Joe Rogan’s comedian friend Bill Burr has called out podcasters who cozy up to billionaires.
Speaking on the red carpet at The Social Reckoning premiere, Burr, who plays a free speech absolutist in The Social Network follow-up, told Variety he wouldn’t sit down for lunch with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. “I wouldn’t,” he told the interviewer, who asked the comic to imagine dining with the multi-billionaire.
Explaining his rationale, he added, “Nothing’s free. You don’t want to have a relationship. That’s why you never have any of those people on your podcast because then, all of a sudden, you have a friendship and you can’t make fun of them.”
Rogan welcomed Zuckerberg onto his pod for a wide-ranging softball interview in 2025.
The pair chatted amiably, and the host let Zuckerberg air his grievances about the Biden administration and try to portray himself as a down-to-earth everyman.
At one point, the Meta CEO said Joe Biden essentially set the dogs on him. “Biden gave some statement at some point, where he’s just like, ‘These guys are killing people.’ And I don’t know—then all these different agencies and branches of government just started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal.”
He also commiserated with Rogan about his “journey” toward distrusting the media, telling the podcast host, “The stuff that’s being written about is not all accurate, and even if the facts are right, it’s kind of written from a slant a lot of the time.”
Zuckerberg has cozied up to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and donated $1 million to his inaugural fund as part of his slide to the right. He was at the White House last month with a gaggle of fellow tech billionaires for a summit on artificial intelligence, which President Trump has renamed “Super Intelligence.”
Rogan, meanwhile, has also welcomed Tesla founder Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, onto his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, several times. After an interview in November 2024, Rogan endorsed Donald Trump for president, citing his guest’s “compelling case.”
He has also interviewed Trump in 2024, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz; Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir; Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia; Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, among other ultra-wealthy individuals.
Burr, who hosts the Monday Morning Podcast, has shared his thoughts on the matter before. Rogan discussed Burr’s thinking on a 2020 episode of his own podcast.
He said, “My friend Bill Burr was talking about that the other day. He was on his podcast. He does with Bert Kreischer. And they were they were talking about meeting a president and he goes, ‘I don’t want to meet the president.’ He [Kreischer] goes, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because then he can’t make fun of them,’ he was talking about his bit about Michelle Obama. And he has this amazing bit about Michelle Obama. And, you know, and he’s like, ‘if I met her, I couldn’t do that.’”
