Fight Club

Even

with Project Mayhem, they're trying to, you know, they're sort of lashing out at things that they don't like.

But they do it in a disciplined way, which is a bit thoughtful.

And they're not picking, you know, they're punching up.

Paper Street...

Yeah, one of the members of the...

Project Mayhem.

Of Project Mayhem.

JRVP.

Yeah, and they would just say it to me, as if we were in a very, very weird fight club.

And they would just mention it to me, and it became clear to me that you were reaching a group of people that weren't mostly readers.

They were like, I haven't read a book in a year.

I love Chuck Palahniuk.

But what...

the adaptation of Fight Club became, I would argue, is on par with, if not better than the book, just a totally different art form.

I loved the film Fight Club.

They're doing this so accurately and that's really interesting.

One of my favorite authors, uh, Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote "Fight Club," researches characters that are like unnecessarily deep and like have these weird niche knowledges.

Blake Crouch does it, like a lot of my favorite writers do this, where you're like, this is so believable 'cause it's so behind the scenes.

Something's being revealed to me and I've carried that into a l- like, I guess B2C context into a lot of my B2B work where it's like how can we go like do an unreasonably deep dive into this without creating so much work that now we become professional researchers or whatever else.

Mm-hmm.

But like, I think it's really interesting that they call themselves Project Mayhem.

It's not Project Justice.

It's not Project Equity or Equality.

It's Project Mayhem, and I think there's, uh, I, I...

There's so much that is political about this film, but I think something that I do wanna take very seriously is that I don't think the characters consider themselves political, and they don't feel that they're doing this for political reasons.

Um, they, uh, they, they are viewing themselves, and p- please feel free to argue with me on this 'cause I'm-

And, um, and, and it is so difficult for him to do so that he literally has to create an alter ego.

So since Oleg wasn't finding anything good to watch on TV and was feeling bored and kind of stir crazy, he decided to see if Sergei wanted to get into one of their deep literary conversations.

And so Oleg turned off the TV and tossed the remote into the chair and took a swig of his drink, and then he glanced over to the corner where Sergei was reading the novel Fight Club.

Oleg had already read Fight Club.

It was about this depressed man with insomnia who meets a charismatic stranger and starts this secret club where people literally fight each other.

Oleg thought the book was amazing, mostly because it had an epic plot twist at the end.

And so after three hours of trying to kill time, Oleg finally just headed to the cafeteria to get a bite to eat.

It was around 3:00 PM when Oleg stepped into the dining room, feeling a, a bit flushed from all the booze he'd been drinking.

And the first thing he saw when he got inside of there was Sergei, and Sergei was at a table still reading Fight Club, just like he'd been doing earlier in the common room.

Davis School District is now considering book bans as normal routine, and state officials have concluded that the Davis School Board doesn't need to publicly discuss any appeals for challenges before making their decision.

This has been an ongoing controversy for Davis School District since April, when the board in a meeting decided to remove Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club from all Davis schools without discussing it.

The silent vote prompted a parent to file a complaint with the state, alleging that the school board had violated procedure.

The district pointed to a written statement of rationale in the board's April public meeting documents, but there was no option for public comment on the proposal to remove the title.

End quote.

State law in Utah assigns book review to sensitive material review committees made up of parents and school staff.

The law also allows guardians or staff members within the district to appeal a committee's decision, which is exactly what happened to Fight Club.

The appeal then goes to the school board, and that is when the board made their vote without discussion or public comment.

Yeah, yeah.

I wrote a book once.

I need to read this book.

Yeah,

yeah.

I read your book.

You didn't even read my book.

Jeez.

There's this entire very quiet underground movement of guys in the UFC specifically going to Mexico to get toxoplasmosis.

Who was the guy that wrote the Fight Club? Okay, Chuck Palahniuk.

I can't pronounce his last name.

He was telling Joe Rogan all about this.

And it felt like a Chuck Palahniuk kind of story in a way.

Clearly, the writer of that novel must have been a huge influence on Chuck Palahniuk because it feels like a Fight Club kind of thing of just like...

It's not even like hyper masculinity, necessarily.

It's like hyper sexuality and crash of just like, we're really into this really twisted thing for some reason.