Joe Rogan Experience #1158 - Chuck Palahniuk

Joe Rogan 0:03 Four, three, two, one. (claps) And we're live. How are you, Chuck?

Chuck Palahniuk 0:09 I am great. Look at this place.

Joe Rogan 0:11 Thanks for being here, man. Appreciate it.

Chuck Palahniuk 0:13 Ha. Thank you.

Joe Rogan 0:13 I've read your books, I've, I've watched movies based on your books, so it's very cool to meet you in real life.

Chuck Palahniuk 0:19 It's always a disappointment, it is always so heartbreaking, because people expect somebody, uh, somebody so not me. And I am constantly breaking their heart when they meet me.

Joe Rogan 0:31 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 any delusions of who you are.

Chuck Palahniuk 0:41 And don't, just, just, just, don't, don't-

Joe Rogan 0:43 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 0:43 ... kill yourself, okay?

Joe Rogan 0:45 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 0:46 I meet Anthony Bourdain and he kills himself.

Joe Rogan 0:49 Well, I think there was a lot of other factors involved there.

Chuck Palahniuk 0:52 I, no, I don't know. I, I see this-

Joe Rogan 0:54 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 0:55 ... so many of my peers, it's like the, the moment I meet them, boom, they're gone.

Joe Rogan 0:59 Um, yeah, I'm, I'm not gonna do that, okay? So don't worry, everything's fine. Um, listen, I wanna talk to you about a bunch of things. First of all, uh, I, I would love to talk to you about your writing process, 'cause one of the, one of the things that 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?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:20 That-

Joe Rogan 1:20 Were you, were you ever writing somewhere-

Chuck Palahniuk 1:22 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:22 ... where you made a deal with yourself where you wouldn't turn the heat on unless you were writing?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:26 Oh my gosh, you think I'm a white person, don't you?

Joe Rogan 1:29 A white person?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:29 That is so weird. The cape? The cape?

Joe Rogan 1:31 You never been to the Cape Cod?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:33 That's like in England.

Joe Rogan 1:34 Is that all white people?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:34 That's in England, right?

Joe Rogan 1:36 New England.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:36 New England.

Joe Rogan 1:36 New England.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:36 Yes. No.

Joe Rogan 1:38 I d- I never read anything like that about you.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:39 No.

Joe Rogan 1:40 I'm sorry.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:41 Never been on, on the cape.

Joe Rogan 1:43 You never been to the Cape Cod?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:44 Never had a-

Joe Rogan 1:45 He's a white person.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:47 ... clambake.

Joe Rogan 1:47 Clams are wonderful.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:48 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:49 What's wrong with clams?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:50 No, no, n- uh, no, it's just something, maybe something I attributed to for, uh, many, many years, was just, uh, an interesting story that someone said that they were, uh, 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, if it wasn't you, it's so embarrassing. You were talking about Michael Cunningham.

Joe Rogan 2:10 Is that who it was?

Chuck Palahniuk 2:11 Y- yeah, because he, uh, yeah, I think that's his story about living in Provincetown.

Joe Rogan 2:16 Might've been. Fucked this all up.

Chuck Palahniuk 2:18 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 2:18 What a terrible way to get going.

Chuck Palahniuk 2:20 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 2:21 Um, but one thing I, I wanted to talk to you about-

Chuck Palahniuk 2:22 Ambien much lately?

Joe Rogan 2:23 No, I don't. Any. At all. I just sleep. I'm fortunate in that regard.

Chuck Palahniuk 2:29 All right.

Joe Rogan 2:29 You don't take that shit, do you?

Chuck Palahniuk 2:31 Of course I do.

Joe Rogan 2:32 Do you?

Chuck Palahniuk 2:32 Yeah, three times a day.

Joe Rogan 2:34 Oh, you're fucking with me.

Chuck Palahniuk 2:35 No.

Joe Rogan 2:36 We got, we got started off poorly, now you're-

Chuck Palahniuk 2:38 Once a day.

Joe Rogan 2:38 ... fucking with me. (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 2:40 (wheezes) Once a day.

Joe Rogan 2:41 Do you really take Ambien?

Chuck Palahniuk 2:42 Yeah, you know, to tell the truth, just before I wanna t- do anything I don't wanna do, it's like a sh- elves and the shoemaker thing, it's I don't wanna do my taxes so I take Ambien. And then I wake up and my taxes are done.

Joe Rogan 2:55 Oh.

Chuck Palahniuk 2:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:55 And do you have plausible deniability too? If you can get videotape of you taking Ambien.

Chuck Palahniuk 3:00 People have committed murder on Ambien and gotten off-

Joe Rogan 3:03 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 3:03 ... because they had no memory.

Joe Rogan 3:05 That is true. Yeah, it's, uh, hypnotic. We actually did a, a pretty in-depth discussion about that after the Roseanne Barr thing came out.

Chuck Palahniuk 3:14 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 3:14 'Cause my own mom, uh, has taken it, and she stopped taking it, but one of the reasons why she stopped taking it is 'cause she woke up in the middle of the night and, uh, 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 a hold of their mom's lipstick. And she just woke up going, "What the fuck is, am I doing? Like, what is this?"

Chuck Palahniuk 3:38 Hey, she got off easy. I've heard, uh, war stories-

Joe Rogan 3:41 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 3:41 ... a hundred war stories.

Joe Rogan 3:41 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-

Chuck Palahniuk 3:47 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 3:47 ... and having no recollection of it.

Chuck Palahniuk 3:49 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.

Joe Rogan 4:03 Jesus Christ.

Chuck Palahniuk 4:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:06 You writing about Ambien right now?

Chuck Palahniuk 4:07 I am. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 4:09 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 4:10 I can tell.

Joe Rogan 4:11 I can tell you're locked in.

Chuck Palahniuk 4:12 Ambien and a hundred other, other things, so.

Joe Rogan 4:15 You, i- if it's fair to say, you, uh, it seems like your writing, like, one of the, your s- 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.

Chuck Palahniuk 4:36 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 4:37 That's fair to say?

Chuck Palahniuk 4:38 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 a, an ongoing field study, uh, that becomes whatever my next book is.

Joe Rogan 4:58 When you wrote Fight Club, you tapped into something that wa- it was really fascinating for me, uh, as someone who's been involved in martial arts my whole life and I, I, I, I'm ki- 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, 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're r- reading what you wrote, it ma- made you go, "Yeah, okay. Oh, all right." No, 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, uh, as someone who's wa- 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 n- nobody really hit before.

Chuck Palahniuk 6:12 Uh, and it's not a nerve that gets hit very much. You know, and it, 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 a s- 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 Ya-Ya-Ha Pants-

Joe Rogan 6:37 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 6:37 ... 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 Poets 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, uh, you know, uh, in which to come together and talk about their sh- their shit. Uh, another thing is, uh, 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, 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 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 gonna teach you. Uh, just like in Karate Kid.

Joe Rogan 8:25 Mm.

Chuck Palahniuk 8:26 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.

Joe Rogan 8:51 That's a huge part of martial arts. A huge part of martial arts is your relationship with the master, with the coach, with, uh, finding someone who can guide you through the, the most dangerous waters, uh, of competition. That it's, it's absolutely imperative. The bad relationships with coaches are absolutely disastrous, and it, 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 c- so- 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, uh, uh, uh, I never thought about it that way. I, I forgot about that part of Joseph Campbell. But, yeah, that i- that is a huge, huge issue with, with young men, and, um, young men getting into martial arts is something that I- I've talked about so many times. I, I don't discuss it as the need for rough play. I, I say there's human reward systems that are just not being, uh, they're, 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, d- d- developing physical skills and having a body that's capable of, of, of not just, uh, physical activity but violence.

Chuck Palahniuk 10:06 Well, and, and beyond just that, you know, it's also just the whole, uh, 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, in exchange you're gonna, you're gonna learn a kind of really master skill at something.

Joe Rogan 10:31 Mm.

Chuck Palahniuk 10:31 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, a physical, you know, fighting thing. It doesn't have to be in that form.

Joe Rogan 10:45 Just difficult. Something that's a struggle. Something that's hard to, to learn.

Chuck Palahniuk 10:50 Right.

Joe Rogan 10:50 Yeah. And that relationship that you have with that secondary father too, th- 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.

Chuck Palahniuk 11:10 Well, and do you remember Officer and Gentlemen?

Joe Rogan 11:13 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 11:13 You know, uh, Richard Gere really has this drunken, this not there dad, and then he has this drill sergeant who's constantly trying to wash him out, and then finally he reaches uh, 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.

Joe Rogan 11:58 Now when you approach a novel like that, when you have a story like that that's brewing in your head, how do you decide w- what to pull the trigger on? Like do you just go on instinct? Do, do you just have a, a concept in your head and it just seems more and more attractive and you just say, "Okay, this is it"?

Chuck Palahniuk 12:16 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, 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 reso- resonates with a, a huge number of people, that everyone can relate to it.

Joe Rogan 13:00 Hmm. That's interesting. So do you purposely, like, go to parties with, like, uh, a, a couple, like, bullets in the chamber?

Chuck Palahniuk 13:08 Sometimes. Or sometimes I 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-

Joe Rogan 13:24 Ah.

Chuck Palahniuk 13:24 ... 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."

Joe Rogan 13:34 That's really interesting. There's a parallel there with comedy, for sure. That s- if you ... in good material, oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes you'll see the audience going, "Oh my God, you do that," or ...

Chuck Palahniuk 13:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:47 That's fascinating. Now, um, another thing I really wanted to talk to you about is something that you brought up, uh, when you sent the notes to Matt, uh, was, um, censorship, and that ... and, and, and self-censorship, which is going on, apparently, in writer groups, and, and groups of people that are deciding that certain words should be eliminated from a vocabulary and from vernacular, and that you shouldn't discuss certain things anymore, that these things are, uh, uh ... It's harming fiction and harming literature, that you can't explore the darker ideas.

Chuck Palahniuk 14:20 You know, oh ... You wanna see me crucify myself right now?

Joe Rogan 14:25 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 14:25 Okay. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 14:27 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 14:27 This is kind of the, uh, career-ending moment. For, um, for several years, I was in a writer's workshop and, uh, 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. Uh, first, you know, uh, nobody really used the N-word, but it was definitely a word you could not bring to workshop. And then I, 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, and it just became more and more tightly strictured that way. And so eventually I realized we were kind of writing to em- make each other happy instead of to kind of confront each other. And, uh, one of the writers in our workshop is a writer named Cheryl Strayed, who wr- who had written a book called Wild, which was a hugely successful book. It was chosen as an Oprah book and it will be on book store 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 f- 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 featherless, featherless birds that had fallen 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.

Joe Rogan 16:34 Whoa.

Chuck Palahniuk 16:35 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 and awareness for a child to have. And this 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."

Joe Rogan 17:18 Did she send it to you or did she show it to you?

Chuck Palahniuk 17:20 She brought it to workshop and she read it. And there was even a newspaper reporter pre- uh, present there. And we all realized it was fantastically powerful. But then she said, "Uh, they won't take this. This can't go in."

Joe Rogan 17:37 Wow. Did she do anything with it? Did she publish it online or ...

Chuck Palahniuk 17:41 No, and, and there were so many parts of that book that were so much better than what they actually did publish.

Joe Rogan 17:47 Really?

Chuck Palahniuk 17:48 And, and so it's that kind of censorship where you're trying to reach a reader standing in line at Starbucks, and this has got to go in that, uh, point of purchase stand and it's gotta be a face out. And I understand for a long time if you wanted a face out at, uh, Barnes & Noble, especially on the Discover New Writers face out stack, you could not have the word fuck on the first page because they did not want people picking up that book and opening it and seeing the F-word, that that just did not fit their corporate culture.And so, you know, so much of the censorship is, is because people really wanna reach the largest audience, uh, without offending people.

Joe Rogan 18:35 Whew. But there's giant problems with that, right? I mean, one of the more fascinating things about books is that the story plays out in your mind.

Chuck Palahniuk 18:48 Exactly. The nature of consumption makes it about the only medium which, in which you can go to those places.

Joe Rogan 18:55 Yeah, literally. You, you couldn't ... There's no way you would be able to find the, I mean, to put that in a book, her story about her grandfather and the bird. Maybe you could put the bird in, but the grandfather part, there's just no way.

Chuck Palahniuk 19:13 Yeah. You know, and I, I, I, I, I feel like I'm telling stories out of school, but it's such a perfect example of that kind of self-censorship. Uh, and it's also something so magnificent that I feel it should come out. It should sort of be stated. Uh, I don't wanna steal her thunder. I, I, I wanna honor the story. But it's like so many stories that people tell me. Uh, I'm kind of seen as a safe person, you know, kind of a degraded monster maybe. But as a degraded monster with no self-esteem whatsoever, they feel (laughs) safe telling me these things because in a way, they, they probably feel a little morally superior to me.

Joe Rogan 19:52 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 19:53 Um-

Joe Rogan 19:54 Why do you think people would consider you a degraded monster?

Chuck Palahniuk 19:57 Because I can read a story like Guts that is so completely humiliating, because as I read it, it's in the first person, so people more or less assume that it's my story even though-

Joe Rogan 20:10 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 20:11 ... the story's garnered from many different people. But the fact that I'm presenting it means that I'm the person that is, that is losing face. And afterwards, people feel like they can risk losing face by telling me their story that's very much like, uh, the Guts story.

Joe Rogan 20:28 So, when someone is writing something that's deeply disturbing like that, when you, when you, when you hit those parts of your mind and you come to this pathway, do, do you consider, do you say, "Well, no one's ever gonna allow this to be in a book. No one's ever ..." Uh, uh, do you consider those thoughts or do you just go through with it first and then review it, or do you d- not do that at all?

Chuck Palahniuk 20:52 You know, I, my formative years were the punk years, the '70s into the '80s, and we always used to have a saying. People would say, "Uh, don't hit the brake until you hear a glass break," or, "Don't stop until you hear a glass break." And so, I always think the point of writing is to coach yourself to that point that you would never have gone voluntarily, and also to coach your reader to the point where the reader would never have gone voluntarily. In a story like Guts, you know, it's very funny on the front end and if you told people on the front end where it was gonna go, they'd never read that story. But it's very funny and charming and well-paced on the front. And then once people realize where it's gonna go, they're already trapped. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 21:40 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 21:40 And so in a way, it's, it's a way-

Joe Rogan 21:42 You seem to enjoy that, though. Your, like, the way you said they're already trapped, you seem to take some satisfaction in that.

Chuck Palahniuk 21:48 But in writing it, I'm also sort of springing the trap on myself.

Joe Rogan 21:53 Hm.

Chuck Palahniuk 21:54 Starting down a path that I have no idea is gonna be so humiliating or so, uh, emotionally upsetting or so dark. Because if, if I did, I would never go d- go down that path.

Joe Rogan 22:09 When you write a story like that, how much of it do you plan out in advance?

Chuck Palahniuk 22:14 I might plan out up to the, the end of the second act. You know, at the moment of greatest crisis, this will happen. You know, in Fight Club, the moment of greatest crisis is gonna be when everyone in the support groups figures out that this guy is lying to them and they're all given the choice of either accepting him for his transgressions or rejecting him. Same thing in Choke. There's gonna be that moment in, uh, when people realize that he has faked choking and that he's made them into a fake hero and they're gonna either kill him or accept him. And so, I typically know that the second act is gonna end with the transgression being revealed. But beyond that, I don't wanna know because I want the story-

Joe Rogan 23:05 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 23:05 ... to complete itself with its own momentum at that point. And if it doesn't surprise me beyond the second act, then it's not gonna surprise the reader.

Joe Rogan 23:14 Do you write, do you have like a storyboard laid out and do you, do you use like index cards or anything to figure out where things are going or do you just kinda ... No?

Chuck Palahniuk 23:23 Uh, no. You know, that's part of the glory is that whenever I get stuck, I go to the gym and I say, "Okay, this, I'm working on this scene where this happens and this happens and this happens." And my friends will say, there'll always be somebody there with a really fresh take and life experience who can say, "Well, have you thought about this happening?" And it will take the story in a direction that is so unexpected because it's not from my experience and that, that's the glory. And they feel like they've contributed. They're, they're so happy and, uh, and I'm happy to spend time among people and I'm happy to have the story complete in a way that I never ever could have anticipated.

Joe Rogan 24:05 That's fascinating. So, you do it at the gym?

Chuck Palahniuk 24:07 Yeah, the gym is really great because you're around people and you have these recoveries between sets, so you have a little time to talk and at the same time you have, uh, during the exercise itself you have time to think.

Joe Rogan 24:20 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 24:21 And so it paces the talking versus the thinking.... and it's also kind of highly oxygenated and it's physically active. And your mind is kind of, you know, y- your mind is not engaged with something else. Your mind is kind of disengaged like it is while you're taking a shower.

Joe Rogan 24:39 Yeah, a lot of people like to walk. They like to read, uh, write, read a little bit of it, and then walk and, uh, bring a recorder or their phone to record on. I think probably along the same lines.

Chuck Palahniuk 24:49 Charles Dickens walked somewhere between 12 and 20 miles a day as he wrote.

Joe Rogan 24:56 Whoa.

Chuck Palahniuk 24:56 And the, uh, the Lakeland poets walked constantly. I mean, walking is a big part of writing.

Joe Rogan 25:02 Anything physical, right? Like, anything where you're forcing your body to move, forcing the blood to flow.

Chuck Palahniuk 25:07 And, and also mindless-

Joe Rogan 25:08 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 25:09 ... so it allows your mind to wander.

Joe Rogan 25:11 Yeah. Uh, th- So I, I love the fact that you're so open with these ideas too, that you, you bring them to people and get their take on it, and then incorporate their take. Is this something you've always done because of the w- workshopping? Is it because just that this willingness to be open with your ideas and express 'em?

Chuck Palahniuk 25:32 Yeah. Th- Uh, really, you know, workshop was the, the crucial thing, having that social expectation that you were gonna bring work every week. And it was also kind of a party, a reward for having brought the work. And it was also a, a way of testing the work, so that you knew whether it was working, you know? You weren't constantly sort of questioning yourself. Uh, th- uh, workshop just provides so many really important ways of, uh, keeping write- keeping you writing.

Joe Rogan 26:01 Now, uh, w- and you've done this always. It seems like you've done this most of your career.

Chuck Palahniuk 26:06 I have, and this is not the first workshop I've been bumped out of. The first workshop I was in was a very... a lot of very nice ladies, and I was probably 28. And I had written a scene in which, uh, a man, a young man has done up a, an inflatable sex doll so it looks exactly like the woman he's obsessed with. And during the, the seduction of this sex doll he accidentally snags the back of it with the zipper of its dress and he realizes during the fornication that it is gradually losing air. So he's got to copulate faster and faster to 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, uh, the surrender flag-

Joe Rogan 26:59 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 27:00 ... 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, uh, "The other writers in the workshop no longer feel safe around you."

Joe Rogan 27:18 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 27:19 She really did. She-

Joe Rogan 27:21 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 27:21 She said, "You've written something that really frightens them-"

Joe Rogan 27:24 Oh.

Chuck Palahniuk 27:25 "... and they would like you to, uh, politely, uh, leave the workshop and not come back."

Joe Rogan 27:30 Wow.

Chuck Palahniuk 27:31 And so that's when I started with, uh, Tom Spanbauer's workshop in which almost anything went. Um, and so this kind of periodic implosion of the workshop, uh, is, is kinda part of the process.

Joe Rogan 27:45 Well, it seems only twice, right? Or more, more times than that?

Chuck Palahniuk 27:48 You know, it's been twice, uh, but in the past-

Joe Rogan 27:51 Twice catastrophic?

Chuck Palahniuk 27:53 Twice catastrophic, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:54 But a few other flat tires along the way?

Chuck Palahniuk 27:58 Uh, periodically we- we've kind of had to, uh, pretend that we were disbanding in order to get rid of a member who was, uh, uh, just more trouble than they were worth.

Joe Rogan 28:07 How many people are in these workshops?

Chuck Palahniuk 28:09 Boy, lately it's been... last it was about eight, but we've been up to, like, 16, 17. And now when I teach I typically have about 25 people.

Joe Rogan 28:18 Uh, uh, what does it feel... I mean, l- to be in a workshop for that long and then have such a, a, a disagreement and to disband like that, or to have you forced out, what does that feel like? That's gotta suck.

Chuck Palahniuk 28:32 Y- No. You know, I, I think in a way we all need a kind of a respite from each other.

Joe Rogan 28:35 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 28:36 We all had kind of... knew what to expect from one another, and I think we were all less, less of a resource for one another. Uh, you know, there's always a chance we'll come back together so, uh, so it's not a big tragedy.

Joe Rogan 28:51 So there's a chance that they might... So did they kick you out or did they just disband?

Chuck Palahniuk 28:56 I left the workshop and I understood that it disbanded ri- after that.

Joe Rogan 29:01 That seems... I just don't understand how someone who is a creative writer can't understand the, the n- not just the, the necessity, like the need to delve into the darker possibilities of, of human reality. I mean, th- this, the, the story she wrote about her grandfather and the bird is a perfect example of that. I mean, although very few people experience that in their life, we all can appreciate that these are possible scenarios.

Chuck Palahniuk 29:31 And I think, you know, it, it really comes down to what people, uh, what purpose reading and writing serves in peoples' lives. And most people, they want reading to be a comforting activity. They want to be able to read a book and then fall asleep knowing the detective will apprehend the killer by the end of the book-

Joe Rogan 29:49 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 29:49 ... that things will end very well. In a way they want to be bored or lulled by the book. Uh, not so many people really want to be kind of confronted by books.

Joe Rogan 30:00 But some people do, right? I mean, isn't it... it's kind of like, uh, pretty much all forms of art whether it's music or movies. I mean, there's superhero movies and then there's movies like No Country for Old Men where the bad guy gets away at the end and you, you leave the movie theater and you're like, "What the fuck?" You know? But those, those are all satisfying in different ways to different people, and isn't that sort of the point?... of creative expression, is that y- you're getting surprised, you're getting taken down a road that it's here's the world through this person's eyes, and they create this world. If you put limitations on that, you're gonna ... yeah, you're gonna eliminate some disturbing aspects that might bother some people, but you're also gonna eliminate some magical moments that might just car- that might ... literally might change the way you view people.

Chuck Palahniuk 30:50 You know, and part of it has to do with the nature of, you know, movies. Movies are gonna always kind of attract, uh, a more dynamic audience. Movies carry their own authority through emotion. Um, and books are gonna be a slower medium that's harder to consume. And so, maybe books are always gonna, at this point, uh, be seen of ... as kind of a sedative, as a kind of thing that lulls you and comforts you and puts you to, to sleep.

Joe Rogan 31:18 Yeah, but by who? By some people, right? I mean, I mean, maybe there's a market for those kind of books, but there's also a market for your books. There's a, there's, there's clearly a market for people that w- that wanna tap into those more disturbing aspects of consciousness-

Chuck Palahniuk 31:32 Y-

Joe Rogan 31:32 ... and of reality.

Chuck Palahniuk 31:33 And that market is moving to video games, and that market is moving to edgier films. Uh, there's just other forms of storytelling that are serving that market better.

Joe Rogan 31:43 Really?

Chuck Palahniuk 31:44 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:44 Better than books?

Chuck Palahniuk 31:45 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:47 But why is that? Is that because of the censorship, or is it because artists aren't exploring those ideas as much anymore?

Chuck Palahniuk 31:55 You know, and part of it is because books are harder to consume.

Joe Rogan 31:58 Mm.

Chuck Palahniuk 31:58 Books take an enormous, uh, amount of, uh, commitment of time and effort to read a book, where everything else is 30 minutes to two hours.

Joe Rogan 32:08 And to write a book as well, I mean, that's such a solitary discipline to-

Chuck Palahniuk 32:13 No.

Joe Rogan 32:13 ... sit alone with your computer.

Chuck Palahniuk 32:15 No, it is not.

Joe Rogan 32:17 No?

Chuck Palahniuk 32:17 Not for me.

Joe Rogan 32:17 No?

Chuck Palahniuk 32:18 I, I hate that model. You know, I wanna be in The Mermaid Tavern talking about my ideas with my compatriots, and getting their take on them, and finding out how it re- resonates with everything else in people's lives.

Joe Rogan 32:31 What's The Mermaid Tavern?

Chuck Palahniuk 32:32 Oh, it's, uh, the, the reference to where, uh, (tongue clicks) . Um ... (sighs) Not Coleridge. All the famous writers of Shakespeare's time-

Joe Rogan 32:43 Oh.

Chuck Palahniuk 32:44 ... uh, basically hung out at, uh ... it was like the White Horse Tavern in New York, but The Mermaid Tavern was in London during that time. Um, and, uh, Boswell, um, all the writers hung out there and exchanged ideas and entertained one another.

Joe Rogan 32:59 Hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 33:00 And so, uh, yeah, I want writing to be my social outlet.

Joe Rogan 33:07 But you have to write it by yourself, right? I mean, when you're, when you're sitting alone, actually putting your fingers on the keyboards.

Chuck Palahniuk 33:15 No, you, you do that part in airplanes.

Joe Rogan 33:18 Really?

Chuck Palahniuk 33:18 Yeah. I write notebooks and notebooks and notebooks in public, and then when I'm trapped in some unbearable place like an airplane or an airport, then I do that horrible part of keyboarding.

Joe Rogan 33:30 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 33:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:31 So that's the only time you actually write-write?

Chuck Palahniuk 33:34 The keyboarding is not writing. You remember the Truman Capote quote about, uh, (tongue clicks) on the road, Jack Kerouac? Y- Capote said, "That's not writing, that's typing."

Joe Rogan 33:44 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 33:45 And so the, the part on the airplane or in the airport where you have the laptop open?

Joe Rogan 33:49 Uh-huh.

Chuck Palahniuk 33:49 That's not writing.

Joe Rogan 33:50 Really?

Chuck Palahniuk 33:51 That's typing. This is writing. This-

Joe Rogan 33:54 Writing to you is physical pen to paper?

Chuck Palahniuk 33:56 Ah, sloppy everything, yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:59 Why is it, why is it different?

Chuck Palahniuk 34:02 Because it's written down in the moment that you hear it, and that is not set in New Times Roman 12 point so that it looks so finished. It looks like a finished book, and it's much harder to monkey with it once you see it on that screen in, in Word. Uh, it looks like a book. It's much harder to edit it. But when it's scrawled on the page in front of you, you can draw arrows, you can scribble it out, you can, you can do whatever you want to it. It's, it's much less precious.

Joe Rogan 34:31 Is this something that you've alwa- this is the approach you've always taken? Did you learn this approach, or is this something that just sort of made sense to you?

Chuck Palahniuk 34:39 This is how old I am. It used to be ... I grew up in the age of, uh, typewriters, when even typewriters were kind of precious because you would have to buy ribbons for them, and those ribbons were really expensive. And so if something had to be written out completely longhand, it had to be perfect longhand before you could risk wasting a typewriter ribbon to type it out.

Joe Rogan 35:08 Wow, so you just developed it this way and just stuck with it, even in the age of computers?

Chuck Palahniuk 35:14 Well, and also because writing is something I do in the moment. Somebody says something insightful, something really bright, something phrased just wrong so that it's suddenly really fresh, and I wanna be able to write it down in that moment so that when I do have to go to the boring part with a keyboard, I have got so much wonderful fresh stuff that it makes the keyboarding part fun because it allows me to, to sort of archive and to curate, preserve these fantastically bright things that were said by so many different people.

Joe Rogan 35:50 And you don't ... Do you ever record? Do you ever record yourself, like record ideas and then listen to them, transcribe them?

Chuck Palahniuk 35:56 Oh, God no.

Joe Rogan 35:57 No?

Chuck Palahniuk 35:57 I hate that, no.

Joe Rogan 35:58 That was a big Hunter S. Thompson thing, who'd r- r- record a lot of his ideas and then transcribe them and write them out.

Chuck Palahniuk 36:06 You know, I kinda write word for word, sentence for sentence, and so, uh, the transcription is just too much of an effort for me. Uh, usually when I do interviews for magazines, um, I will record my interview subjects, and even then-... uh, transcribing the interviews is so- it's such a misery because people seldom talk in complete sentences and there's so many false starts and so many sentences that just don't go anywhere.

Joe Rogan 36:36 Right.

Chuck Palahniuk 36:37 So, no, talking into a recorder is just that: a mess.

Joe Rogan 36:43 And so, th- this notebook that you have in front of you, this- this is a notebook for life or is this a notebook for a particular project? Like how do you- how do you organize it?

Chuck Palahniuk 36:53 This is a notebook where three pages are devoted to topics that I will talk to you about if we're desperate.

Joe Rogan 37:00 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 37:02 And, uh, there are little notes in here about contacting my agent for different issues.

Joe Rogan 37:07 Oh, so it's all universal. It's like for all sorts of things.

Chuck Palahniuk 37:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:10 It's for tasks that you need to do and then as well as that, parts of books you're writing.

Chuck Palahniuk 37:15 And there's all these little notes that Jamie just gave me about microphones.

Joe Rogan 37:19 Yeah, you're writing something about someone who's into recording equipment?

Chuck Palahniuk 37:23 Yeah, that's just a small part of it, but that's what she knows. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:26 Mm-hmm. Now, this- I wanna go back to this workshop thing. Like, wha- was it just words? Just the- the use of the word faggot or the N-word? It- was it just words that characters were utilizing in your story that was so disturbing to them?

Chuck Palahniuk 37:45 It was words, but it was also some situations that I thought were, you know, I got that people were very upset by. People would leave the room or people would-

Joe Rogan 37:53 They would leave the room?

Chuck Palahniuk 37:54 ... or would- (sighs) would weep, uh, would weep in just complete upset.

Joe Rogan 37:59 Does part of you go, "Yeah, I got this," when you see someone weeping at some shit you wrote?

Chuck Palahniuk 38:05 No. I mean, most of the time people would go to the bathroom and weep, and I would find out about it much later.

Joe Rogan 38:10 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 38:10 So ...

Joe Rogan 38:11 So did you get post-satisfaction that way?

Chuck Palahniuk 38:13 No! It just made me feel like a bully, and th- th- th-

Joe Rogan 38:16 Really?

Chuck Palahniuk 38:16 ... it's kind of another thing that it's a thin line, especially when I read a story like Guts. Am I entertaining people or am I bullying them? Am I beating them up? And I- I kinda-

Joe Rogan 38:30 How so bullying? Why in that way? Why do you- why do you describe it that way?

Chuck Palahniuk 38:34 Kind of charming them into a story that eventually will make them faint, or eventually will- will make them retch, but will upset them very deeply. Uh, and I- I- I feel a real reluctance about that.

Joe Rogan 38:50 Doesn't that sort of have, that bridge have to be crossed, though, if you're- if you're really going to explore every single possibility in a creative narrative? If you're- if you're really gonna write a book and just let your mind go wild, that has to be on the table, doesn't it?

Chuck Palahniuk 39:06 It does, but I don't think it hurts to be aware, uh, so that you don't lapse into being a bully for the sake of being a bully. You know, I think anybody who is a really hard trainer, uh, kind of, you know, comes up against that. "Am I a really good trainer or is part of me a sadist?"

Joe Rogan 39:26 Right.

Chuck Palahniuk 39:27 And you have to make sure that you don't become that sadist.

Joe Rogan 39:30 But, so you're not a monster. So there you go.

Chuck Palahniuk 39:33 Yeah, but I worry about it. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 39:35 (coughs) Well, that's why you're not.

Chuck Palahniuk 39:36 No.

Joe Rogan 39:36 But it's, uh, the- the- the- being able to explore the- those possibilities and being able to just delve into the- the deep recesses of your mind in the interest of creativity, that seems to be if anybody's gonna appreciate that, it's gonna be creative writers.

Chuck Palahniuk 39:55 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, of something that it'll ... Like comedians.

Joe Rogan 40:08 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 40:08 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. Uh, I tell a classic anecdote. After I had read the, uh, the Guts story at an event, a woman came up and, uh, 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, uh, 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- when she was seven years old, she was in second grade and she was in a little organization called The Brownies, which is the precursors of- to the Girl Scouts. You- you wear a brown dress, little brown hat. You get these little merit badges. And she said, "One day, I had a stomach ache and my mom kept me home from school. And we had this heating pad, it must've been in the 1960s, and this heating pad had this vibrating function. And she put me face down on this heating pad on my stomach, and I fell asleep. And while I was asleep, this vibrating, warm heating pad must've slid down between my legs," she says, "because I woke up with the most amazing feeling. 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 gotta try this heating pad." And she says, "All the Brownies, they turned the heating pad on, the vibrating heating pad, and they rode it like a pony all afternoon."

Joe Rogan 42:11 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 42:11 And she said, "It was like Sex and the City for seven-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 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 with it. And she beat me with that cord and she beat me and she said, "You fucking piece of shit. You dirty whore. What kind of a fucking whore am I raising? You whore!" And she beat me and she beat me-

Joe Rogan 43:08 (Exhales)

Chuck Palahniuk 43:08 ... 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."

Joe Rogan 43:44 Holy shit.

Chuck Palahniuk 43:45 And so see, see, see, see, that's what I'm trying to do.

Joe Rogan 43:49 (exhales)

Chuck Palahniuk 43:49 I'm trying to create the opening for people to tell these stories that they, 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.

Joe Rogan 44:04 We have these, um, um, bidet toilet things that have a little button on the wall. You press it, it shoots hot water up your ass. And, uh, my kids come over and, uh, they love these toilets. I have two daughters, and my youngest, when she was seven, she would sit on the toilet and she was laughing and giggling, and we didn't tell her there's anything wrong with it. So she was telling us how much she loves it, how much she loves the hot water when it shoots onto her butt. She's like, "It feels so good." And there was no shame in it. And there was this weird moment where I'm like, am I supposed to react to this? Am I supposed to say, "Yeah, I know, I like it too"?

Chuck Palahniuk 44:53 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:54 Am I supposed to say, "Hey, don't do that too much"?

Chuck Palahniuk 44:57 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:58 Am I supposed to say, "Don't tell anybody you like that. You can like it, but don't tell anybody you like it." Like, what am I supposed to do? And, uh, I didn't do anything. I just let her smile and she walked out of the bathroom laughing like it was great. And it was no, there was no issue, but it was this moment where I was like, wow, if I was a religious person or a suppressive person or some person with some sexual issues, this could be a real problem for this little girl. Instead, I was like, "Okay, let's get out of the bathroom now." (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 45:32 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:33 I guess you're done, all righty. And she has no idea that this was even, like, a moment of, you know, crisis in my mind where I was like, okay, how do I handle this? I'm in the bathroom with my seven-year-old daughter just getting water shot up her ass and she's enjoying it. What-

Chuck Palahniuk 45:51 You, so you talk about it on the radio? Is that how you deal with it?

Joe Rogan 45:53 I enjoy it too.

Chuck Palahniuk 45:55 (laughs) Sure.

Joe Rogan 45:55 I enjoy it too. We all do. We talk about these toilets. They're amazing.

Chuck Palahniuk 45:59 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:59 It's warm water. It shoots into your ear. It's great. It feels awesome. But it's not supposed to feel awesome for, like, a little girl for some reason, right?

Chuck Palahniuk 46:09 See, you tell that story and people will have so many versions of that story.

Joe Rogan 46:13 Oh, yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 46:13 For me, I was in Germany. I went in a bathroom in the airport. I didn't know what this button was, so I pressed it. I looked down just in time to see this little plastic arm swing out. I didn't know what that thing was gonna do. So I jumped off the head and this thing shot up with such force-

Joe Rogan 46:31 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 46:31 ... it knocked a ceiling panel out of the ceiling.

Joe Rogan 46:34 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 46:34 And all this hot toilet water came sprinkling down on me.

Joe Rogan 46:38 Uh.

Chuck Palahniuk 46:39 And that's the only time I've ever been around one of those.

Joe Rogan 46:43 Well, we have one here if you wanna try it out.

Chuck Palahniuk 46:45 I, uh, no-

Joe Rogan 46:46 I don't know. It scares me. There's two of them. There's one in that bathroom, one in that one. One in that bathroom, you could lock. It's private.

Chuck Palahniuk 46:54 And see, that's my process-

Joe Rogan 46:55 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 46:55 ... is you, you tell these stories and you kind of gather the stories that people tell related to these stories and you choose the ones that escalate the fastest, that escalate the best. And that gives you a gradual sort of, you've established the precedent and then something worse, escalating worse, escalating worse, escalating to the most atrocious or extreme version. And that's what brings a story to crisis.

Joe Rogan 47:23 I, I have a hard time believing that someone would be angry at that woman for her story.

Chuck Palahniuk 47:30 You know, and it's not, it's har- it's about her and her story.

Joe Rogan 47:34 Right.

Chuck Palahniuk 47:34 Her relationship to that story.

Joe Rogan 47:37 That one you're gonna get away with. You'll get away with that one. The j- jerking off the grandfather one is in a different place. Like, she's, she's a victim of sexual abuse. She's a victim of vi- it's w- strange that violence, for some reason, is more acceptable than sexual abuse in a lot of ways. Sexual abuse seems to be transformative, like there's something about sexual abuse that it, it ruins. You introduce, uh, an experience, a memory into a person's life that ruins them.

Chuck Palahniuk 48:17 Uh, uh, this is a rough segue, but I find with so many beginning writers is that they have absolutely no, uh, capacity to be with tension or suspense. So they might start to create suspense, but then they'll resolve it instantly, and so the story never really gets off the ground.... because something has happened to them, whether it's violent or whether it's sexual abuse, that, uh, that makes them cling to a kind of calm serenity. And that's all they want and that's all they ever want. And then writing, in a way, seems to be a way of coaching them back to a greater and greater tolerance with the unresolved, with the, with the tense, with suspense.

Joe Rogan 48:59 Yeah, some of the best moments in books that I've read are moments where you're reading and you're like, "Oh, fuck." Like, "Where is this going?" Like, you, you know you're going to get introduced into some really disturbing scene.

Chuck Palahniuk 49:13 And you have to be with that. You have to be with that until it's resolved. And that's good writing. You know, bad writing is where it comes up, it's resolved.

Joe Rogan 49:22 Now, when you're in this workshop and they're discussing with you this possibility of censorship, of you self-censoring or of them not accepting your ideas, like, how do you ... how do you debate that with them? How do you, how do you talk about that?

Chuck Palahniuk 49:41 Boy, (sighs) there's really no debate. You know, uh ... And, and that was another asset- aspect of the workshop, is that we had all known each other for so many years that, uh, um, that really, we, we didn't have the freedom to kind of, uh, teach each other anything new. Um. Yeah. So there was a staleness there too.

Joe Rogan 50:06 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 50:06 We were all kind of hardened into the people we were going to be.

Joe Rogan 50:11 I just don't understand their argument. I just don't understand, if you're gonna really paint a monster, you have to have monstrous actions.

Chuck Palahniuk 50:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:19 You have to ... It ... They have to be a real monster. We know of real monsters. I mean, there was just some, some guy just got arrested, uh, ju- some ... had sex slaves in his basement. And, you know, you h- you hear about those people and you go, "Yeah. Yeah, they're out there." There's probably a 100 of them scattered across the country right now where they have a locked basement and we don't know about it. Those are real people. But if you wrote about one of those people, using real scenes that were depicted in the news, you know, real eyewitness testimony, real interviews with these monsters ... some people would object to that. But if you're gonna write about a monster, you have to write them in a monstrous way.

Chuck Palahniuk 51:06 Oh, I, I, I totally agree. Um. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:14 What are they trying to achieve? Like, I, I, I just don't understand what ... They might not enjoy the, what you're doing. They might not, it might, might not be something that they wanna take in recreationally, that they wanna read your work in that, in that way. But the fact that they don't appreciate what you're doing or the fact that they don't want you to do what you're doing, or they don't want you to bring it to the workshop. Like, w- is this a new thing? Is this ... Is there a new trend?

Chuck Palahniuk 51:44 You know, it's ... In a way, it's a, it's an ongoing thing for me because, you know, I've been kicked out of workshops before for just going a little bit too far. Uh. And, uh, so in a way, it's kind of a ... It's ... Maybe my goal, maybe my goal is to, you know, always piss off my beta audience, um, as a way of kind of proving that I've gone too far. Um.

Joe Rogan 52:12 Yeah. That's not too far, though. You're ... It's too far when you piss off the alphas.

Chuck Palahniuk 52:17 Well-

Joe Rogan 52:17 Not the betas. Right? It's a, it's, it's ... You go really far when you piss off psychos, when they're like, "Jesus, man. The fuck are you doing to my brain?"

Chuck Palahniuk 52:26 You know ... Oh God, that's another thing not to talk about. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 52:31 Just keep going. (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 52:34 (laughs) Oh, my books are banned so many places. And, uh, and sometimes I think that maybe that's a good thing because it, it ... they aren't reaching the psychos. My books are banned in prison systems.

Joe Rogan 52:45 What?

Chuck Palahniuk 52:45 Uh, because they are enormously popular, these prison librarians tell me, but the books are considered way too stimulating. So, um.

Joe Rogan 52:54 Wow.

Chuck Palahniuk 52:55 So people in prison cannot read my books.

Joe Rogan 52:58 (clicks tongue) Holy shit. All prisons?

Chuck Palahniuk 53:02 I'm not ... Don't know if it's all, but, uh, it's Texas and a number of other really big states, so I don't know.

Joe Rogan 53:09 That's kind of a badge of honor.

Chuck Palahniuk 53:13 Yeah, but it doesn't equate to the, like the, uh, the immortality of being banned like, uh, Howell or, uh, Tropic of Cancer or-

Joe Rogan 53:20 Salman Rushdie.

Chuck Palahniuk 53:21 Yeah, exactly.

Joe Rogan 53:22 Yeah. Oh, God. That fucking struggle, man. The struggle of wanting to express yourself as, as freely as possible, but being limited even by your own peers. That is, um, that's unexpected to someone who's in the outside of literature, someone who just reads it. 'Cause it's not in the comedy world. Well, it is in the comedy world, but not amongst good comedians.

Chuck Palahniuk 53:50 Well, uh, another aspect of that is that so often people aren't censoring it because it offends them, they're censoring it because they're afraid it will offend someone they know. They're doing it ... They're kind of white knighting on behalf of someone else. David Sedaris, uh, told me this story about, uh, telling a joke, uh, or something very funny about a girl in a wheelchair. And how he looked out in the audience and no one was laughing. They were all looking at a girl in a wheelchair. And the moment she started to laugh, the entire audience started to laugh.

Joe Rogan 54:27 Oh, yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 54:27 And so, so often people in a workshop, they might not personally feel offended by the word, but they're thinking how that word might hurt people they know.

Joe Rogan 54:38 Yeah, that's a fact. Yeah. That's a, that's a giant issue in comedy if you... If someone's telling a joke, uh, if someone's on stage talking about someone who's fat and there's a fat person in the front row, that joke will bomb.

Chuck Palahniuk 54:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 54:50 It just... Yeah. But that's 'cause people are good people overall, you know? They, they recognize that they don't wanna cause pain.

Chuck Palahniuk 54:58 Another really odd comic, David Sedaris story is that he always told me, uh, "When you're on the road, don't read from your current book. Always read from the next book, because it's a way of road testing the stories and finding out which ones work and should go into the next book." And in doing so, he was telling this story about being in this, uh, this forensic, uh, uh, laboratory as an, as an autopsy was taking place. And this autopsy table was adjacent to this, uh, this huge indoor window that separated the autopsy suite from this lunchroom. And in the lunchroom were the rest of the, uh, the forensic staff and they were all eating their lunches. They all had tuna sandwiches and, and cans of Coke and barbecued potato chips. And they were watching through the window as this absolutely perfect 12-year-old boy was being autopsied. 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 dead. And dead without almost a scratch on him. Just this perfect, naked, dead 12-year-old boy on the autopsy table. And as he... The, the technicians eating their lunch, watching it through a window, th- they watch as the, uh, as the, uh, pathologist incises around the top of the kid's face, at the top of the 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 the face around the neck, like a mask, like a rubber mask.

Joe Rogan 56:46 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 56:46 And this 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? That there? That's the color of red that I wanna paint our rec room."

Joe Rogan 57:06 Holy shit.

Chuck Palahniuk 57:07 And when Sedaris told that story-

Joe Rogan 57:10 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 57:10 ... in front of 600 people, it was dead silent, and you could hear people weeping. People were crying, and they were hating David Sedaris in that moment. And so I had to laugh. I laughed really loud, like a donkey.

Joe Rogan 57:28 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 57:29 And it was amazing how the hatred-

Joe Rogan 57:31 Uh.

Chuck Palahniuk 57:31 ... in that auditorium swung from hating David, who they did not want to 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.

Joe Rogan 57:49 Wow. Did the story not go in any book just because the reaction by the audience or-

Chuck Palahniuk 57:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:54 ... just the uncomfortable moment, he just decided?

Chuck Palahniuk 57:56 He was-

Joe Rogan 57:56 Did you speak to him about it?

Chuck Palahniuk 57:57 No, I didn't. Not afterwards. It was just such an awkward, painful thing. I would never kind of throw it back in his face.

Joe Rogan 58:04 Right.

Chuck Palahniuk 58:04 But to my knowledge, that was the only time the story was told.

Joe Rogan 58:07 Do you have those, like, scattered about? Are there, there, there's... Are there scenes where you wrote and you just sat and looked at them and went, "No, I just gotta put that one somewhere else."

Chuck Palahniuk 58:17 Oh, there are-

Joe Rogan 58:17 Set that aside.

Chuck Palahniuk 58:19 ... jokes that I told where I got hissed by 800 people.

Joe Rogan 58:22 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 58:22 And you know-

Joe Rogan 58:24 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 58:24 ... if you can live through those moments-

Joe Rogan 58:26 Ugh.

Chuck Palahniuk 58:26 ... you realize you can live through a lot.

Joe Rogan 58:28 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 58:29 If you can be hated by 1,100 people-

Joe Rogan 58:32 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 58:32 ... at a Barnes & Noble on Union Square-

Joe Rogan 58:34 Ugh.

Chuck Palahniuk 58:35 Yeah, you can be hated by your mother. It's okay.

Joe Rogan 58:39 Now, when those people come to see you, how many of 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, the people who are fans of your work would at least expect some uncomfortable moments.

Chuck Palahniuk 58:52 And for the most part, they tend to be, uh, more or less just fans of my work.

Joe Rogan 58:57 Hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 58:57 Uh...

Joe Rogan 58:57 And still, still hiss.

Chuck Palahniuk 59:00 Oh, yeah, but it's... Again, they're hissing on behalf of someone. They're not hissing for themselves. You know? "I made this horrible cheap shot." And they always know a cheap shot. People always know a cheap shot. I, uh, I was commenting about how in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote had made this observation that Americans don't like true beauty, true classical natural beauty. They wanna see a very plain person who has been so groomed, so exercised, so made up, so style- stylized that she can kind of pass as this, this amazing, strange beauty. That's what Americans want. Because natural, classic beauty is not egalitarian. You're either born with it or you're not.

Joe Rogan 59:50 Hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 59:51 They wanna see a plain person who has been transformed. And to make my point at the end of the story, I made a cheap shot. I said, "And that's why we have Sarah Jessica Parker."

Joe Rogan 1:00:04 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 1:00:06 And I said this in New York. And in New York, Sarah Jessica Parker is worshiped like a god. And that whole crowd hissed and booed and did everything but throw excrement at me.

Joe Rogan 1:00:22 Wow.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:00:23 But then later in line, half of them came up and whispered, "That was really funny."

Joe Rogan 1:00:31 (laughs) Yeah, that's... Well, that's one of the things about dark comedy clubs. Y- You want them dark.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:00:36 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:00:36 You know? You don't want everyone illuminated. Like, the... When the, the crowd is... Like, the... When... It's one of the real issues with doing a comedy special is that, uh, especially the old way they used to do them, they used to like to light up the audience, which completely changes the dynamic of the, the room, changes what you'll laugh and what you won't laugh at.... you know, and a scene like the Sarah Ca- Sarah Jessica Parker joke. It's a perfect example. Like, you don't wanna be caught dead being the one person that throws their head back and howls at that.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:01:04 (clicks tongue) You know, cheap shots, uh, just, just stay away from them. But that's another... I'll ask you, ask you a question. You know, with so many colleges becoming these kind of strident, safe places that demand their own aesthetic, what is it like doing comedy?

Joe Rogan 1:01:21 Well, it, it hasn't changed that much. People have gotten a little, gotten a little bit more sensitive because they're aware that other people are more sensitive. With the, the audiences that come to nightclubs, which is primarily where I perform... If I do a theater, those people are there to see me, so that's, they're, they're usually pretty loose, pretty fun. But if you're in a nightclub, they're there to see especially The Comedy Store. One of the good things about The Comedy Store is there's literally two dozen people in the lineup. They're not necessarily just there to see you. They're there to see Anthony Jeselnik and Chris D'Elia and all these other comedians that are also there as well. So you get a, uh, a real- a much broader comedy audience. But they're nightclub audiences. They have a few drinks in them. Maybe they smoked a little pot before they got there. Those people are there to have a good time. Colleges are a nightmare now.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:02:17 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:02:17 It's a nightmare because it's recreational outrage. It's, it's kids who have been under the control of their parents for most of their life and haven't had their own sovereignty and identity and now they're free. And they, uh, are very quick to, uh, be outraged. They, they wanna point out their moral superiority. They wanna virtue signal on every opportunity. They wanna shut down anything they think is, air quotes, "problematic." They don't want things to go in a bad way, and they think for some reason that comedy should be uplifting, and it should only punch up. Like, I've, uh, I had this conversation once with a professor who wrote a book on comedy, and he said, "All great comedy punches up." And I said, "That's bullshit." I said, "One of the greatest bits of all time is Sam Kinnison's bit about starving children in Africa, about watching those commercials, where starving kids are in Africa and, you know, and the, 'Couldn't you please help?'" And he goes in... you know, and Kinnison's like, he just wanted to grab the guy with, "Hey, why don't you help them? You're right fucking there! Or send someone like me!" He goes, "Send someone like me, who's gonna take these people and go, 'Hey, we just drove here 5,000 miles with your food, and it occurred to us you wouldn't be world hungry if you people would live where the fucking food is!'" He goes, "Come here! You see that? That's sand! We got sand in America too! We just don't live in it, asshole!" And he's go- he goes, and one of the greatest bits of all time is literally about starving babies in Africa. It's one of the greatest bits of all time, and he didn't have anything to say. He didn't know where to go with it. I'm like, don't, don't say comedy is only about punching up. That's crazy talk. That's... What you're doing is you're f- you're... There's, there's a, this moral thing that they're trying to achieve that literally is completely independent of humor. It's not what's funny. It's like they're, they, they want to, they want it to be a, a multipurpose tool.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:04:14 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:04:14 They want it to be funny as well as morally uplifting and great for people who are discriminated against and amazing for folks who are marginalized and uplifting for those who are disenfranchised. Well, that's not what comedy is. What comedy is, is funny. Those things are wonderful in ter- uh, if you wanna do a spoken word show or poetry or writing or, you know, a one-person play. Those, those are great. But that's not funny. Comedy is funny. So it's either funny or it's not funny. And some things are funny that are fucked up. You know, Kinnison had a bit about homosexual necrophiliacs who were paying money to spend, uh, a few hours undisturbed with the freshest male corpses. And he, so he would lie down on his stomach, and he goes, "You imagine these people? They're on the slabs. They're like, 'Well, (sighs) went through life and had a good time and everything, and now I guess I'm gonna go and be with Jesus, and hey, what the hell is this?'" And he's rocking back and forth. "'It feels like some guy's got his dick in my ass! You mean life keeps fucking you in the ass even after you're dead? It never ends! It never ends! Oh! Oh!'" He would close on it, 'cause it was th- he couldn't follow it. It was such a powerful bit. It was about a dead guy getting fucked in the ass. There is no further down that you could punch other than starving babies in Africa.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:05:37 (clicks tongue) You know, and I'm not sure about if this is punching down, but do you remember the s- the, the routine that kind of put Whoopi Goldberg on the map a million years ago about being a Black surfer chick?

Joe Rogan 1:05:49 No.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:05:50 Oh, you know, she did it on television. I must have seen it on cable when I was, like, 19 years old. But she talks in valley speak. Nobody's seen this Whoopi person before. She's brand new. Nobody's ever seen her on television. She's got this funny name, and she's doing this valley speak about being the only Black surfer chick on the beach, and she loves surfing, and she loves this one white surfer guy, and she finally hooks up with him, and then she realizes she's pregnant, and it's all very funny. The whole front end, you're just roaring with laughter. And then then, she's pregnant, and she doesn't know what to do, so she gets a rusty wire coat hanger, and she goes into a public bathroom on the beach, and she gives herself a coat hanger abortion.

Joe Rogan 1:06:35 (gasps)

Chuck Palahniuk 1:06:35 And it spills out there on the concrete floor. And everything's okay, and now I'm back on the beach, and I'm just doing fine, and, and why don't you come on down and see me here on the beach? It's great down here. It's great.

Joe Rogan 1:06:50 Holy shit.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:06:51 It's a fantastic piece, and she-

Joe Rogan 1:06:54 She did that on television?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:06:55 She did it on TV, and it started so light, like an Ira Levin novel...... and then it went to such a dark, horrible place. And then it came up with just this kind of token, everything is okay ending. Every- I'm gonna be all right.

Joe Rogan 1:07:13 Don't worry.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:07:14 This is just something that happened.

Joe Rogan 1:07:16 Be happy.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:07:16 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:18 Do, do, do, do, do.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:07:19 That it just leaves you shaken.

Joe Rogan 1:07:22 Ah.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:07:22 And that's the kind of comedy that I love.

Joe Rogan 1:07:25 Yeah. Damn.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:07:25 Where it ju- it goes to the- that dark or that sentimental place and it breaks your heart. And then it kind of comes out of it a little bit. But Ira Levin did that so well. Nora Ephron in her books, she was so good at doing that. Uh, Heartburn. Uh, Heartburn is fantastically funny, but by the end you're just weeping the book is so sad.

Joe Rogan 1:07:50 But these are moments that if you're gonna ... if you're gonna censor people, if you're gonna self-censor, if you're gonna decide that people can't use certain words, if you're gonna decide that certain scenarios are just too upsetting for the, the reader, the, these words are gonna ... these moments are gonna be harder and harder to achieve. And these are the moments that we're gonna talk about. Like if you wanna ... If we weren't here, if we were in a, a bar somewhere and we were having a few drinks talking about great stories or great moments, these are the moments we would bring up. These are the impactful things that y- ... Saying that Sarah J- Jessica Parker joke in front of those thousand people and they're booing and hissing and you're, you're literally on fire under your skin like, "Ugh."

Chuck Palahniuk 1:08:30 And you're beating yourself up viciously.

Joe Rogan 1:08:31 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:08:31 Like, "Why did I say that?"

Joe Rogan 1:08:32 Right. Sure.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:08:32 "I'm such a jerk."

Joe Rogan 1:08:33 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:08:34 "I didn't need to say that. That was just cruel and thoughtless and ... yeah."

Joe Rogan 1:08:39 But if you said that exact same joke and it killed ...

Chuck Palahniuk 1:08:44 I'd still kind of beat myself up a little bit.

Joe Rogan 1:08:47 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 1:08:47 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:08:47 Right? You'd be like, "Who are these awful people that are laughing at this unfortunate girl?" Do you think that the reason why people love the transformation thing is because it almost, like if ... everyone feels like they have a chance? Instead of like-

Chuck Palahniuk 1:09:01 That's exactly what it is.

Joe Rogan 1:09:03 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:09:03 That you can be ... You don't have to be born with it.

Joe Rogan 1:09:06 Right.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:09:06 That you have a chance of attaining it.

Joe Rogan 1:09:10 Yeah. Yeah, the unfairness that, that is just re- the reality of life. You know, one of the things that Jordan talks about all the time is e- equality of outcome. That the, the, the ... that this idea of equality of outcome is ... it's absurd. It's never going to happen. It's not, it's not what life is. Life is not about equality of outcome. It doesn't happen that way because not everyone's willing to put the same effort in and not everyone was given the same tools at birth.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:09:39 And, you know, you gotta be a little careful too or you fall into that Jay Gatsby trap, where you get exactly what you wanted when you were four or 14 years old.

Joe Rogan 1:09:49 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:09:49 And then you realize, oh, this is not an adult's dream, this is a dream of a child.

Joe Rogan 1:09:55 Uh, it's one of the things that is interesting about your current situation and o- one of the things that I've read about your take on it. I do- I don't know how much you wanna go into this, but you got ripped off.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:10:08 I got embezzled, which is a word I can now spell. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:10:13 (laughs) Um, was it someone you trusted?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:10:16 It was. It was, uh, the accountant for the agency that represented my work and this is a man I'd worked with for, uh, oh, almost 20, 21 years and one of my favorite people in my professional life. Fuck, though.

Joe Rogan 1:10:31 And what I thought was interesting was your take on it. I mean, the whole thing's horrific and everyone's worst nightmare, uh, you know, who, who trusts people with their money. But what was interesting is you'd ... you decided like there's some merit to this, there's some benefit to this, that this is gonna make you hungry again, that this is ... like you have to work now.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:10:54 And also that, uh, that I have been really poor in my life and it was never my goal to be really rich. It was never my goal to have money. It was my goal to be a writer. It was my goal to be able to write books for a living. And I can still do that, you know? I've been poor. Poor is not something I'm afraid of. Uh, as long as I can write books, I'll be a happy person.

Joe Rogan 1:11:19 Yeah, to be rich and to not be creative, like as if ... You know, you've met those people-

Chuck Palahniuk 1:11:24 It's exhausting.

Joe Rogan 1:11:24 Sure.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:11:25 Those ... You go to those parties, those rich people parties, and all they have to talk about is their servants.

Joe Rogan 1:11:31 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:11:31 It's like, "I hate my maid, I hate my ... the gardener. We ha- we have this new person to do the this and they're doing a lousy job." And all they have to talk about in their lives is their household help. I hate those parties.

Joe Rogan 1:11:44 Or objects.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:11:46 Or objects, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:47 Yeah. There was a guy that used to live down the street from me, I used to call him Bling-Bling 'cause every conversation that I would have with him, he would eventually be like, uh, "Yeah, look at this new car I got," or, uh, "Where'd you get that watch?" Or, you know, "What, what, what kind of car are you driving?" Like, "W- what's the, what'd you do to the house? You got a new sink? You know, it's got a new TV? Which, which, which size did you get?" It was always objects, it was always things. You know, he was just this, this strange guy that was just working for things.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:12:14 Yeah, the same things that everybody else is working for-

Joe Rogan 1:12:17 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:12:17 ... just a different combination of things.

Joe Rogan 1:12:19 Yeah, but it's a game, you know?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:12:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:12:21 Trying to accumulate points in the game, you know? And because these things are difficult to achieve, then they become attractive and then they become the main focus because it's hard to get a Bentley. You gotta save up a lot of money to get a Bentley. "You know how much those cost? Which model was that? Is that the one with the, the le- ... Oh, look it, you got the perforated leather seats. That's extra expensive." And then this becomes the main goal.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:12:43 (snoring)

Joe Rogan 1:12:43 Yeah. But so many people fall into that bizarre trap. This is such a strange common trap.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:12:50 Well, you know, but it's the only trap that we kind of have. We are not really trained to, again, go to that, uh, that place of, of wanting to, you know, learn something, to wanting to create something, to apprentice yourself to somebody who creates the thing-... that you dream of creating. It's much easier to kind of fall into the ready-made trap of these things are for sale, and the people who sell them will treat you really nice.

Joe Rogan 1:13:19 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:13:20 You go into their showroom and they will treat you so nice and you are always welcomed there.

Joe Rogan 1:13:25 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:13:25 And, uh, and you have a way of kind of, you know, signaling that you've accomplished something-

Joe Rogan 1:13:30 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:13:30 ... in a very public way.

Joe Rogan 1:13:31 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:13:32 It's much, much harder to apprentice yourself and to sit down and do those 10,000 million words or to, you know, paint those pictures or whatever, build those brick walls and really develop the pride of a skill.

Joe Rogan 1:13:47 Yeah. I mean, the- the- the pride of a skill and the knowledge that your- your discipline and your focus allows you to achieve these works, that these things, when they're done, I mean, what is that feeling of satisfaction like when you touch the back cover of a book for the first time and it's over?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:14:06 No, that's nothing. That's nothing compared to when you hear it echoed in the culture and you hear people pick up the word snowflake, and you hear all these people say, "The first rule of blank is..."

Joe Rogan 1:14:19 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 1:14:20 When you realize that you've kind of dictated the semantics of the culture for a period, that feels like power. That is, uh, that's glorious.

Joe Rogan 1:14:33 When you found out that this guy ripped you off, were you shocked? Did you have suspicions before this?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:14:41 I had known, uh, almost a year before. And, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:14:44 So you had an idea for a year?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:14:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:47 And then it was confirmed?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:14:48 It was, finally.

Joe Rogan 1:14:49 What- what happened?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:14:51 You know, a year ago, I was supposed to start receiving some significant payments from this year's book, and they never came through and they still never came through. And every time I requested them, the publisher said that they had been paid, but the accountant said that there were, uh, technical difficulties with wiring me the money or he had personal problems in his life caring for his mother. And so there was always some reason why the money never came through. And finally, um, I kind of... I told my agent I didn't want to do any more deals until we had this money thing resolved. And at that point, the accountant, uh, made a videotaped confession, and has since pled guilty, uh, and I believe his sentencing is gonna be in November. Um, but according to the district attorney, they can't seem to find any of the money. So, the money seems to be gone.

Joe Rogan 1:15:46 How much does he steal?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:15:47 You know, it's kind of up in the air. It's, uh... Initially they said it was 3.5 million, and now they're saying it could be as much as 25 million. And this is from not just me. This is from Mario Puzo's estate, the man that wrote The Godfather. This is from a lot of different estates. Uh, the agency handled the estate of- of, uh, Lillian Hellman and Jacqueline Susann, and a lot of very big, big writers. Uh, Edward Gorey, who wrote those creepy, wonderful cartoon books. Uh, a lot of different writers, a lot of different estates lost money.

Joe Rogan 1:16:20 So was this guy doing this from the jump or does this... somewhere along the line, he lost his mind?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:16:26 Nobody really knows.

Joe Rogan 1:16:27 Yeah. Wow.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:16:30 Jamie, can you hit that pause button while I go out and take a leak?

Joe Rogan 1:16:34 Just go out and take a leak.

Narrator 1:16:35 Okay.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:16:35 Oh, thank God.

Joe Rogan 1:16:36 Go ahead. Don't worry about it, man. I know it's rough.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:16:40 Um-

Joe Rogan 1:16:40 Get used to it, though.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:16:41 What, uh... Are we anywhere close to 3:30?

Joe Rogan 1:16:44 We... No. It's, it's 2:30, but we can end any time you'd like.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:16:48 Oh, 3:30. No, 3:30 is kind of my, uh, drop dead.

Joe Rogan 1:16:50 Okay.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:16:51 But, uh, I'll be right back.

Joe Rogan 1:16:52 Okay. Uh, Neil deGrasse Tyson's here, ladies and gentlemen. He's waiting. He got here way early though, right?

Narrator 1:16:58 Yeah, he... That was the plan. He's just got some work to do before, so...

Joe Rogan 1:17:01 Oh, okay. He's probably in the tank right now.

Narrator 1:17:04 Yeah, maybe.

Joe Rogan 1:17:04 I hope. This dude's intense, right?

Narrator 1:17:07 Yeah, man.

Joe Rogan 1:17:07 I can't believe I fucked up that original story.

Narrator 1:17:09 Yeah, that's all right. I was trying to look to see if it was someone else, but-

Joe Rogan 1:17:12 I thought... Man, I really thought it was attributed to him. But that's me.

Narrator 1:17:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:17 My fucked-up brain. He's intense, though.

Narrator 1:17:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:20 Kind of creeps me out with his intensity a little bit. (laughs) What do you think about some of the shit that he's written, like Guts?

Narrator 1:17:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:26 You know?

Narrator 1:17:27 Choke.

Joe Rogan 1:17:28 Yeah.

Narrator 1:17:28 There's a couple other ones.

Joe Rogan 1:17:29 What was the one where, uh, someone turned into a werewolf on an airplane?

Narrator 1:17:35 Uh...

Joe Rogan 1:17:36 It's the one... I think that was from his, uh, collection of horror stories, the one with the alien on the cover. (swallows) The- the process, though, it's like-

Narrator 1:17:49 Survivor.

Joe Rogan 1:17:49 Survivor. He's so perfectly designed for being a writer, you know? Like, it- it's one of the more fascinating things about this podcast, is getting to pick the brain of someone like him. And, uh, how- when would you ever have two-plus hours to sit down with a guy like that and just find out how he thinks about shit? Like, fi- I mean, who is... you know? How are y- he's never gonna l- let you in like that. Like, this is one of the weirder things about podcasts, is that for three hours, or whatever the time is, the phones go away, you're- you're wearing headsets, which I try to encourage people to wear now, because for a while it was like, yeah, do whatever you want. But there's something about the headset that locks you in. Your voice is exactly the same level of sound as my voice is, because they're... it's all coming through the headsets, so it's all combined. So you're much more aware of talking over each other and shit like that, but you're also much more aware there's nothing else going on, that the sound of your voices, it's- it's... By isolating, by putting the headset on and eliminating the outside noise, you would never be able to... you would never be able to have a conversation with a guy like that, like, that's gotten this deep into the game.

Narrator 1:19:05 Just the... That's what I was gonna say, the depth. The depth of everything.

Joe Rogan 1:19:09 Yeah.

Narrator 1:19:09 You know, this background in journalism is probably where that's coming from, but...

Joe Rogan 1:19:13 His appreciation for darkness, too.

Narrator 1:19:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:19:15 Like, his appreciation for that story.... of the little girl jerking the grandpa off. Fuck, dude. It's, uh, oh, he's back. I gotta stop talking shit about him.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:19:25 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:19:26 Feel better?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:19:28 Much.

Joe Rogan 1:19:29 Something about this podcast makes people pee.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:19:32 Drinking all this coffee.

Joe Rogan 1:19:33 That's it, too. I've developed a superhuman bladder.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:19:36 Ah.

Joe Rogan 1:19:36 Occasionally, though, I have to get up. Occasionally. Um, so back to this dude ripping you off, this guy who was your friend. Um, so they don't know where the fuck the money is?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:19:50 No, they don't.

Joe Rogan 1:19:51 And he's not talking.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:19:53 You know, uh, I guess he hasn't really talked about where the money has gone. At first, they thought there was some dummy corporations and they could recover the money, so we were all looking for a big payday. Uh, but now the DA says they cannot find the money.

Joe Rogan 1:20:08 And he doesn't wanna talk?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:20:10 Uh, or he's saying the money is spent. I'm not sure.

Joe Rogan 1:20:13 Don't you wanna torture him?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:20:14 No, I don't.

Joe Rogan 1:20:16 Don't you want someone to torture him?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:20:18 No, but it's so sweet.

Joe Rogan 1:20:19 (laughs)

Chuck Palahniuk 1:20:20 It is so sweet because I have had readers, readers-

Joe Rogan 1:20:25 Offer to torture him?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:20:26 ... to kill him.

Joe Rogan 1:20:27 Hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:20:27 And they say they'll do it free of charge, so apparently these are people-

Joe Rogan 1:20:30 Oh, that's very kind.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:20:30 ... who do it for a living.

Joe Rogan 1:20:32 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:20:32 So, damn. I, I need to make a list, okay? If I'm gonna get some free killings, it's gonna have to be some people I really don't like.

Joe Rogan 1:20:41 But you want the money first. You don't wanna just kill somebody. You wanna make sure you get that money first. Otherwise, it's sitting in coffee cans buried in the Nevada desert.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:20:48 You know, I really, uh, between you and me, I really don't care.

Joe Rogan 1:20:52 Really?

Chuck Palahniuk 1:20:53 No. You know, I'm n- I really am seriously not somebody... It would've given me a little more wiggle room. I wouldn't be writing so frantically on the next book. I could maybe take a little time off and, I don't know, relax. But, you know, this is what I do, and so what the hell?

Joe Rogan 1:21:12 Yeah, you have your health. You have-

Chuck Palahniuk 1:21:14 I-

Joe Rogan 1:21:14 ... a million ideas.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:21:15 Yes. Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:21:16 Great ideas, a great profession that you love. You're involved in it right now currently.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:21:21 I'm working-

Joe Rogan 1:21:22 You're in the process.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:21:22 ... all these projects, and so, you know, I haven't really lost any of the things that I really love. You know, my dad is dead, my mother is dead, and I think after your parents are dead, there's not a lot that can hurt you that much, except, you know, of course the death of a child.

Joe Rogan 1:21:38 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:21:39 And so, you know, you're kind of, uh, uh, bulletproof after those things.

Joe Rogan 1:21:46 Well, the real issue that happens with successful people is they lose their hunger, right? They lose that... It's, it's a death sentence for comedians. One of the things that happens with comedians is the early specials tend to be really good and then the, the later specials tend to be really bad. And it's because these people are now super wealthy and coddled and there's no danger in their life and there's no, no real risk or challenges and there's no growing or learning. Everything is just, like, performing to people that adore you.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:22:16 Another aspect, and I talk about this more and more with writers I know, is that when you're starting out, you've got a lot of downtime, a lot of daydreaming, daydreaming time, a lot of slack, unstructured time. But the more successful you become, the more your time is really scheduled and you just don't have those "I'm really bored" times-

Joe Rogan 1:22:38 Yeah.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:22:38 ... when you tend to come up with fantastic ideas. And so in a way, being somewhat poor again gives me those, those really slack times when the ideas occur.

Joe Rogan 1:22:51 That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, um, again, to bring it back to comedians, comedians, uh, they'll, they get movie careers.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:22:59 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:22:59 That's another d- death sentence for their comedy. They start doing movies, they're on sets all day. They're constantly working, and then you don't have enough time to, to concentrate on your standup and you have zero fuck around time 'cause you're just doing things all day.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:23:13 You-

Joe Rogan 1:23:13 You lose that.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:23:14 Y- and this is weird name dropy Brad Pitt advice. Brad Pitt told me, Brad Pitt said that success is actually one of the, uh, failure is actually one of the best things that can happen because only failure gives you that kind of alone, isolation downtime when you can really reinvent yourself in a significant way and create something remarkable again. That ongoing success becomes kind of a, uh, mediocrity.

Joe Rogan 1:23:47 Mm-hmm.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:23:47 You really need to fail to fall out of the limelight long enough to produce something really strong again.

Joe Rogan 1:23:54 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 1,000 dicks in front of your mother.

Chuck Palahniuk 1:24:06 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:24:07 But the problem, uh, the difference is that there's probably someone out there who would enjoy sucking 1,000 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 wanna experience that again. And some of the greatest moments in m- my own personal journey of standup have come from eating shit. That's where they come