Joe Rogan - Chuck Palahniuk on the Impact of Fight Club

So you if it's fair to say you it seems like you're writing like one of the you're one of the ways you collect data It's 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'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 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 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 we don't know what he really hit before 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 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 Yaga ha 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 a fight club or you have the dead poet society And that is really it so we don't have a lot of narratives that Depict to men a role or a kind of script of you know in which to come together and talk about 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 there 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 it typically is 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 gonna teach you Just like a karate kid. Mmm, 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 bad relationships with coaches are absolutely disastrous and It's it's imperative that someone find the right coach find someone who 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 it's I never thought about it that way I forgot about that part of Joseph Campbell, but yeah, that is a huge huge issue with with young men and Young men getting into martial arts is something that I've talked about so many times I don't discuss it as the need for rough play I say there's human reward systems that are just not being Did 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 Not just Physical activity but violence well 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 gonna do all this grunt work for but in exchange You're gonna you're gonna learn that kind of really master skill at something. Mmm, and so It's a way of mastering yourself as you master this other thing. So You know, 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 learn, right? Yeah, and that relationship that you have with that secondary father to that It's almost in in some ways more intense 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 Gere really has this drunken Yes, not their dad and then he has this drill sergeant who's constantly trying to wash him out and then finally he reaches it at 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 gonna live forever. It's a very Martin Heidegger moment where you realize you have to become a being living towards death You're not gonna 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 Vy 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 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 your 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 purposely like go to parties with like a couple like bullets in the chamber? Sometimes or sometimes they just go to the party and I listen to hear somebody tell that that personal anecdote that does evoke all those other anecdotes Because a great anecdote doesn't leave people speechless it leaves them competing to tell a better version of the same thing and That's when a real writer just starts realizing. Okay, there's a pattern and that can be turned into something really big That's really interesting. There's a parallel there with comedy for sure