Joe Rogan - Chuck Palahniuk on Fight Club's Most Infamous Line

It's kind of a mediocrity. You really need to fail to fall out of the limelight long enough to produce something really strong again. Totally makes sense. One of the best things that can happen to a comedian is bombing. When you bomb, that feeling is so bad. I always describe it as like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother. But the difference is that there's probably someone out there who would enjoy sucking a thousand dicks in front of their mother. But nobody enjoys bombing. So it's probably worse than that. But that feeling, whatever it is, reignites your appreciation for people's attention span, your appreciation for tightening up your delivery, your concepts, figuring out a better way to get them through. You never want to experience that again. And some of the greatest moments in my own personal journey of stand-up have come from eating shit. That's where they come from. It's great to do well. Wonderful. Feels great. But those eating shit ones, those are the ones that get you to the notebook again. Those are the ones that reinvigorate you, have you spending hours and hours in your hotel room, going over sheets of paper and checking out ideas, making sure these concepts connect together in some sort of a meaningful way, figuring out how to tighten things, cut out the fat. When you're in this situation right now and you're frantically writing now and sort of forced into this element of creativity, you're forced to be hungry again, I wouldn't wish it on you. But in a way, do you feel like it's kind of a gift? In a way, you have to accept ultimately that everything is a gift. Because it's always about what they call cognitive reframing. Cognitive reframing. Whatever happens, you reframe it in such a way that you recognize the value of it. And so, yeah, regardless of what happens, you know, before my father got murdered, he had been asking me for an introduction to a No. No. Rider in 1998. I kept on thinking, I am not going to introduce my father to a No. No. Rider because I know he's going to hit on her. And I was just going to be mortified to have my dad hitting on No. No. Rider. And he'd always talk about how pretty she was and any chance I can meet her and to tell the truth. When I got the word that my father had been murdered by white supremacists in the mountains of Idaho. One of my first thoughts was, I'm off the hook with that Winona Ryder thing. And that's cognitive reframing. And you have to do it all the time. That's glass half full right there. And I love my father, but you know, nobody, none of our relationships are completely perfect all the time. There's no way around it. Well, that's, again, the great thing about unchained writing is that you can express those ideas. And that would be my main concern about any sort of a workshop or support group or any sort of group of like-minded peers that wouldn't understand that, that would want you to limit your language. I just don't, it just doesn't compute. Yeah. And in the platonic world, yeah, everybody should kind of get it. But unless you're rustling feathers, even within a workshop, you're not going far enough. You know, I loved writing that line in Fight Club where Tyler and Marla have sex for the first time. And the most romantic thing that Marla can say is, I want to have your baby. So what is the inverse? So, of course, Marla turns to him and she says, I hope I got pregnant because I really want to have your abortion. And that's the line that the movie studio went around and around. And even Brad Pitt said, you know, my mom's going to see this movie. I don't want her to see this line. And they shot that scene with so many different substitute lines. And then finally Fincher wrote the line. And Helen Bonham Carter says, I haven't been fucked like that since grade school. And at that point, 23 Fox said, can we switch it back to the abortion line? And so unless you're always kind of pushing to kind of, you know, until you get some pushback, you don't feel like you're pushing hard enough. And so pushback is not a bad thing. It's just kind of a proof that you're doing your job. There's a trend that's happening now, though. This pushback is coming far quicker than it ever has before. There's a trend now to limit language and limit creativity and just limit the subject matter, trigger warnings and stop people from, you know, stop people from experiencing things that might be disturbing. And I could see both sides of that because on one hand, we've got a generation that has been exposed to so much sensationalistic stuff in order to attain their attention. They've really been overloaded with the most extreme versions of everything in order to get their ticket money or whatever. They've really been pounded by so much stimuli. I could see them kind of really pulling back and wanting to be monastic for the rest of their lives. And on the other hand, I see them as being, as wanting to sort of counter dominate in order to just create room enough in the world for their statement. You know, they're moving into a world that's already so occupied by attention getters that if they can shut some down, that there might be room for their own expression. So I kind of see benefit on both sides. And in a way, too, they're dominating their teachers, which is good because it's a way of exploring your own power and figuring out what you can do in the world and that you can have effect, you can have agency. So I don't think it's a totally bad thing. That's interesting. The idea that them dominating their teachers is in some way good. Well, it certainly gives you confidence and lets you understand that you can affect change, even if it's meaningless change. Did you pay attention to what happened at Evergreen State in Washington? Did you see when there's a for people don't know the story, it's the Bret Weinstein story where the students decided that there was going to be a day of absence. Traditionally, it had been where people of color stayed home just so that people could recognize the important part that they play in the culture and society. But then they had ramped it up and decided white people are going to have to stay home now. And he was like, that's racist. And the whole thing went crazy. It went haywire and the school is basically falling apart. But there was a scene that was filmed where the president of the university was in the college was in this auditorium and he was addressing these children. And they told him to stop moving his hands because it was threatening. And so he put his hands down. He put them behind his back and they all started laughing. And I was like, wow, this dumb fuck like this. This guy is running this university and he let them tell him not to move his hands gesturing as he's speaking. He's like one of the most one of the most non threatening beta people on the planet. And this guy is just giving just wants to keep his job and try to silence this mob, this angry horde of, you know, fucking kids. They're kids. But when he listens and puts his hands down, I probably watched it 10 times. They all start laughing, you know, and just I think it just demonstrates how desperately they want a stronger leader. Yeah, they don't want they don't respect that. They want to learn from somebody who is a college professor and has never really attained anything in the world. They just don't want to become another cog in that same kind of, you know, wheel. They want to learn from somebody they respect and whose achievements they respect. Right. That's probably part of the issue of universities, right? Is that these professors are so terrified of the reactions of these students, which is not the place you're supposed to be with a mentor student relationship. It's not supposed to be that way. It's not supposed to be the mentor desperately needs the student. You know, you see that sometimes in private schools with rich kids, they treat their teachers like shit. The teachers have to bite their tongue because they have to, you know, this is not it's not not it's not the normal dynamic that exists with the older wise person and the young person who's trying to learn from this person. They deeply respect. It's not that dynamic at all. It's this old person who's weak and wants to keep their job and is willing to tailor their own thoughts and ideas to this irrational mob of social justice warriors. And that's what we're seeing on campuses now, you know, professors calling for censorship and to stop freedom of expression. You know, when I was in college, my favorite professor, Roy Halberson, he was the John Houseman of the journalism school. He was this old gray eminence and nothing made him happy. You could never please this this this John Houseman paper chase guy. Nothing was good enough and nothing.