Name: Joe Rogan Experience #848 - Bryan Callen
Uploaded: 2016-09-20T23:50:57.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #848 - Bryan Callen' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-09-20. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #848 - Bryan Callen' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-09-20. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #848 - Bryan Callen

Two, one, Brian Callen, terrorist survivor.
And I'm wearing a sky blue shirt, please.
If I call you a terrorist survivor, how much hate do you think I'll get?
It seems like a nice green light for people to get upset for no reason.
Well, you know, I think that everybody wants to be, if you've not been affected
by it,
but you were there, you want somehow credit.
Like I found myself, I was 800 feet exactly away from the blast.
Because I was at the Gotham Comedy Club, 208, I think West 23rd, and the bomb
was at 133.
It's hard for me to think of how big 800 feet is.
It's a half a block.
Half a block.
If you look at on your Google Maps, it's a half a block.
So you were about to go on stage.
I was about to go on stage, and I was with Jimmy Burke, the national treasure
that is Jimmy Burke.
I love Jimmy Burke.
Of course you do. Who doesn't?
And we were talking in front of the club.
So I was literally right behind the front door.
And in the Gotham Comedy Club, you have to walk all the way down and go into
the room.
So probably about 25 yards.
So I'm literally on the street, but with the door in front of us, and we just
hear,
ba-boom!
And that sickening sound where you know it's a bomb.
You know it's not a manhole cover.
You know what I mean?
You just know.
It's just too loud.
I don't think I've ever heard a bomb.
It's horrifying.
And it was 800 feet away.
You heard a bomb before that?
Well, you did when you were a kid, right?
I did because I lived in Lebanon.
Right.
Right.
So I had, in fact, I remember going back to Lebanon.
I can't remember the year, but they shot a missile.
It was a test fire, a missile over our head on the beach.
I will never forget this.
It was so loud that we fell down on the ground.
We were on the beach.
It was so loud.
And I don't know if that was because it was shot over our heads in the sonic
boom,
but we fell down and it was either a shell or something, but I remember, and
you don't
see it though.
You don't see the, you know, the shell.
Because it's going so fast.
Yes.
But what you do is you hear this insanely loud noise.
And I remember looking around and everybody fell down and I fell down.
I, you know, you, you know how, um, it's not even like a fall down.
You are, it's like you lose your balance and you're, you're reaching for
something to hold
onto, but then you, you go down to your hands and knees.
It was a really strange thing.
So, um, and I, I remember being a kid in Lebanon and seeing, uh, uh, planes
bomb a gas
station from the balcony.
And then we had to go downstairs and sleep in the, in the garage.
But, um, so you, I, I heard loud noises as a kid, very loud noises, but this,
it doesn't
matter.
It doesn't matter.
I'm not a seasoned terrorism expert here.
Uh, you know, uh, experiencer and I don't think anybody is.
And it certainly wasn't, think about this.
This was a pressure cooker.
This was not a car bomb and that was 800 feet away, which is how many football
fields?
Well, explain, cause it was the same sort of bomb they used in the Boston
marathon bombings
a few years ago.
Right.
Same kind of thing.
And I believe it was hooked up to a cell phone.
Yeah.
I believe that's how it was activated through a cell phone.
Yeah.
And when that thing went off, you just knew it was a bomb.
And the crazy thing, the sickening thing was before that, they said, you got
four minutes.
He's coming off in four minutes.
And I, I ended up, we were in the front there and Jimmy and I were talking and
I said, no
problem.
And this bomb goes off.
And I said to Jimmy, I go, that was a bomb.
And he goes, yes, it was.
And we go outside and I see smoke and it's quiet, you know, because there's
this pause before
the storm sort of, and it just, I saw smoke and then you could smell this sort
of, um,
like a burning thing.
You know, it smelled like smoke, um, quickly.
And then you, then instead of people running toward you and screaming, they
were jogging
New Yorkers, like, ah, the fuck man, come on.
That's right.
You know, and they were jogging.
So your instinct is to go toward the blast, you know, to make sure everybody's
okay.
But the sick thing is, is that what your instinct does?
Yeah, for me, because I thought there's no way people aren't injured or killed.
It's horrifying.
I got to be on stage, but you know, this is obviously all encompassing.
Did you have any new material you're working on that you really had to get out
of the way?
I did, and that's why I had to let them fend for themselves.
I had to fend for themselves.
It's all in the name of art.
Don't worry about it, folks.
It's just a bomb.
Guys, guys.
Hey, good to be here.
Good to be here tonight.
Where are you from, sir?
You look like Jersey.
Well, what was really bizarre was that we were running toward it.
I said, Jim, we got to go back inside, because I was afraid it was another mom.
Right.
Because in Lebanon, they used to always set off an explosion.
The old trick was to have people run toward another explosion, right?
I know that from, you know, and my mother used to always say, be careful of
that.
That's a terrible piece of information to carry around your head when you're a
child.
It's also important.
I know.
It's horrifying.
It's horrifying because it's so maniacal, because they're trying to injure
people.
And that's an old technique, right?
So you create a small explosion, get people to run toward the bigger explosion.
There's just something incredibly fucked up about people's ability to just
attack and kill
random people that they don't know.
Well, that would be terrorism.
To plan that out.
The terrorism is the idea is to spread fear and get people to behave
differently.
You're not going to win the war with big bombs, but you can get people to
change their routine,
their life, and the way they think.
And even, like I told you, when I was in the Chelsea market five hours before
that, it
was so crowded.
And it was so, I just, great food.
People were at a spice market and clothing and just beautiful people.
And I thought to myself, I'm going to get out of here because this feels like
the place
that I would bomb if I was a terrorist.
And it was just a premonition.
I'm sure a lot of people feel that way.
My thinking is different because of the world we live in.
So they've changed the way, my inner geography, they've changed the way I
behave, the way I
think, regardless of whether I want to admit that or not, I've found myself to
be nervous
in that space.
Do you think that you would have had that same feeling anyway if no bomb went
off?
Or do you really think that that was a premonition?
No.
Is it one of those things where you sort of connect a feeling like, I mean, I
kind of-
It's not a premonition.
I don't believe in premonitions.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe I do if you can read signals and stuff, but that wasn't the case
for me.
I just have an active imagination.
My take on that kind of stuff is maybe.
Hmm.
You know, it's right.
I don't want to say I don't know because there's not a goddamn way to measure
it.
There's no-
But there are weird moments where people have weird thoughts.
So I'm just wondering if you really-
Yes.
Well, the answer is there are two books that were-
This has been studied.
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
He won a Nobel Prize for economics and behavioral economics.
And then in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, there are-
And for that matter, Josh Wayskin's book, The Art of Learning, all three great
books that
I recommend to everybody because there are signals a human being and soldiers
talk about
this when they've experienced a lot of IEDs.
They get very good, when their life depends on it, at reading signals, the
stillness in
the air, behavior that they can't explain, but why are those people acting a
little bit
differently?
Why are the women not out?
Why are the women not out?
Why can't I see any women out?
Why is it just men?
Why are the windows being shut right now?
They pick up on all these little signals.
And in Blink and in Thinking Fast and Slow, there are things we pick up on very
quickly.
We just have pattern recognition.
There are other things that take a long time to think about, right?
So a math problem like 48 times 36 would take a long time.
It's a slow process.
And you can't do a lot else when you're doing that.
But you can recognize if somebody's running at you, screaming with their eyes
open and their
hands up, that they're probably going to do something physical to you or
something.
We register these things very quickly.
The same goes for, you know, any kind of situation, probably when something's
about to happen,
there may be a change in behavior.
There may be, this doesn't look right.
Why does that road, why is that bump in that road?
That wasn't there last time.
Those kinds of things that soldiers talk about.
So for me, I think this was just simply the idea that I was closed in.
Everything was really great.
And I felt like I have coffee running to my body.
I'm on a caffeine high.
I did my yoga.
I feel good.
This is too good to be true.
I'm going to turn around in case a bomb goes off and blows my head off.
That's more just paranoia.
But in this case, after the bomb, I ran and I said to Jimmy, I said, come back
inside.
Come back inside.
There could be a second bomb.
And he said, yeah, you're right.
And so we ran back inside.
And they go, you're on.
And now I go, but there was a bomb.
And they go, what?
And I said, a bomb went off.
And they go, you know, full house, sold out house.
So I run on stage.
And the real worry was my cousins were coming to see the show.
And I thought that they were, you know, right there.
So that's what I, so I had to kind of get myself together and do stand-up.
And my heart was beating fast.
But it was more depression.
It was less fear than more depression at the world we live in, that sound.
So I did stand-up.
And then halfway through, or three quarters of the way through, an off-duty cop
who works
there, walked on stage, because he stopped the, the, the soldiers that came in
with the machine
guns.
He said, let me get them off stage.
Don't, don't raid the comedy club, please.
How bizarre.
Yeah.
So he walks on, literally walks on.
And I turned and I went, oh no.
I just said, oh no, because I was confirmed.
I knew something was bad, you know.
And he said, he took the mic out of my hand.
He said, sorry folks, we have to get you out of here.
Whoa.
And then we left.
It was, it was just depressing, man.
Wow.
I'm not a terrorism survivor, but I witnessed something.
What did that feel like going on stage right after you knew that a bomb went
off, 800 feet
away?
You know, I asked Jimmy, who was there, I said, did it seem like I was nervous?
He said, nope, you just went right into pro mode.
You know, I've been doing it so long.
And I, and I, it was a full house.
And I just said, you got to get it together.
Wow.
Go through.
I think, I think anybody who's been doing stand-up the way, as long as I have,
or you
have, you know, we'd figure our way through.
You know, I probably was speaking faster.
I could feel my heart beating.
But I was also just, it's terrifying, man.
When you, when, when, when it's that real, you know, when, when, when you think
about
the fact that people are walking through their lives.
Life is hard, right?
Like, just accomplishing shit, keeping yourself on the straight and narrow, flossing,
fucking
working out, going for your dreams.
I heard you don't have to floss anymore.
Feels like a study.
Oh, I heard about that.
Yeah, this is, flossing's bullshit.
Good, because I use a toothpick, because I'm a man.
Good for you.
And then, and then something, the random can happen, and all those plants go
out the fucking
window.
Yeah, that's the strangest aspect of it, isn't it?
The randomness of it.
But all of a sudden, these moments, unexpected, are introduced into the world,
and they change
everything.
Yeah.
You know, and we only see our, our side of it.
Obviously, this is happening all over the world to varying degrees.
We're just so insulat