On an uplifting episode of The Charlie Kirk Show in these dark times, Charlie is joined by author and filmmaker Lee Strobel to talk about his latest film, based on his phenomenal book, “The Case for Heaven.” Lee walks through his faith journey as an analytical journalist and a reformed Christian—detailing his transformation from struggling atheist to enlightened Christian apologist. They talk near-death experiences, Grace, Faith, redemption, and everything in between. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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The Case for Christ00:12:44
Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, a hero of mine, someone who I have admired from afar and read his books for quite a while, Lee Strobel, who is the author of The Case for Christ and also The Case for Heaven.
If you have your doubts about the afterlife, your doubts about God, or if you're a Christian, you just kind of need a shot on the arm around these topics.
This episode will blow your mind.
I learned a lot and really convicted me to talk more about these topics, to be honest.
I think you'll really enjoy it.
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There are a few books out there that really change your life and change the way you view things.
And I remember where I was when I first heard about this book, and then I saw the movie.
And I just give it out to everyone that has questions about the Bible and about kind of their place in the world.
And the author, really, his story resonated with me because we're both from the same place, the suburbs of Chicago.
And the book is The Case for Christ.
It's phenomenal.
And then there was kind of a sequel book, The Case for Heaven, which is now coming out as a movie.
So I'm super thrilled and honored to have with us the author and kind of the mastermind behind it all, Lee Strobel.
Lee, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Oh, thanks so much, Charlie.
I appreciate the opportunity.
I didn't know you were from Suburban Chicago.
Where did you grow up?
Wheeling and went to Willow Creek.
Come on.
And as well as Harvest Bible Chapel.
So we kind of live in the same area.
Oh, my goodness.
I grew up in Arlington Heights, went to Prospect High School.
I went to Wayne High School.
So we're awesome.
Same type of place.
So yeah, well, it's a great, great honor, Lee.
Tell us about the movie that's coming out.
Well, it's based on my book, The Case for Heaven, which was inspired by an incident that happened to me 10 years ago when I almost died.
My wife found me unconscious, called an ambulance.
I woke up in the emergency room, and the doctor looked down at me and said, You're one step away from a coma, two steps away from dying.
And so I hovered there between life and death for quite a while until the doctors were able to save my life.
And this is a very clarifying experience for me.
When you get in that kind of position, you really want to know for sure what happens when you close your eyes for the last time in this world.
And so I'm a Christian.
I believe what the Bible teaches, but I've also got a skeptical gear.
You know, my background's in journalism and law.
So I tend to be a bit skeptical.
So I decided to investigate what is the evidence, both inside and outside the Bible, that supports the idea that there is an afterlife that we continue to live on.
That resulted in my book, The Case for Heaven.
And then we produced a documentary based on that book.
It's going to be in movie theaters coast to coast for three nights only, April 4th, 5th, and 6th.
I say documentary, but that conjures up images of a grainy 16 millimeter black and white thing with talking heads.
This is a beautiful film.
The cinematography is breathtaking.
I hope people can see it on the big screen because I think they'll really be inspired by what they see.
Well, so walk us through kind of some of the questions that you try to answer in this film.
The movie Case for Christ, I thought was really well done.
Thank you.
And kind of introduce a little bit of your journalistic background.
You started as a skeptic.
And I don't want to mistell the story, but basically, I'm going to prove my wife wrong.
She believes in this kind of, you know, mystical stuff.
I'm going to go to do the research myself.
And it brought you on a fact-finding mission that really brought you to confirmation in your belief in Christ.
That's right.
I was an atheist at that time.
My wife started out as an agnostic.
I'm trained in journalism with a degree from the University of Missouri and in law, a master's degree from Yale Law School.
And I was legal editor of the Chicago Tribune newspaper.
And my wife gave me the worst news that an atheist husband could get.
She said she decided to become a Christian.
And that freaked me out.
And so I decided to try to rescue her from this cult that she got involved in.
And I figured that I could do that if I could just disprove the resurrection of Jesus, because even I, as an atheist, recognize that is the foundation of the faith.
So I took my journalism training, my legal training, and systematically investigated.
Is there any evidence historically for the resurrection of Jesus?
And of course, Easter's coming up.
A lot of people this time of year think about these kinds of things.
And my book, The Case for Christ, and also in the new book, The Case for Heaven, I deal with the evidence for the resurrection historically.
I found it to be overwhelming when I investigated it.
In fact, it was interesting.
One of my heroes when I was a student at Yale Law School was a guy named Sir Lionel Lucku.
Sir Lionel was the greatest defense attorney in history.
He won more murder trials as a defense attorney in a row than anybody in history.
He was in the Guinness Book of World Records.
And he, like me, was a skeptic for the resurrection at the time.
And so, but he was challenged to take his monumental legal skill and apply it to the historical record.
And he spent several years doing it.
And this was his conclusion.
He says, I say unequivocally that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof, which leaves absolutely no room for doubt.
The greatest defense attorney who ever lived.
So I came to a similar conclusion on November the 8th of 1981, that based on the evidence of history, that Jesus clearly claimed to be the Son of God.
And then he backed up that claim by returning from the dead.
And that's when I repented of my sin, received Jesus as my forgiver and leader.
And my life, my values, my character, my morality, my attitudes, my parenting, my relationships, I mean, everything over time began to change for the good.
And this is something I tell people all the time, which is you should want this to be true, right?
So you should be skeptical, but let's just ask what would you want for your life?
You should want this story to be true.
That means you get heaven.
That means you, that there's meaning to the universe.
And so what I love about the book, I know we're here to talk about Case for Heaven and we're going to keep talking about it.
But what I loved about Case for Christ is it really resonated with my analytical, more reason-based approach.
And, you know, my critique is that sometimes the church can be more about experience and renewal, which is phenomenal.
I mean, we believe in all those things, but there's still some of us that, you know, say, show me the facts.
I mean, come on.
And you kind of went through some of the great claims, such as, well, maybe Jesus wasn't actually killed or, you know, maybe that his body was just stolen.
And you go through those very analytically because as you went on that fact-finding mission, you were trying to say there's got to be some reasonable explanation.
There's no way this could be true.
Right.
Exactly.
I mean, when you examine the evidence, you look at things like the execution of Jesus.
Even the Journal of the American Medical Association carried an analysis of the crucifixion of Jesus and concluded that clearly, based on the historical and medical evidence, Jesus was dead after being crucified.
In fact, before the spear was thrust into his side, he was already dead.
The early accounts of the report, in other words, the early reports of the resurrection that come too quick to merely be a legend, took time for legend to develop in the ancient world.
But we have a report of the resurrection of Jesus, including named eyewitnesses and groups of eyewitnesses that has been dated back by scholars to within months of his death.
That is a news flash from history.
And then the empty tomb that even the opponents of Jesus admitted was empty.
And then we have nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament confirming and corroborating the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the resurrected Jesus.
That is an avalanche of historical data.
And Josephus, amongst many others, and one of the ones in your book that just blew my mind, such an obvious point, which is actually a point that's used against biblical Christianity, which you, and you say, wait a second, so there's female witnesses.
If you were to make something up, why would you use female witnesses, right?
Exactly.
That's right.
In the first century, Josephus, the Jewish historian who worked for the Romans, and even the Jewish Talmud both say that the testimony of women in that culture in that day was not considered reliable.
It wasn't considered trustworthy.
And yet the gospels tell us it was women that discovered the tomb empty.
So if you're going to make up the story about the empty tomb, there's no way you would say women discovered the tomb empty.
You'd say John discovered the tomb empty.
Peter discovered the tomb empty.
But no, they say women discovered empty, even though it hurt their case.
And indeed, in the second century, critics of Christianity did attack it by saying, oh, well, you can't trust that.
Women are the witnesses.
Well, why would they do that?
If they were going to make it up, they wouldn't have said it that way.
And yet they did.
That gives you clear evidence that they just basically said, look, we're going to tell the story and just let the chips fall where they may.
And then we have the account of the apostles and the people that willingly died afterwards, the disciples that died afterwards.
The kind of whole body of work, Lee, that you've developed, I just want to say has helped strengthen so many people's faith because the monotony of secularism is a real thing, right?
It's an overwhelming amount of skepticism and kind of a smart alec attitude.
And your decades of work in these fields have really helped me personally.
I know so many of our listeners.
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Lee, walk us through some of the questions that you were trying to answer in this movie.
Yeah, I wanted, as someone trained in law and journalism, I wanted some corroboration of what the Bible says.
Corroborating Near-Death Experiences00:04:31
And so I explored an area that explored an area that I was really skeptical about, which are near-death experiences.
I thought these were overhyped.
I thought, you know, it was from fraud involved.
Some people claim they died and met Jesus and he's five foot 10, real nice guy.
I can't confirm that.
I can't corroborate that.
I reject that.
But I learned that there are 900 scholarly articles written about near-death experiences published in scientific and medical journals over the last 40 years.
This is a very well-studied area.
In fact, The Lancet, which is the famous medical journal in England, carried an analysis of near-death experiences that concluded that none of the alternative explanations account for this phenomenon.
So I looked at cases, you know, because the Bible says in a couple of places, for instance, the Apostle Paul says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
Jesus told the repentant criminal on the cross, today you'll be with me in paradise.
So the Christian conception of the afterlife is two phases.
One is the first phase that occurs after we are physically dead, in which our spirit, our soul, our consciousness continues to live on.
And we live on either in the presence of God or away from God in Hades.
At the time of Jesus' return and the consummation of history, we are reunited then with our now resurrected bodies.
We go through final judgment and then we spend eternity in a very physical place, whether it's heaven or hell.
So I needed to know: is there any evidence from near-death experiences that indeed our spirit, our soul, our consciousness, does continue to live on after our physical demise?
And what I found to my shock were a number of cases that we deal with in the book and the movie where people saw things or experienced things or heard things during their out-of-body experience that would be impossible if it wasn't authentic.
I'll give you an example.
It was a woman named Maria.
She died in the hospital.
And yet she said later, I was conscious the whole time.
She said, my spirit separated from my body.
I kind of floated near the ceiling.
I watched the resuscitation efforts on my body being taking place.
And then my spirit floated up and out of the hospital.
But then when I was finally revived, when they brought me back around, my spirit returned to my body.
And she told the nurse, she said, by the way, there's a shoe on the roof of the hospital.
And it's dark blue.
It's a man's tennis shoe.
It's left-footed.
There's some wear over the little toe and the shoelace is tucked under the heel.
Well, they went up to the roof and they found it exactly as she had said.
This is the kind of corroboration.
There's no way she could have known that had this not been authentic out-of-body experience.
In fact, get this.
One study explored 21 cases of blind people, most of them blind since birth, who during their near-death experience were able to see for the first time.
They saw the resuscitation efforts going on in their body.
They met dead relatives and went to a place of bliss that they can interpret as being heaven.
And when they returned to their body and were revived, their vision disappeared again.
Medical researchers said this is medically impossible.
Another study showed, look, 90, let me see, let me get this right.
Over 90 cases where this kind of verifiable observation was made during out-of-body experience.
So almost 100 cases they explored.
What they found is that 92% of those cases, those observations were 100% accurate.
In another 6% of those cases, they were almost exactly accurate.
Just 98% accuracy.
So something is going on here.
So I think this is affirmation from outside the Bible that confirms the fact that after our physical demise, we continue to exist.
Our consciousness continues to live on.
And that's in corroboration of what the Bible actually teaches.
It's incredible.
And I hear stories like this as well.
And you also hear these stories of people halfway around the world that have the almost identical types of near-death experiences and they've never met each other and they've never, they're in separate cultures and they're almost identical.
And then I want to ask you about Lee, another phenomenon, which some people claim that they have seen hell.
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I did, yes.
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That's not as uplifting.
But in some ways, people need to believe that there's something after this.
In fact, I believe it's one of the most important things for a society.
If you don't think there's an afterlife, well, then you're going to make really bad decisions while you're here, actually.
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So, Lee, some people will say the skeptics or the humanists or the atheists, oh, your mind plays funny games on you.
Before death, you get a chemical rush, and this is where you get the out-of-body experiences.
I've seen far too many of these skeptic videos of the quote-unquote neuroscientists.
How do you respond to that?
Yeah, and certainly there are those phenomena where people do have a sense of an out-of-body experience.
However, as the Lancet Medical Journal in England pointed out, none of these alternative explanations can account for the full range of this phenomenon of near-death experiences.
For instance, to have a perspective from above you, that you see things that you otherwise couldn't see, to hear things that you couldn't otherwise hear, and so forth.
Beyond Moral Scorekeeping00:10:53
So, those are things that I think corroborate.
I'll give you another example.
There was a girl named, I think her name was Katie, and she drowned in a YMCA swimming pool, massive brain swelling, zero brain waves, zero, no heartbeat for 20 minutes.
They take her to the hospital.
She's clinically dead.
And yet they keep her body mechanically alive as they're trying to figure out what to do.
She's ultimately revived.
And when she is revived, she said, by the way, I was conscious the whole time.
So one night when my parents came to the hospital to visit me, I followed them home.
And then she described what they cooked for dinner, what the children, her brothers and sisters were playing, what toys they were playing with, where her father was sitting, what clothes they were wearing.
I mean, things that she could not have otherwise known.
She even drew a drawing of the emergency room as she was taking when she was clinically dead and accurately placed everything in that drawing.
So these are things I think corroborate the fact that something extraordinary does take place upon our clinical death.
So what you've described so far is extremely compelling.
However, it doesn't get all the way to heaven, right?
So this might explain that we are a mind, body, and soul or spirit.
So walk us through then the actual heaven aspect, because some people would say, okay, Lee, I'm with you.
I think there is a spiritual domain, but who's to say our spirit just doesn't get released back into the oversoul?
Yeah.
So what I do in the book is I go on a journey to reason through the various options.
And I look at what I call the heaven pyramid.
And by that, I mean, if you picture a pyramid and the base of it and then goes up to a point.
And so I look at the base, which is what is truth?
That's the base.
What is truth?
Well, truth is that which corresponds with reality.
That's the best definition of truth.
Well, then you go to the next level.
Then what about different worldviews?
And you can look at the three main worldview possibilities, atheism, theism, or polytheism, pantheism.
That is, everything is God.
Those are really the only three choices.
And then I look at the logic and the livability of each of those worldviews and conclude that theism is the one that survives logic and livability the best.
Then you go on to Revelation and you say, you know, different worldviews have different books of revelation.
The Christians have the Bible.
I look at the reliability of scripture and say that it's unmatched by any other world religion's scriptures.
Then I look at the evidence for the resurrection and I touched on that a little earlier, but there is clear and compelling evidence that Jesus didn't just claim to be the Son of God, but he backed it up by returning from the dead.
And then ultimately the gospel that Jesus is the way, the truth, the life, that no one comes to the Father except through him.
And so we go on this pyramid and I reason through it all to come to the conclusion that, okay, if Jesus claimed to be the son of God and he backed that up by returning from the dead, then he's an eyewitness to the afterlife.
Not only that, but he is the son of God who created the afterlife.
And so we ought to look at what he says about what heaven is like.
And one of my favorite metaphors that Jesus uses in talking to the disciples is he uses the metaphor of home in talking about heaven.
And so I don't know if you've ever traveled internationally to maybe a third world country that was very primitive and difficult.
I know that as a new Christian, I went to India for quite a while to do ministry.
And, you know, you're living in very basic conditions.
You're sleeping on the ground.
You're living out of a knapsack.
You're eating strange foods.
And so you begin to have this homesickness.
You begin to long for home.
And when you finally get home and you walk in the door and it's such a place of warmth and security and familiarity and love and grace.
And then you crawl into your own bed and Jesus says, that's the metaphor I want you to carry with you.
That's what heaven is like.
It is your real home.
So talk about, I don't know if you go into this in the movie or not, but the importance of really trying to get people to think deeply about an afterlife because that's something that, you know, is on everyone's mind.
Everyone, whether we like it or not, is thinking about their death at least past the age of 30 on a daily basis, right?
And whether they realize it or not, it's like everything's building up to the fact that we're not going to be permanently here.
There's scientific pushes to try to make us live forever here.
None of them will actually succeed.
But talk about either the resistance or the need to have this conversation.
I think it's actually really healthy for a civilization.
Oh, absolutely.
And I think especially in light of the pandemic, this has become ever more relevant.
29% of Americans know someone who's died during the pandemic.
My brother died at the beginning of the pandemic.
I was talking to a waitress at a restaurant not long ago and she began to cry.
And I said, what's wrong?
She said, oh, I almost didn't come into work today.
We just lost a family member to COVID.
And I thought, here's a young woman, probably 18 years old, never probably thought about death before.
She's just a kid, you know?
And yet now you can see the anxiety in her eyes, the apprehension in her eyes, because death had come knocking on her family's door.
And so I think it's ever more relevant today to say, wouldn't you want to know with confidence, with a degree of certainty that what happens to you after you close your eyes for the last time in this world?
And I think the movie is going to encourage believers.
And I think it's going to challenge people who are skeptics.
So talk a little bit more about the promises that we know about heaven.
I mean, someone might be saying, okay, how do I get there then?
Do I have to do a lot of good stuff?
I mean, do I have to kind of put a lot of points on the board?
Talk about what Christians do about heaven.
You know, Christianity is the only world religion.
I've studied every major world religion.
Christianity is the only religion based on grace.
In other words, every other religious system is spelled D-O-N or is spelled D-O.
It's spelled D-O.
You have to do something to earn your way to God.
You've got to use a Tibetan prayer wheel.
You got to go in a series of reincarnations.
You got to go on a pilgrimage.
You've got to give alms to the poor.
You have to do, do, do a bunch of things to try to earn your way to God.
And guess what?
You probably won't make it.
Christianity is not spelled D-O.
It's spelled D-O-N-E.
It's done.
Jesus said it's finished.
He said that on the cross.
And what he means by that is he went and paid the death penalty that we deserve for the sins that we've committed.
And he offers forgiveness and eternal life in heaven as a free gift of his grace.
And like any gift, it becomes ours when we receive it in gratitude and repentance and faith.
And so that is distinct and different about Christianity compared to every other world religion.
That's something that people don't expect to hear, though.
They expect that they have to kind of do like that God is some sort of kind of moral scorekeeper and that you're going to kind of see.
the score at the end.
Talk a little bit about that because this kind of idea of like points on the board is a common belief in America.
It's very common.
I think it syncs up with the American, you know, hard doctrine of hard work and perseverance and so forth.
It's kind of bred into us as Americans.
We're hard workers and so forth.
But, you know, that's where reincarnation got its attractiveness because reincarnation says not only can't you do enough good deeds in your lifetime to earn your way to God, you've got to go through a multitude of lifetimes, maybe an infinite number of lifetimes to try to earn your way to God.
And yet you don't know what you did wrong in the previous life.
You don't know what bad karma you're waking up, making up for.
And so you have no idea how to improve.
It's just an illogical system.
But I think it plays to our desire to try to earn something.
It's harder, I think, for us as Americans to be offered a gift.
We'd rather try to earn something.
But Jesus says, you can't earn this.
You can't earn this.
You need to receive.
You know, the last verse I read before I became a Christian is John 1, 12.
It says, but as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name.
And that forms an equation of what it means to become a child of God.
Believe plus receive equals become.
Lee, talk about the transformation that putting Jesus in your life did for you.
If I remember correctly, it made you a happier person, less angry.
Walk us through that.
I had been as an atheist.
I had lived a very immoral, drunken, profane, narcissistic, self-absorbed life.
And that was my life.
I mean, I remember once getting into an argument with my wife about her going to church, and I just blew up.
I had so much rage inside of me.
And I reared back and I kicked a hole right through our living room wall out of rage.
My daughter was crying.
My wife was crying.
In fact, my daughter, when she was a toddler, if she was playing with some toys by herself in the living room and she heard me come home from work through the front door, would just gather her toys and go in her room and shut the door.
She's going to be drunk again?
Are you going to be yelling and screaming and kicking holes in walls?
You know, at least it's nice and quiet in here.
And yet, four or five months after I received Jesus as my forgiver and leader, and he began to change my attitudes, my character, my morality, my life, that same daughter, watching the transformation in her own dad, went up to my wife and said, mommy, I want God to do for me what he's done for daddy.
And she received this free gift of grace at age five and is a devout follower of Jesus today.
Same thing with my son, who got his PhD in theology as a professor now at Bioli University.
So God changed our family.
He rescued our family, changed our future, our eternities.
And I hate to think of what my life would have ended up like had I continued to go down that dark road.
Well, what's so fascinating about your story is that you wanted to find the truth.
And that's kind of what got you on this journey, which is what I tell people all the time.
Say that just if you have an openness to the truth, that's a phenomenal start because I find, and I've asked this question throughout, some people don't want this to be true, quite honestly.
Heaven Is Real00:05:32
They don't.
They want their own kind of belief of themselves being the most important person on the planet, their own God, if you will, to be true.
Because this can be, if you believe there's a heaven and you believe there's only one way to get to heaven, which is not earn your way to heaven, that's really humbling, actually.
Really humbling in more ways than one.
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So, Lee, it says here the case for heaven and hell.
Tell us about it.
Yeah, I'll tell you, let me say one thing before I say that, and that is one of the other breakthroughs I think in this area of near-death experience was my interview with John Burke, who you'll see in the movie and also in the book, a Christian pastor who studied a thousand near-death experiences.
And his conclusion that he backs up verse by verse is that if you look at what actually happens in near-death experiences, it is consistent with Christian theology.
Wow.
Now, having said that, the question about hell is very interesting.
We actually have in the movie, you'll see this and in my book, accounts of people who have had hellish experiences in their near-death experience.
About 24% have that.
And in the movie, you'll see Howard Storm.
Howard was an atheist.
He was a tenured art professor and chairman of the art department at a secular university.
He died, and he had a horrific experience after his death.
I mean, he, I mean, you can tell he had post-traumatic stress as a result of it.
I mean, he was, and he describes how he was reduced to roadkill by demons.
I mean, he was literally torn apart.
He said no horror film could begin to depict how horrific this experience was.
And in the middle of it, he called out to Jesus to be saved.
Jesus rescued him from that.
And this experience, he was later revived.
And this experience was so real to him that he not only renounces atheism, he not only resigned his tenured professorship at the university, he not only became a Christian, he became an ordained pastor and is now pastor of a small rural church to this day.
So, yeah, we have well-documented stuff that these people who have no nothing to gain by talking about this.
I mean, who wants to say, oh, yeah, I died, I went to hell, frankly.
I mean, it's the last thing somebody wants to admit.
And yet, some of these people are willing to talk about it.
And, you know, I think the best thing about heaven is that it's real.
The worst thing about hell is that it's real.
But the very best thing of all is that through this free gift of grace offered through Jesus Christ, we can, our pathway to heaven is open.
The doors have been flung open to anybody, anywhere at any time in any culture who receives this free gift of grace.
Amen.
So, Lee, just in closing here, what was the thing you learned most about this film?
Like, just from a... your own personal perspective, looking back, you say, wow, this either changed my mind on something or I have a better understanding of something.
Well, for you personally.
The thing I take away the most, I interviewed Luis Palau, the famous evangelist, who shared his faith with a billion people before he died.
I had the last interview with him before he died.
And he looked at me before he died and said something I'll take to my grave and beyond.
He looked at me and said, Lee, when you get to the end of your life and all is said and done, you will never regret being courageous for Christ.
That was powerful.
And he was my friend and my hero.
And hearing that from him is something I'll always carry with me.
I hope in my own small way, I can be courageous, just as your viewers and your listeners can take small steps to be courageous, especially this Easter season, to reach out to someone, invite them to church this Easter season.
I know that's a risky thing.
It's a courageous thing to do.
But who knows what God might do as a result?
Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs that that's considered to be a courageous thing in America today.
Heaven's at stake, everybody, and it's real.
If you don't believe us, just watch the movie, The Case for Heaven.
Lee, thank you so much for joining us.
This was great.
Thank you.
Thank you, Charlie.
It's been great to be with you.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
God bless you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.