Posted on 09/10/2025 10:46:45 PM PDT by Harmless Teddy Bear
Mike Rowe talks about Charlie Kirk and their relationship Sorry if the transcript is a bit wonky
The video that you should be watching right now is a really fun and light-hearted conversation between me and Theo Vaughn. That's what we were about to put up on YouTube. But our friend Charlie Kirk was just murdered. And it's like I don't really want to talk about this. It's too soon.
But I can't put up a conversation with me and Theo Vaughn.
I can't put up a conversation about anything. Ben Shapiro was coming in here tomorrow.
Yeah.
Which is why I'm down here today. And Ben and Charlie were very close, of course, and Megan Kelly and so many others are going to be thinking about and talking about nothing but this for I don't know how long.
So it just seemed like I mean the last time the last time I felt like this I remember calling you it was after that Vegas shooting. Another insane event that I I have no agency to speak to and yet when these things happen I don't feel like I have permission to do anything else. So, you either be quiet and let the world spin or say a few words. And because he was our friend and because when I came back from lunch, you were sitting here crying and because I just got off a Zoom call with Theo Vaughn.
I bet he was crying, too.
He said to me, "I don't understand why this hit so hard." and his uh business partner, a guy named Ezra, he said, "I got a room full of young people behind me here, and they're just… they don't know what to think or what to say. They're just walking around looking at their shoes. They're they're stunned."
And yeah, stunned.
It is stunning. And I know why people are so upset. Because he was such a strong voice for his side. He spoke eloquently and I've never seen anybody argue more kindly than he did. He never would embarrass his debating opponent. Interlocutor.
He was always polite and he always let them say their piece and then he would destroy them rhetorically and politely
and politely.
Did you see the footage?
I did. I I I watched it and I was not ready to see it, but I did. I couldn't I couldn't help myself. And when I saw it, the first thing I thought was, how can he possibly survive this? Cuz I and I just started I just started praying immediately, you know, he would, but obviously he didn't.
Yeah. I don't I mean, to me, it kind of feels like, I said this to Theo, too. It's like somebody um put the Constitution up on a wall and and shot the First Amendment, you know. I mean, people who Mary, my partner, she's very emotional she's never met him.
Yeah.
You know, and I think I think maybe something extraordinary is going to happen in the days and weeks ahead. I don't know what it is, but it feels um portentious.
Look, you had the the healthcare CEO get shot. The two people in Minnesota get shot. These are assassinations. This wasn't a murder today. This was a political assassination.
This is This is, You're right. the First Amendment got shot today.
Maybe too. I think a lot of people on both sides of the aisle. I I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but what happened in Butler a year or so ago, that was a game of inches, maybe an inch.
Yeah.
And so, you know, people were just like, "Wow, that the country the country dodged the bullet literally and figuratively."
Yeah. But they didn't today.
Yeah. And I don't want to turn this into a eulogy so much as an acknowledgement of I consider him my friend. We only met twice in real life. The last time I saw him was here. He interviewed me a month ago and he was such a supporter of Microworks.
Yeah.
And he he called me a couple of times in the past just to say, "Hey man, I'm just you know, I'm out here doing my thing and it's easier for me to do what I do knowing that people like you are doing what you do over there. And we might not agree on everything. We might not see the world the exact same way, but you know, we're we're pushing a boulder up a hill as best we can.
And he was he was actually joyful about it, too. It didn't always come across in his videos, but he was, you said, kind, but he was a happy sort of warrior.
Warrior. Yeah. you know, and when he when he latched on to this cause, right? And this is what really breaks my heart. I socially I don't try I mean I've been on MSNBC, I've been on CNN, I've been on all of them, but I knew when I shared this and you can you can go to my Facebook page and find the post. It's a month ago. I knew there'd be hell to pay in the comments and it is.
And I want I want the people I want the people who were unkind in those comments. I want those comments to stand. I want their names to stand next to them. I want the cheap shots to be there. So, I'm not going to take that down. But but I am going to say to his wife Erica and their kids, it's a just a grief that can't be spoken and I'm just so sorry for it.
And I believe he'll be remembered for a long time.
Well, I mean he had a great future ahead of him. He was only 31 years old and you know four years from now he could have run for president and I think a lot of people might have voted for him. Did you see the size of the crowd? It's massive.
That's another thing that never comes through on those videos. You see a guy in a tent.
Yeah.
With a little bit of security, right? You see a, you know, a rope and you see somebody on the other side and you see the very thing the country was built on. Debate, disagreement, and exchange of ideas.
Yeah.
You know, he um he went into the lion's den. He he was, you know, he was brave.
Fearless.
Yeah.
I wonder if he was fearless. I wonder if he was scared. I wonder if he just did it anyway. I mean, I'm sure he was scared at some point, you know, but just the look on his face, the, you know, the little smirk that he would have when he would go, "Okay, I hear what you're saying, but you know,
Yeah, I I think I don't think there's anybody who argues like him to take his place."
No. And what came out in this interview, the last one I did with him, it was almost a parenthetical, you know, he was he was telling me something I knew and something probably that most of his audience knew, but he didn't go to college.
I know. I know he he didn't go to college, but he read every damn thing he could get his hands on. He read everything.
Yeah.
And he logged it away.
And so what's he do, man? He goes to college to share
Yeah.
what he learned not from college.
Yeah.
But from the world and to meet his interlocutors on their turf.
Yeah.
And to debate on their terms. And when you look at that audience today, I don't know how many in the audience are with him or against him. But it's a big audience and most of them are there, the vast majority are there to listen and maybe have their minds changed or maybe have their ideas challenged or even if you're not sure where you fall, just to just to hear people coming from it at totally opposite directions.
It's a good thing. It's a healthy thing. It's what the country is based on.
It's the essential thing. Essential indeed.
It's the essential thing. I may not I may not agree with you, but I'll risk my life to defend your right to say whatever the thing is.
Yeah, that's what he was. Who said that?
It was Voltater.
Was it?
I think so.
I'll take your word for it.
Yeah. So, sorry it's not the most uplifting episode of The Way I Heard it. But it's the only thing I could possibly do is to add my condolences to the pile of the shattered and see what tomorrow brings.
Well, you don't have any predictions on what is going to happen next, do you? You just think something's going to happen.
Look, I was six in 1968. I remember, I remember when King was killed. I remember the look on my parents' face watching a black and white TV and the way they just shook their heads. I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know who he was, right? But I knew that something had changed.
Yeah.
I didn't know what. And you would think I'd be You think I'd have a better answer, you know, 56 years later. It's tough to say. I mean, I just with all of the things that have happened recently, it feels like 1968.
I mean, I was five in 1968, but I remember too RFK his train heading to his final resting place in DC, I believe, is where he is, right?
Uh I think he's buried in Arlington maybe, or probably, I don't know. But I was just, you know, I was five and my sister and I were sitting on the floor and she was weeping and I didn't understand why. I just saw the train and but I know you know looking back at that time all of the things that happened all of the just so much so many people assassinated that year and it's just it's never a good idea.
It's never that's never a good argument.
You know what, man? I No, no, it's never a good argument, but we say a lot, history is a wheel and it spins. And there's a real temptation, I think, to take the feeling we have right now. And look, Charlie Kirk was not RFK or JFK or Martin Luther King, but he might have been.
Yeah. And there whatever it is the something something bigger than him died today and what that's going to mean. I I truly don't know. But I can see just in the anecdotal conversations I've had in the hour or so since this happened. Um it it it doesn't fit neatly onto a shelf. you know.
No, it doesn't. So, I I don't really know. I know a lot of people are feeling scared. And I think, too, you know, this business in Charlotte, it's another video that's really hard to watch and it and it makes us feel like something is untethered. That's the feeling.
Yeah. Something ain't right.
Right. And that's going to have to be corrected, addressed. And I don't uh, I wish I had a better answer. I don't know. The only thing remotely optimistic is that I know that we're tempted to see the headlines of our day as new and as special and as unexampled. Nobody's lived in a time like this. The country's never been this divided. The these feelings surely must be new because we're special and this is our time. But to your point, 1968
Yeah.
1865.
Yeah.
And so it goes.
People will argue whether he was a a great man and a lot of people who disagreed with him will keep their counsel, but one thing's for sure, he was he loved this foundation and he was my friend and I'll miss him.
I didn't even know him. I just knew of him and I'd seen his work and I could appreciate the talent that he had and I know how he got it honestly by just reading and studying and he could, he could speak about the Constitution. He could speak about the Bible. Every time one of his videos came up my feed, I watched it to the end and I smiled because I thought this guy is an amazing talent. He is a rhetorical he's brilliantly, you know, he's brilliant with rhetoric.
You know, the thing he says somewhere on this video, Mike Rowe, I agree with you so much I can't stand it. And all I said was with respect to that point, I said, "My liberal arts education has served me well." And I said, "You know, I'm sorry you didn't have one." He goes, "Oh, I got one."
And I said, "Right, but my point is everybody who's got one of these (Iphone) has one." You know, 99% of the known information in the world is on this thing.
Yeah. Right.
Thanks to this thing, we all got the terrible news today that we got, but it's with us and access to all the knowledge you could want. And that's the thing that he and I agreed with, I think, um, most passionately. Anyway, we'll miss you. RIP.
All the people who want to shut up or arrest those who say something with which they disagree, and Charlie Kirk just engaged with his mind and with his voice. He's exactly what America should be about.
The man was truly a hero. And unfortunately, now a martyr.
I believe they will eventually catch the monster who did this. Something he did will lead us to him. My bet is on some trans nut job. That is because the bullet happened after he started talking about trans people .
>> So sue me.
absolutely no need for that disclaimer — Kirk’s impact is only beginning to be understood — the shock is real, the implications are consequential
RIP Charlie, go with God.
God bless Charlie Kirk and damn the hateful leftists.
Check it out:
JNeukirch61
@JackSon12450022
My son sent me this:
White cap gives the get ready timing…. Black shirt acknowledges and swipes arm… boom. Am I seeing things or did they baseball play a sniper
https://x.com/JackSon12450022/status/1965931754486980807
Intellectually gutsy too.
His main work was on college campuses, never having been a college student!
Charlie Kirk was the Gandhi of our day. R.I.P.
Bkmk
Thanks for your work Charlie. R.I.P., sir. ❤️
My suspicion is that it is a cross dresser, too. Just a suspicion though.
He was a perfect example of the distinction between formal edication and intelligence. Plenty of brilliant, self-educated people never went to college, and plenty of stupid people did.
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I am many things, some good, some bad but I do try not to be a hypocrite. I have given people grief because they link YouTube videos. I added the transcript, which most of them do not, but it was a short video.
Kirk’s impact is only beginning to be understood — the shock is real, the implications are consequential
Yes. The cubs are in shock.
Yeah, it’s certainly not for kids. X did good there.
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