Finding Signal Against the Noise | Piers Morgan | EP 469
If you watch a Trump rally speech for two hours and you don't laugh once, you've got a problem. I've known him a long time. Yeah, he can make me laugh like very few people. I mean, he's genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. He called me for a catch-up conversation—we were having a chat. He said, "By the way, what happened to Theresa May?" Well, funny enough, I'm just reading a story this morning that she's now on the speaker circuit. He went, "What?" I went, "Yeah, she's getting uh £140,000 of speech." And Trump, "Are you effing kidding me?" He said, "I'd pay £140,000 not to hear her speak." Now, that's just funny.
[Music]
Yeah, hello everybody! I'm in London, UK, today. Just arrived this morning. I had the opportunity to speak with Pierce Morgan. I've got to know Pierce a little bit. He's always treated me very fairly as a journalist, and also my daughter, who he's interviewed a couple of times. So, we had a chance today to sit down and talk. Pierce has moved out of mainstream Legacy broadcasting and into the online space. He's actually kind of a first mover on the European and UK side, with regards to such a move.
He has a very popular enterprise, Pierce Morgan Uncensored, which is actually kind of a hybrid between a Legacy Media news approach and the more free-flowing conversation and investigation that YouTube in particular enables. So, we talked a fair bit about how he got to that point, the development of his career. We talked a fair bit as well about Britain's Got Talent and America's Got Talent, and the strict meritocracy that those shows represent and the implications for the value of meritocracy in the public landscape.
We talked about his orientation, his increasing orientation in relationship to his own curiosity, his desire to change his mind and to learn, and how that plays into learning to listen and into running an increasingly successful private news and public affairs operation, which is what he has on YouTube—a very, very rapidly growing channel. We talked a little bit about the British political scene. As most of you know, the UK people elected a new government only a few days ago, headed by Kier Starmer. We had a chance to talk about that as well, and that made up the bulk of our interaction.
So join us! So tell me, what have you been doing that's particularly interesting? I'd like to know about your work online, in particular. You've really blown up as a journalist. So, what do you think you're doing right, and what have you been doing that's interesting?
I would say the most interesting phase of my entire career has been the last few months. The reason I would say that is I've run national newspapers for nearly 10 years in the UK. I've judged massive talent shows—America's Got Talent, Britain's Got Talent. I did CNN—replaced Larry King at CNN. All of these jobs were fascinating. There was a morning show over here, but transitioning out of conventional linear television completely, because we were running with Pierce Morgan Uncensored both a linear vehicle for it and also YouTube.
What was happening was we were getting 100,000 people watching the big shows on the linear version, and we were getting 10 million watching on YouTube. Eventually, I went, "Why are we bothering with the TV version?" There's the question—why are we bothering with the TV version? Like a global question. I think the answer in 10 years' time is nobody will be. I think, you know, people like yourself, people like Joe Rogan, people like Ben Shapiro, I think everyone has worked out that anyone under 45 doesn't really watch linear television. They watch it for live sport. They might watch it for a massive breaking news story, but actually what most people under 45 do is they watch apps on their TVs.
In America recently, 10% of American television watchers, it was revealed in a major study, now watch everything on their Smart TV to the YouTube app. So that's one in 10, right? And that's going to massively, exponentially increase, I think, very quickly. So to me, you know, I joke about it, but in a way, I feel like the kind of just...