Joy, a Podcast. Hosted by Craig Ferguson - 131 - Series Finale!

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

This week Craig makes a big announcement about the future of the Joy Podcast. It's a can't miss episode. Have a question for Craig? Drop him an email at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, send him a message on social media, or drop a comment below. _______________________________________________ Craig is also on the road. Dates and tickets can be found here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.thecraigfergusonshow.com/tour ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠_________________________________________________ FIND CRAIG: Website - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.thecraigfergusonshow.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/craigyferg⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@craigy_ferg⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ X - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.x.com/craigyferg⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Facebook - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/thecraigfergusonshow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ABOUT THE JOY PODCAST: Storied late-night talk host Craig Ferguson brings his Joy Podcast to you. Joy is a free association improvised broadcast with a quick witted smart ass. Craig answers your questions in his own way. No guests. No Bullshit (actually that’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's never too early to plan your summer story in Europe with WestJet, from rolling countryside to cobblestone streets. Begin your next chapter. Book your seat at westjet.com or call your travel agent. WestJet, where your story takes off. I'm Craig Melvin. Cheers. Cheers.

Cheers. I've always been a glass half-hole kind of guy. And now I'm talking to some people who look at the world that way too. Some really fascinating folks who share their defining moments, their triumphs, challenges. Their stories are funny, bang, like candid. So I hope you'll join me each week, and who knows, you might just come away with your own glass hatful. Search Glass Half Full with Craig Nelson from today on YouTube and wherever you get your podcast. This is me, Craig Ferguson. Come see me live in your region on my Pants on Fire comedy stand-up tour. For the full list of dates and tickets, go to the Craig Ferguson

wwwinshow.com. VIP meet and greet packages are available as well. Come say hi and have a laugh. Ah, ha, ha. Hello, everyone. My name is Craig Ferguson. I am your host for the Joy Podcast today and every day that the Joy podcast is on,

which up until this point has been one day a week. But from this point on, that is about to change. And I will tell you why. Well, I'll tell you how it's going to change first. I don't have the bandwidth, as the kids say at the moment, to do the Joy podcast. This podcast I've been doing for once a week. So I'm going to step back from it a little.

I'm not saying I won't throw up something every now and again. I will, but maybe, I don't know. But the business of doing a show once a week at the moment has become a little. little difficult for me. I'm very busy with a ton of other projects, which I won't bore you with. I'll bore you with them later on when they come out.

I don't really have time to do it. And I feel like if you don't have time to do something, maybe you shouldn't do it. But I mean, look, I don't know if that's entirely true. Maybe you shouldn't do it. But in the case of this podcast, I think, look,

here's the honest truth. If you if you're looking for a podcast, there's probably some other podcasts out there. I feel like there are enough podcasts. Like if I stopped making podcasts right now, which I'm going to, then there's plenty of other podcasts around.

A lot of them have got me on them and will continue to have me on them. That's another thing I noticed is that I did a bunch of podcasts in the last few weeks, other people's podcasts. And I thought, you know, I feel like I enjoy doing other people's podcasts than I enjoy doing my own.

I wonder why that is. Maybe they're better at it, possibly true. Maybe it's just the way I am at the moment. Also possibly true. Maybe a mixture of both of these things and a few other things I haven't thought of. It's always a little tricky when you decide to stop doing something.

Because, I mean, I don't know if you know this about me. I've stopped doing things before and people have gone, why did you stop doing that? and I mean I remember when I stopped doing late night everyone was like oh you must have got fired I didn't I didn't get fired I have been fired in my life but not not from late night no I stopped doing it because it was time to stop doing it

and it's time to stop doing this this podcast I feel like I'm beginning to I mean look I'm literally at this point even as I speak to you now forwarding it in I'm recording it on a phone And whilst I think that's fine, sometimes, I've noticed recently, I wonder if any of you have noticed this. Sometimes when I, if I have an idea for a story or a piece of stand-up or something like that, I need to mess around it with it for a little while. I mean, if it begins as kind of something I talk about it, so I'll talk about it to my friends or I talk about it to, well, I don't have that many friends. You know, I talk about it to my friend, I talk about it to Megan, or I, I'll talk about it to my friend.

I talk about it to Megan or I who's also my friend don't get me wrong and also you know I just I kind of let it breathe a little bit and what I've noticed is if I have an idea or I'm thinking about something I will put it up in the podcast before I've thought

about it properly and then once you do that you think well I'll put up on the podcast and I'll just go away and it doesn't it doesn't amount to any I don't follow the idea to the point where I would normally or maybe you would normally do that. And to that end, I have noticed in particular,

I've been working on a book, a fiction book for a while. And as a writer, not a reader, I've been working on a few fiction books as a reader as well. But I've been working on a fiction book for a while. But it's fiction in an odd way. It has a lot of real lives in it and real life in it, which requires me to be accurate. So it requires a little bit of work. And I feel like,

and I like work that I enjoy, you know, research and research in the old-fashioned way, not Googling something, which is, you know, it's a legitimate form of research. It's getting it, it's a kind of, a lot of the times I feel like it's maybe just scratching the surface and research has to be a little more analog, For me, reading from books, I seem to absorb the information with greater accuracy or just efficiency.

I seem to absorb information better when it comes to me in a slightly more papery form in the computer. I'm not saying I don't use computers, of course, I do everybody does, but I don't know if everybody does, but I do. but I do want to severely curtail my digital activity which is not massive by anybody's metric I don't think I don't want to minimize my use of it but I really am not

I'm not on social media although I have for a long time been putting up bits of the podcast or ticket sales and all that kind of stuff on social media sites and that'll probably still happen but I'm less so as well I really feel like I want to kind of cut that back a bit and part of that for me is to to pull back on the on the rather kind of hectic nature of putting out a show every week in which sometimes I don't feel like doing it and

whilst if it were a job sometimes you've got to do the job when you don't feel like doing it God knows we've done that but this shouldn't really be a job podcast isn't going to be a job is it I mean I know it's for some people but it's not for me this is not how I earn my living and so I

kind of feel like I I don't I mean I just I'm not going to now do it anymore I'll keep the YouTube channel up in case in case it's

you know, I have to make a statement or if I if anything turns out or I want to share something, you know, on that or push that. I've actually thought about putting another stand-up special on the YouTube channel because I'd very much like doing it that way because that way that you have

autonomy, you know, you do what you want. I'm not against, and I please don't think that I am, against modern technology, I'm not against modern technology, but I do feel modern technology, digital technology, is very similar to every other technology in human history,

whether it is the wheel or the printing press or, you know, a knife. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. You know, you can put a wheel on a car. You put a wheel on an ambulance. You can put a wheel on a tank. So what I mean? You can use a knife to make a salad or you can use a knife to stab somebody. It's, you know, so it's not about being a luddy about technology,

but my interaction with digital technology, I feel in my line of work, like if I was a doctor, which I think bear for us all I'm not. But if I was, I think I'd be way into technology much more because the advances of what AI can do for diagnosticians and people who are looking at patterns and stuff like that, it's immensely useful.

And I don't want to kind of, oh, it's all bad, it's going to take over the planet. I don't think it's all. bad. I also don't think it's sentient either. I think that's a kind of silly, non-scientical idea. I look forward to your quotes, which I won't, your comments, which I won't read, because I don't do this love doing that years ago. But here's, here's what I think. I think that for people like me who work with your imagination, and that's a lot of people, I need time for that imagination, to percolate.

Other people may know, but I do. And it's funny because, you know, like people will, you know, the assumption is when I was doing late night where I'm doing stand-up, the assumption is that, you know, a lot of it have improvised. And it is. A lot of it

is improvised. But it, in fact, I'd say most of it is, particularly at the beginning of a show, like the beginning of a stand-up show, nearly always. and as time goes on that's why I change it every couple of years even if I do a special or not because I don't want to get into pattern

repetition patterns but you know for a while it's good to have it that way you have your act and you go out you know what you're going to say pretty much you know how the punch lines are going to land and it feels good and then you ditch it and start again

but even if something is improvised it's usually an idea that's had some time somewhere or maybe my brain's just been working at that speed I don't know how anyone else's brains work. I think we've established I'm not a doctor. But I'm kind of, I have a fair idea how mine works. And mine needs a little more time.

And I feel like a lot of the time in the digital world, in entertainment, I'm not talking about the rest of the world. I've no real experience about it other than as a consumer. And I certainly, it's how I get news, is how I get it from. digital size. I don't, you know, I don't look out and try and find a newspaper salesman. You know, Adam is connected to the world, I think, as most people. I don't, I don't, I do have this. I'm a bit careful. Maybe I'm a snob, but I'm a bit careful. I think it might be a snob. But I, I'm careful about how I get my news. I don't, I don't consider a lot of, uh,

news outlets they consider themselves news sources, I don't consider them new sources. And a lot of, and certainly, you know, parts of social media, I find that, well, I'm not honest, so maybe I shouldn't comment on it. But when I was on it, I didn't feel it was a reputable source of media, perhaps of information, perhaps that has changed. I think it probably has. Let's be optimistic and say, no, it's all believable now and everything's fine. check. So

I think what I'm saying is I think the thrust of what I'm trying to get at is this. It's not yours as me. Do you know what I'm saying? I'm not saying that I have a problem with how it's how it goes

except in the way I interact with it. And that's, if any of us have any agency in life, it's how we interact with the world. I mean, that's pretty much all your control of as far as I can say is, you is how you personally interact with the things you can, you can't change.

I mean, you, you got to accept the things you can change, change the things you can and know the difference. That seems to be the thrust of what I'm getting at. And it's always the thrust of whenever I have to break things down. So, bottom line is this, my friends. This is obviously going to be a little bit of a shorter episode today because really it's an au revoir and an explanation

to those of you that have been following this podcast and I appreciate that you do it. You'll realize though through the time of it as well like it began as a, I had a concept that we'd call it joy and I would talk to people about ways it makes them joyful and I did do that for a bit and then I found myself talking to people just about anything because that's usually ever conversation goes

but the name kind of stuck and we just kind of kept going. And then towards the middle of last year, I began to get extremely busy with a lot of different projects, all of which I want to do, and all of which require my presence a little more than this does. So I thought, well, I'll be able to keep going. But as time mounted up, and there's a bunch of things going on it, the ones that you know about, then it's Scrabble or American on purpose, which is a series of documentary shows that I'm doing for CNN, which has taken up a great deal of my time. But we're in post-production for that now. They're nearly ready, and I'm very optimistic about them. I feel very good about them, but they do require my

participation and attention. And that matters to me. There are some other projects that haven't been and out because they're not at that stage yet but they are you know projects which involve me writing and particularly right something that I really enjoy

doing I've neglected a great deal and I feel like part of the neglect of that is not allowing myself it feels very self-indulgent to talk to you like this

and I do try and avoid this so if this is boring for you you can switch off because it's not like I'm going to make any more. You're like, oh, what happened? Did I miss an episode? So, but in order, by way of an explanation for me, if you're still here, the process of right and I like doing it, and I don't think I'm bad at it. I need to think about things for a little bit. And some of the times the things I need to think about, I think about, I think, I think they're nothing you know I'll I'll think they're like just throw away thoughts and

then they'll turn into something and I think that if you do I'll give an example if you improvise a lot then sometimes you will throw something away in an improvisation it's not I suppose it's not throwing it away but you use it in an improvisation and then it doesn't go anywhere else because it's out and done so it doesn't sit and metamorphosize or mastasticize or do something inside your mind that turns it into something else. It doesn't grow in richness and strangeness.

It's just exercised from your thought process. And I think that's how my brain works. I'm not making a claim for anyone else's brain. So I feel like when I was doing late night, I didn't write, I wrote American Own Purpose, which was an autobiography. so I kind of knew what happened because I'd been there.

But the first thing I did when I stopped doing late night, which required a great deal of improvisation is what I'm getting to is I wrote a book. And I wrote a book that came out and it was fine and I'm very proud of that book and I actually like that book. I like all the books, but I like

not all the books that exist, all the books that I have friends. I don't like all the books that exist I think that would be a grand claim to make and also they're not all good as a spoiler alert no books are good maybe not all mine are good but I'm proud of them and I want to write some more of them

and they require me to shut up sometimes and like the first time I wrote a book I wrote a book called Between the Bridge and the River and the impetus for writing was I just made a movie

which had failed and I was very upset and I was going through which I mean it failed at the box office I used to be very cruel about the movie and say it failed it creatively it was a movie called I'll be there but I look back in it now I think the two things

one I regret saying that because so many people worked hard on that movie not just me so who am I to say that and secondly it's not a failure it just turned out a little bit different than I thought it was going to be but I watched it fairly recently I thought, well, it's not bad.

It is sweet. Nobody gets hurt. So, but the reason I wrote the first book I wrote is because I had written something that had failed in it. It created an avenue of unemployment. So, and with that unemployment, I was able to turn it to my advantage by writing something that nobody asked me to write. and then after I had that book

actually after before that book even came out I got late night and I got you know my life changed immeasurably and I got extremely busy all the time and I have being extremely busy in many ways ever since and plus I have no idea about I had no concept of retiring

I'm not interested in that as a concept for me What I do is so not really a job anyway. It's just a kind of, it's an expressionist. I'm now lucky enough to make it live and doing it. But, you know, I kind of do things that I like to do. And I realize that it's an extremely privileged position now that I know that. But it's also how I've been able to work and navigate the world. So, I mean, I do work hard at what I do.

And I also, I follow the basics. You know, I'm a show up on time. you know, try and be respectful of everything that's going on. So what I want to do is in terms of writing, the ambitions I have for myself creatively is that I want to create a bit more space for myself to do that. And whilst I realize that that is a privilege, it doesn't make it any more necessary for me to do what I want to do.

I mean, I can't pretend that I don't need that space. It requires me. What I intend to do for the next little while, aside from the work I'm committed to, which I'm enjoying to, enjoying doing, is create space for me to write, is basically what I'm saying. And that space is being eaten up a little bit in criminal. I know you think, Craig, it's half an hour talking to a camera a week.

How is that a podcast? How is that? Eat up your time. It doesn't physically, you know, but it eats up something, you know, it eats up some kind of energy,

I think. If I, you know, if this podcast comes out on a Tuesday, you know, usually I record it on a Sunday, Sunday today. And it goes out on Tuesday because it goes to the podcast.

podcast guys and they, you know, they put the music on it and stuff and put it on the podcast sites and then it goes up. And if I'm recorded on Sunday by about Thursday of the week before I start to think, I'm going to do that podcast. I got to do the podcast. So what am I going to do? And then I'll look at the tweets and emails and then I'll just do that. And but and that of course is what it's not like I think, oh, I'm going to talk about this. I don't. But it's kind of in my mind somehow. I can't really explain it other than I don't have the bandwidth for it right now. It's become mature and I don't want it to be that. If it was how I earned my living, that's one thing.

But it's not. So my dear lovely friends, this is, I am going to step up back from me. doing a weekly podcast. Now, I feel like if you want podcasts, there will be some avail. So that's really what I'm saying to you. If you've lasted this long in these and there's ramblings, then you probably listen to me more than most people. So look, I appreciate it.

I'm still going to work. I'm still doing stuff. I'm actually working more but I want to work more on stuff which I think I can contribute a little more to rather than just being another podcast for you so I bid you do

I'll see you along the way as I walk the earth solving for crimes and doing kung fu and and that's it I, you know, much like when I was a kid, I used to love watching the monkeys on TV. I loved to watch the monkeys.

It was a good show. And it was a good show. And the song, Hey, Hey, the Monkeys, used to finish it with, we may be coming to your town. And I thought, oh man,

it would be great if the monkeys came to my town. They never came to my town. But it always kind of stuck me as a thing that as an entertain, Like if you like an entertainer and they came to your town, that would be awesome. The town that I grew up in, which is outside of Glasgow, no one really came there, like ever, as far as I remember. So, I mean, I'm sure it's changed now and it's a paradise of urban renewal, but it wasn't when I grew up there. And I, so the reason I said that thing about the monkeys is because I, I,

will continue to tour. I will continue to do stand-up. I will continue to do live performances because I do love that. And I love the visceral human connection of a live performance, more than any other type of performance. And so I'll continue to do that. So I may be coming to your town, is what I'm saying, but Pando coming to your computer every Tuesday on a podcast. That's not happening. I appreciate you supporting this thing and I hope you'll buy the products advertised and I'll see you along the way, my friends.

All right. Thanks a lot. Tata.