Transcript of Charlie Kirk’s Views on Business, Fatherhood, and Celebrity | Tyler Bowyer

In continuation of my Charlie Kirk legacy series that I've been doing this week on Culture Apothecary, I wasn't planning on this episode, But you guys loved the Andrew Colvette interview so much. I thought, Man, well, who is somebody else that's known Charlie for forever and can speak to the nerdy behind the scenes, inside baseball, turning point, come up type of stories. That's Tyler Boyer. He is the COO of Turning Point Action, which is our sister organization that really focuses on candidates and the hard core politics of things. Tyler is our longest tenured employee at Turning Point USA. I thought he would be a great person to have on just to share some Ogie Charlie stories that you've never heard. Some of the older, original Candice Charlie-Conye stuff, Charlie's philosophies on parenting, what he envisioned for his kids, his ideas of what would have made Turning Point a success in the early days. Please welcome COO of Turning Point Action, Tyler Boyer, to Culture Apothecary. You are the longest tenured Turning Point employee. Is that right? That's right. You really embarked on this journey with Charlie together. You guys had started this. You're one of the founding fathers, as well as Andrew Colvette.

You guys have been here since the beginning, known him from just being a kid all the way through becoming a husband, becoming a father, and really the superstar that he became. Can you talk about that moment where you first met Charlie and how you guys decided, Okay, let's band together and build this thing?

When I met Charlie, he was already going a million miles a minute. That's what really attracted me to Hitch My Wagon to Charlie. I tell people this all the time is I was here in Arizona, and I was a young leader. I was a college Republican President. I had served on the board of regents as a student regent. We just realized that there weren't any conservative organizations actually helping young people. People had said, Hey, you need to go to meet this kid. That's in Illinois. He's saying a lot of the same things that you're saying, doing a lot of the things that you're suggesting that need to be done. I met Charlie, and it was right away that I knew, wow, he got it. He understood. That's what made his fast friends was he was doing all the things that were the answers to all the problems. That's really the story of Turning Point.

Which at that time, what were the problems that he was seeing and you were seeing?

Oh, man. Just so much. There was just a lot of bloated, conservative of organizations out of the DC area that just didn't do very much. They were more interested in just patting people on the head than actually doing the work. The work is across America. The work is in all 50 of the states, not in the DC Beltway. When you have organizations being run out of DC, they sometimes get in this rat race circle hamster wheel type thing where all they care about are the people who are there and that they're answering to, whether it's donors or if it's people in Congress or the big power players. Charlie never cared about that. That was never of interest to him. It's never been of interest to me. In fact, that's our anti-establishment focus that we have at Turning Point, that everybody's always sensed and always made people feel very uneasy, is that they just can't control us. They can't control Turning Point. They can't control what Alex Clark has to say. They can't control what Charlie has to say or anyone else that works here. That's very unnerving for people who are in the DC area.

That's what makes us so cool is that we were never supposed to exist.

Did he come up with that slogan, Big Gov Sucks?

Yes. Right from the very beginning, that's part of what attracted me to Charlie. All the stuff that you see here that we do today that we continue Charlie's brainpower came up with. So these rally signs, all the big posters that you see on campus that we still use, and we use those at Turning Point Action as well. That was all already devised when I met Charlie. And the Big Government Sucks slogan is so funny. Our original website was turningpointusa. Net, and we also had biggovernmentsucks. Net. And so that was. Net because that's all they could afford at the time. I don't know if somebody else owned the domains or whatever. We eventually got a hold of them. But we were pushing that as a slogan, which was just the rallying cry for all of Turning Point. That was basically our only collateral that we had ever produced was Big Government Sucks signs. And the next day, I had an election to become chair of Maricopa County. I had little Brooks, who's my oldest son. At that time, I think he was five or so, but he was very little. And he's in the picture holding up on the big of Sucks signs right next to me.

Everybody, you could see the entire crowd loved it. Everybody loved it. That was my first interaction, which was that confirmation that this genius, this brainpower, this conservative epicenter that Charlie had created that was so right and so anti-establishment and so real. You could touch it, right? You could feel it with the big stuff. It worked, and it worked with the grassroots. The grassroots gravitated towards it, and that's what the movement needed.

So originally, and correct me if I'm wrong, originally, Turning Point was created, and the vision was just this college campus chapters, clubs, if you will. So it was the field program, which was the first thing we did. And then eventually throughout the years, we expanded into all these other different departments of the organization conversation like CVP and events and graphic design and productions and all these things, right?

Influencer, all that stuff. That's the element that you came through on was all that. But yeah, the heartbeat for all of Turning Point USA has always been the field program, the National Field program. We didn't even have chapters. Chapters came later. It was just going out on campus with a table and preaching the good word, essentially, out on campus.

How did he move from that to events and all these other things?

One of the earliest things, and again, this is the brainpower of Charlie Kirk, was they came up with our Young Women's Leadership Summit.

That was the first event?

That was really one of the first events. It was young women, young Latinos, and then our high school summit. So the very first one that we ever did was in 2015. It was in Pheasant Run Resort in Illinois. So it was real close to the heartbeat. So this was still when Turning Point was all centric around Illinois. And we held basically all three of those events all together, one after another. And this actually happened to be the same week that we did the first Trump rally, which was in July of 2015, but all three of them were basically sandwiched together all at the same resort. So it was like back to back to back. But all of them were tiny. I mean, we had, I don't know, maybe a dozen, two dozen young women at the first Young Women's Leadership Summit. Two dozen. It was not very... I mean, I still have the pictures on my phone. It was not very big. Our high school was a little bit bigger. I think we had 50 or so kids.

But see, to put this in perspective, the growth trajectory we've been on for this last decade or so is so crazy because my first turning point event was Young Women's 2018. I remember. When I was there, there were hundreds and hundreds of kids. Yes. You're saying in a three-year span, we went from 24 or so women to hundreds and hundreds of women?

Hundreds, yeah. Now, thousands where we're at today. But that, to your question, there was always a known quantity here of like, Hey, we need to organize events. We need to organize and do these. The real question was, how do we go about those? Because how do we make them attractive enough for enough people want to go to them because you have to keep expanding. It's a little scary because you have to go from, Okay, well, we can all fit in a conference room in a low budget resort in Illinois to, Hey, we need to move this to Dallas to do it in a little bit more of a central, a little bit more of an accessible place, and we need to move it into a real legit hotel and take over, and then go from there to where we are today, which is we have to take over convention centers and Gaylord Resorts and things like that. The real history of this is our events team. We started building our events team, and we had incredible people, like Alex Sevie, who was working for us at the time, and she had just started. She was in a campaign intern on the Ted Cruz campaign in 2016, was looking for a job, loved doing the events for the presidential-style stuff.

We brought her in and we just sat down, and I remember sitting down with her when we still had our offices in Illinois, and I was like, Hey, are you willing to move to Arizona because we're moving our headquarters to Arizona. She said yes, and she did it. We got into this building, actually, where we're filming right now. There was nothing in here. This was a garage where we're sitting right now. That's all it was. It still is a garage.

It still is, technically.

But it was just a garage. There's nothing in here. This entire space was just completely empty, and we had no one. We had basically one employee that we had to build from the ground up then at that point for our events. For the world's class style events that I know Charlie had always envisioned, along the way, it was, how do we convince donors, and then also Charlie, that we need a bigger and more expensive stage? How do we convince donors and Charlie? How do we lay out that we need a bigger venue for that?

He did not want this to be your mom's or your dad's conservative convention. He was very specific because with the memorial, there was a lot of people clowning on us online being like, Oh, you have fire shooting and cannons and all these things. He had a specific vision of like, This is what makes events great. He wanted us to be doing that stuff, right? Yeah.

I'll tell you from the beginning, this is the humility of Charlie. Charlie was always interested in making sure that we weren't wasting money. Yes.

He was very fiscally responsible.

I mentioned Alex. I remember the first time we bought T-shirt guns, and I was like, Hey, our events are big enough. We used to throw T-shirts from the stage and stuff like that. We still do. Charlie is known for throwing hats and things like that, right? But we bought these T-shirt guns, and I think they were, I don't know, 500 bucks a piece or something. I remember it'd be like, talking with him. I was like, Hey, I think we really need this. And us having that debate over, should we do it? Should we not do it? Every single decision that was made along the way, whether it was expanding the venue expanding the stage, our debate over LED for the background on that. Because, again, once we got to a size that was approximately the size of CPAC, which was the biggest event that existed, we looked at... We had been at CPAC every year since the inception of Turning Point, and I had been there every year. And there was always this uncomfortable because it felt like an older event, right? Not to knock CPAC. It just is more geared towards seniors.

Well, it's more geared towards adults.

Not really young people. That was our concern was like, Oh, do we invest into CPAC and try to make it acceptable, and we're not really in control, or do we do our own thing? That's really when we took a turn, which was like, All right, let's do our own thing. That's where we started the development process with the events team. Lauren started at an event. She came to one of the last events from the old school way of doing things. I remember sitting down with her. She was just a student that had come to watch but had some events experience. She had applied for a job. I sat down with her afterwards, and we We had a conversation. It was like, What would you do differently here? It was just this list. I took that list and sat down with Charlie and was like, Here's all the things that we need to do better. We're hiring. We got to hire more people to help support and make this bigger. Charlie was all on board for that with everything. But we went through all those things. Again, one of those things was LED, and it was like, Oh, man, it's a huge expense.

I mean, doing things like a Taylor Swift concert style level of event, it costs money. You don't want to waste donor dollars and things that programmatically go right into us, campus activism and actually doing the job on things like that, and especially when your budget's a lot smaller. At the time it was. We had to figure out how to offset it by getting more people to show up to events. That's what forced us to grow and say, Okay, we're going to have more tickets sold. We're going to have more sponsors show up to these things. They're going to offset the cost of the LED. They're going to offset the cost. It worked. Charlie was all in on board for that. I think it was that culmination. I think that first year that we were able to pull together America Fest in particular, we started LED at a much smaller scale for YWLS and the Student Action Summit, which we held in West Palm Beach. But that first America Fest that we did a handful of years ago, we moved it to Arizona, called it America Fest, and the LED just lit up, and it was like the sparks and the confetti and everything.

Once you see that on camera, you see everything, and then how many people that attracts and how exciting that is. That's when the game changed, and we've never looked back.

Do you think Charlie wanted to be famous?

No. Charlie Kirk was the most humble person that I've ever seen step into a limelight. That's what has honestly kept everybody squarely around him. He was never a person that was seeking attention. His goal was always to tell the truth and expand the movement.

That the truth would be attention getting enough.

That's right. That would attract everyone that would be necessary to complete the mission. Again, when you step into that role of being a spokesperson for the conservative movement, you naturally become famous. I think he did. He became the face of young conservatism very rapidly because there was a big, huge gaping hole that was left there by the political establishment and the elites. But he never was seeking to be famous, didn't want to be famous.

But he was smart to say that we need to surround ourselves with influencers and commentators and whatever you want to call it that did want to be famous. He would say that to me. He would say that about me. He would be like, Alex, Alex doesn't want to be famous enough. We need her to want to be famous more because it's like that's going to drive you to want to go out there to draw attention to the organization and all that stuff.

I think he was always really focused on the organization and the mission, which is that if we can get people who want to help profess the mission, they always came first. There was a lot of people, and there's give or take. Again, people who want to be famous who can also help profess the mission, that's a really great trade-off. I think that's who really excited him the most, were people who would lay into the mission that wanted to do the hard work. I mean, there's a lot of people who want to be famous but don't want to do the work. Charlie always wanted to do the work, and Fame followed the hard work that he put in. Does that make sense?

What was his early vision of success for TPSA? He was like, We will know we have made it when. Then what did it become in the months right before his death? Then he was like, This is our big vision for Turning Point now going forward.

Oh, my gosh. I mean, those goalposts always kept moving for sure. Every day, it seemed like, Oh, we did it. Then I'd go talk to Charlie and be like, Oh, no, we haven't done it yet. The goalpost just moved. Which is what I honestly love about Charlie is that we were always leading from the front. I mean, it didn't take much in the conservative movement to lead from the front with youth because there was so little that was being done prior to turning point existing. And so we basically became our own marker on that. We had to move the goalpost. Charlie had to constantly keep pushing everyone. Charlie was the person that honestly was always a great example to others because he did that, but always pushed people just the right amount so they wouldn't break, but they would see the vision and see what the outcomes would be for that.

What were numbers or things that he wanted to do then? Then what did it become this year?

I remember we bring up events, our first goals of wanting to get a thousand people at an event. That was a huge, huge deal. No one in the conservative movement had ever done an event that was a thousand people big. They just didn't exist. That's why. Think about presidential campaigns really couldn't get a thousand people in a room a lot of times. Wow. We knew that. Back in 2015, when I remember there was 20 people running for President, we hosted the first big speaking event I talked about. I had Charlie and we had Rand Paul, and it was here in Arizona. Corona, and Rand was still running for President. This was early 2015. We got a thousand people in the room, and they were blown away. They couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe it. It was Charlie and Rand that spoke. But that was pretty typical back then. We can't really envision it now because of Trump rallies and 20. 0 events.

I know that's what I was going to say. I forgot that politics didn't used to be that exciting to people.

It was not exciting. It was horrible. It was awful. It was decrepit. It was miserable. The people running it had no vision.

That's probably something Charlie and President Trump had in common is they both saw the value in making politics more like showbiz.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, Trump is a showbiz President, and turning point became a showbiz events organization that really jived with the entire Trump administration, right?

Right before Charlie died, I mean, this year, what was he telling you guys, just sea-level executives, this is what we need be working towards now for the future of Turning Point?

Well, it's constant. There's a lot of different things. First and foremost, at the very heart, we talked about the field program. The field program has always been the heartbeat of Turning Point's system, right? Whether that's on the Turning Point USA side or the turning point action side. The goal was to grow significantly and dramatically the high school program.

That's growing faster than anything.

Well, that's the biggest thing that's come since Charlie's assassination is that there have been more requests specifically to get involved in high school, and that was the biggest need, and we knew that.

We just found out that the state of Oklahoma, every single high school is going to have a turning point chapter.

That's right. Hopefully, we'll have more states follow in that way. We're going to talk about that, hopefully, in Utah with our Utahns. Yeah, that's a great example of that mission never changed for Charlie from day one to where he is today, which was that was the focus. Keep pushing, keep pushing. There's 30,000 high schools in America. We've got to be at least half of those. He would say, prior to just recently, just when we were in Colorado, we just had talked about this. It's like, We need to be at 20,000 high schools. I remember going like, Charlie, there's only 30,000 high schools in America. He had 20,000 high schools. With Andrew Cipher, who runs the field program, we were having that conversation. I was like, Oh, my Gosh. But that's how much Charlie pushed, right? It was like, Hey, we can be at two-thirds of every high school. Now we almost certainly will. We will. Almost every high school, probably in America.

You're now the COO of Turning Point Action, which is our sister organization. It's a 501(C)(4). And you guys are ballot chasing and you're helping candidates win races. It's more of the straight-up political arm of the organization. Before that, though, you were COO of Turning Point USA. You were the person that hired me originally. There were no media shows. Turning Point USA had never done a show before, and I pitched this idea for a show. You guys decided to take a huge risk in hiring me. What were those conversations like the scenes between you and Charlie about hiring me?

I remember them very, very fondly because it was all centered around YWLS. I remember you came to YWLS, loved it. You had reached out and said how much You loved it. You were a premiere radio talk show host. You were too nice and cute and funny for radio.

I was too conservative, is really.

Then mostly too conservative. That was what the conversation was, which is like, I'm too conservative. This is not a great trajectory for me right there. I don't know what my stability will be here. We had had the conversation with Charlie of like, Hey, what if we took someone like Alex and built around her, something that was really special and unique. At that exact same time, we were actually in conversations with Snapchat about doing a very specific Snapchat-related show because Snapchat does shows, but they control all of the content that goes in and out of Snapchat. It's not like a free-flowing platform similar to Instagram or X or whatever or Facebook. They control all of the narrative, and they had vocalized and said, We would be open if you guys wanted to create a show. That's where, at the same time, having the conversations with you, you had this incredible idea for poplitex. When it brought to Charlie, he was ecstatic and like, Yes, do it. Go. Go, go. That's what really launched the, and God bless you for picking up your entire life out of Indiana, moving to Arizona.

Yeah. This was before... I mean, there was no... He didn't even have the Charlie Kirk show yet. That came later in the pandemic.

I think the next year, the very next year is when we launched Charlie's show.

It was really exciting because you guys took a risk, and again, with donor money, but Charlie saw a bigger picture of like, Okay, I see how this could be something that attracts even more young women to the movement using pop culture as that gateway to hook them in and then be like, Oh, by the way, I'm conservative.

I mean, that was the whole thing, right? We were saying amongst ourselves, but then obviously to everyone else is like, If Fox News and E had a baby, it would be Alex Clarke, and we would love to tap into that with young women. And it worked. The most important thing was that that risk worked. There were many projects that were like that over the years, but obviously, you being one of the most successful things that you invest in yourself, you sacrificing basically your sofa an unknown outcome. Charlie doing that, the entire team, building a team and doing all of that. But it worked because your entire audience was 18 and 24-year-old women. We talked about that so many times of this was the plan. We weren't sure what the outcome was going to be. If you build it, they will come type of a thing.

We all bet on ourselves. We all bet on ourselves.

It did. It was incredible. It was a lot of work. It was every day. Remember that production schedule? Oh, yeah.

I cried every single day. It was just grueling, like hardly any sleep. Just like, Is this going to work? Did I just ruin my life? Give it my entire radio career number one rated show to move out here. What if nobody watches this?

We started from zero. Started a brand new Instagram handle and everything else. Obviously, you had your personal stuff, but you were changing your entire persona, the public persona to the things that you cared most about. Looking back on it, it's like, of course that would work. But at the time-You never know. You never know. The thing that I love about Charlie, and I know he loved about you was, and we talked about this even up until just weeks ago, which was that he always 100% believed in you and the way that you were moving your brand to work with the people who are listening and watching and the content to help the movement. Again, Charlie was always a person, has always been a person that if someone wants to invest themselves into the movement, he would do everything he possibly could to lift you up.

He valued loyalty, and he was loyal.

A hundred %.

What were some of the biggest scandals or hurdles that Charlie had to overcome in the early days? Maybe a video went viral for the wrong reasons, or there was a financial issue, just something that you guys had big drama about.

During the 2016 campaign, we had hosted the first big Trump rally ever here in Arizona, and Charlie really was right there helping with it the whole time. He had become super close with Don Jr and some of his closest confidants who really had put the entire campaign on their shoulders because the RNC at the time was Wasn't super pro-Trump. A lot of the political establishment, political elites really hated Trump. They weren't doing anything to help him. And so literally, Don and his closest allies weren't going out. And they had picked up Charlie. Charlie was brilliant. They had gotten to know him pretty rapidly. Charlie was zipping across the country, helping Dawn, one-on-one, talk to donors, talk about stuff, do content, things like that. So a piece of content was created, and it was like a bowl filled Skittles. It was something along the lines of, if one of these Skittles was poisonous, would you eat it? The analogy was letting one bad person in the country, With a legal immigration? Yeah, legal immigration. Okay. At the time, that was super controversial. Now, it's not very controversial. Now, that meme would fly and people would be like, Yeah, 100%.

70% of the country would agree with it. At the time, it was like, This is somewhat racist. All this stuff, right? What is Don We had produced that. Charlie had had that meme done by one of our graphic designers at the time. It was super stress-inducing because it was like-Because he didn't want to ruin his friendship with Dawn, probably. He didn't want to upset Dawn or the campaign or whatever. But it went massively viral about this racial undertones or all this stuff. Now you put that stuff out, nobody would even believe. But that was the world then. I remember that week, it was just like, we were so stressed. Our whole lives were stressed. We're like, We have to produce more content. We have to do more to make this go away or whatever. Now you can... If Charlie was here right now, we would laugh. We did laugh about that this last election because we were talking about It's how meaningless that feels now. But at the time, it was like our whole world was crashing down because this one meme that we had made for Dawn.

Yeah, and he would never blink at some scandal like that now. You wouldn't even faz him if people were mad.

It's not even a scandal. When you look at that, you're like, That's not a scandal at all. But it just shows how much he cared, how sweet it is. He cared so much. We cared so much. He never wanted to let down Dawn. I tweeted this on Sunday. It's like, Dawn was a big brother to Charlie. He loved him like a brother, and he cared about him, and he wanted to see his success was our success and so on.

Do you remember a time where you and Charlie had a massive disagreement on just how to run or manage the organization, maybe, and Charlie ended up being right?

Charlie was right all the time. We disagreed a lot. The one thing I would say about this is that Charlie was such a humble human being that he wanted to have people around him that would challenge him, that would disagree, all this stuff. He didn't have... There's a lot of people who are CEOs and leaders, executive directors of things, they only want to be surrounded by yes men.

Everybody did feel empowered around him in here to bring something to him like, Hey, I think this should change, or this wasn't right, or this didn't go well.

He always has surrounded himself And so even in the early days where it was just me or just a couple of people making decisions, now we have a lot. As you know, we have dozens of people who are decision makers around here. But again, I would say the one thing about him was he was always so humble where if somebody disagreed, they didn't feel like they had to shut up. I never felt that way. In fact, I felt like he appreciated the constant like, Hey, are you not sure if that would work? Or Are we sure we want to go that way? Or why don't we do it this way? He was always very sensitive to the outcomes that we had because he always knew what was going on. What do you mean? He wasn't detached from the business, right? Oh, right. Again, till last breath on Earth, he was on campus doing some of the very same things that we were doing in the beginning, albeit less popular back then.

Now, probably more of a- You're saying he was always extremely invested and present in the business no matter how famous he became and all the other things that he could have had going on.

Yeah, he could have stopped. He could have just said, I don't need to go on campus anymore. I can just sit in the safety of my house and do my show. He could have. He did do that. He could have easily said, You know what? We don't need spend all this money on a high school program. We don't need to do that. We didn't. Most organizations in the DC Beltway, that's why they never grew, is they just stopped investing because they would just pay themselves or they would pay a bunch of their friends and when they raised more money, they would just pay their people more instead of doing the work for what it costs. That was never the plan. It was always growing things from the ground up. People see that now more. People A lot of people didn't even realize all this work that Charlie did. I had no idea. All this work that Charlie put his name to that he was invested in. They knew him for his radio show, obviously, and listening on a day-to-day basis and his great takes and everything else. But his capacity as a really effective CEO, a really invested CEO, I think is the most critical to truly understand.

And so he had a vision for something that you at first thought was a bad idea?

I would say half the things that we've done haven't worked I mean, we fail all the time. Trial and error. Trial and error, fail early, fail often. There are ideas all the time of shows, for example, ideas like, you are a huge success story, right? But there were lots of shows that failed. There are lots of ideas that didn't do well that were like, Oh, well, we need to scrap that. And in fact, one of those was we did a debate night with Charlie Kirk that was here. It was, again, a safer environment, which was at our headquarters, filming, debating some of the top minds that we'd like to bring in with Charlie. But we realized, Hey, this just doesn't work.

Well, the truth is that behind the scenes, it was hard for us to book people. Nobody wanted to come.

They didn't want to come down to our headquarters They knew he'd win. But it was, yeah, they knew he'd win. He was smart enough. That's the thing. Charlie was like a lot of people I've seen say, Oh, well, of course Charlie Kirk can be a college kid in debates and all that. We tried to invite in the most brilliant leftist minds. They wouldn't. They would decline. They They were just equally as afraid to come in. That's when it was like, the pivot was like, Oh, well, we should just lean in more on the campus tour stuff instead of trying to graduate beyond that, keep doing the same things that work. He's always right about that. I appreciate that about him was that he never wanted to quit doing the things that he knew were the most impactful.

Candice put out her original video that she put out when When Charlie first had died was just about the early days, her friendship with Charlie and all their adventures and everything. What is the story that you have about Charlie and Candice that Candice didn't share?

Oh, well, there's a lot. I put one out. That was right away. I was there with them. It was like, the three of me because I was with Charlie and Candice when we went to TMZ that day with Candice and Kanye. Kanye was immediately obsessed with Candice. I woke up super early to Candice's phone call. I was like, Oh, my gosh. I got this tweet from Kanye. Call Charlie. By the next week, we found ourselves. We were in Calabasis where Kanye had all his production and everything. He was living with Kim at the time. They were married and everything else. Basically, we took Candice there, and they had their first meeting that was there. Candice had mentioned that she loved Chick-fil-A. In the conversation, there was the conversation about she liked it with, I think it was Honey Mustard or whatever it was. I don't know. I can't remember. We had also talked about liking chicken minis. He had shown up the next morning with... He had driven through Chick-fil-A's drive-through by himself.

Oh, my gosh.

And had bought a thousand chicken minis, but had put mustard on them. It was like... Just for Candice? Yeah, just for Candice. But he had I don't know where they fumbled at, but there was all these inedible chicken minis that had like, honey mustard or mustard or whatever. It was all over them. I was like, wow, that's true love from the very beginning.

Was Kim there when you guys had this meeting?

They met at Kanye's house at some point with that, which was like, again, this was before everything. Everyone had come out. I just remember how excited Charlie was because Kanye had brought all all these Yeezy and everything else. I had given Charlie some very particular Yeezy's. Charlie had worn those around for a long time after that. I mean, this is just one of many Charlie being there stories, but he was there the whole time to support and love on the direction things were going with Candice.

Are there any other secret A-list celebrity stories involving Charlie that nobody's ever heard?

Yeah, a few. I mean, there were a few were really special people who early on really leaned in on Charlie when they didn't have to. One of those was Chris Pratt. Again, I don't want to put a huge target on the man for all that. I think he came out this week and said some really nice things about Charlie, so I think we're okay. But Chris actually started following Turning Point way before Turning Point was famous in any way, like a known entity. We were like, Oh, my gosh, we were blown away. I remember specifically, we reached out, Charlie reached out on Twitter or Instagram. It might have been Instagram. We just made that connection. Hey, thank you so much. I'd love to talk. It was very obvious in the response from Chris right away that he had followed Charlie, really thought Charlie was great. That was a mind-blowing experience at that time because it was like, nobody that was a This was right after he had become... He was famous already from Parks and Rec and stuff like that, but he became ultra famous with Guardians of the Galaxy and things like that. This was just after that.

This was in the mirror, just following of the Galaxy. We were just blown away like, Oh, my gosh. Because that was the first time anyone that's A-list, A-list, Marvel, all that stuff. He was so nice and so nice to Charlie.

Was there anyone else?

Half the NFL's quarterbacks would constantly be texting Charlie and DMing Charlie.

Unfortunately, we didn't ever get a Travis Kelsi endorsement.

Travis was, I don't think, one of those people. But there was half the quarterbacks. I'm not even kidding. Half of them. When the one person I would I would say he really valued their banter and going back and forth a lot was Kirk Cousins. Kirk has been a known Christian and things like that. I think he was like, they were definitely big fans of one another, and they had talked a lot. But I'm not even kidding. Half the guys, half the quarterbacks in the NFL, Brett Farr, so many others had communicated with Charlie on a regular basis, including our favorite kicker on Kansas City who had spent time down here. Harrison?

Yeah. By the time Charlie became a dad, you'd already been a seasoned dad. You have three kids. When Charlie was embarking on fatherhood, did he ever come to you asking you for advice or tips?

I just remember because we were going, going, going, going, going been going all the time. Charlie was a guy that was before anything else was on a plane 24/7. I think President Trump said he was 300 days a year. It was more than that. In the early days of turning point, before he was married and had kids. He was on a plane, probably, no joke, 330, 350 days out of the year. So when you create that mentality and that habit, you're constantly going. It's hard to change gears and to stop. It really is. I had balanced work life, I think, pretty well with going a lot and trying to keep up with Charlie, quite honestly. All of us here will tell you and agree that we just constantly were trying to keep up with Charlie. Charlie was always demanding excellence out of all of us. But one of the things that we had talked about a lot was being home on the nights and weekends for your family. Being there, that he definitely took to heart. And so the moment that he got married, we talked about Shabbat and him taking that time off. I don't know how much you guys have talked about this, but where he was making that time for himself with God, but also with his family.

Basically, Friday night till Saturday night, it was like as soon as we got through all of the media for the week and his show, in particular after his show was running, it was like he was able to log off all social media, all devices, and just focus on, again, his relationship with God, and then also his wife, and then later his kids.

Did he ever share with you what his parenting philosophy was or what he envisioned as his kids got older? This is how I want to parent.

Charlie was a big athlete, loved athletics. I think his vision for his kids was lean in on the athletic prowess that I think he would say. Those kids have great genetics between him and Erika.

Erika and Charlie are both gifted athletes.

They're both gifted athletes, right? Erika being a baller. Charlie was... I actually posted this clip, so I don't know if you've seen it, of his high school reels from basketball. He was really good. He was a great player. He's tall, right? Yeah. He could have easily gone. If he hadn't done Turning Point, no one ever talked about this, but he could have easily gone and played college basketball somewhere. Had he gone to college somewhere? But I think he'd always visually... He loved sports, right? He loved the idea of sports. I think that that would have played a big part in the conversations we had. He was a much stronger and much more disciplined father, probably, than I am with kids with iPads and things like that.

His kids are not allowed to screen time?

They're not at screen time people like I've probably allowed my kids to be. We've had a few conversations about that. Obviously, it's still in the early years.

Yeah, things could change. Eric could change.

You could change. I'm not holding that as an example, but I think he was really interested. Obviously, he's a brilliant mind that was interested in reading. Charlie was really into the philosophical leaders that had developed his worldview that developed Turning Point. I think he wanted to instill that with his kids for sure.

What was Charlie like before and after Maha?

All the same. I think Maha I told Charlie he was right about a lot. Since the moment I met Charlie Kirk, he was always an extraordinarily healthy eater. Always. He never wanted to eat anything really outside of really clean vegetables and meat, and oftentimes early on, and then never partook in soda or things that were like, that would kill you.

It didn't drink. It didn't drink. We would have to make sure that we had little office Halloween parties and stuff like that when he was not here.

He was super anti-drinking, which is always a great example of that. He took a lot of offense to when people would suggest that he drink in private or things like that. He never did. That just never happened. I was around him, probably logged more hours. He was never, never, ever, ever was into that. But he was always a really healthy eater, like freakishly healthy. The man never drank any bad things for it. Everyone It was about the tea now, obviously.

Yeah, the Starbucks drink.

He was a big coffee, very clean coffee drinker for a long time. But the teas and water and healthy eating. He had plates. We joked on the show about this. He would eat plates of vegetables. We would go places, and especially afterwards, we'd unwind, and he would order literally an entire plate of steam broccoli. Oh my gosh. It would just be piled up. Then he would just go through and eat the whole thing. Then he would move on to a plate of that was usually some meat, and it all stacked up, and he eat it all that. But it was always very clean.

One thing that Charlie brought up on his show, which I had never heard, and I'm very, very interested to hear more about is Charlie actually said that Erica was more conservative than he was, that he was a moderate compared to Erica. In what way, specifically, is Erica Kirk more conservative than Charlie?

Let me just start by saying Charlie and Erica, in my opinion, have always been one. You have some people who are married to one another, and they disagree on a lot of things, even politically or religiously or whatever. They were very united on almost everything. I've never seen them not united on specific topics. There's a lot of people... I mean, look, you have Kelli Ann Conway with her husband. You have all these different people who have disagreements all the time. They've always been so complementary to one another. On that front that I just don't think that there's very much wiggle room between the both of them. I think that's what allowed Charlie to be able to say, She's more conservative than I am because as conservative as you might view Charlie, she agreed with him on everything that I've ever seen. The one thing I would say is this is that Eric is from Arizona, and Charlie's from the Midwest. A lot of Midwesterners, Charlie would tell you this himself, are pretty moderate on some specific issues, especially on immigration and things like that. I don't want to speak for Erica, but she's from Arizona, and that's an issue that we're really big on here.

I can see him saying something along those lines, which is that, well, she's firmly grounded on immigration, the pro-life issues, especially with her faith backing and everything else, and by virtue of her being from here versus from somewhere like the Midwest or New York or something.

Are there specific strengths that Erika has that Charlie didn't necessarily that you think are going to make for really unique exciting leadership at Turning Point?

Yeah. I mean, Erika, we've been talking about Charlie brought the young men. I think Erika is going to be an incredibly impactful voice for young women. I think it goes beyond that. But I think she's going to continue the legacy of Charlie with young men, too. But I think now is the time, and this goes along with you, too, is this is the time to convert all the young women. This is the time to speak directly to the young woman in America that's 18 to 40 and say, Hey, you are leaving high school or leaving college. You're starting a family. We need strong men in this world. We need to find that heart for the family and not be trying to kick that down the road and delaying that. I think her voice and her example is going to be able to do that. Yeah, me too. Then, again, tying in your entire Our premises around Maha. There's so many young women and young moms who that's their political dynamic. That's their single-issue vote at this point, which is making sure that they're coming into a clean lifestyle, a clean home, making sure that their kids aren't being fed or given or vaccinated with the wrong things.

Those are all really predominant issues that are dominating culture right now. That's really important, I to have a spokesperson that can really speak to those things. I actually think that Erica can speak to a lot of that in a unique and different way that's even more suited than where Charlie was. Charlie's voice is going to continue to live on forever. We're not going to let that quit. In particular, the things that he cared about and he spoke so well to, I think she's going to have her own strengths.

Megan Kelly dropped a very interesting story about how in the days leading up to Charlie's assassination, Jezebel, which is a media outlet on the left, had put a witch curse on Charlie, and that Erica was terrified about this, and Charlie was worried, and that they had even asked a pastor or a priest to pray over them the night before Charlie went to Utah. That's right. Can you share anything about that? Have you heard anything?

They were definitely worried about that. Charlie was definitely aware of those things. Charlie took every bit of media that was out there that was centered on him and focused on him, very seriously, as a threat.

It's just interesting to me, and I guess maybe that speaks to their faith background, that they didn't see that as something so stupid, like, Oh, brother. But they took it serious enough that they were like, No, we need to have a person of faith pray over us in your safety.

Yeah, I mean, in general, and I'll just say this, is as long as I've known Charlie, I think he always was focused on and believed that there are dark forces in this world. He would call them that. He would call them dark, sinister forces in this world and people that were dark and had really bad intentions that comes literally from the devil. I think he believed that 100% fully. When people were out there having conversations that were dark in nature. I think he took those things very, very seriously.

I think it is so weird that the entire time I've worked here, it's been like, Charlie Kirk is a shill for Israel, all this, and people hated him for that. Then as soon as he is murdered, it's like, Charlie Kirk is anti-Israel, now people hate him for that. I'm like, overnight.

It's always been like that, though, Alex. It's so odd. On both sides. There are tons of times where people have called Charlie anti-Israel or pro-Israel, and it was always both sides saying that. I think that's how you know Charlie was always himself. Whenever you have both sides saying those things, it's them trying to control, again, a personality or a persona or narrative. That's how you know he was his real man. It's like you have both sides saying those things all the time. It wasn't just that issue. There's tons of other issues, like pro-Trump, anti-Trump. There was in the run up to the 2024 election that was somewhat bothersome. Was There's people that were like, Charlie Kirk's a show for DeSantis, or Charlie Kirk is way pro-Trump. Those things were happening the exact same time. Charlie was always supportive of President Trump and him running for election, but people wanted to hijack those narrative. You We had different issues like that that always existed all throughout. It's just two sides of some issue, right? People wanting to control really one of the biggest voice or the biggest personas out in media life. Again, that's how you know Charlie was his own man, is when you see both of those things, that tells you that he's probably not either of those things.

On that day, September 10th in Utah, do you feel like Charlie's security team did everything the best of their ability, or were there mistakes made?

First and foremost, it's really bothering me that there are people out there even suggesting that Charlie's security team was somehow lackluster or insanely involved with something. Absolutely not. The Charlie's security team, we've known for many, many years, they are brothers with Charlie. We have an elite force of people who are supporting Charlie at all times. And had they even known or suspected that there would be even an element of danger that day in Utah, they wouldn't even let him out of the car, off the plane, into public life. Every single event that's held is a combination of our security team working with the local police. In this case, on university campuses, it's the University police. Police. The University Police Department is responsible. There's a line that is drawn where there's personal protection for Charlie versus protection for the campus, in this case, or if it's out in the world, the city, or whatever. In this case, for Utah Valley University, their responsibility was to protect the campus, all of the perimeter, rooftops, everything else. When we go out in public, our team handles those things where there isn't a police department to work with or do that with.

Whether it's a drone program or covering all those angles or a perimeter, they do all that. But when you're having to work with partners who are responsible for those elements, you're depending on them. There are some elements here where it's like there are people asking, Well, why wasn't this? Well, that wasn't Charlie's team would have done anything and everything, particularly if it was completely within our purview. They did an incredible and impeccable job At all times, always covering Charlie. They were the first people that were trying to save Charlie's life when he was assassinated and doing all of that. They loved that man inside and out. They would do the same, not just for Charlie, but for anyone on our team. They would take a bullet, jump in from a car, or do anything that they possibly could. We're praying for them. We hope that everybody is praying for them because they're being unfairly targeted by people online who are making really wild, crazy suggestions that are not even possibly remotely true. That's really hard on people that love and care so much for a person. Then again, too, I feel bad for other officers that were involved with this, that were maybe part of the department, things like that.

Obviously, there's some really significant dramatic lessons to be learned that are coming out of this. A really competent drone program, for example, would have saved Charlie's life. That should be the standard protocol on every single campus. Without question, there should be eyes on every rooftop at all times with everything. We'll see what happens with the investigation and what comes out on all of that and how this tragedy unfolded. The guy is in custody, and he's going to be going to trial, and all this is going to come out. We're waiting, just like everybody else, to find out what happened and how it happened. I think there's no one that's more motivated to get answers than everyone here.

What did Charlie envision for Turning Point USA for when he was old?

We talked about that a lot. We knew I aged out. I'm the oldest guy at Turning Point. I'm right behind you. Which is funny because I was always the oldest. And survivability here is like, you can't have 40 something year olds going to campus, right? And at Turning Point USA. Charlie was well on his way to, even though he's still young, we probably still had another 10 years of Charlie on campus and doing things. He knew that at some point, that's where you have faith that came up. That's where you have action that came up. Part of the reason why I shifted over to action was, Hey, the big boy stuff that we have to do on the political side, that's not age inhibitive, right? That's almost beyond college and high school. You have to start working with people who are middle-aged and above and seniors to help organize.

You're also like the encyclopedia of the Republican Party. If you want somebody to nerd out on polling and, I don't even know, random old races and Barry Goldwater and all this stuff, it's Tyler.

I'm nothing compared to Charlie. Charlie was like, again, Charlie had a photographic memory. He always knew more than I felt like I did on possibly anything at all times. I think that's also what was so cool about Charlie is he was able to do it all. He could do everything that we're doing on campus, plus all the political stuff, plus handle the Trump administration and all the changes that were happening there, plus all the individual unique personalities. We mentioned famous people. There's also organizational leaders that would talk to him and look to him for advice all the time. He quite literally did it all, Alex. That's why I think I miss him so much is there's nobody that's going to be able to fill those shoes to be able to have those conversations with. But that's the torch that we've got to carry now and have those. That's the opportunity for you to step up and for so many others that are influential in every space to Charlie did this, and he was able to do all those different things. No expectation to be as good as Charlie was at them, but for us to be able to blend into those things more and lean on one another, I think that's what he wants.

Yeah, it is. If you could give one remedy to heal a sick culture, physically, emotionally, or spiritually, what would it be?

I think looking at the example that Charlie gave us, he was just so balanced when it came to eating healthy, being spiritually healthy. I think that analogy between your your souls, your spiritual health is so good with your physical health is that you need to have proper... And Charlie believe that fully, right? Like your body is a temple and you should take care of it and you should be very cognizant of how you treat it, both physically and spiritually. I think that's the greatest example that he gave. And he lived that. I'm telling you, since the day I met Charlie Kirk, since he was barely 20 years old, just barely coming out of his teenage years, all the way through his life that ended so tragically early, he always treated himself with that much respect.

I think somewhere deep down, subconsciously, he had this feeling that there wasn't a lot of time or there wasn't enough time. He did not waste his time.

Isn't that interesting? Yes. Isn't that interesting? I've been thinking about that. Isn't that interesting? The way that he treated himself was that he was always go, go, go? Yes.

He didn't sit around and want to binge Netflix. He was like, Every moment of every day, I am with my family. I'm pouring into my kids. I'm pouring into my wife. I'm pouring into my business. I'm pouring into the country. The people around me, how can I help somebody else? It's just so beyond. He lived so unlike anybody else. That's why I think he is such an example for all of us. It's just unbelievable the way he thought. I'm really looking forward to having Erika and just our state-of-the-art basketball court or whatever she's going to put in. I'm just kidding. I have no idea.

Truly. I think she's going to carry that on, that legacy on so well. Like I said, she and Charlie are just one human being. They really are. They're one person. They relied on each other so much for all of those things. But Charlie, you look back on it now, and I've been thinking about this all the last two weeks, is how he really lived his life like that. He just never quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit. He was always happy. We dealt with a lot of crazy stuff. Again, we went through COVID as an organization where we took zero government money and had to keep everyone employed and everything. Extraordinarily difficult moments. That would have been easy to see some stress peak through, and he never did. Yeah. He really lived his life the way that you saw him in public space. He was always so good to everyone, me included. I'll be the first to tell you My life is innumerably blessed because I knew Charlie Kirk, that he poured into me, that he let me do all the crazy stuff that I wanted to do at Turning Point all the time, similar to how you feel about all your media ventures.

I'm just incredibly grateful that we have that and that legacy that we can always hearken back to and really live up to. We have to live up to it.

Yeah, me too. Thank you, Tyler, for giving us the Turning Point history lesson and just some stuff about Charlie that we hadn't heard.

No, we love him. We miss him every day. We love Charlie. We're going to keep living up to that.

Okay, so this was an extra episode that I wasn't planning on doing until last minute. Now, tomorrow, you are going to get my interview with somebody who has known Charlie since he was a child and has been there for his entire faith journey and transformation and can really speak to that, as well as Charlie's views on education education and homeschooling and the Department of Education, why he thought that it should be abolished, all kinds of things. I think that the homeschool moms in my audience are really going to love that episode in particular, and those that just want to hear more about Charlie's faith and relationship with Christ. This week is a special week, but normally I drop episodes every Monday and Thursday, 6: 00 PM Pacific, 9: 00 PM Eastern, and I focus on how to heal a sick culture, physically, emotionally, or spiritually. Every single guest that I have on has their own remedy to do just that. We really focus on the Maha side of things and all sorts of sense of the word. So hopefully you will hang out with us beyond the Charlie Cribs Legacy episodes. But it was important to me this week to really spend some time thinking and remembering the best boss ever.

If you're enjoying what you're hearing this week, please take some time, leave a five-star review for us on Spotify or Apple. Subscribe to the Real Alex Clarke YouTube channel. These are all really easy, free ways to support the show and keep us going. I'm Alex Clarke, and this is Culture Apothecary.