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Despite being able to demonstrate a very large audience, major advertisers at first wouldn't touch Limbaugh.

So that what you tend to see is someone like a Rush Limbaugh, he's the classic case because he's the most successful, he didn't sort of like come out of his mother's womb with the highest ratings in the country.

The reason that conservative talk radio works is because there is an audience for it.

It's nice that HBO is in business with the audience and not with the advertisers. There's a difference.

But HBO is less interested in how many people are watching than in how much the people who are watching are liking the show. They didn't set up their business model to make writers happy. It's just a nice unintended consequence.

The reason I take Rush Limbaugh seriously is not because he's offensive or right-wing, but because he is one of the few people addressing a large group of disaffected people in this country. And despite his frequent denials, Limbaugh does indeed have a somewhat cult-like effect on his ditto heads.

There were so many people after that first 'Colbert Report' interview that were impressed by the synergy we had during the interview. People everywhere we'd go would say, 'You should be the bandleader; it would be great for jazz. It would be great for the music.' But I was completely against it.

It's hard for a liberal to go on between Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, because it's like doing country music after hip-hop. I mean, just, the audience doesn't go from one to the other.

Rush Limbaugh makes money getting simpleminded people to feel good about their intellectually undernourished brain spasms. He's very good at it, and I scarcely believe a fraction of what he says.

I think one of the things about Donald Trump that's interesting is he lives in a rarified atmosphere where it's possible that he doesn't get enough feedback, enough people rolling their eyes at him. It's a danger more in show business than it is with wealth.