Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1158 - Chuck Palahniuk
Uploaded: 2018-08-23T03:06:58.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1158 - Chuck Palahniuk' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-08-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1158 - Chuck Palahniuk' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-08-23. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1158 - Chuck Palahniuk

four three two one and we're live how are you Chuck I am great look at this
place thanks for
being here man appreciate it thank you I've read your books I've watched movies
based on your book
so it's very cool to meet you in real life and it's always a disappointment it
is always so
heartbreaking because people expect somebody somebody so not me and I am
constantly breaking
their heart when they meet me well I expect you so you're not breaking my heart
at all I'm very
pleased to meet you so I didn't have any weirdo expectations or delusions of
who you are and don't
just just don't don't kill yourself okay I mean Anthony Bourdain and he kills
himself well I think
there's a lot of other factors involved there I know I don't know I see this so
many of my peers
it's like the moment I meet them boom they're gone um yeah I'm I'm not gonna do
that okay so don't
worry everything's fine um listen I want to talk to you about a bunch of things
first of all I'd love to
talk to you about your writing process because one of the one of the things I
read once is uh I believe
you were writing down it was on the Cape it was in Massachusetts were you ever
writing down there
would you were you ever writing somewhere where you made a deal with yourself
where you wouldn't turn
the heat on unless you were writing oh my gosh you think I'm a white person don't
you that is so weird
the Cape the Cape you never been to the Cape Cod that's like in is that all
white people that's in
England New England yes no I never read anything like that about you no I'm
sorry never been on on the Cape you never
been to Cape Cod never had a person she's wonderful what's wrong with clams no
no no it's just something
maybe something I attributed to you for many many years but it's just an
interesting story that someone
said that they were forcing themselves to be disciplined writing and so they
wouldn't write
unless they had the heat on and so they they lived in this place uh over the
winter god wasn't you it's
so embarrassing you were talking about Michael Cunningham is that who was yeah
because he uh yeah I think
that's his story about living in Provincetown might have been this all up what
a terrible way to get
going um but one thing I wanted to talk to you being much lately no I don't any
at all I just sleep
I'm fortunate in that regard all right you don't take that do you of course I
do
do you yeah three times a day oh you're with me we got we got started off
poorly
once a day do you really take Ambien yeah you know to tell the truth just
before I want to
do anything I don't want to do it's like a elves and the shoemaker thing is I
don't want to do my taxes
so I take Ambien and then I wake up and my taxes are done oh and do you have
plausible
deniability too if you can get videotape you take an Ambien people have
committed murder on Ambien
and gotten off because they had no memory that is true yeah it's uh hypnotic we
actually did a
pretty in-depth discussion about that after the Roseanne Barr thing came out
because my own mom
uh has taken it and she stopped taking it but one of the reasons why she
stopped taking it because she
woke up in the middle of the night and she had a white bathroom mat and she
painted it with lipstick and
makeup she had no recollection of it whatsoever but she painted it like a two-year-old
would
if they got to hold their mom's lipstick and she just woke up and what the am i
doing like what is
this hey she got off easy i've heard more stories 100 war stories oh yeah no i
i i have heard about
murder i've heard about people driving their car to someone's house killing
them driving home and
having no recollection of it well a young woman in london climbed to the top of
a construction crane
fell asleep on the huge counterweight so far up over london wakes up in the
morning birds around her
she has no idea where she's at she is terrified jesus christ yeah you're
writing about ambient right
now i am i can tell you're locked in ambient and a hundred other other things
so you if it's fair to
say you it seems like you're writing like one of your one of the ways you
collect data is almost like
you're reporting on these people like you're you're collecting real life
interactions between people
and real life characteristics and then you incorporate them into fiction
exactly that's fair to say my degree
is journalism i have no idea how to be with people so i need to introduce a
topic and see if it resonates
and then get everybody's take on these common experiences and then pick the
very best one so in
a way basically what i'm doing is kind of an ongoing field study that becomes
whatever my next book is
when you wrote fight club you tapped into something that it was really
fascinating for me as someone who's
been involved in martial arts my whole life and i i i i've i've understood the
cathartic release
of violence but i never saw it articulated the way you did and you made it enticing
for a thinking
person you made it like you what you did it you you sort of opened up these uh
these doors of understanding
for someone who maybe maybe had frustration or had some pent-up rage or had
some some angst that just
was not going to get out any other way and then you wrote about it and then
when you wrote you reading
what you wrote it made you go yeah okay oh all right now it's like you you
added an element to it that
really didn't exist before in pop culture it was really fascinating for me as
uh as someone who's
watching that whole thing unfurl and watching people get like really resonating
with people watching
people really getting excited about your work it's like oh he he hit some nerve
that nobody really hit
before all right and it's not a nerve that gets hit very much you know and it
there's so many different
aspects to it and one is just my classic thing is that there are so few social
model novels or stories
for men for for women there are us you know every season there's a new joy luck
club a new how to make
an american quilt a new traveling sisterhood of the yagaha pants whatever just
all these different models in
which women can come together and talk about their lives and if you're a man
you've got either fight
club or you have the dead poet society and that is really it so we don't have a
lot of narratives
that that depict to men a role or a kind of script of you know in which to come
together
and talk about their their shed another thing is jordan peterson back to jordan
peterson he talks about
that need for really rough play and he talks about it a lot and a lot of my
friends they they brag
about how badly their kids hurt them oh my gosh my daughter came at me the
other day i had no idea how
strong she was she pulled my arm out of the socket and they're proud they're
proud that their kid can
play that rough and is growing up that strong but you know we've kind of fallen
away from this idea of
consensual rough play and i think fight club resonated with that a lot and also
the idea of joseph campbell's
idea that there needs to be a secondary father in men's lives that you're born
if you're lucky with a
biological father that you do not choose and that is the the nurturing loving
father that you eventually
kind of have to reject but in doing so you have to choose a new father and that
that father by choice
typically is a a minister or a teacher or a drill sergeant or a coach one of
those fathers and you kind
of put yourself in apprenticeship to the secondary father and you have to sort
of consign your life to
the secondary father and agree to learn what they're going to teach you just
like in karate kid and that
is getting harder and harder and harder to find so fight club was also depicting
a new form of the
secondary father with all these these kids that were showing up on the doorstep
of this ramshackle old
house so there were just so many aspects of men's lives that were not being
addressed when fight club came out
and it sort of reinvented so many of those things that had fallen by the wayside
that's a huge part of martial
arts a huge part of martial arts is your relationship with the master with the
coach
with finding someone who can guide you through the the most dangerous waters of
competition that it's
it's absolutely imperative that bad relationships with coaches are absolutely
disastrous and it's it's
imperative that someone find the right coach find someone who they they really
can trust and appreciate
and you do develop it's a such a common theme they talk about this person being
like a son or this
person being like a father you know i mean it's um it's i i i never thought
about it that way i i forgot
about that part of joseph campbell but yeah that that is a huge huge issue with
with young men and um young
men getting into martial arts is something that i've talked about so many times
i i don't discuss it as
the need for rough play i say there's human reward systems that are just not
being uh they're not being
met and that systems that have been in place for thousands and thousands of
years that are designed to
reward us for fighting off the enemy running away from danger developing
physical skills and having a body
that's capable of of not just uh physical activity but violence well and and
beyond just that you know
it's also the whole idea of apprenticeship you know whether you're apprenticing
yourself to a
fighting coach or to a metallurgist or to a welder or to a bricklayer or to a mason
you are apprenticing
yourself to somebody that you're going to do all this grunt work for but in
exchange you're going to you're
going to learn a kind of really master skill at something and so it's a way of
mastering yourself
as you master this other thing so you know it it's not just always a physical
you know fighting
thing it doesn't have to be in that form just difficult something that's a
struggle something
that's hard to to learn right yeah and that relationship that you have with
that secondary
father too that it's almost in in some ways more intense the the the pride of
someone teaching you
something and then you eventually developing those skills and then this person
who is teaching you
this being proud of your work is extremely satisfactory well and do you
remember officer and a gentleman yeah
you know richard gear really has this drunken this not their dad and then he
has this drill sergeant
who's constantly trying to wash him out and then finally he reaches that the
existential crisis of
saying you can't throw me out of the service because i have no nothing else i
have nowhere else to go in
the world my life will amount to nothing unless i can master this thing and he's
a relatively young man
but it is that existentialistic moment where you you realize that you have to
sacrifice your youth for
something you're not going to live forever it's a very martin heidegger moment
where you realize you
have to become a being living towards death you're not going to live forever
and you've got to give your
life to something now when you approach a novel like that when you have a story
like that that's brewing
your head how do you decide what to pull the trigger on like do you just go on
instinct did you just have
a concept in your head and it just seems more and more attractive and you just
say okay this is it
you know one really good test is if you can take it to a party and you can tell
a very small part of
it as much of it as you know at that point and people will vie for a chance to
relate some aspect of
their life that is very much like that but an even more extreme example of that
so in a way they're
they're fleshing out your theme with parts of their own lives and so you find
yourself drawing from the
experience of dozens or hundreds or thousands of people and at the same time
you're beta testing it
you're kind of taking it on the road and you're seeing that it's an idea that
resonates with a huge
number of people that everyone can relate to it hmm that's interesting so do
you purposel