Joe Scarborough revealed there’s one major celebrity guest he’d love to have on Morning Joe in the future.
During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday, January 29, Joe, 61, was asked about celebrity guests that he would hope to have the chance to interview at some point. There was one name that stood out to him.
“Paul McCartney. I want to interview Paul McCartney,” the political commentator declared. “That’s the only person. Here I am, 18 years later, still reaching for the brass ring. One of these days, one of these days, one fine day.”
The outlet revealed that Morning Joe is currently in talks to welcome Mick Jagger and Anjelica Huston on the show as the program shifts gears and leans more toward talking about entertainment in addition to its usual political segments.
Joe previously wrote a piece about Paul, 82, for The Atlantic titled “How Paul McCartney Ran to the Top.” He also recalled meeting Paul one time during a July 2016 interview with Billboard. The broadcaster has long been interested in music, singing, playing instruments and releasing his own songs over the years. He said he took inspiration from The Beatles and other rock bands when he was younger.
“Growing up, I was always a British music fan. But in college, I remember going to this record store and saying, ‘Waddaya got?’ And the guy said, ‘There’s this band out of Athens [Georgia.] called R.E.M. You’ve got to listen to Murmur.’ And I go home, and it was like Almost Famous — I listened to it for three days straight,” Joe said.
Joe has been a host on Morning Joe for 18 years, alongside his now-wife, Mika Brzezinski, and Willie Geist.
Also, during the interview, the former politician touched on all of the success that clips from Morning Joe have had on online platforms like YouTube. Joe admitted there were initially some fears that came with the territory of dominating the internet.
“It’s great. One of the things that I had been worried about, that Mika and I always went back and forth on, was the fear that we were just preaching to the choir,” he explained of the show’s success on YouTube. “Whether you’re talking about YouTube, whether you’re talking about the newsletter, whether you’re talking about writing in other formats, whether you’re talking about these town hall meetings, all of them open up the audience and help you reach new people and get new insights.”
“I will tell you that since such a large swath of social media has gotten so toxic, I actually found myself going onto YouTube more, and it’s just an extraordinary format, where if I randomly want to see a Paul McCartney concert from 1976 I can type it in and sit there and it comes up immediately,” Joe added. “Or if I want to see a [Winston] Churchill speech, I can do the same. I haven’t followed it closely, but I read about Piers Morgan apparently doing extraordinarily well on YouTube, and I suspect others will probably follow in that direction.”
