“You said to me and many other people to never say ‘Thank you,’ because we owe you nothing. It is one of the few times I’ve known you to be dead wrong,” Stephen Colbert told Jon Stewart last night, as Stewart squirmed and wriggled uncomfortably on his final night hosting The Daily Show.

“We owe you. And not just what you did for our careers, by employing us to come on this tremendous show that you made. We owe you because we learned from you. We learned from you by example how to do a show with intention, how to work with clarity, how to treat people with with respect. You were infuriatingly good at your job. On behalf of so many people whose lives you changed over the past 16 years, thank you,” Colbert said, as Stewart choked up.