Bill Burr Got Happier, Healthier, And Apparently People Hate Him For It

(FULL DISCLOSURE- I Am not a Rolling Stone fan. Far from it. They glorified a coward terrorist who killed and maimed innocent people at The Boston Marathon. They publish some of the most trash top 100 music lists you've ever seen in your life in hopes of getting clicks. And they are a shell of their former, once ground-breaking self. I simply tuned in because it was Bill Burr. Same as I would have if this was Vanity Fair, or Fox News, or the NYT)

So I watched Bill Burr’s new Rolling Stone interview with their senior editor David Fear last week and came away thinking two things- one, it was fucking fantastic. And two, Bill Burr has apparently been canceled by a large portion of his own fanbase and nobody bothered to tell me. I made the grave mistake of posting on Twitter that I really liked the interview and I was impressed with how much Burr seems to have grown as a person. You would have thought I announced I was joining ISIS.

Almost immediately it was some variation of-

Bill Burr sucks now loser.

Bill Burr isn’t funny anymore fucking moron.

Rolling Stone sucks you liberal f^g30t. 

You suck for liking Rolling Stone.

You suck for liking Bill Burr.

I genuinely had no idea this had happened. Somewhere along the way, apparently, Bill Burr became very uncool to like. Which is hilarious, because after watching this entire interview, the reaction to me saying I enjoyed it basically reinforced half the shit Burr spends the interview talking about.

--- SPOILER ALERT---

(Though chances are, if you're reading this you're probably reading to pile on and have no intentions to watch this anyways)

The conversation starts with Burr’s upcoming movie, The Social Reckoning, the follow-up to The Social Network. The movie reportedly deals with the 2021 Facebook whistleblower story and the internal information that came out about the damage social media platforms knew they were causing. That gave Fear a perfect runway into something Burr has been talking about in his stand up sets forever- technology was supposed to make everything better and instead somehow made all of us fucking insane.

Burr talks about how social media started out fun, because it genuinely did. Facebook used to be checking what some girl from your freshman dorm was up to and looking at pictures from a party you weren’t invited to. Twitter used to be people posting what sandwich they were eating. Instagram was pictures of sunsets with Valencia filters. Then big money showed up, and as Burr puts it, once everything became monetized, everything goes to shit and basically becomes evil.

And when you really stop and think about where we started and where we are now, it’s pretty fucking depressing. We went from reconnecting with old friends to algorithms deliberately trying to make people angry and insecure because angry and insecure people stare at their phones longer. You’ve got teenage girls killing themselves. Everybody comparing themselves to everybody else. Everybody addicted to being fucking outraged. Nobody able to sit through a dinner without touching their phone 15 times.

Such a great invention.

Fear used that to segue into Burr’s stand up because this is basically what Burr has been screaming about for 20 years. Technology taking over everything, corporations ruining everything, everybody becoming more isolated and miserable while being told everything is improving. From there they get into the UnitedHealthcare CEO murder, and Burr makes a point I thought was really interesting- he’s not celebrating murder or saying killing somebody is good, but his point is that look at what the reaction was to the whole thing. You had this insane amount of public anger toward health insurance companies and executives, and instead of anybody stopping and saying, “Jesus Christ, why do this many people hate this industry this much?”, the reaction was basically that we need to hide the executives names and faces from the public. Increase their security, and make them harder to find. Anything except maybe examining why people are this fucking furious in the first place.

Advertisement

That turns into Burr talking about journalism, which he says "is basically dead". And again, I don’t think he’s wrong. He talks about how media got bought up by huge corporations and how the old version of journalism- people actually spending months investigating powerful people and exposing corruption- barely exists anymore. Now we get talking heads yelling at each other all day telling everybody who they’re supposed to hate. The have turned politics and social issues into sports effectively, where we are rooting for one side, vs. the other, like they are are our favorite sports team and our dreaded rivals. It's fucking bonkers.

And that becomes another huge theme of the interview- division. Burr compares what’s going on in America right now to the way countries used to destabilize other countries. You start by planning to divide everybody. You get them fighting each other. You make everybody suspicious of everybody else. Except now we’re doing it to ourselves. And you can't really deny it, he speaks firsthand by seeing it when he travels to play shows coast to coast. Texas hates California. Florida hates New York. Democrats hate Republicans. Republicans hate Democrats. Everybody thinks the people on the other side are fucking evil and stupid and trying to destroy the country. It's eerily similar to the blueprint laid out in the 80s by that Russian KGB agent who explained the rest of the world realizing they could never defeat America because we were too strong as a united front. That we would need to be taken down from the inside-  

From there, Burr kept coming back to the idea that most normal people really aren’t that different. There’s one part where he compares the extremes on both sides to sports fans. He says "your team cheats, my team doesn’t. Your team is corrupt. My team only does bad things because they were forced to."

Which is exactly what politics has become for a lot of people. And Burr’s point is that most people are just sitting in the middle completely exhausted by all of it. We all want to find somebody to love, and to be loved by. We want to put a roof over our heads. We want to make enough money to not be stressed all the fucking time. We want to go get a sandwich and have a fucking normal afternoon. And that’s basically it. That’s the dream. And yet somehow we’ve all been convinced that the guy in another state voting differently than us is the reason our life sucks.

Advertisement

Then he gets into immigration and starts talking about how ridiculous it is that people struggling financially are being convinced that immigrants making minimum wage or less are the reason they can’t afford a house. Meanwhile we’ve got an ABSURD amount of wealth concentrated at the very top. And that was where Burr says something that I really agree with and I wish more people would wake up and realize- it isn’t left versus right. It’s class warfarem and it’s working people versus what he calls the new robber barons. That’s the fight. And I know that sentence alone is probably going to make people furious because everything has to immediately be shoved into some political box now, but that’s exactly the fucking point he’s making.

Everybody is so busy screaming at the person next to them that nobody looks up.

He does the same thing with AI. Everybody keeps talking about how AI is going to replace regular people. Entry level everything, customer service people, writers, programmers, "office workers",  pretty much all middle-class jobs. It's already happening. 

Burr goes, "why the fuck don’t we make an AI CEO?"

Seriously, if the entire argument is efficiency and saving money, why are we starting with the guy making $70,000? There’s some suit making $7 million sitting upstairs. Automate his ass.

And Burr continues on that while they’re building the machine maybe they can program some empathy into it too. Which is such a perfect Bill Burr joke because it’s funny but there’s also an actual point underneath it.

From there things get darker when Burr starts talking about surveillance. (Another topic I couldn't be more in agreement with him on.) He says the amount of surveillance we live under now is insane and compares it to the FBI watching John Gotti sitting outside a social club. Except his point is they used to watch guys like Gotti because they were worried about what those guys were doing. Now everybody is being watched, and Burr’s theory is that all this technology exists because eventually technology becomes how you control people at scale.

David Fear asks him what he thinks it would actually take for things to change and Burr tells him "a revolution."

Giphy Images.

Advertisement

Then he says it would probably be a fucking bloodbath abd he brings up Braveheart.

I’m not packing a sword and heading into battle tomorrow morning, but Burr’s larger point is that people who accumulate gigantic amounts of money and power usually don’t just wake up one morning and say, “You know what? We’ve probably taken enough. Let’s give some back.”

But honestly, the political stuff wasn’t even the most interesting part of the whole interview to me. The personal stuff was. Burr talks about reading a scene for the movie and unexpectedly breaking down emotionally. It made him realize that growing up, there were certain emotions he was basically taught not to have. So he buried them for decades. And every time something happened later in life that brought those emotions back up, he didn’t really know what to do with them. So recently, he sought out a therapist and got into breathwork and meditation. And mushrooms. And I already know there are probably old Burr fans reading that sentence and rolling their eyes- “oh great. Hollywood guy does mushrooms and breathwork now.”

Except that if you take the guy seriously, which I think he deserves, he says he basically released 30 years of pent-up anger, and the way he describes it makes a ton of sense. He says he can still get angry- he’s still Bill Burr, but he’s "not starting every situation at an eight out of ten anymore." He starts at one, and ifo something happens, maybe he goes to three, or if something really pisses him off, maybe he goes to six. Before, he was constantly filled with so much rage that he was always walking around at a steady eight. Which means every little thing could send him straight to ten or higher. That seems like a pretty fucking miserable way to live, and he hated being called an “angry comic” his whole career. Which was surprising to hear considering that was pretty much his whole schtick. Because when people called him angry, it made him feel like he had no control over himself, and that reminded him of his father growing up. So he felt ashamed of it, and because he felt ashamed of it, he hated himself, and because he hated himself, he got darker and angrier.

And then everybody called him the angry comic even more and it was just a total death spiral. And he didn’t know how to get out of it, which is why I keep coming back to this idea of growth.

Burr wasn't saying he woke up one day enlightened and now he floats around his house meditating in linen pants. HHe’s still the same guy- cynical, suspicious, hilarious, and always at the ready to call out bullshit. He just seems like he understands himself better now, and he talks about being able to go back and look at old opinions he had and reconsider them.

At one point he jokes basically, “You know what? Maybe all chicks aren’t psychos.”

Which is fucking hilarious. But it’s also kind of the entire point. Being 58 years old and admitting maybe you were wrong about something you believed at 30. I feel like if you can't look back at your younger self- 30, 20, hell even 5 or 10 years ago, and at least slightly cringe, or shake your head at something you did, or believed, or said, and feel disappointed in yourself or ashamed—then chances are you're either a saint, or you haven't grown much.

But apparently we don’t like that anymore, and I think that’s where a portion of his old fans lost him. Because they didn’t just like Burr being funny. They liked Burr being really really fucking angry. The guy who was permanently pissed off. And now he’s talking about therapy and fatherhood and empathy and maybe reconsidering some of the shit he used to think, and suddenly people think he got soft.

The most powerful moment in the whole interview comes when he starts talking about his kids. He tells a story about an interaction he had with his daughter when she was two years old and he starts tearing up. Then he just stops completely and he can’t get the words out. And he explains that what happened with his daughter was basically the opposite of something he remembers happening to him growing up with his father.

Then he and Fear get into this really interesting conversation about parenting, about how we naturally remember the things our parents did that fucked us up and think, "I’m never doing that to my kid." But he says that you also can’t overcorrect so hard that you end up creating a completely different problem. Which sounds impossible. Parenting honestly sounds like the hardest job on Earth and I have developed so much respect for mothers and fathers out there today who give a shit about their kids, are active in their lives, and are trying to raise responsible, good people. You’re trying to keep all the good things your parents did, throw out all the bad things, account for all your own baggage, not project any of it onto your kid, and then somehow hope you don’t screw them up in a new way nobody’s thought of yet. Good fucking luck.

And I think that moment with his daughter is what made me like the interview so much, because this wasn’t just Bill Burr ranting about America or technology or politics, it was a guy looking back at his own life and being honest about things he clearly wishes he handled differently. And then trying to do better with his kids. And that’s pretty fucking human in my opinion.

Which brings me back to the response I got when I said I liked the interview- I honestly had no idea people hated Bill Burr now.

I thought I was posting an extremely harmless opinion.

Apparently not.

People acted like I announced I was joining a cult, and the irony is that the reaction almost proves half of what Burr is talking about. You can’t just say something is interesting anymore, you have to pick a team. You have to decide if Bill Burr is GOOD or BAD. Everything is a fucking jersey now, and if somebody changes at all, they betrayed the team.

I don’t agree with every single thing Bill Burr says in this interview. But that’s what made the interview interesting. But I respect and appreciate the guy for still thinking out loud, and questioning things. And questioning himself. He’s willing to say maybe something he believed 20 years ago was wrong and I don’t know when that became a negative quality. So yes, perhaps Bill Burr has changed. But I would fucking hope so because he’s almost 60 years old and it would be a lot weirder if he hasn’t.