Stephen Colbert

Now I've miseducated America.

I won.

I don't want to win.

You know, I didn't always want to win, but my character always wanted to win.

The biggest difference is that I'm not there to win against my guest.

And, you know, I I am not I'm letting them talk for more than seven seconds at a time where I was.

I was living by the old Joe Scarborough rule on the old show, which is if your guest talks for more than seven seconds at a time, you've lost control of your show.

And I don't do that anymore.

I'm so happy to hear the stories that they have to tell.

Now, the danger there when I first started the show is that then you bring – you have to bring some opinion to the table.

Again, it was like a matter of overcorrection when the show first started.

I guess I'll have no punch.

And there's a great release.

There's a great –

gift of exhaustion that comes on you from doing a show like this over and over and over again that you actually lose all those second thoughts and then you're allowed to sort of be yourself with your guests finally and again about six months into the show i went okay i don't have any i don't have any energy left to overthink this i just have to do what instinctually feels good to me and every and every aspect of the show and got better and and got easier and became more like me because i didn't have time to think about i didn't have the energy to think about it anymore

I'll tell you who actually gave me kind of a hint about that is that one of my dear friends is Steve Higgins, who's Fallon's announcer and sort of sidekick.

And I've known him for many years, and he's a lovely guy.

And he said, so how's the schedule going?

I said, oh, we're going to start doing two on Thursdays.

And he goes, oh, thank God.