Look: It’s a slow news afternoon, the entire East Coast is about to go into rain-induced hibernation, and you probably don’t have anything better to do than watch a great man of letters puzzling over Drake’s word choices. Here’s the backstory: The still-standing Salman Rushdie has a new book called Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and he recently visited Toronto to help promote it. When he went to CBC’s studio, someone had the great idea to expose him to Toronto’s preeminent cultural export: Drizzy Drake. And so Rushdie gamely recited a few of Drake’s lines, including the infamous “last name Ever, first name Greatest” Sprite commercial bit. Rushdie’s reaction, by and large, was something like this: Hmm, sure, that’s fine. Watch it all go down below.

If the haters ever really get Drake down, at least he can console himself by remembering that the Ayatollah Khomeni never issued a fatwa commanding an entire religion of people to kill him. With that in mind, Rushdie’s “I know how that feels” is pretty great.