The Joe Graham Hancock rogan experience it’s harming fiction and harming literature you can’t explore the darker ideas you know oh you want to see me crucify myself right now yeah okay this is gonna be a career-ending moment for several years I was in a writer’s workshop and the core group of us had been meeting since 1990 so this is a workshop that was almost 30 years old and gradually people were asking each other not to use certain words first you know and nobody really used the n-word but it was definitely a word you could not bring to workshop and then in a story I used the word faggot and a very good friend of mine said you’re not bringing that word into workshop you’re not writing anything with the f-word and it just became and more tightly structured that way and so eventually I realized we were kind of writing to make each other happy instead of to kind of confront each other and one of the writers in our workshop is a writer named Cheryl Strayed who had written a book called Wilde which was a hugely successful book it was chosen as an Oprah book and it will be on bookstore shelves for the rest of history Cheryl’s book wild but while she was writing it she had written a segment about how as a child she would be sat on the sofa with her grandfather and her grandfather taught her how to masturbate him and so as a child she would masturbate her grandfather until he achieved orgasm and then later she would find these feather lists featherless birds that are falling out of a nest and she picked one up and she knew it would die so she crushed it between her bare hands this is a very small child and she wrote how as that bird died crushed between her hands it its death throes its spasms of death felt exactly like her grandfather’s penis ejaculating in her little hand that was the best thing she ever wrote and her editor at Knopf said that is not going in this book because we want this book to be a big book and if we see you jerking off your grandfather and then killing baby birds that is not gonna make Oprah Winfrey happy so it was a magnificent piece of writing and a magnificent kind of parallel an awareness for a child to have and that’s juxtaposition of sexual abuse and death was magnificent oh my god it worked on every level but the publisher said this is not gonna be in the book did she send it to you or did she show it to you she brought it to workshop and she read it was even a newspaper reporter present there and we all realized it was fantastically powerful but then she said they won’t take this can’t go in this is not the first workshop I’ve been bumped out of the first workshop I in was very a lot of very nice ladies and I was probably 28 and I had written a scene in which man a young man has done up an inflatable sex doll so it looks exactly like the woman he’s obsessed with and during the seduction of this sex doll he accidentally snags the back of it with a zipper of its dress and he realizes during the fornication that it is gradually losing air so he’s got to copulate and faster try to achieve orgasm before this thing completely goes flat and at the end of the scene he’s standing there with this completely deflated sex doll hanging off of his erection like this the surrender flag and of course his mother walks into the room and after I wrote that scene the leader of the workshop I was in my first workshop she took me aside afterwards and she said the other writers in the workshop no longer feel safe around you she really did she said you’ve written something that really frightens them and they would like you to politely leave the workshop and not come back Wow and so that’s when I started with Tom’s fan bars workshop in which almost anything went that seems to be if anybody’s gonna appreciate that it’s gonna be creative writers but it’s not my mind I’m delving into the deep recesses if I’m lucky if I’m doing it right of your mind something that they’ll like comedians and they’ll say oh my gosh that happened to you too and a lot of times there are things that people have never ever talked about I tell a classic anecdote after I had read the gut story at an event a woman came up and she was a middle aged woman she was about my age and she said I really loved that you read that story about how you got your anus prolapsed while masturbating in a swimming pool which is not my story but I’m the one that read it so that’s the one I’m the one that they’re picturing in this horrendous situation and she says since you can tell that story I’m gonna tell you a story and she said how when she was seven years old she was in second grade and she was in a little organization called the brownies which is the precursor to the Girl Scouts you wear a brown dress little brown hat you get these little merit badges and she said one day I had a stomachache and my mom kept me home from school and we had this heating pad it must have been in the 1960s and this heating pad had this vibrating function and she put me facedown on this heating pad on my stomach and I fell asleep and while I was asleep this vibrating warm Heat had must have slid down between my legs she says because I woke up with the most amazing a feeling like I’d never felt before oh my god it felt so good and so next time it was my turn to host the brownies I said brownies you’ve got to try this heating pad and she says all the brownies they turn the heating pad on the vibrating heating pad and they rode it like a pony all afternoon and she said it was like Sex in the City for 7 year old girls they could not get enough of this heating pad and they were all riding this heating pad and they had a great time and she said and for the Home Buyer first time in my life I was the most popular girl in my class and I was the girl that all the girls wanted to play with and for every Brownie troop meeting it was at my house and I was the leader until the day that my mother came home from work early and she caught us with a heating pad and she sent the other brownies home and she whipped the cord out of the wall she just ripped it out of the socket and she started to beat me and she beat me with that cord and she beat me and she said you piece of shit you dirty whore what kind of a whore am I raising you whore and she beat me and she beat me and she says this woman who’s my age now she says I have not had an orgasm since I was seven years old and then she goes but if you can tell that swimming-pool story about how you got hurt jacking off underwater she says I can tell my heating pad story and I can tell that story until I can make it funny and then maybe someday I can go back to my mom and I can say do you remember that heating pad we used to have and it’ll be complete oh shit and so si that’s what I’m trying to I’m trying to create the opening for people to tell these stories that they never thought that they could tell because that’s the way in which they’re gonna resolve these stories and they’re gonna master these stories how many of you if someone’s telling a joke of someone’s onstage talking about someone who’s fat and there’s a fat person in the front row that joke will bomb yeah it’s just yeah but that’s because people are good people overall you know they were recognized that they don’t want to cause pain another really odd comic Santaland Diaries david sedaris story is he always told me when you’re on the road don’t read from your current book always read from the Release Date next book piece it’s the way of road testing the stories and finding out which ones work and should go into the Rr Martin next book and in doing so he was telling this story about being in this forensic laboratory and as an autopsy was taking place and this Travis Alexander autopsy table was adjacent to this huge indoor window that separated the autopsy suite from this Ann Arbor lunch room and then the Country Market lunch room were the rest of the forensic staff they’re all eating their lunches they all had tuna sandwiches and cans of coke and barbecued potato chips and they were watching through the window as this absolutely perfect twelve-year-old boy was being autopsy and just hours before this kid like two hours before this kid had been riding his bicycle he’d fallen over he’d hit his head on the curb and now two hours later he was and dead without almost a scratch on him just this perfect naked dead twelve-year-old boy on the Thermo Shandon autopsy table and as he the technicians eating their lunch watching it through a window the daywatch as the pathologist in sizes around the top of the kids face at the top of forehead the hairline and then peels the face down like peeling an orange peels the entire face off of the skull of this little boy and leaves around the neck like a mask like a rubber mask and exposes this liver colored dark red musculature of the child’s underlying face and this one guy watching it with a mouthful of tuna sandwich he points this out and he says see that dere that’s the color of red that I want to paint our rec room holy shit and when Sedaris told that story in front of 600 people it was dead silent and you could hear weeping people were crying and they were hating New Yorker david sedaris in that moment and so I had to laugh I laughed really loud like a dog and it was amazing how the hatred in that auditorium swung from hating David who they did not want hate to hating this jackass over here who was actually laughing and so I threw myself on the sword for David and that story never went in any book Wow did the story not go in any book just because the reaction by the audience or just the uncomfortable moment he just decided he’s peaked him about it no I did not afterwards it was just such an awkward painful thing I would never had to throw it back in his face right to my knowledge that was the only time the story was told to have those like scattered about are there these are their scenes what you wrote and you just sat and looked at him and went no I just got to put that one somewhere else oh there that aside jokes that I told where I got hissed by 800 people and you know and you can live through those moments realize you can live through a lot you can be hated by 1,100 people at a Barnes & Noble on Union Square oh yeah you can be hated by your mother it’s okay now when those people come to see you how many those people are fans of literature and how many of those people are specifically fans of your work like there’s there would be a difference like the people or fans of your work would at least expect some uncomfortable moments and for the most part that tend to be more or less just my work hmm and still hiss oh yeah but it’s again there hissing on behalf of someone deny hissing up for themselves you know I made this horrible Cold Steel cheap shot and they always know a Mississippi State cheap shot people always know a Carmelo Anthony cheap shot uh I was commenting about how in Breakfast at Tiffany’s Truman Capote had made this observation that Americans don’t like beauty true classical natural beauty they want to see a very plain person who has been groomed exercised so made up so style stylized that she can kind of pass as this amazing strange beauty that’s what Americans want because natural classic beauty is not a gala terian you’re either born with it or you’re not hmm they want to see a plain person who has been transformed and to make my point at the end of the story I made a Floyd Mayweather cheap shot I said and that’s why we have Sarah Lovely Sarah jessica parker and I said this in New York in New York Sarah Matthew Broderick jessica parker is worshipped like a God and that whole crowd hissed booed and did everything but throw excrement at me Wow but then later in line half of them came up and whispered that was really funny another thing is I’m really conflicted about the nature of my creativity this idea that in journalism school they call the theory seduced and betray that when you go into an interview situation your goal is to gain the trust of that person and to get them to reveal something very intimate that you’re gonna betray by revealing to the public so you just you’re basically going in there to charm them and then to hurt them and so much of my creative process is that way because for example the guts story mm-hmm the-the-the story in which the guy puts the carrot up his butt that was my best friend at the time in like late 20s and he got fantastically drunk and he told me that Coffee Egg carrot story and I honestly believe he had never told anybody the Coffee Bean carrot story and I kept that story in my mind for you know 10 15 almost probably 20 years until I found a way to put it with three similar stories and make a larger piece out of it and the Home Buyers first time I read that story I hadn’t seen him in maybe a couple years this friend and I look across this big auditorium and there he is and I’m telling his Egg Coffee carrot story in front of and hundreds of people and the look on his face he’s just stricken and he hasn’t talked to me since and this is even did you use his name no then him no but what’s wrong with that people still feel betrayed and I get over it you need to hang out with more comedians if he was a comic you’d be laughing well you know American Life david sedaris has told me he said his family is very reluctant to share their lives with him anymore because he’s kind of made them involuntary public figures and they have to deal with the fallout yes from these stories about them and really only his brother and his sister Amy have kind of been able to spin this in a good way but it alienates a lot of people I had a hired car from Philadelphia to New York once on tour and as we’re going past Lawrence Ks liberty hall in Philadelphia this great guy over the Philly accent driving the car he points at Goose Creek liberty hall and he says that building has stood for you know 300 years I bet you can’t tell me why and I just looked and I said because the bricks are late in Brick Thick flemish bond I think that’s probably it where the brick bricks are offset in such a way that they bond in the center called Brick Wall flemish bond and it guys so silent nobody’s ever answered the question and his father was a bricklayer and he was so proud and he goes you’re right nobody’s ever said Half Brick flemish bond that’s why it still stands and we were best friends and just talking like crazy all the way into Manhattan weekend into Manhattan there’s two guys walking down street the guy goes oh Christ I hate coming to New York ah the fags and I said well you know I’m married to a man and faggot is pretty much my middle name sans re juggling of everything that the guy who knew 2 Brick flemish bond was also one of them and it was one of those wonderful kind of icky but necessary moments and you know they’re horrible but you know things are better afterwards you must have loved that moment though you know it was a horrible moment because I felt like I was throwing away any kind of chatty conversational relationship I had with this guy mm-hmm you seem like just assaulted the earth great funny guy and it was just kind of going out on a limb and saying okay you know he’s going to hate my guts after this.