever pitched a show i like a correspondence office in the third world. And I can just wrote that down. And it was like, and then like, I remember the first time I ever pitched a show,

I was a mover in New York and I wanted to write a show about being a mover in New York, like kind of a male broad city. I still have never cracked the code. It's not ever been turned into a good script. Yeah. But, um,

I remember like the first time I ever went into pitch it, I pitched it for like an hour because my manager didn't tell me how to pitch and so i just a pitch is supposed to take 10 to 15 minutes right right and i just i didn't have no idea i didn't talk to friends about pitching you know an hour yeah so did you have like a powerpoint priest like no i just sit there bullshitting and i'm saying things like well we could do this we could do that and i mean who cares like this character can change i was basically giving them every possible scenario. And it was very obvious to everybody in the room.

I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. Right. And especially if they're like, well, if we don't understand it, how is an audience going to get that? Also, this guy doesn't understand. He doesn't understand. Right, of course. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

Right. He's pitching us a world where anything, he's basically just saying, will you let me write a show yeah i'll do anything me want money yeah can i have you think that's inevitable though you think that just part of it is just going through the experience of you have to go in and pitch when you've never done it before i don't think it's inevitable i think it's highly probable yeah but like if you look like going back to like something like uh you know if you look at it from like a malcolm gladwell outliers kind of sense um 10 000 hours 10 000 hours but beyond that like um you know like mulaney like he opened for

verbiglia and he was friends with all these guys who would also become kind of the greatest comedic minds of this current generation like he he was open miking with Jeselnik and, um, Pete Holmes and Nick Kroll was his best friend. And, um, but like having Birbiglia there, Birbiglia is a couple of years older than him.

He's established. So when he goes and he's like, Oh, I'm going to pitch a show. He's probably talking to Mike before and being like, Hey dude, like you've pitched a show before. Yeah.

What the fuck do I do? What the fuck do I do? And I didn't do that. I didn't yeah i didn't know anybody really well enough to ask but also like i just wasn't even it wasn't even a thought that crossed my mind right to like no and the thing about it is like when i got to hollywood and i started getting jobs in actual tv writing i met people who are tv writers very funny extremely some of the funniest people i've ever met in my life for tv writers yeah um and they've been trying to be tv writers since they were 20 yeah it's crazy when you meet people like that that knew ahead of time yeah exactly what

they wanted to do for it their whole lives yeah and they did it the you know they read seinfeld scripts when seinfeld was on you know on. They went and listened to fucking Larry David talk. They read and took classes and all that shit. And I didn't do that stuff. I was not a good student of it. I was like, hopefully the 10 minutes that I have is killer enough to keep me kind of on

people's mind. But otherwise I'm going to smoke weed and kind of focus on looking cool. When realistically that shit does not matter at all. That could be your show Looking Cool with Andy Haynes. wise i'm gonna smoke weed and kind of focus on like looking cool right when realistically does not matter at all that could be your show looking cool with andy haynes yeah i mean it would be a lie because i've rarely looked cool i've looked cool as like a divorced dad would always look like that was always my kind of my spirit animal as a divorced dad right right i don't have children though so it's very weird i think i've seen a couple good pictures

yeah yeah a couple out there yeah there's some good divorce moments here's some moments of coolness um i think i started a midlife crisis when i was probably like 20 i'm maybe 18 and that midlife crisis has lasted up until about the last two years okay and now i'm kind of like oh okay cool so this is this is life this is what my body's gonna look like yeah how much hair i have and you know so on and so forth yeah yeah you the one person i've seen who you guys are friends with probably is brandon wardell who brandon has amazed me because when he first got out to la i didn't really take him seriously as like a comic i knew he was funny i knew he was cool i kind of knew what he wanted but the kid was so intentional and he believed so much in his own idea and brand it

is weird he's like yeah i'm just gonna be the guy that wears a fucking iphone charger on his neck and everybody's like that's the guy that wears the iphone charge nobody believed nobody believed in him yeah i really don't think so and i think that's part of why he's got that chip on his shoulder because i don't think anybody really took him seriously in dc at all yeah i really don't think so and i think that's part of why he's got that chip on his shoulder because i don't think anybody really took him seriously in dc at all yeah i remember when he first showed up to la he was just so hyper and he was talking like he was using a lot of like um lingo like lingo and stuff like that and i was like i was like this what are you doing dude like you are going to embarrass yourself and now like yeah he owns owns me. He gives me writing jobs. And I think he's fucking really funny,

but that's a guy who like just believed in him, in his, what his, and it goes back to that intention thing. He kind of had a through line from the very beginning. And look, he's, he's fucking leaps and bounds above a lot of people that,

yeah, I mean, Brandon is killing it. Brandon's movies. Brandon's, I think everybody always is killing it. Brandon's movies, Brandon's TV shows. I think everybody always thought he was funny. I think everyone always respected him as a funny person, as someone who can write funny jokes.

But everybody, I think, was just like, but the way you act, you can't just act this way. It's not going to work out for you. And then he just skyrocketed past everybody. Yeah. And that was it it i mean when i heard he had that bob odenkirk album i was like what like i didn't think that was real i was like what the fuck you mean you're on bob odenkirk's only stand-up that's like nothing compared to what he has going on now yeah no but that was just the beginning and i thought i was like okay he's peaked yeah when he said that i was like what what the fuck do you mean that was a weird thing was a weird really make any sense but i think it's because like somebody like bob who really kind of knows

obviously oh shit andy x and accidentally answered a call there yeah it was actually that was my spawn cna um hopefully he's all right uh doing a podcast probably kind of important probably fine yeah he's okay um i uh i um you know and i i think he's like a good lesson not in the sense of like because he definitely alienated people out here i don't hollywood is a place that does not give a fuck whether you're a nice person there is like a certain aspect to it and brandon is a nice person that's not what i'm saying but like the reason why brandon is so successful out there is because people look at him and they go oh i see what you are as far as like a exact like you are this thing and he's gonna do great because of it it doesn't mean that it it works everywhere and i don't necessarily think brandon's any more strong of a stand-up

than he ever was you know what i mean like i don't think that that's any more strong of a standup than he ever was. You know what I mean? Like, I don't think that that makes him a great standup. It makes him whatever that show business kind of thing is. I do think he's gotten better as a standup. Oh, of course. Yeah. I do think being put in that position.

Exactly. Being put in the position where he's on those shows, he had to perform better. He had to learn to perform better. And I think that he did. Yeah. he had to perform better. He had to learn to perform better, and I think that he did. Yeah, and I think that, you know, I don't know what his ultimate thing is because I think Brandon loves doing stand-up, but I think ultimately, like,

he might become a comedic personality just because he's going to be able to be on TV shows and going to get to host things and get to do all this kind of cool stuff, and that's going to get in the way of stand-up. It's kind of one of the bummers about la is that they see a funny stand-up and they're like oh you should do all these other things right and that's a nice thing about new york is like they see a funny stand-up and they're like you should do

stand-up right you know you should go up at the cellar and you should go up at the new york comedy festival and you should right be a stand-up and um that's why that's what that city is it's live performance and la is it's different there's the best stand-ups city is. It's live performance. And LA is different. The best stand-ups in the world all live there right now because New York became too expensive, really. I mean, not in the world, because obviously a lot of great stand-ups live everywhere. And New York is probably still bare bones.

But everybody kind of moved. I think it's still the collection in the world of best stand-ups. New York. I think New York is, but I think there's a lot in la i think a lot of people in la la became what it was because i think new york became it was a so expensive and b hard to there was just yeah life lifestyle difficulty but also getting up i mean the seller has like 20 spots a night and if fucking louis ck seinfeld chris rock adam ferrara the whatever their collective ted alexandro amy schumer they all live there like why the fuck do you get on right you don't so um i moved to new york because i watched comedian and i wanted to be a seller

comic yeah i've never ever gone up at the cellar and i don't know if i ever will i mean i hope yeah it seems hard as shit to get into like you're saying all the seats are taken basically yeah i mean i think there's also a million people in line right wait they are trying they want they don't want like i think aziz can get up there because he's aziz yeah but if it was just aziz without the fame right of the fame i don't think he would because they they also give a shit about like can you work a room can you it's not their brand that's not their brand of comedy yeah yeah um so do you think about that stuff now like what your brand is or is it just focusing on being funny uh i think i'm whittling it down i mean it's i think it's hard because i'm not it's weird

very interesting in a in a show business sense. I'm a sober guy. I kind of try to talk about that. I'm a divorced guy. I talk about that a little bit. But those aren't brands. The divorced guy. Yeah, like a white guy that's bothered by modernity.

Nobody gives a shit about that. So I don't know. I mean, I'm trying to figure it out. I'm trying to talk more about my experiences yeah honestly it's like i don't i would i think i would have to kind of contrive something at this point to be like this is my brand that'd be terrible that couldn't last either i think that would crush your soul too right yeah i think this guy yeah you just got to be funny and i you know i think uh i've heard jim gaffigan talking about it on a podcast at one point, but he said in some ways stand-up is like the exact opposite

because as a white person you come with the least offer. A white male, nothing. He's a great example too of somebody you would look at. I mean apart from all the kids, he's a pretty regular guy yeah there's nothing interesting about him no and other than that he's a very good at stand-up he's very funny yeah and i think that he you know like there's like you know there's a few spots you got to be extremely good and you got to fucking figure it out but it's i just am just trying to write and write and write and talk about experiences but i think honestly like the idea of me like exploding overnight is probably not

a reality just because i don't know what i could offer in an explosive sense i'm not internet interesting like nobody's like i'm funny i have no doubts about that i would have to be an asshole to not believe that i was able to do the stuff i was able to that i've been able to do because you know but in a in a in a broader kind of businessy sense like it's just there's not like a specific i could talk about being sober i could talk about my beliefs and stuff but it's like a fucking broad out there thing it's like i just kind of have to dig in i think honestly like i think i'm probably years away from the comic that i will become that will be the thing i am i think i think something that's interesting is the idea of not knowing what kind of comic you'll become truly being focused on it because you've had all these distractions right so you you went through the

time of of drinking then you went through the time of your divorce and then smoking pot all the time and now it's almost like i i feel this way about a bunch of things about myself but in your case it's like now you have an opportunity to truly focus on what you're doing and it's really maybe the first time that you're completely focused. Yeah, I would say I'd agree with that. And you've had a decent level of success. Hell yeah. Even with all the distractions. So I guess to me, I would think the hopeful thing would be, hey, look, you were able to succeed despite all these other things. Now these other negative parts of your life are gone. And it's kind of interesting to think,

okay, well, what will happen if you really have time to write? You really sit and think through these ideas, and you're not just kind of half doing it. I mean, I think that's the hope, and I feel good. It's just, yeah, I'm the happiest I've ever been in a life sense. Stand-up-wise, I feel great about standup. I love doing standup again and I, I do feel good about that,

but I'm not like conscious of that. I think if somebody said, do you think that you're going to be famous? I would say that I'd like to be, you know, that'd be nice. But like, like we're talking about,

like there's no reason why I should be other than I'm good at this. Yeah. But there's a lot of people that are at the same level. So that's kind of how I look at it. I would like to make a good living and do stand up. And I'm pretty stoked on just the way it is. I don't want to write for like clip shows. I want to write for like a great sitcom and I want to like be a part of great movies and

things like that. And yeah, but it's like at the end of the day, I'm also like I still make a lot of money and I have a great life and i get whatever the fuck i want so it's hard to be like oh man i didn't get to be the best right and if you could talk to you 12 years ago and be like andy you tour all over the country and you get paid to do that and it's your only job but it's just as you go there's just always more mountain to climb you know what i mean and it's like other people are doing other things and you're like well i'm not yeah and i think stand-up's one of those things where it's easy to be good at stand-up it's really there's that's a short that's like a switch that

happens in your first two or three years you start getting good at stand-up but to become great at stand-up that is forever huge and i think you know i think a lot of people yeah i went through a lot of this because you know i i have depression too and i i was undiagnosed with that for a long time and i let that kind of eat me up that was like another distraction and i would compare myself to people constantly but it really doesn't work like that because like some of the best guys out there like i mean i don't know the exact story about it but like i heard bill burr like didn't have any success for like the first 15 years as far as like a critical kind of like peer-to-peer like i know he booked some

pilots when he was very young and i know that he was able to work but it's like yeah some you know like i always heard this story about fleetwood mac which was that like there was like they just showed up and they like made rumors and that like everybody was like, oh my God, who's this new band? Oh my God, this is great. And that was like their 11th year

in the band and they were ready to break up and they'd all been, like people had come and gone. They hate each other. They hate each other. And it's like, that's what most of life is like.

Yeah. And it's not that you just like show up and things are great. It's like a lot of it is long and you got to figure shit out. Hopefully, I mean, you know, I think sobriety is like the one thing that's been able to kind of like change everything for me and also being like i got on antidepressants and stopped being like

feeling insane all the time right but um yeah i think you know that's important is to know that like you just got to put your head down and fucking i think uh if you guys watch comedian there's a part where seinfeld just says like my banner you know he's like talking about like what he would tell all the young comics uh-huh and he was just like work just work that's the only thing i would tell you is just work and i think that is you know like i don't write enough i'm i'm trying to fucking i never hear a comedian say like i write the perfect amount everybody but i don't i i know I don't write enough. I write a troubling amount because I'm trying to write scripts. I'm trying to write jokes for the TV show I work on.

I'm trying to be in a relationship. I'm trying to stay in shape. I'm trying to come up with new things. I dabble in writing, writing, and things like that. All those things are not jokes. That's a whole day. That's many days of work yeah i've already described and you're kind of exhausting your creative juices basically so it's tough to be like okay now that's done let me be creative on this thing like it's you got to be a fucking factory all day i don't know how some of those people that have like 10 fucking things going at the same time where you hear

somebody who's like you got a great new hour they're working on their new pilot they're gonna act in this movie yeah I'm like how what the fuck that as we wrap up here can we talk about sobriety for a bit sure so where so I listened to your interview with Pete Holmes and you're kind of just saying that your parents just kind of let you just kind of do whatever, like they had trouble. Like you'd be like, well, I'm going to smoke pot. And I'm like, don't?

And you're like, nah, I'm going to. Yeah, I mean, I think they were not good at disciplining me, but they were also checked out and kind of like my dad and mom got divorced when I was five, and my dad always lived in the suburbs and then at around age 10 he moved all the way across the country gotcha and so i had this mom who is basically a manic depressive worked 60 hours a week and also is like pretty liberal yeah you know on top of that yeah so she would tell me stuff not to do all the time but i didn't give what the fuck is she gonna do right right she's a 40 something year old lady who's like you know like yeah can't get her own shit together she can't

stop me i don't know if i think is that yeah my parents got divorced when i was five my mom's bipolar and uh yeah and it was the same thing although my dad i lived close but when i was with my mom as the same thing it's just like okay i'm like i'm seven i'm obviously in charge of this yeah i'm obviously gonna make decisions on my own at this point things are happening for me but i mean when i was 18 i got accepted to a couple decent schools like good state schools i wasn't in any harvards or stanfords yeah and i said no i'm not gonna go to school i want to move to lake tahoe and be a professional skier i didn't have i mean i was a really good skier but nobody was like saying like this this kid's it i wasn't getting paid

to do it i wasn't competing actively and um my parents were like okay like yeah and i they had done something like if they said if i went to school they would pay my rent or something like that so i like enlisted in night classes and i went to school down there and they paid way way too much money i made them pay like everything for everything and uh you know that was such a rich kid excuse um and uh now my sponsor's calling me do you want want to take a break? No, it's fine. I'm sure five minutes will be fine. But I was just worried for a second that maybe my sponsor had heard the conversation for a second. I was like yeah um no but um the uh they just let me do whatever they want like my my parents should have fucking told me fuck off you're going to college like that is i think you have a responsibility like they say with like uh with like dogs you know like it's like you're actually doing them a disservice not to train them

yeah because they're like structure yeah because they're like freak the fuck out they don't know what they do and i think my parents did me a disservice in that way where they were like just like and honestly all this stuff is like such a fucking like white kid problem my parents did me a disservice of not like pushing me in the right directions they gave me everything i ever wanted so i don't besmirch them for that but like i kind of just grew up without rules you know i went to my first grave old dead concert when i was like 12 i got high yeah it's 12 years old but by myself i mean i was like a friend but there was no parents telling me not to like smoke weed or like see the shit i saw there was giving a 12 year old weed though

fucking stoner hippie yeah man it's hilarious it's like it was great yeah i walked up to them and i was like do you have any weed i was wearing soccer shorts and nothing else that's all i had on and they were like this is crazy it's the coolest yeah he's gonna be the coolest guy i had this teacher in high school who said that she had known about me before we'd ever met because when i was like in eighth grade she taught at a middle school and i would show up at recess at their middle school and just kind of like hang out say what's up to my friends and she thought i was like the fawns she just was like who's this like 13 year old kid that just like like just like does lunch with his friends and then goes and fucks off in the world and that kind of like it wasn't as romantic as

that it was like i was suspended from school and I lived close to those kids school. Right. But it was like there wasn't a lot of guidance. I mean, I honestly think like I have a new joke about this. But so don't think I'm trying to like panel you guys here. But like I think I should have been in the army. I think I should have been like if I could go back and like beat the shit out of 16 year old me, I would do that in a second. I would shake the shit out of 16 year old Andy i would i would do that in a second i would shake the shit out of 16 year old it's the weirdest time travel yeah because yourself up i would i would because it was just like i had no fucking structure and sure i would have gone to a rock but like

i also wouldn't have like if i would have gone to a rock i probably wouldn't have like fucking like had to clean like the fucking oil trap at a hippie Mexican stand. Just the shit that I saw. Right. It's just the fucking awful things I did. I probably wouldn't have done mushrooms in Calgary. Just awful. I'm not thinking of the actual funny examples

of things that happened. It's hilarious for you to say the shit that I saw in that Mexican restaurant. Man, if I had only been in Iraq, I'd tell you what. Then my memories would be clear i mean you know like i think i'm obviously like hyperbolizing i don't like i know of course i know but i think i did a bunch of shit that i didn't need to do and i don't think that i was better off because i didn't do other things yeah

yeah you would just need a guy screaming at you to get your shit together yeah and have some like okay you wake up at six then you eat then you do this and it took like basically being like like getting a divorce feeling pathetic fucking up at my job realizing that my career was kind of stagnating yeah and being like oh fuck man like i've been fucking off for fucking 10 years jesus and like i was fucking off the 10 years prior to that but i didn't have a career in mind right you know right and uh it's just um i mean i guess that's life but like you know like in an outlier sense when we go back to that it's like those are the people that had the opportunity so it's kind of out of my control but if you have the opportunity to have

somebody in your life who's like hey maybe you shouldn't do that yeah you should try to go to school or hey maybe you should like take a class or maybe hey you should yeah not like honestly i didn't i wanted to quit spot the smoking pot but i really didn't decide to quit smoking pot until i was hanging out at the store and things were going just fine and i didn't really see what the big deal was you know like divorce jobs not being great um and i was talking to gerard carmichael and he said you smoke weed every day and i was like yeah like all day and he was like dude you shouldn't do that and then like walked away and we're not like friends because he thinks i'm like a fucking stoner you know like like me and that guy aren't close, but it was just like being like, oh, yeah, I shouldn't fucking be doing this.

This isn't a good look. I'm not like Doug Benson where I can like market this. You're not the weed guy. I don't want to be the weed guy, and I am the weed guy, you know? Yeah. It's on your cover of your album. It is.

It is true. The Greatest Hits. I don't push that album very hard. Is it because of the cover? No, it's because of where your album it is it is true the greatest hits i don't uh push that album very hard that was is it because of the cover no it's because of where i was at in my life and kind of like i think there's some great jokes on yeah yeah still some jokes that i tell when i have to do an hour i think it's a good album dude yeah i thought so too yeah it's fine yeah but it's just like not where i'm at as a person now you know i have like a lot more kind of uh in in mind you know right right so so for stuff to plug at the end

don't get the album if you come across you can get it it's on spotify if you have apple itunes uh music fucking listen to it yeah i never made physical copies i don't see any money from it so just you know listen to it however you can yeah i think there's some good stuff on that but you know buy the next one pay to come see me live yeah when uh when are you doing your next one you know i probably have two-thirds of a new hour and that's probably like i probably say i'll record something within the next year but like probably around a year from now nice yeah cool man well uh is there anything else you want to plug um man, what are the dates I got? I don't, you know, honestly,

whatever, like come, if you see that I'm on your calendar, like, or if you are a Twitter follower right now, I'm just like, kind of like looking towards what's that next thing is. And it'll probably be an hour at some point. It'll probably be working on things I like. It'll probably be doing lots of live comedy. So if you that or if you know like if you listen to me and you're

in an area where i'm not coming tell me about it and i'd love to come do stand up there cool man well uh thank you for doing the podcast i'm glad you're sober and doing well man yeah it's great i like stone faced i'm having a great time i'm having a great time no it's my life is great i just have a tendency to complain about things. It's only natural. White men, you know. That's what happens. It's the worst, right?

When are we going to get over it? Everybody complains. It just sounds bad when white males complain. Yeah, because it's just like, I mean, like I flew out here. I got to do comedy at this show, which is awesome. I love doing comedy in D.C. I get to do show here which is like my favorite kind of setting i'm gonna make some money and then i'm going to go to the seahawks

game tomorrow oh nice with my dad it's like like i have a girl back in la like what the fuck could i complain about yeah nothing i've literally zero to complain start over again on the podcast you can hear all the complaints. And then I just start talking about it. Go back to the beginning of the podcast. You'll hear the complaints. They're all there. So don't complain.

That's what I'd say to plug. Okay, good. Meditate. Sean, what would you like to plug? I would say check out UndergroundComedyDC.com. That's what I figured. If you're in DC, there's shows every night. And yeah, that's it. Hell Fear in DC their shows every night and yeah

that's it hell yeah well yeah you run Great Rooms you're just in the Washington Post as well yeah

you're Empire so yeah you're Empire dude you're the TV show Empire you are Empire I've never seen that show I haven't either

oh I don't know how to act I'll watch it so I know how to act I need cues you have to start being real like cutthroat with people i

think you got to start like slapping people i can do that i'm mean inside making allegiances you're good oh i do them i do make allegiances and you just got to crush somebody you gotta do something i'm in the process of crushing someone you got to do something where you like this would be the most empiry thing i think was like you have a beef with somebody okay i already have that you you let's they're bugging you about doing your show. I'm sure there's somebody that annoys you about that. Okay. That's a different person.

You let them come on to the show in circumstances where you know they will fail. Sure. That's like some real Empire shit. Like, yeah, come and do the show. And then, boom, they bomb. Underground comedy, bitch. I could do that. I could do that for sure.

Yeah. That's no problem. That's easy. That's some Empire shit. Yeah. You have that in you. I'm going to do a lot more of that stuff. Yeah. For sure. that's no problem that's easy that's some empire yeah you have that in you i'm gonna do a lot more of that stuff yeah for sure i'm trying to get a little bit more powerful like so just to a little bit more leeway to do whatever and then the more powerful

i get the more i'll fuck with people that's my that's the way i do things just like take those names and then you kick those asses later yeah i start off as the nicest guy yeah but gradually i get meaner yeah i think you're a nice guy people still i'm still in the nice guy later yeah i start off as the nicest guy yeah but gradually i get meaner i think you're a nice guy people still i'm still in the nice guy phase yeah i think depending on who you are i can see a simmering yeah yeah yeah oh there's tons of it people get freaked out it's very deep texting you the other day and they're like i think he's mad i'm like you just wrote cool and i was like what it's fine it's fine like but he didn't put an exclamation point i was like it's okay it's all right i like to do But he didn't put an exclamation point. I was like, it's okay. It's all right.

I like to do ambiguous texts. That's one of my favorite things. I like to not respond to texts, not respond to emails. It's the best. It's so much power in a non-responder. It's real good. Yeah. Is he mad at me?

What did I do? Yeah. So thank you guys for doing the podcast. Check out digressionsessions.com. We're on iTunes and Stitcher and all that stuff. Thank you for listening. Andy, thank you. Sean, thank you.

Thanks. Thanks. Bye. Bye-bye. Digression Sessions coming to an end. Thank you. Oh, yeah.