This is me, Craig Ferguson. I'm inviting you to come and see my brand new comedy hour.

Well, it's actually about an hour and a half and I don't have an opener because these guys cost money.

But what I'm saying is I'll be on stage for a while.

Anyway, come and see me live on the Pants on Fire tour in your region. Tickets are on sale now

and we'll be adding more as the tour continues throughout

2025 and beyond. For a full list of dates, go to the Craig Ferguson show.com. See you on the road,

my dears. Hello, welcome to the Joy podcast. My name is Craig Ferguson. I am your host today. I've just

finished reading this book.

Well, not this one. This is a fancy show-off version, but I've read the same book inside bits.

But this is the new cover. It's by a gentleman called Salman Rushdie, who is one of the greatest

writers of our generation. And you're going to talk to him right now with me.

You're not going to talk, I'm going to talk, and he's going to talk. You're going to listen.

So let me just say this, before we go any further, I just finished reading the 11th hour this morning,

which is a little late for me to talk to you about it, because I like to kind of get a little cynical and have a bit of distance from the book

so that I'm not like fawning and fanboy, but I'm going to fawn and fanboy a little bit.

That's okay.

I don't know, though, because sometimes, you're a seasoned professional.

Sometimes flattery sounds like manipulation, doesn't it? No, it just sounds like. All right, I good. I'll go for it. So here's what I thought. I think that this book, because I've read, I don't know if you know this, but you've written a few books and I've read them. This one,

I feel, is the most accessible thing. Either I'm getting smarter or you're, or you're kinder.

It feels like a very affable book to me in a weird way. It was, you know, it was very enjoyable to write. Yeah, it's very enjoyable to read. Which isn't always necessarily the same thing. Right. But this one, it was like,

you know, because I wrote this nonfiction memoir about the attack, etc. Right. And somehow,

the moment I finished it, like this door in my head opened and I was able to go back into fiction.

...