Bill Burr has a supporting role in The Social Reckoning, the “sequel” to The Social Network. According to Rolling Stone, Burr plays one of Facebook’s investors, a guy who is trying to get through to Mark Zuckerberg about how the whistleblower is really going to change the company. I know Burr is a comedy legend, but I’m not surprised that he took a more dramatic acting job. He’s been experimenting more and more with acting gigs and he seems to enjoy it. One of my favorite theories about Burr is that his wife Nia Renee Hill has had a calming influence on him overall, and that’s why he’s been much more chilled out since his “angry white guy” stand-up days. Anyway, to promote this movie, Burr spoke to Rolling Stone about the film, about AI and about politics – you can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

RS: The Social Reckoning is not a follow-up to The Social Network, exactly. But it’s Aaron Sorkin, it’s about Facebook …
BB:Yeah, it’s about a whistleblower that was working at Facebook. When it started to go sideways, she reached out to somebody at The Wall Street Journal, which caused all of this internal strife with the company. It put some information out there that people needed to know. Social media platforms are [still] new. We’re just seeing the fallout of them now. It started off as fun and silly, and then it got monetized, and then it just got evil.

RS: One minute you’re using it to talk to an old high school buddy. The next, somebody’s being dragged before Congress to talk about why Instagram is evil for teenage girls.
BB: That is kind of what happened. The internet’s this crazy place. I don’t understand why you can’t say curse words on TV, but you can post whatever you want on the internet, and there’s no rules of libel or slander and all of this stuff. And now with AI, everybody is just like, “Well, you know, it’s here … so you just have to deal with it.” It’s weird.

RS: Who asked for this AI wave?
BB: Nobody. Nobody wants it. That’s the thing. Maybe CEOs want AI because they don’t want to pay anybody. They’ve never wanted to pay anybody. But we’re too busy yelling at each other about red ties and blue ties, so we don’t realize we’re on the same team.

RS: The Social Reckoning is getting into this stuff that you’ve been talking about in your act for the past few years — the lack of accountability, how the media works, the way tech is taking control of our lives. Did this seem like a natural extension of what you’ve been doing onstage?
BB: It’s way deeper. You know, I’m a stand-up. I’m joking around. But we live in a world where if somebody tells their version of the truth of what’s going on, it’s like they’re trying to escape Russia in the Eighties. It’s insane. [Facebook] is an American company that seems to function like the CIA, which is really sort of indicative of you’re doing something wrong.

I mean, if you look at the response to the Luigi [Mangione] thing. It wasn’t “Maybe we need to look at what we’re doing if it makes some crazy person do this.” [Healthcare executives’] response was to take their faces off of the internet and get security. It’s like, “You don’t think you need to examine this? You’re just the CEO of a business. Why do you need this level of security?”

Even just touring as a comic, I’ve seen it change. It used to be we hated the Russians. Now it’s like, Texas hates California, California hates Texas. These people hate Florida. Everybody hates New York. It’s like, “Guys, same teams. We’re on the same teams here.”

I was talking about that ICE stuff onstage, talking about my people, white people. We’re not nearly as upset as we need to be, because we don’t see ourselves going into the van. I go, “Who do you think’s going in the van next?” And this guy in the crowd yells, “Liberals!” And I go, “Did you just say liberals?” Like, dude, you’re literally talking about half of your team. They’re gonna work their way back to you eventually. People think they’re in the in-group. They think they’re gonna get under the mountain or get on the spaceship. You’re not. They’re using you, and they’re making you not like me, and they’re trying to make me not like you.

[From Rolling Stone]

This is so true and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills: “Nobody. Nobody wants it. That’s the thing. Maybe CEOs want AI because they don’t want to pay anybody. They’ve never wanted to pay anybody.” NO ONE WANTS AI. No one asked for it! No one wants any part of this bulls–t. Burr is also right that the Luigi stuff was just weird, like CEOs took the wrong message away from all of it. I still say that the scariest thing for the CEOs and C-suite class was that Luigi was largely celebrated as a folk hero. Anyway, yes, the lack of accountability is a huge shift in the past decade. You know what else? People are just getting dumber. People aren’t reading, critical thinking has fallen off a cliff, and media literacy is at an all-time low.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.