The Sean McDowell Show - Stunned by Near-Death Experiences: A Doctor’s investigation 

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

What does a Doctor have to say about life after death? And what evidence convinced him to believe that the evidence for the afterlife is remarkably strong? Dr. Jeffrey Long is a researcher into the phenomenon of near-death experiences (NDEs). A physician by training, Dr. Long practices radiation oncology at a hospital in Kentucky. He is the author of Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences, which appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list. READ: Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (https://amzn.to/3Purz4d) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Why would a medical doctor who considers himself a man of science reconsider much of what he was taught in medical school regarding the afterlife? Why does he now believe that the lines of evidence by mathematical calculation are 99% convincing that there's life after death? What research has he done over the past few decades to become one of the leading researchers on near-death experiences today? Our guest today, Dr. Jeffrey Long, is here to answer these questions and more. Thanks for coming on. It's a real pleasure to be here. We got a lot to talk about. We do. Well, let's jump right in. And my question is, what was your medical training, your expertise, and your worldview before you began researching near death experiences? Yeah, absolutely. My medical degree is, of course, an MD, and my residency training and medical specialty is radiation oncology, which is the use of radiation to

treat cancer. That was many decades ago. And at that point in time, I was like pretty much all other doctors. I mean, we were very evidence-focused. We make decisions based on science and evidence because that literally translates into giving our patients the best ability to survive cancer, which we were treating. My worldview back then, I went to church like about everybody else did in small-town Iowa. I didn't really have you know, have any strong beliefs about it. I've sort of like went there, maybe it was a social thing, you know,

I didn't know how much I firmly believed in it. It was more just sort of out of habit than really having the kind of strong, if you will, foundation for the reality that underpins that like I do today. It sounds like your family was broadly, at least culturally, Christian, but also really scientific-minded too, weren't they? Oh, absolutely. My father chaired the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Iowa for many, many years. So we would literally talk about his research at the dinner table. So I grew up really respecting research, really understanding

its importance and sort of picking up pieces as we went along meal after meal and talk after talk about, you know, what research meant, how important it was and how these kind of important research investigative findings could really go from the research to ultimately benefiting humanity. I smiled because my dad is a researcher and we would always talk at the dinner table about relationship stuff, apologetics. So I love that family dynamic that you have. Now you start your book with when you first heard the word near-death experiences. Now, before you tell us that story, when you came across the idea of near-death experience, was it like, oh, this makes perfect sense.

I'm a Christian. I believe in life after death. Were you skeptical? Like I interviewed Dr. Michael Sabom, who you talk about in your book a while ago, and he's like, I thought this was just hogwash and nonsense. What was your mindset about the possibility of life after death and the possibility of science weighing into this when you first came across the idea of near-death experiences? Right. That's a great question because growing up, I sort of thought here's faith. We're here at church every day and here's science. And there really wasn't a connection between the two. So when I first saw that term near-death experience, it was in one of the world's

most prestigious medical journals, the Journal of the American Medical Association. There I am flipping through this big bound volume at the medical library looking for a cancer-related article during my residency training. And totally by accident, all of a sudden I see the term near-death experience. And actually, I was intrigued. I mean, I was mystified. Everything I'd learned as a doctor in my medical training was, you're either alive or you're dead and what's this near-death experience? So I was actually puzzled. But once I started reading it, and by the way, that was the article by Dr. Sabom that

you interviewed, immediately I was fascinated. I mean, here was Dr. Sabom having a good-sized study of people having near-death experiences I mean he's a heart doctor cardiologist so boy when patients heart stop he knows it that's his job and yet at that time when consciousness should have been impossible here will people having these out-of-body experiences consciousness apart from the body typically above the body and amazingly he was describing remarkably accurate descriptions of ongoing earthly events when I knew as a physician consciousness should be impossible after cardiac arrest after your heart stops it's kind of amazing in 1984 that JAMA the Journal of the American Medical Association had

an article on near-death Experiences where he's kind of responding to the editor. I mean that's if I'm doing my math That's about 40 years ago. This research was beginning but before we jump into some of your research How much how many people really were studying this even though it wasn't on your radar at that time? there were actually very few. A group of researchers, well, the very first awareness we all had of near-death experience was in 1975. Dr. Raymond Moody's groundbreaking book, Life After Life, and boom, all of a sudden, near-death experience became a household word. So at that time, within a few years, a small group of

researchers were so intrigued, they formed a group called the International Association for Near Death Studies. But gosh, there weren't very many, you know, like less than 12. So they all got together. Yeah, I mean, this was very, very small. This is a group that had a scholarly interest in this, that had a history of publishing in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. So yeah, it was a very, very small group. And yet from that core, from that foundation, the research grew, more people were interested. I got interested. And nowadays, at current times, there are literally hundreds of articles about near

death experience published, again, in some of the world's leading medical and scientific scholarly journals near-death experience research is now no longer a small group it is literally mainstream and respected research I'm an apologist that's my studying and probably if I had a guest six or eight years ago I first studied near-death experiences and honestly my mindset was I don't think there's gonna be much to this but I hear people I respect talking about it I'll just check it out but I didn't expect there to be much force to it was surprised by it but once I started looking at the evidence and kind of being aware of it it's amazing how many conversations I've had with people personally with near-death experiences that

have shared with me. Now for you, you in 1984 is when you first described coming across that journal article in JAMA from Michael Sabom. And then 10 years later, you really start studying it. But in between that time was a personal experience where you met somebody who had a near-death experience that was really pivotal for you. So tell us about that experience and how it affected you. It sure was. I had a college friend visiting me when I was still in residency training, Iowa City, Iowa. So it was winter. So obviously we were indoors having a nice meal. And just in the course of conversation, my friend's wife mentioned that

she had so many medical allergies, so severe, in fact, that one time she was having an operation and she coded while she was having the operation. But the way she said it triggered my thinking about a doctor. I said, it's funny. She said it almost mysteriously. I said, my instinct is there's more to this story, but that would have been the stupidest question I could have asked in my life. And I knew it that you're under general anesthesia and your heart stopped. But I was so intrigued by what little I knew about near death experience that I went for it and asked that critical question. Well, did anything happen after your heart stopped and you were under general anesthesia?

And to my somewhat surprise, she said, yes, it did, and gave me my first in-person narrative of a near-death experience I'd ever heard. I mean, her heart stopped, consciousness above the body. She saw the EKG, or measurement of heart electrical machine, go flat, and believe me, that makes a heck of a racket. It's got an alarm and she described exactly what happens when that happens medically. Her consciousness went then up through a tunnel. She had the classic type of life review, met some deceased loved ones, had that typical, as I'm sure you've heard from others, overwhelming sense of peace and love and that unearthly, beautiful, aptly

called heavenly realm, and then ultimately returned to her body. But she had no idea what had just happened. And I said, well, you know, I read about that once. I think you had what we call a near-death experience. And I was fascinated. I remember thinking vividly, if this is real, and if this happens a lot, this completely changes my view of the universe or some greater picture of consciousness of the world of the universe we live in that is in these near-death experiences. And that was literally the one sentinel event that

got me started on focusing on getting my near-death experience research started. So it sounds like you were somewhat agnostic. Like I find this somewhat believable. I'm not sure what to do with it. I don't reject it, but it's enough to make me want to know more. Is that a fair assessment? Well, absolutely. Actually, as a doctor, you know, especially one that makes critical decisions about treating patients with cancer, I knew that what I heard from her was what we call anecdotal. In other words, it's just a single account. And so while that's, you know, if you will, hypothesis generating, it's certainly fascinating. That's not convincing to me. I'm an, as a man of science, I insist on having evidence, which means many, many accounts. And there's a basic principle of science that what is real

is consistently observed. So if I was going to believe that, if I was going to have evidence for the reality of near-death experience, I had to hear from lots and lots of people that had near-death experiences and I had to see for myself that they were consistent, that they made sense, that it all added up before I would accept that amazing statement that near-death experiences are real. And again, you know, incredible claims require incredible evidence, as they say. And for the near-death experience to be real, for this to be an observation of the soul leaving the body of a description of an unearthly heavenly realm, that's pretty incredible. I mean, that's outside of my great majority of other people's

life experience. So you can certainly understand the bar was pretty high for the amount of evidence I would need to really accept that. That's been my experience with researchers like yourself, Dr. Michael Sabom. Some of the criticism people go as well. People are global. I'm like, you have not looked at how carefully people are studying this. If people end up not believing your case, it's not for lack of rigor. It's not for lack of care. They just have a different worldview and different assessment of the evidence. Now we're going to get to the nine pieces of evidence that you think, and use the word prove, we'll come back to that, that there's life after death with a high degree of confidence. Now, obviously, these aren't just anecdotes. You think there's evidence outside of the anecdotes that confirm them. And these nine different evidences help show that. We will come back

to that. But one thing we maybe should have done earlier is can you just define, explain what you mean by near-death experiences? Because there's a lot of different definitions people operate under. Oh, you're right about that. Many different concepts about near-death experience. So for my research, it's a very straightforward definition. You look at the term, you're near death. In other words, you're so physically compromised that you're unconscious or clinically dead

with no heartbeat. So at that time that a conscious experience should be impossible that's the experience part of a near-death experience so that's a fairly rigorous definition of near-death experience but I think that it certainly carries forward what dr. Moody suggested in that in 1975 that and what frankly most of the public accepts as being a near-death experience. You have to be near death and have the experience at that time. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Let's go to your research.

So you're weighing into this. If I got the math right, this is 1994 when you started doing some of this. Is that right? Actually, I set up my research website back in 1998. So that was when the nderf.org research website standing for the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation got going. And again, at that time, I had not read much about near-death experience. I was still mystified, fascinated, and so curious about this, I wanted to go to the best source of evidence possible, and that is people that had a near-death experience. And I knew a thing or two about

designing surveys, so set up that research website with a very detailed survey right off the bat, threw it out to the internet, and said, if near-death experiences are real, let's know for sure by the results of the survey and people sharing their experience, and then I'll decide. Okay. So some of Sabom's research was having people come to him he personally interviewed and was able to, on his first wave, a hundred or a few hundred, I don't remember the exact numbers. Yours was anonymous surveys now on the web. And of course that technology is available when you did it. And it wasn't at the time when Dr. Sabom started.

So maybe tell us a little bit more like what the survey entailed, why you think you can even trust these accounts since they're anonymous. Some people would say it would make me less likely to trust them. So walk us through your scientific approach and why you think it's a good sound approach for studying NDEs. You know, back in 1998, the internet was relatively new, so we didn't have the good scholarly published studies that validated the reliability of internet surveys that compared internet surveys to the traditional pencil and paper surveys. Well, we have that now. Now,

internet has been established by many, many investigations as being reliable, at least as reliable as your, as I say, pencil and paper survey. So now we know with a certain date that that is reliable. But above and beyond that, when I set up this survey, yes, we wanted it to be anonymous. In other words, people would share their, well, actually, we would get their names, contact information, but we posted them with their advanced permissions, about 95% gave us. We posted their experience anonymously on that inter-website. That actually is important because that reduces the incentive for anybody to share a fraudulent

account. They're not going to get any personal recognition. They're not recognizable. We scrub all information that would allow, you know, specific dates, specific locations. We scrub all of that so that people cannot identify anybody that shared the near-death experience. We don't pay them. And so as a result of that, people are literally sharing because they want to share what to them is a very profound, personal, and important experience. And a lot of the times they

do that, it's out of that compassion for knowing they had a powerful experience and their desire to share it with the world. And we get, you know, 50, 60, 70,000 unique visitors to our website every month. Those that do share those experiences, certainly it's an important way for them to feel good about reaching that important message in near-death experiences with the world. You talk a lot in your book about how people are not often believed by their doctors when they share a near-death experience, and that can be painful. Did you find people willing and eager to share for this survey? Because it's like, finally, somebody will believe me and take me

seriously. Was that a piece of what motivated some people to participate? Oh, absolutely. Now, especially back in 1998, when near-death experiences were much less known than today, people were reluctant to share it with their doctors. Their healthcare team would not be aware of near-death experiences, misdiagnosis of some psychiatric disorder. Very sad when people had what they knew was a very profound, incredible experience, and their friends, family, loved ones, healthcare team, all of them pooh-poohed it and felt that couldn't happen. Now, the good news is that was back then today it's a whole different ballgame just about

everybody's heard about near-death experiences there's certainly members of the healthcare team that probably have very strong awareness of this and in fact a Pew Forum survey published in 2021 found that 71% of Americans believed that near-death experiences are the soul departing from the body. So you've got huge public awareness of this. Yeah. That's how many people are embracing that critical acknowledgement of the reality of near-death experiences today. And so certainly healthcare team, they're now more open to it, especially nurses, frankly, hats off to nurses who are, you know, the ones who will often talk with the patient more and validate their experiences.

Even doctors now are fascinated. I've talked to groups of doctors in health care settings. And in this day and age, thank goodness, unlike when I started in 1998, far more openness, far more awareness and acceptance of near-death experience and a desire for them to learn more about it. I love that. Now, before we jump into your nine lines of evidence, just a couple more questions. In the book, when you're talking about your study, you mentioned how you weed out valid from invalid accounts. And one way was to ask the same kind of question multiple times in different ways and see if there's consistency. What other methods do you use to rule out those that are fraudulent? And how

frequently did you come across accounts that you're like, we just can't trust this? Yeah. We have posted a huge write-up on the internet about how we look out for fraudulent accounts. I mean, we spend a lot of time thinking about this. As you said, redundant questions makes people nuts to answer redundant questions, but that's how you validate it. Makes sense. That's the best way. But above and beyond that, I'm a doctor, so I can read the life-threatening event that led up to the near-death experience, and I can tell, medically speaking speaking if that passes muster. I mean is that really medically plausible that that really happened and what their descriptions

are of their experiences in healthcare settings. So that really helps a lot too. You're back to that core understanding in science and that is what's real is consistently observed. So if people are sharing near-death experiences that are basically like all the others I've reviewed, and by the way, that's over 4,000 near-death experiences now, the pattern is very deeply ingrained. If it lines up with what the other experiences are sharing, that's a pretty strong indication

that it's real. You can certainly, as I look through these experiences, we look for things that don't add up, that are hallucinatory. The one thing where people are more likely to share falsified or embellished near-death experiences is if they have a financial incentive in doing so. I'm still quite suspicious about the very, very small percentage of people that share with us, that have a book for sale, that have a, you know, there may be their mediums or something crazy that, you know, they, it seems to help to advertise

they've had a near-death experience or two or three, like some of them do. And so if there's, if there's a financial incentive, I'm, I'm certainly got my suspicions up, but above and beyond that, it seems to be, and I've talked about this with other near-death experience researchers, fortunately seems to be no more than several percent of people are going to go out on the way to fraudulent an NDE on the website. And by the way, our current survey has well over 80 questions. It takes a huge amount of time for people to go do that. So you're not going to do that, you know, for an anonymous survey where you're going to have no personal recognition.'re not going to do that, you know, for an anonymous survey,

where you're going to have no personal recognition. It's going to take probably a good hour of your time where you're going to sit here and try to figure out, you know, what, you know, what a near-death experience would be like if you didn't have it. So the bottom line is we're quite confident, especially the driving thing is our redundant survey questions, my medical ability to weed out the fakes. And then the bottom line is the overwhelming consistency in those that have the courage and take the time to share these wonderful near-death experiences with it. So we're quite confident that if you learn from what's consistently expressed in near-death experiences, given the honesty and

integrity of the great majority of people, they're for real. So you have now, so let me take a step back. You started this site in 1998. You wrote your book, which is fantastic, thoroughly enjoy it. Evidence of the Afterlife is now going to be up there with a book by Stephen Miller, who I know is a friend of yours, Jay Steve Miller. His book on near-death experiences, two of my top single volumes I'll recommend on the evidence for them. You wrote this 2010. Now it's 14 years later. And so you have 4,000 accounts. And every single one of these, you and your team have assessed as best as you can to be sure you feel like they're valid accounts.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we're very careful about that. Our webmaster, my wife, is an attorney. So if she disagrees with my estimate or has any concerns about the validity, we talk. And that's not really very common at all that we have any concerns about that. Again, it's, you know, with all the checks and balances

we have and the caution we have, the lack of incentives for people to fill out a huge survey. And then don't forget, bottom line is, if you have that one at most, I think, 2% of people that share a falsified account, if that is significantly different from the 98, 99% of accounts, then you're really not going to change our collective understanding of near-death experience or the content of near-death experiences, even if there's those rare frauds. They're gonna be outliers.

People will see that it contains non-conventional content, and it's not really gonna affect our overall understanding of what near-death experiences are all about. Even if they're not frauds and they're exceptions that we can't account for, it still wouldn't overturn the norm of the patterns we consistently see. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Near-death experiences tend to add, and I'm sure you know this from talking to people, very strong, very consistently observed patterns. And so, you know, if we see an

outlier, you know, the very much an outlier, especially the rare fraudulent ones we have seem to have like an agenda. They want to try to carry forward some message that is generally near-death experiencers don't do that. They just simply say, this is my experience. And to them, very often, it's literally a sacred experience. I mean, they're not going to, they're going to go out of their way not to embellish, not to minimize that, which is so important to them, that which is like literally sacred to them and so transformative in their life. Well, let's jump into your nine lines of evidence. And I know right now, some of you are thinking, well, how diverse are these? How many languages are these in? Are these Western and non-Western? But that is your point number eight

about worldwide consistency. So if that's in the back of somebody's mind, we will get there. I'm going to ask you to jump into each one of these, maybe explain what you mean and why you think this factor is a piece of evidence for life after death. So the first one you call lucid death. Yeah, that's a dramatic term. We've talked about cardiac arrest, your heart stopping. To understand how amazing near-death experiences are, and a lot of them are associated with cardiac arrest as the precipitating event, well, when your heart

stops beating, of course, immediately blood stops flowing to the brain but 10 to 20 seconds after blood stops flowing to your brain after your heart stops an EEG electroencephalogram which is a measure of brain cortical activity goes absolutely flat there is no measurable cortical brain electrical activity that is absolutely impossible to have any lucid organized experience like is consistently seen in a near-death experience so to have that near-death experience and again fairly common boom their heart stops you know that like the example i gave the first near-death experience i heard where she was literally in the operating room and saw that ekg measure of her heart electrical activity go flat there's just no way seconds after that you can have any kind

of experience. In fact, most people whose heart stops and they will, it's called like a heart attack. I mean, they're literally in a coma for not only during that event, but for often hours afterwards. So for people to have a near-death experience, conscious, lucid, usually super normal consciousness is absolutely medically inexplicable. So that helps validate consciousness and near-death experiences as definitely occurring outside of any possible physical brain function. Now, I imagine a skeptic might say, okay, if we had somebody actually hooked up to an EKG or an EEG while they're having a near-death experience, we could test this. But I'm going to guess most of these stories are people who were not actually hooked up to these machines.

So how do we actually know they're genuinely near death? Okay, because when your heart stops, people call the emergency medical crew. They come in, they're trained to assess absent heartbeat. That's their job, and they do that very well. Believe me, as a doctor who's been, walked a mile in these shoes, you don't dang start CPR and start doing something very invasive like that unless you are dang sure that their heart stopped and they're not breathing. And above and beyond that, I mean, they can open up their eyes or pupils are fixed and dilated. They've got that coloration indicating lack of perfusion of oxygen in the tissues. I mean, they can open up their eyes or pupils are fixed and dilated. They've got that

coloration indicating lack of perfusion of oxygen in the tissues. I mean, there's a whole host of things that go along with validating, yeah, your heart stopped and you show it physically, physiologically. So that's very straightforward with cardiac arrest. Now, this has been called the Oprah factor. And I think it's tied to the fact that Oprah Winfrey was one of the first people that really drew attention to near death experiences years ago. How do we know that some of these people haven't don't have certain expectations about what happens at death? And that just kind of shapes the brain or the mind or their experience of it in some fashion, in a way that it maybe wasn't when Michael Sabom first started his research back in the 70s.

Yeah, sure. The Oprah effect sort of implies you saw it on Oprah. And so when you have a near-death experience, that's what you'll experience. Well, the answer to that's very simple. We have over 4,000 near-death experiences posted on our website anonymously. Anybody in the world can read them. In fact, we have portions of the website in over 30 different languages. So as a result, anybody on the planet can take that journey I have, my wife has, and you can very vividly see

that no two near-death experiences are the same. Yes, they have that very consistent pattern of elements typically occurring in consistent order, but no two near-death experiences are the same. It's not like they're copycat experiences. It's not like they heard somebody's near-death experience and then that was what they described. So it's not only the consistencies, but it's that very important diversity of near-death experiences. It bespeaks its reality and they're not a product of someone's pre-existing imagination or belief in near-death experience. And may I add, in our survey, we asked a survey question, have you ever heard about near-death experience prior to the time you had

your near-death experience? About 8% had never even heard about near-death experience. Oh, interesting. And yet, yeah, and is it, of course, there are near-death experiences strikingly similar to near-death experiences of people who've heard about near-death experiences. And then last but not least, I actually did a study looking at near-death experiences that happened prior to 1975. Remember that's prior to the Dr. Raymond Moody's book, Life After Life. Nobody heard about near-death experience. There wasn't any term that anybody was aware of.

And yet, those experiences pre-1975 content, once again, strikingly similar to all near-death experiences shared after 1975. So no shred of evidence that there's any pre-existing awareness of near-death experiences or beliefs in what to expect that affects the content. That seems to put the nail in the coffin, pun intended, of the Oprah effect objection, which is a fair question. Okay, so last one before we move on to your second proof. I've had lucid dreams where I've woken up and thought, it took me a minute to realize that was dream or just reality. Some are obvious.

What are some of the differences between dreams and near-death experiences that tell you that it can't just be a dream? That's a great question. Literally, the very first version of the survey I posted in 1998 I too was curious about that I mean our near-death experiences seem so unearthly and dreams can be unearthly is there any connection between the two so I asked the critical survey question was your experience dreamlike in any way very open-ended question to encourage any possible relationship between a dream and a near-death experience of the way they would say yes and describe that so that was what I was looking for and that was the most one of the most amazing learning experiences of any question I've

ever asked on a survey because the answer I got from people that had near-death experiences over and over no no way are you kidding not a chance and i was embarrassed i was literally i i really felt bad about that okay okay geez i didn't know so i mean you know that people have had dreams and they've had experiences and i was uh i i quick that was one of my impetuous to quickly change that version of the survey because i felt so bad that people were so adamant that their near-death experience was not like a dream in any way, per the survey question. One of the things that Dr. Miller has pointed out is he said dreams end abruptly. But as a whole, near-death experiences tell a story and a narrative with a beginning a middle and an end that's just a really interesting one of many different kind of distinctions that you have

and i think as we get into some of the other proofs here some of the other differences will come to the surface okay number two you say your second proof is out of body now i can obviously guess what mean by this but maybe explain it and why you think it's a piece of evidence that near-death experiences are real sure about 45 percent of people that have near-death experiences have that out-of-body experience which i conceptualize as consciousness leaving the physical body and typically rising above the body uh variably but usually high enough up that they can see ongoing earthly events around their physical body down below them, including often the frantic efforts of people

trying to bring them back to life. So that's the out-of-body experience. As a researcher, I was intrigued by that and said, well, their unconscious are clinically dead. So with their conscious up above their physical body, is what they're seeing and hearing real? And in my study I published in the book, we found over 98% of those out-of-body observations contained no unrealistic content, either by my assessment of what they were describing or by what the people having the near-death experience said themselves. In other words, down to the finest detail, who came in, when they came in, what they said, what equipment they used to resuscitate them, family members sobbing in this part of the house. So just amazing, very accurate, very detailed

observations often. And in fact, many of these out-of-body observations are observations geographically far from the physical body and far outside of any possible physical sensory awareness. One example out of scores and scores we have, a person was riding a horse out in an area away from the barn, fell off their horse, bam, very severe head injury, consciousness above their body. But their consciousness went back to that barn that was about a mile away. And from that vantage point, she was able to see and hear those conversations of those a mile away, unaware that she was having that crisis event that far off. And of course, when she came back and checked out what she saw and heard, accurate down to the finest detail. Now, that's anecdotal, but once again, we have scores and scores and scores of such

observations. And it's rare, literally rare that what they see in here and that out of body experience is unreal or didn't really happen. In fact, I'm a lot more fascinated by those very rare, uh, faulty out of body observations because they're so rare I mean it's like geez 98 or so percent are accurate down to the finest details I get hundreds of those experiences so it's exciting to me when we have that rare experience it doesn't add up so if you have 4 000 accounts and 45 percent of people report an out-of-body experience that's about

I don't know 1800 plus accounts of people and then they describe details that then go check out that go beyond chance with precision like i love the one about a left size 10 blue tennis shoe on the third story floor with a wear mark over like the small toe they find it the dentures one i think is so interesting about exactly where it was placed and then they're able to go find it now in this book so again this is 14 years ago you talk about what's called these aware studies capitalized aw are e and this is where if I understand correctly people are kind of setting up in emergency rooms ways to test if there's really an out-of-body

experience or not. But then you said in the book, it's too early to assess them. Is there an update on how that's gone? Yeah. I mean, it's really, yeah. There's been a fairly limited number of those. I can think of about seven right off the top of my head. When people place targets, they're often like probably the best designed experiment like that are targets placed in like operating rooms or emergency rooms or where people may well code, where their heart may stop. Now, the problem is when I work in a hospital, there's a couple of huge issues with those studies. Number one, hospital administrators hate them. They don't want to get a reputation that they're doing studies like that because it might bother some people. And when you do, and the people that were fortunate, brave enough to get the hospital to agree to that, the targets are what the people having an out-of-body experience

would look at. They have to put it way over to the side. I mean, they're way off on a shelf. They're away with all the other operating room equipment. And so, when someone codes and has a near-death experience in an operating room, for example, as we see vividly described by, again, scores and scores of people having near-death experience, consciousness above the body, where are you going to look? Are you going to look over at the shelf and look around the gauze and the gowns and think, well, no, you're going to look down at the body where the action's going on and the doctors are having a fit and the machine's going off and the crash cart doesn't magically appear. So it's not surprising to me from having been in an OR

setting a lot, obviously, that people that have that out-of-body experience aren't going to be looking over at the side. But what we do have is, again, literally, like you said, it's probably 1,800 or so experiences where the observations are accurate down to the finest detail. So, and by the way, in all these prospective studies where they place targets, not only have they not seen any targets, they haven't really had their consciousness focused on the target to have the ability. So if you don't have, if you're having a near-death experience, that out-of-body experience, and your focus of conscious is not on the target, that doesn't mean they didn't see it. It just means they didn't have, it's not anything that you can really

study and say yay or nay regarding an out-of-body experience because they weren't looking in that direction. So we really don't have that smoking gun. I'd like to. There needs to be more studies like that. Very, very hard to do. And then people worry about the sterilization of targets, and it gets to be a real, especially in this day and age in healthcare, that's very, very difficult to do. Fair enough. Let's shift to your proof number three, what you call blind sight. Yeah. Blind sight is absolutely amazing to me. I mean, here we are, people that have been legally or blind, they may be severely visually impaired. I now have a small series of people with that degree of visual impairment based on our, you know, out of those 4,000 near-death experiences. In fact, we directly ask a survey question now, well,

what about their visual impairment they may have had in their earthly life prior to the near-death experience. So we now have a series, but every single person that shared that they were severely visually impaired or blind at the time of their near-death experience described at least normal or apparently supernormal vision. And the example I used in my book was Vicki. Vicki was born totally blind. To her, vision was unknown and unknowable. You cannot explain vision in terms of the remaining four senses.

I tried with Vickiicki and that was like, no way. So you can't. But Vicki, who is a professional singer, was being driven home from her bar singing stint by an unfortunately inebriated patron and had a very severe auto crash. So the first time Vicki saw her body, she was having that out of body experience up over her body, but there was her body down in the gurney. And her initial emotional reaction was to be horrified because vision was so unfamiliar to her. But when she calmed down, she then realized that what she'd known her whole, like 22 years of her life, that body down there, she said, Oh, that's me because I correlated that sense of feel of my hair.

And interesting, the sense of field of a ring that her father had given her. And then, and only then, she said, wow, that's me. Vicki went on to have a stunningly detailed near-death experience with vision, very detailed vision. And in fact, her vision is what so many people with near-death experience describe as 360 degree vision. She could simultaneously see and interpret and process visual awareness front, back of her, right, left, up, down. That's technically spherical vision. And in fact, when Vicki relayed this to me, I talked with her about how all the rest of us with normal vision in our earthly life see like a pie-shaped visual field because of the location of our eyes and our socket in our in our in our head and vicki literally laughed at me she said that can't be because sure i said okay because her entire life experience was vision in that way and

it did not make sense to her that your vision would be so impaired like we all know in our earthly life it is amazing how many people who were deaf they'll describe hearing blind will describe seeing and in your interview of her i mean i almost wish i could hear somebody try to describe what it means to see for the first time that has been blind their whole life i mean what was that like yeah and you we see that medically on very, very rare occasions. And I mean, they're just in awe. I mean, it creates, you know, it's a shot at national news every time that happens. And, you know, they could see actually the first time

you see vision, actually, it's a good point on these very rare individuals where they've had significant visual impairment and for whatever reason, didn't have the typically operative repair so that they could see. Generally speaking, when that happens in their like in early middle childhood, they don't see very well at all. I mean, their eyes are not at all accustomed to vision, very indistinct vision, and it can be very slow for them to recover normal vision or they can not uncommonly have impairment in their vision the rest of their life, because their eyes have just not developed.

So, you know, that stands as a striking contrast to Vicki and the other people that have shared with me with severe visual impairment that start their near-death experience, boom, there's no transition. They're immediately seeing at a level normal, and often as with the case of Vicki, super normal descriptions of vision.

That's incredible. What an experience to have. I'm sure that stands out being a physician, being able to have somebody describe that would be pretty amazing. I could only imagine. It was. There are so many of these near-death experience accounts, even to this day after 25 years, leave me just awed at the experience. All right, well, let's shift to number four, impossibly conscience. Sure. These are, as I mentioned with the very first near-death experience that I encountered, while she was under general anesthesia, I mean, heck, under that blanket of sleep, under adequate general anesthesia it should be impossible

to have any kind of conscious experience I mean heck probably many probably most perhaps of the people viewing this have had some kind of general anesthesia experience and if it's like virtually everybody else boom you go asleep and then boom you awake and there's nothing in that blanket of sleep under adequate general anesthesia so if your heart stops while you're under general anesthesia and we talked about that I mean within seconds blood stops going to the brain EEG goes flat after 10 to 20 seconds well if you're under general anesthesia and your heart stops it should be doubly impossible to have any conscious lucid remembrance at that time. And yet, once again, by the scores, we have people that describe general anesthesia. And of course, don't forget, the heart and breathing are very carefully monitored while you're under

general anesthesia. I mean, if your heart stops, you know it while you're under general anesthesia. So again, very well documented cessation of heart function, and yet again, by the scores, people described their near-death experiences. And I compared the elements, what occurs during the near-death experience in the group of people that were under general anesthesia and their heart stopped, to what occurs, the elements of near-death experiences under all other circumstances. So using statistical comparison, the only difference I found was people that were under general anesthesia and had a near-death experience, statistically were more likely to have a tunnel experience. And I don't know why that is. You

know, out of 23 different elements we got, it's probably just a fluke. I need to update that. But again, the bottom line is 22 out of 23 elements, no statistical difference. They have typical near-death experiences. And including the key question I asked, what was your degree of consciousness and alertness during your experience? Well, I mean, heck, if general anesthesia could diminish consciousness and alertness during a near-death experience at all in any way, you would expect near-death experiences or general anesthesia to have a little bit less degree of described consciousness and alertness. Not so. No difference statistically between whether they're near-death experiences under anesthesia or all other circumstances.

Amazing, isn't it? That even under those powerful anesthetics that are general anesthetic, which often will shut you down even to the brainstem level. I mean, heck, under lots of general anesthetic procedures, you have to sit here and ventilate them with a bag or more often with a ventilator. Yeah, you're shut down to the brainstem level. That controls breathing and the heart stops. And yet these people have absolutely typical near-death experiences, all the elements of what occurs during all other near-death experiences, and the same level of consciousness and alertness. Once again, powerful evidence that what occurs during near-death experiences absolutely cannot be explained by physical brain function.

All right, Doc. Maybe they were not under enough anesthesia. That would seem to be one way that could maybe explain this. Do we actually know that they were under full anesthesia that would seem to be one way that could maybe explain this do we actually know that they were under full anesthesia yeah well first of all that's called anesthetic awareness that's where you have inadequate anesthesia and that's been very well described i want to emphasize for the peace of mind of everybody watching this anesthetic awareness or having some awareness during a general anesthesia surgery is extremely rare, especially with our modern monitoring techniques. I mean, you almost need to say it doesn't happen, but it's extremely rare, suffice it to say. So, what occurs if you have anesthetic

awareness? First of all, it's typically auditory only. They don't have visualization they may have some discomfort it's nothing like an out-of-body experience it's nothing like the they're diminished consciousness as you might imagine because they're partly under the effect of the general anesthesia but has nothing what they describe at all like what occurs during a near-death experience no out-of-body experience the life review no visit to unearthly realms it's just you know just sort of a very bare conscious awareness of what's going on with consciousness in their physical body on the operating table so that brings us to our next one proof number five you just mentioned life review I

think most people understand what's meant by a life review, but why would a life review be evidence that the afterlife is real? Sure. That's a great question. Just to get everybody up to speed on that, a life review happens in about 20% of near-death experiences. At that time, and it's typically in that unearthly heavenly realm, they may see parts or even all of their prior life and review it and literally see it, be aware of it. One of the more common ways that it's described is like flashing on a screen, often multiple screens, and they'll see different aspects of their life. You can skip around to different prior events of their life out of sequential time order or they may have a life review or they see all of their prior life in sequential time order, or they may have a life review, or they see all of

their prior life in time, if you will, sequential order. This is a vivid example of how accelerated consciousness is during a near-death experience. I mean, think about this. Here's people that have often lived decades of life, and yet here they are reviewing every single event of their prior life in detail. Yeah, that's an incredible acceleration of consciousness far beyond anything earthly possible or possible with the physical brain. So that's one line of evidence. But another thing I was interested in is there were a number of life reviews where they became aware of what occurred in their prior life, including when they were toddlers, when they

were very young. So in my study, I found that if people were aware of something early childhood that they reviewed, they saw, they became aware of, but even if these were memories long forgotten, if they went and checked it out, generally asking their parents, hey, did this really happen? Every single time that a near-death experiencer has done that and shared it with me, what they saw, what they saw in their life review really did occur, even if it was long, long forgotten. So both by acceleration of consciousness and awareness of long forgotten memories that are accurate, again, another

significant line of evidence that near-death experiences are, in a word, real real so it's the calm reasoned clear life review when somebody's undergoing trauma and their brain is experiencing the opposite is a piece of the evidence and then they're able to recall things that either they knew in the past or didn't check them out and confirm it that tell you more is going on with this life review. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. Good stuff. Three more. Now, this is one of the most intriguing ones to me. You call family reunion. Oh, you know, around 15, 20%-ish of people that have a near-death experience

will encounter their deceased loved ones. And these are joyous reunions. They're more likely to be genetic relatives, but can be friends. They can be spouses. They can be acquaintances. So when this happens again, you're back in that heavenly realm, basically, generally. who died and even if the relationship was strained in the earthly life these are essentially always joyous reunions also even if the person that was deceased died of say very advanced age or a disfiguring accident or illness essentially always an inner death experience their picture-perfect health so and interestingly if they died in very advanced age, they may appear years to decades younger. Interestingly, if this was an infant that died, they may appear many years older, like

older childhood. And yet, they're instantly recognized in a near-death experience. You almost never see people questioning, wondering if that's their deceased loved one that they knew. There seems to be an immediate recognition. So, my question was very simple. As a physician, I knew that all other types of altered consciousness, dreams, hallucinations, you name it, in all other aspects of altered human consciousness, it's not a near-death experience.

The being that they're going to encounter in that experience will be like the bank teller they did business with that day, the family member they said hi to as they went up the stairs just to go to bed or something, but these are people that are living. And so to my study, I wanted to see how often that these were truly deceased people, dead at the time they had their near-death experience, or living people. And I found what another researcher, Dr. Kelly, had discovered that 96% of the time, if a being is encountered in a near-death experience, they are deceased at the time of the near-death experience. And amazingly, the person having the near-death experience may not even know that they died prior to their near-death experience. And yet there they are. Then when they,

yeah, they check it out, they find out that that person died, and sometimes even very shortly, prior to their near-death experience. And amazingly, we have a small series of, these are typically children near-death experiences, where they encounter a deceased sibling that they never knew existed. And here's the backstory on that. When a parent has a child who dies,

obviously that's devastating, They're heartbroken. So when they have another child, it's not uncommon for parents to decide that they want to wait until that child is old enough to understand death before they will share that tragic news about their deceased brother or sister that they never knew existed. And yet in our small series of near death experiences, they recognize that person typically as being their brother or sister. There's a dialogue, and every single time they encounter a boy, yeah, it was a deceased boy that died that they never knew existed. If it's a girl, they had a sister that died that they never knew existed. The gender is always pinpoint perfect,

and you can just imagine the shock to parents when this child recovers from that life-threatening event, tells them their near-death experience, and says, oh, here's my deceased sibling, and can often describe them in great detail what they look like. And once again, gender is accurate, appearance is accurate, and parents are obviously absolutely shocked. Again, further powerful truth, powerful evidence that near-death experiences are exactly what the great majority of people having a near-death experience is being, and that is a real awareness of a reality outside of our physical earthly realm. That'd be about as shocking. Yeah, and I have to jump in real quick. For you,

pet lovers, it's very common that it's not just deceased humans. There's been a lot of descriptions of deceased beloved pets. I mean, you name it, dogs, cats, horses, birds, we've heard it all. Like with humans, they're picture-perfect health, joyous reunions. And that's, at least to me, very heartening as an animal lover that we see that so commonly in near-death experiences. Now, you mentioned children, and this brings us to proof number seven. We've got three left, and this is the experience of very young children matching up with other near-death experiences. So tell us about that. Oh, sure. I was fascinated by the concept that these very young children, my study group was age five and younger, average and median age in this group was three and a half years old.

That's dang young. Well, at that young of an age, you almost certainly have never heard about near-death experiences. You don't have real developed concepts of death or certainly life after death, and you don't really have well-formed religious beliefs, for goodness sake. You're practically, if you will, culturally a blank slate at that very, very young age. So I was real curious to see how their experiences, near-death experiences at that very young age, compared to the near-death experiences in older children and adults. So just like the study that I did, or analogous to the study I did with near-death experiences under anesthesia, I looked at the 23 elements or what occurs during the near-death

experience in the very young children and compared it to older children and the results. And to my actual amazement, no statistical difference in the occurrence of any of those 23 elements between the two groups. So once again, it doesn't seem to make any difference how young you are. If you have a near-death experience, and by the way, they recall it vividly, even though they're very, very young in general. And so amazingly, even in that very young age, no reason at all to believe that pre-existing cultural beliefs, awareness of near-death experience, religious teaching has anything to do with the content of what happens with a near-death experience. Again, very powerful evidence of that. By the way, while on the topic of near-death

experiences in very young children, to answer that unspoken question, there have been several good studies that find that what people describe with a near-death experience stays verbatim the same in both prospective and retrospective studies, their remembrance of it seems to be absolutely verbatim the same years, decades beyond the time of the event without any forgetting of the details or embellishment of it in general. So near-death experiences seem to be a very unique type of consciousness in the sense that people, we've heard near-death experiencers say, geez, I don't remember what I had for breakfast a week ago. I remember the finest detail of my near-death experience 20 years ago, exactly as it happened. I was going to ask you about that consistency. So I'm really

glad you brought that up. Now, we see that consistency over time. We see a consistent young and old. Your proof number eight is worldwide consistency. How wide is this in terms of where people are from, religion, and other maybe ethnic differences too? Sure. Great question. A huge shout out to my wife and webmaster, Jody, who incredibly, out of huge, I mean, hundreds of hours, has portions of our inderf.org website in over 30 different languages. So now about a fourth to a third of the near-death experiences we get are non-English. We are so dedicated to being accurate in sharing these experiences with the world that we actually use human volunteers that we've worked with. I mean,

my wife has way over a hundred that she's worked with over the years and translating these non-English near-death experiences to English. And in turn, the English ones that we have, selected English ones, translated by human volunteers into non-English languages to put up on that portion of the website. So as a result of that, we have by far the largest cross-cultural study of near-death experience that has ever been possible and ever performed before. So we literally have, I've lost count, many, many hundreds of near-death experiences from all around the world shared in non-English languages. So I've looked at that carefully, and once again, as you might expect from this discussion, the content of the near-death experience is strikingly similar no matter where on the planet it occurred. Of course, as a researcher, that's not good enough for me.

So I was thinking, well, gee, what about non-Western near-death experiences, which I defined as countries which are not predominantly Judeo-Christian? Well, in these countries, they're typically very culturally different, very different religious beliefs, very different culture, if you will. And so we now have acquired well over, gosh, we're probably up to, and again, I've lost count and I have to check more recently, we're probably up close to, if not over a hundred of near-death experiences shared from non-Western countries. In my most recent research, I was curious about that, but knew that the survey questions, I mean, how do you translate unearthly, spiritual, you know, things that are tough concepts for us in English, but you know, here that are tough concepts for us in English.

But, you know, here we have people in non-English countries. So I thought the best way to look at non-English near-death experiences, I mean, non-Western near-death experiences, and compare them to typical Western experiences, would be to just get that subset of non-Western near-death experiences where they knew English well enough that they could share it in English, and yet they were, you know, you name it, Hindu, Muslim, got a lot of that, Buddhist. And so we were able to get a large enough group that we could compare head-to-head

non-Western near-death experiences with responses to the same survey questions with Western near-death experiences. And so, once again, there's a little bit of buzz, but the great majority of those elements that we keep talking about, what occurs during the near-death experience, great majority of them, absolutely no statistical difference. A little bit of difference in questions where you talk about like an unearthly light or some things where it's a little bit tough even for us to understand but really the bottom line is strikingly similar near to end it looking at the narratives again strikingly similar near-death experiences once again wherever on the planet they occurred and it still amazes me even to this day to understand based on evidence that it

makes no difference whether you're, say, a Muslim in Egypt or a Hindu in India or a Christian in the United States, anywhere on the earth that you are and whatever your prior religious cultural beliefs, if you have a near-death experience, the content's going to be strikingly similar. And I might add, that's corroborated by my work with an Iranian Muslim near-death experience researcher. We have our third paper coming out. And again, we had several dozen Iranian Muslim near-death experiences, and this should be no surprise to anyone by now. Our conclusion in our published paper, the content of near-death experiences in Iranian Muslims strikingly similar to typical

Western near-death experiences. That is fascinating. And I've got so many questions about that, but let's shift to your final proof about changed lives. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Changed lives. As you can imagine from, gosh, everything we've been sharing here, you can just imagine the impact of having a near-death experience. It's huge. I mean, here's a very vivid, dramatic experience, unearthly and yet, you know, hyper-consciousness usually, and with messages that are literally challenging and life-changing. So, the scholarly literature calls these after-effects, and those are the typically observed changes that occur after a near-death experience.

Now, they don't necessarily happen immediately. It can take often years for people to fully integrate that powerful near-death experience and its messages and its lessons into their consciousness, their value system, and how they express it in their earthly, everyday life. But just as an example of some typical after effects we see over and over are as follows. There's an increased belief in an afterlife. Well, no surprise there from their view.

Sure. Yeah, I mean, of course not. Well, they know what lies beyond death's door because they lived it and they know it. And they know the gripping reality of that. And that's good. So as a corollary to that, obviously, there's a decreased fear of death. Again, no surprise.

They know what lies after permanent bodily death. It's an afterlife. And so they no longer fear, have that afraid fear about what will happen to them or their loved ones after they die. They know it's a wonderful afterlife. But above and beyond that, loving and compassion, love is one of the most common words used in describing what they encountered in a near-death experience. So it's almost like, shoot, like they take that little piece of heaven back into their earthly life, and they can manifest that love, that compassion at a much greater level in their earthly life than they ever could before. We ask direct survey questions on this, by the way,

and there's a huge shift in people having a near-death experience being much more compassionate. Over and over we see that people have less materialistic value. They no longer think that what our meaning and purpose here of our earthly life is, is to make as much money and, you know, be as big of a big shot as possible. All of a sudden they go, oh, gosh be as big of a big shot as possible. All of a sudden they go, oh gosh, no, that's not it at all. The meaning and purpose is focused more on love, relationships, their spiritual growth, and sharing with the world. So that, you know, being and being more positive, radiant often people. So these are the typical after effects that we see over and

over. Now, I've actually, I'm crunching out a paper with another NDE researcher, which has the largest study of after effects ever done. So one of the things we're coming up with is there seem to be about as many different after effects as there are individual near death experiencers. So in other words, everybody has their own experience. Everybody sort of has their own changes of values and beliefs. And so there's a whole sort of range of these things,

which are typically considered very positive. Very, you know, people find them much more loving, compassionate, easy to be with. They may let go of these anger, guilt, resentments, or things that haunted them during their prior earthly life. And that's part of the whole spectrum of very positive, often very profound changes in people that have near-death experiences. Dr. Long, I have so many more questions for you about this and your research. We're going to have

to have you back, but you've mentioned a couple of studies, the recent one about the after effects, about this Iranian near-death experience researcher who's a Muslim you're writing with him how can people follow outside of getting your book tell us how people can follow kind of some of the research that you continue to do oh wow well you can go to our website and we'll have you know links our webmaster is very good about having links to the talks I do I do lots of YouTube videos there's's a lot of, I mean, heck, you don't have to go spend the money and buy that book you just showed off there. Go watch, but listen to this talk right here. Heck, we just hit the main points of the book anyway,

and there's a lot of YouTube videos that go into detail on the website. I would sure encourage you nderf.org, Near-Death Experience Research Research Foundation over 4,000 near-death experiences posted in a good starting point would be to go to those top links and look under experiences and exceptional experiences I you know how doctors don't guarantee anything well I can yeah here's one for you if you read even 10 of these so-called exceptional archive near-death experiences, I think if you're curious about near-death experiences or reality, I would pretty much be willing to bet that if you read even 10 in a row of these exceptional near-death experiences, that it could be life-changing. You'll see vividly not only everything we've

talked about today, but even the deeper messages, what they learned, how they grew, near-death experiences that are absolutely informative in terms of understanding consciousness, but certainly beyond that, inspirational. And helping everyone vividly understand the reality of an afterlife, the reality of God, and the reality of the importance of our human relationships and compassion in everything we do in our life. I mean, it's all right there. In some ways, you may have answered this, but my last question is, you first heard about NDEs in 1984, start the website in 1988, publish a book in 2010. You're still researching it today. How has this research personally affected you? Wow, great question. We talked about that earlier on. I was sort of, you could probably call me a closet agnostic.

I mean, I didn't, church was a social thing. I say that's separated. You have the faith and what you hear every Sunday in church, and you have science, and there didn't really seem to be any kind of an overlap there. Wow, has that changed? Now, vividly, based on evidence, based on science, I can absolutely say how it's profoundly affected me. I've taken, like so many other near-death experiencers, I think, a little piece of heaven back into what I do in my daily practice with patients. I can help my patients face their diagnosis of cancer with more courage,

with more confidence, with more ability to be with them compassionately, to be with them in every way a doctor should be than I ever could before. Above and beyond that, I have in the back of my mind, even if they're going to succumb to that cancer, that's not the end. They have an afterlife, a wonderful afterlife. We'll all be together again. There really is that eternal existence. There really is that part of what lies beyond our human life, and it's wonderful. That's inspired me dramatically every step of my current professional and personal life.

That's a great answer. Well, folks watching, check out N-D-E-R-F for stories and research and updates and links to videos from Dr. Long. Your book, you say you don't have to get it, but it's excellent. Evidence of the afterlife is very clear, straightforward, written like a doctor, just no nonsense in there, straight to the point. Lay out your evidence. Don't go beyond what the evidence points to. It's excellent. And then those of you watching, make sure you hit subscribe.

This is a topic we are going to come back to because I get a lot of questions and requests to talk to some of the leading NDE researchers. You heard from one of them today, Dr. Jeffrey Long. And if you thought about studying apologetics, we would love to help train you in our apologetics program. We have information below, but it's the top-rated distance apologetics program. Dr. Long, I had a student who said she entered into our program because of an NDE. Changed her life in all the ways you described and said, I want to learn to defend the gospel. I want to make my life count.

And she came in our program and she shared with me. And because of my research in NDEs, I was able to say, I completely believe you. Thanks for opening up. That's amazing. And it was a piece of heaven, so to speak. So really appreciate your time. You've been really generous with it. We will have you back soon.

This has really been fun. I'd be delighted. Great, real outstanding interview. It's been a real pleasure to be talking with you today.