Near-Death Experience Expert Dr. Jeffrey Long | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #479

**Today's guest is a practicing physician, an author, and a researcher into the phenomenon of near-death experiences. He has conducted the largest case study, with over 5,000 cases of near-death experiences, and he wrote the book *Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences*, which is a New York Times bestseller. I'm grateful to be able to spend time with him today and learn about what's right on the cusp of the afterlife. Today's guest is Dr. Jeffrey Long.**

[Music]

**I'm sitting here with Dr. Jeffrey Long, and you had the New York Times bestseller, *Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences*. That term is fascinating to people. You know, you hear "near death," and it's like, that's what we're all so afraid of—the finality of it. I want to start just by asking, what quantifies a near-death experience?**

**Sure. Now, different researchers have different concepts, but the research definition that I've always used is exactly what the name implies: you're near death. In other words, you're so physically compromised that you're unconscious, or you may be clinically dead with an absent heartbeat. At that time, it should be impossible to have any lucid conscious remembrance, and yet people do have that remembrance at that time. That's the experience part of a near-death experience.**

**Okay, and why is it at that time that you shouldn't be able to have any lucid brain activity? Why is that?**

**Sure. Let's talk about what happens to the brain after a cardiac arrest, which means the heart stops beating. The moment the heart stops beating, blood immediately stops flowing to the brain. Ten to twenty seconds after that event, the EEG, which is an electroencephalogram—a measure of brain electrical activity—goes absolutely flat. There's no measurable cortical brain activity. Twenty seconds after the heart stops and after blood stops going to the brain, it should be impossible to have any remembrance at that time, let alone the highly lucid and organized near-death experience.**

**So you started to kind of quantify or collect the experiences people were having at that point?**

**Absolutely. I've been researching and gathering near-death experiences for over 25 years. I was so fascinated when I first heard about near-death experiences that I really wanted to study them with the best methodology possible. That being people that actually had near-death experiences sharing their firsthand experience. So, over 25 years ago, I established the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, a research website that encouraged people to share a narrative of their experience. It also had a scientifically designed survey with a huge number of questions, so that not only were we getting large numbers of near-death experiences, but we were learning about them from all those survey questions at a depth that had been impossible before.**

**So you created a website where people would go who had had near-death experiences, and they would start to list out the information. What were some of the questions that you would ask someone?**

**Sure. Well, first, of course, we have them give the narrative of their experience. We don't want any leading questions prior to that time. But then, once we start, the current website survey has over 80 different questions. Some of the questions include the leading research tool called the NDE scale, which is a series of 16 questions that express different degrees of a particular element or not expressing it at all. In addition to that, we have dozens of other questions that help establish demographic questions—male, female, where do you live, when did the experience occur—also content questions, which is a very strong focus of the survey, and then finally, importantly, after-effects: how did their life change after that? How did their life change in response to that amazing near-death experience?**

**Wow. So, 25 years ago, you start the website, people start reporting what happened, and you start collecting this data. Were you surprised at the number of people? What were some things that kind of shocked you right off the bat?**

**Right off the bat, I realized there was overwhelming consistency. Even in the first few dozen near-death experiences, I saw everything I knew as a physician told me this is not possible. You can't have highly lucid conscious experiences when you're unconscious or clinically dead. Yet here, the very first few dozen people shared with me very clearly, and what was very impressive was the remarkable consistency of the elements they were describing. What happened during the experience—the elements, or if you will, characteristics—not only were they very consistently seen across many near-death experiences, but they typically occurred in a very consistent and logical order. This is nothing like dreams or hallucinations or any other type of pathologically altered consciousness. I realized very quickly, and as I was to learn even more and more with it, as I got more and more experiences shared with me, near-death experiences are, in a word, real.**

**What were some of the things that led you to believe that they were real?**

**Oh, absolutely, the overwhelming consistency. Now, while no two near-death experiences are the same, if you study a lot of them—and Theo, I've studied over 4,000—so with that huge data set, it's kept me busy. It's my second full-time job. It's tough to be a full-time doctor while doing that as my other full-time job. But what I have observed, and other near-death experience researchers see, is that very consistent pattern of what happens when you have a near-death experience. Of course, there's that life-threatening event; they're unconscious or clinically dead, no heartbeat. But at that time, a very common first element is what's called an out-of-body experience. Consciousness separates from the physical body and goes above the body. Now, from that vantage point, they can see ongoing earthly events, often including people frantically trying to bring them back to life. They may then go into or through a tunnel, variably described. Often at the end of the tunnel, there's a beautiful unearthly light. After passing through the tunnel, they may be in an unearthly, what some call a heavenly realm, aptly described. It's very different from what we've known in our earthly life. It's literally a non-physical realm. Movement is non-physical; communication is essentially always telepathic. Time is almost invariably described as either radically different from earthly time or not existing at all in this realm. In this unearthly, beautiful heavenly realm, there can be encounters with deceased loved ones. There can be a review of part or all of their prior life, called a life review. At this point, they can see colors in plants and landscapes that are so beautiful that there are no earthly words to describe them. There can be buildings around. At this time, there's often a decision that they make as they interact with other beings about whether to stay in this beautiful unearthly realm or return to their earthly life and that body struggling to survive. Those are the most common characteristics of the near-death experiences.**

**What would be like your strongest evidence that this actually happens? Because anybody can kind of go on a website. You know, any naysayer can say, 'Oh, anybody can go on a website and fill it out.' Right? Sure, there's been a ton of people that have done it, but what's the most common evidence that you believe that this has happened?**

**Oh, absolutely. You know, Theo, we talked earlier about that out-of-body experience where consciousness goes above the body, above the unconscious or clinically dead physical body below. What I and other researchers have investigated is how accurate are those observations in that out-of-body state? Amazingly, in my study, over 98% of what people are seeing and hearing with their physical body and conscious down below is accurate down to the finest detail. In fact, they can make these observations in that out-of-body state geographically far from their physical body, far outside of any possible physical sensory awareness. For example, what do you mean when you say that? Just before you get to the example, like geographically, what do you mean? I'm a little sorry; I got confused there.**

**Yeah, let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. We had one relatively recent near-death experience. A lady was riding a horse and was out, you know, basically breaking in the horse. The horse threw her off, and she hit her head, suffering a very severe head injury, and immediately became unconscious. She had that out-of-body experience, consciousness above her body, saw her body lying on the ground, saw the horse heading back home. But then her consciousness went to where she had started her journey, the barn, and she was able to hear other people talking, aware of what they were saying and doing. They didn't know that she was fighting for her life over a mile away because they weren't aware of that. They only became aware of it when the horse arrived without her. Again, she was able to see and bring back all that information, verified down to the finest details of what she was seeing a mile away. Obviously, there's no way you're going to see, hear, or perceive in any way with your normal sensory function. And so that's a common thing. People like so hovering kind of outside of themselves. So people leaving their physical realm, right? You leave, and I guess, do they feel okay being away from themselves? Do they feel like, 'Jeepers, I got to get back into myself,' like when you lost your phone or something? Or does it feel like—?**

**That's what I would be like, 'Gosh, because if I'm just milling around, it's almost like you're just naked. You're as naked as you could be. You're naked down to your soul.' You know, that's a good assumption, and I kind of wondered about that too early in my research. But amazingly, even though these people are unconscious or clinically dead and may have had severe trauma or illness problems that led to that episode of unconsciousness, when that consciousness separates from their physical body, they essentially never describe any pain. It's unusual for them to feel fear about consciousness apart from their body. Far more commonly described is a sense of calm, a sense of peace, a sense, amazingly, that this is actually their real conscious self—that being non-physical and apart from their body down below.**

**Ah, so that's a common thing that people say. Oh, this felt a lot more real than the existence I'd been having in my body.**

**Oh, absolutely. In fact, we have a survey question, and we ask people about what they said about the reality of their experience. In our survey of 834 people that had a near-death experience where we asked that question, 93.8% said their experience was definitely real. Over and over, as part of that, they were saying it was more real than anything they'd known in their earthly life. They typically have an acceleration of consciousness. Amazingly, the substantial majority, even though they're physically unconscious or clinically dead, are actually thinking at a speed they simply couldn't have done in their earthly life. Wow. A good example of that is we talk briefly about the life review. I mean, just imagine that here you are unconscious or clinically dead, and yet about a fifth of people have a life review, or they may see part or even all of their prior life. Here they are unconscious just for often minutes, certainly less than 30 minutes, almost always. And yet at that time, they're reliving, viewing all that went on in their prior life—an amazing demonstration of just how rapid consciousness can be during a near-death experience. So that's one. You said one out of five people had that life review.**

**Okay, and a life review. I mean, I think that makes sense because the brain is like—the ultimate function of the brain is to organize. And I feel like a lot of times, I guess it would make sense if your brain is worried that it's going to shut down, it's still trying to like—it would almost show. It almost seems like, say, if it's trying to prove at the last second, 'Hey, what I've been doing makes sense. Here's my work.' It's almost like you're trying to show your professor, like, 'Look, I have the beginning, I have the next, I have this, I have this. Doesn't this check out?' Because does that make any sense, thinking like that?**

**Absolutely. That's how I thought for a long time going into my near-death experience research. Absolutely, I assumed, as I think most people would rationally assume, that near-death experiences had to be due to physical brain function. Because, Theo, that's how we think; that's how we live our life. I mean, that's what we're used to. We haven't really, in general, had any particular experience of consciousness or awareness that wasn't part of our physical brain. But that is the amazing thing about near-death experiences. During the life review, it's not a matter of them using their physical brain. It's like that consciousness apart from the body where they're seeing and hearing things. Theo, you can't possibly do that with normal physical sensory awareness. In fact, we have scores and scores of near-death experiences that had their life-threatening event, typically their heart stopping, while they were under general anesthesia. Now, under that blanket of sleep, it should be—and as many of you know that have been under general anesthesia—I mean, the brain just shuts off. There's no possible remembrance at all. And at that time, they're carefully monitoring vital signs. I know I've been there. I'm a doctor. I've seen people wake up and say something racial sometimes. I've done that before. Is that crazy? I've never—I can honestly say I haven't ever done that. I've heard of people waking up and having their altered brain some bizarre conversations with the anesthesia team. Ask any anesthesiologist; they'll have all sorts of stories like that, by the way. It's a bit of an aside. But getting back to that cardiac arrest, heart stopping while under general anesthesia, Theo, it should be doubly impossible for the physical brain to produce any kind of awareness or experience. And yet, at that time, by the scores, me and other near-death experience researchers are finding that they do have near-death experiences—typical near-death experiences like all others.**

**Okay, so but how do you know something is not just a dream? How do you—or I'm trying to think of another word for a dream, but I don't know another word for it.**

**Yeah, well, that's a good one. I mean, in all of our lives, we typically have dreams. That's very common. Near-death experiences are nothing like dreams. Theo, at the risk of embarrassment, I'm going to share with you how I found out about that. At the very dawn of putting a survey up on the website, I asked the question, 'Was your experience dreamlike in any way?' Oh, I was embarrassed at the responses. No way, no chance, absolutely not—emphatic, over and over again for people having near-death experiences, emphasizing this had nothing to do with a dream. So I quickly let go of that line of questioning. So again, you know, when you hear about a near-death experience, it seems so unearthly. People normally would think, 'Gosh, isn't that like a dream that I'm familiar with?' Yeah, nothing—absolutely nothing like a dream. It's far more lucid and conscious. The a dream, Theo, typically events may skip around in an illogical order.**

**Yeah, it's almost like that movie *Gummo*. Have you ever seen that?**

**I've heard of it. I just can't place it.**

**Yeah, I mean, it is what it is, but yeah, it's like somebody made a collage. Dreams feel like a collage.**

**I love that. That's a great way to look at it. You're typically less lucid, less conscious than earthly everyday life. Events in the dreams skip around because, well, they're like dreams. You're hanging with your buddy, then you've got a snake, and then you look inside of a window, and then everybody hates you, and then you have to go home because you did something.**

**I love it. We've all been there, Theo. So you're right; that's nothing like near-death experiences. While it's a different type of altered consciousness, it's actually a hyper-lucid consciousness. It's interesting when you say that because, like, whenever I—so, and I don't want to equate this to ayahuasca, right? But I've done drugs in my life, you know, and you know, have you ever done any?**

**No, I actually haven't.**

**You haven't? Yeah, no. Oh, that's okay, right? Some people do them, and some people don't. But when I went and did it, it was not like doing a drug. People were like, 'Do you get messed up?' You know, it's like, 'No, dude, it is an intense emotional boot camp where, like, your thoughts suddenly have a response to them in a way. Like, suddenly, your world thinks back at you.' That's what it feels like, kind of. I never really was able to think about it, but the world—you can feel the world literally thinking back at you and reflecting. So you get so much—there's a lot of, like, solving of problems because you're not just wondering and putting things out in there and waiting for you to solve them. It feels like nature or the world or God or a higher entity or a collective entity or energy meets you halfway and helps you work, like, in real time. It's a very loving, helpful entity or energy, even though it can take you through some moments that feel challenging. It feels extremely cathartic and helpful. So that's one of the things that made me fascinated when I started hearing about some of your work. I was like, 'Oh, this is so—I wonder how much of this is similar to some of the experiences that I had on ayahuasca.' And I wonder what just people's experiences are like, you know?**

**Well, I can address that. I co-authored a paper that was published in the *Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences*, and the lead researcher investigated the published medical literature about a wide variety of what we call psychotropic or brain-acting drugs and looked at the descriptions of these experiences and compared them to near-death experiences. The conclusion of this study was that there are really radically different experiences between psychotropic drugs and near-death experiences. But above and beyond that, Theo, for anybody listening or viewing this, you can find out for yourself. There's a website called arrowhead.org. Arrowhead.org has thousands of firsthand shared experiences with psychotropic drugs. It is amazing how many they have. You can look up any type of psychotropic drug. You can look up ayahuasca, you can look up DMT, you can look up LSD. There are literally hundreds of examples of virtually all of these psychotropic drugs. I've done that, and very quickly you'll realize, as I have and others do that go through that exercise, that the psychotropic drug experiences from shared by people that actually had them are, in general, radically different from what happens in a near-death experience. They're more hallucinatory, they're more often frightening, they're more often dreamlike in a sense that events can skip around. All you have to do is read 10 ayahuasca, especially 20 ayahuasca experiences from that source and read 10 or 20 near-death experiences, and it jumps out at you immediately the contrast. And then finally, when we have our survey, people will often share when they have a near-death experience that they've also tried psychotropic drugs. In general, they will state from the source, people that had both near-death experiences and psychotropic drug experiences, that the two experiences are radically different. The near-death experience is grippingly real; the psychotropic drugs tend to be not real.**

**Damn, dude, you make me want to—I want to have a damn near-death experience.**

**Oh, well, I tell you what, and I want to emphasize that. A lot of people hear about the near-death experiences and go, 'Wow, I got to go get me some of that.' And I have to give a cautionary note to you, and I think this is important. Some people hear about near-death experiences, and tragically, a few people will actually do something risky with their lives, you know, up to even considering suicide. I think I want to emphasize that people that have had near-death experiences as a result of suicide attempts learn almost uniformly during their near-death experience that that suicide attempt was a huge mistake. Virtually everyone that has a near-death experience as a result of an effort at suicide and then recovers will almost never attempt suicide again. And why? Because they understand life is meaningful; life is important. They're here for a reason, even if their life is extraordinarily difficult. And by the way, if you commit suicide and don't have a near-death experience, you're much more likely, unfortunately, to attempt suicide again at some future time.**

**Wow, really?**

**Yeah. Yeah. Well, also, if you're listening, you didn't commit suicide. That's a good point. You know, like, no judgment to anybody that gave it a run or whatever, you know? We're glad you're no good at it. Okay, that's good. But yeah, you didn't do it. Did people that tried suicide—did a lot of them have near-death experiences? Well, I guess they did because they tried suicide, but that's a physical act of it.**

**Well, and that's a good question, Theo. First of all, I want to point out that of people that have a life-threatening event, only about 10 to 20% of them will actually have a near-death experience. Eighty or 90% don't. So you're saying if somebody falls off a cliff, somebody, you know, falls into like a butter churner or something, or somebody gets hacked by somebody, somebody gets beaten, hit by a train, whatever, domestic dispute, heavy domestic dispute, and something happens to them, you're saying only a small percentage of those will have, then within their unconsciousness, have a near-death experience? Right? Does it matter how you get into unconsciousness on whether or not you have a near-death experience?**

**No, it doesn't make any difference what that life-threatening event was as to whether you have a near-death experience. In fact, the only good research study found the closer to death you are, the more likely you are to have a near-death experience. Wow, so you got to walk over there, huh? Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I actually co-authored a scholarly book chapter where we looked at all the demographics. I mean, you name it, you know, gender, location, what led to the near-death experience, and we could find no correlation with what the life-threatening event was, what your demographic background was. It didn't really seem to predict the probability of having a near-death experience when you nearly die, nor what the content would be.**

**So you're saying, yeah, because I would think some ethnicities and, you know, and probably like, I'm not going to, you know, but people in like Memphis or something might be more likely to have near-death experiences because there's more near death going on, you know what I'm saying? Like, but you didn't find that any ethnicities or genders or anything or ages had none were more likely to have near-death experiences than others?**

**Yeah, absolutely not. There was some earlier research that thought maybe children were more likely to have a near-death experience when they nearly died, but I'm not seeing that. So it seems to be, you know, interestingly, Theo, I mean, children just came from life. They just came from life, so you think like, oh, they might have—maybe just they got a shorter tether. Well, yeah, and I think so. You know, they'd be less likely to, but on the other hand, Theo, I studied very young children, age five and below. The average age of the study group was three and a half years old. Now, at that very young age, when they had their near-death experience, they're practically a cultural blank slate. They almost certainly have no formed ideas about religion, the afterlife. They almost certainly have never heard of what a near-death experience is or wouldn't understand it if they had. And yet these people statistically had basically exactly the same content, the elements of near-death experience as older children and adults, which is a very strong line of evidence that pre-existing beliefs don't really lead to people having a near-death experience or what the content of the near-death experience is.**

**Wow, that's fascinating. So whether it was a 90-year-old or a seven-year-old, that seemed to articulate well, you found that what they shared had a lot of similarities?**

**Yeah, absolutely. That's really—and that's exciting because, you know, it seems it gives you some proof that you're on to something that, you know, it just furthers your belief.**

**Well, it really eliminates the skeptic concern that the near-death experiences are pre-existing beliefs—it's what they thought would happen. And there's absolutely—**

**Right, because a child doesn't really have enough time to have too much of a pre-existing belief. Exactly, you wouldn't think.**

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**One thing that I found that was really interesting that really made me lock in and want to learn more was when you said that people of different religious beliefs and things like that, and they all had the same characteristics of their experience if they had a near-death experience.**

**You're exactly right. That's one of the things that really hooked me in.**

**Yeah, and that's exactly right. In my research, we've had—well, the website, our research website has been translated into over 30 different languages. So as a result, we can do by far the largest cross-cultural study.**

**Do that CU. Otherwise, if you get like, yeah, you get some dude fresh out the barrio or something, and he's like, 'You know, we was dreaming.' You know, like, hold on, bro.**

**And that's what's exciting when you have pull in near-death experiences literally from all around the world in their native language. So we have about 60 what we call non-Western near-death experiences. These are in countries where they're not predominantly Judeo-Christian, and they're from just—you name the religious background, I've run into it. Remarkably, these non-Western near-death experiences, the content, what occurs, the elements are strikingly similar to typical Western near-death experiences. In fact, I've co-authored a scholarly paper with an Iranian near-death experience researcher that looked at a couple dozen people that had near-death experiences in Iran. Exactly what I'm seeing in my series, no matter where on Earth you have your near-death experience, amazingly, it doesn't make any difference, Theo, whether you're, say, a Muslim in Egypt or a Hindu in India or a Christian in the United States or no religious belief at all. Wherever on the planet you have your near-death experience, whatever age, the content, what occurs is going to be strikingly similar.**

**Do you feel like over time, though, that you became—what am I—the term I'm looking for? Like you became—?**

**That's what you started looking for, you know what I'm talking about?**

**Oh, um, I—what's the term I'm looking for? You know what I'm talking about? It's like—?**

**Yeah, um, uh, confirmation bias. Did you believe—did you worry about that? Did you take that into account at all?**

**Oh, absolutely. As a researcher, I have to carefully minimize anything that would affect wrongly my interpretation. Confirmation bias is one thing, but that's the glory of having the survey and then archiving the results and then posting them all. Theo, we have over 4,000 near-death experiences posted. We have scores of non-Western near-death experiences. Give me one of those that was interesting, that kind of really surprised you. Is there one that stands out, like a non-Western?**

**Yeah, we have—there was a lady who was literally dying of Hodgkin lymphoma. Oh gosh. Tragically, she was given basically no chance of survival, and right at death's door, she had a near-death experience—a profoundly detailed near-death experience. As part of that, she became aware that if she was to choose to return to earthly life, that the lab results that were just drawn would come back showing she was recovering. She was starting to respond. And if she chose not to return to her earthly life, that the lab results would indicate she was on her path to irreversible permanent death. Amazingly, she recovered, and when she recovered, she had an amazing, highly detailed near-death experience with most of the characteristics we've talked about.**

**Now, see, that's interesting. That makes me think that some of the information that you get in a near-death experience, right? And I hate that we keep having to say the term over and over again, but we have to say it. We do, we really do. What are some of the information that you get during an experience like that? I wonder if some of it then—because at first, I'm thinking it comes from the other side. It comes from the great beyond, you know? But then now I'm thinking that if you're getting information where you see that, you may be getting lab results coming that would be different if you return. That makes you wonder if some of that information is somehow coming out of your body, like on this side of service. You know, does that make any sense?**

**Well, normally you—does that make sense or not?**

**Yeah, it does, because you would have to say maybe something that occurs or is described in near-death experiences is just because they had that sense, that inner awareness in their physical body. But Theo, they're unconscious or clinically dead when they have their near-death experiences, so they really can't gather from that sense, that memory, that subconscious part of themselves because everything is shut down when they have a near-death experience.**

**Are there other choices? I know you mentioned early on that people were—there were choices that people had to make. So that one is a lady saying lab results could make her upcoming live results could be different. Were there other choices that came up?**

**Yeah, I'll tell you the most poignant choice that we encountered in near-death experiences, and that is a choice to stay in that unearthly beautiful realm, in the environment there, in the spirits, or the choice to return to their earthly life and struggle to overcome that life-threatening event that caused the near-death experience. What is it? And this is where it gets really interesting, Theo. At that moment of decision, even though people having the near-death experience, everything that they knew up to that time—friends, family, loved ones, decades of their life—often is their earthly life. And yet what they're experiencing in this unearthly realm, overwhelming sense of peace and love—those are about the two most common words used. And they often describe that they feel this unearthly beautiful realm is their real home, their true home. But the great majority of people that are in that unearthly heavenly realm that make a decision—they ask to make a decision—want to stay there. They want to leave their earthly life and not come back. And believe me, that is a difficult decision. They will often argue with the beings there.**

**You go to Destin for the first time. You've been in Destin.**

**Oh, yeah. So that's really interesting to leave there. That's just how compelling and beautiful and what the sense is like in this unearthly beautiful realm that they're in of near-death experiences.**

**Wow. See, and so that makes me believe that it's not like ayahuasca, because in ayahuasca—and I only compare to that because I've done some of the other psychotropics, LSD and mushrooms, right? And those are the only ones I've done. I know there's a lot of new ones, and people are, you know, sucking on animals or whatever, and you know, licking frogs or whatever. There's some stuff. Hope not. A lot, Theo. I mean, I look—I mean, I don't know. Look, I know a guy has done a thing down there, you know, a couple of—okay, well, that'll leave a taste in my mouth. But moving on, look, I know a guy north of Panama City. I don't know if he's ever gotten high, but he's definitely done some things. Okay, goodness gracious. But on ayahuasca, I never felt a sense of peace. It's always a sense of learning and constant, like, uh, negotiating, but not a big—some relief, but it never feels very much like you're in a long period of therapy, which sometimes can be extremely intense. So it doesn't feel like you're in this, you know, a million-thread-count ex—you know, space, which that sounds like what you're talking about.**

**Wow. Yeah, now is there a—and if so, people—if they—some people might have near-death experiences, but they just die, and you're like, 'Oh, [expletive], we didn't get the information.' Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, at a life-threatening event, you know, certainly, unfortunately, a lot of people will ultimately permanently and irreversibly die. So that's, you know, that—that's it. However, that brings up an interesting point. We do have a small series of what we call shared near-death experiences. These are two or more people that simultaneously had a life-threatening event. No, and true story. We're up to about 20 posted on the website, so it's not a real small number. Twins, kind of. So what happened? I mean, you name it—auto accidents, collapsing buildings, you know, some kind of accident out in nature. These are all common precipitating events. So two or more people, boom, they're in that life-threatening event. In a shared near-death experience, they can interact with each other. They be aware of their physical body down below in these shared near-death experiences. At least in the series I have, one goes on to permanently irreversibly die; the other returns back to their body. And then when they recover, they can talk about a shared near-death experience. Now, Theo, that is some of the strongest evidence I can conceive of that for those that permanently irreversibly die, their consciousness continues to live and will eventually be reunited.**

**See, that's so w—the fact that two people had it. Now, was there ever two people that had it and both of them lived?**

**There have been, not in my series. We have—there has been a report of firefighters. They were called the Hot Shots in Arizona, and they were battling a fire. And they were—yeah, then the wind changed direction and trapped them. And so there were many of the firefighters that died, and certainly all of them had a life-threatening event, and they were aware of each other. And then ultimately came back to report that remarkable shared near-death experiences where several lived and several died.**

**Wow. Oh man, that's food for thought. Those just blow me away. I mean, I tell you, even after 4,000 near-death experiences, when I read these shared near-death experiences, I'm still in awe, even after 25 years. Can you tell when somebody—some are fake?**

**We are very careful to investigate whether they're fake, Theo. We ask many of our survey questions in a similar concept. We're asking, but worded differently in different sections of the survey. So as a result, we use that tried-and-true method to make sure that the near-death experience responses are valid. Above and beyond that, as a doctor, I can certainly spot things that don't add up medically. But finally, if the overwhelming majority of people share true and honest near-death experiences, even those people that share falsified near-death experiences, if they're that rare, it isn't really going to change our overall understanding of what happens during a near-death experience and what their meaning is.**

**What are some things that people do where that if they're telling a fake near-death experience, where you can kind of spot those or some of the—because there's got to be commonalities there too, I'm sure.**

**The main—well, first of all, when we do our survey, we always post it anonymously. They don't get paid anything. They literally have no public recognition because their experience—no real incentive, no incentive at all for them, no clout at all, no direction for them to share a falsified. Yeah, no clout, no coughing cloud or whatever they call it. It would take probably most people, especially with a detailed account, over an hour to fill that out. And so people generally aren't going to do that just for laughs. So I think in general—and certainly what we're observing in our near-death experience accounts are strikingly similar to what all other researchers are finding in their research series. So I'm reasonably confident that these great, great majority of you—not virtually all—are legitimate.**

**Are legitimate? Yeah. What are—is it mostly—is it more women that fill them out than men? Because women, I think, low-key want to die all the time. I feel like.**

**Well, because they love Dateline, you know what I'm saying? They're always like, 'Oh, you know, they're always leaving a window open.' Like, that's a great question. It's probably pretty close to 50/50. But I'll tell you why I think, Theo. Guys like us are just a little more inclined than women to drive the car fast, to go do risky things, you know, swim in places we shouldn't swim. We've all been—I mean, it's a guy thing. So we may be a little more predisposed to have fun in some risky way. Women, I think, are a little less inclined to do that. So I think that may help explain why it's about 50/50. Right? Because you have more men that are actually getting doing—getting close with death and accidents, but you have more women who may share stories like that. Yeah, they're more inclined to share. Women, childbirth, and severe complications and clinical death during childbirth, we have a huge number of those types of near-death experiences.**

**Have you ever had a woman that had a child, and then the child—but I guess the child wouldn't be able to recollect something like that?**

**Yeah, no, we don't have any—if a lady had a near-death experience, there's no, you know, obviously, they're very good at delivering the baby even if she has a life-threatening event. But there's no real discussion later from that child of, 'Oh, I had a shared near-death experience. I remember years later.' That would be too hard to remember.**

**What motivates you to care about this?**

**I am fascinated by near-death experiences, even after 25 years and 4,000 near-death experiences. Have you been to Busch Gardens?**

**Yeah, I have. Yeah, that's awesome too. That's true. But I love all that kind of stuff. It's fun. Well, near-death experiences, to me, it continues to remind me that there's an afterlife—a wonderful afterlife—and that's for all of us. I'm a physician that treats patients with cancer. These are my patients that have life-threatening events, and I'm involved with them every day. What I know about near-death experience has helped me to help them in their journey with their battle with cancer in a way with more courage, more confidence that even if we ultimately don't cure them, that in the end, they're going to have a wonderful afterlife. And as I've told them, you're going to be in a much better place than those left on our earthly life. So I think that's really, you know, certainly something to look forward to.**

**I hope it—I believe that too, because even just living is so—like, that's what I always say when people are like, 'I don't believe in an afterlife.' I'm like, 'All right, you know, like, okay.' You know, because here's why my biggest proof is that we lived at all. Yeah, that's my, like, at least believe in reincarnation because we already lived. Yeah, how you—you then why don't even believe you're here? Then if you're not even going to believe it's possible, that's ridiculous. Like, I'm doing this right now. You're going to tell me—and I came out of nothing. I don't know where I was. You know, I got some vague ideas, and you know, I'll sketch some stuff every now and then, but I don't have any real information. But to think this couldn't happen again to me seems asinine because you have proof. Like, you're living in proof. Like, it'd be different if you weren't, but you're freaking living in proof that existence from nothing is possible. Now, I know you came from people when you came from sex, but they eventually—we don't know where they came from. You know, Y, and we don't know where life came from. That's the thing.**

**Sure, no, and absolutely. That's—sorry to yell at you or anything. No, this is great. Hey, Theo, this is what I find, among other things, very inspiring about near-death experiences. I mean, here, over and over, is very powerful evidence that we do have a life after death. Our consciousness goes on. We're not really going—both for us, our friends, our family, our loved ones. When we have that final end of our earthly physical life, there's a much bigger picture, a much—continuation of consciousness, eternal and infinite, as best I can tell from near-death experiences. And that's exciting. Yeah, I mean, whenever earthly life can get miserable, difficult—and we've all been there, all of us—and you always have that thought in the back of your mind from near-death experiences, 'Wow, here is the evidence, powerful evidence that we go on.'**

**Well, and it makes me think, like, you know, we used to bring it back up that aroid site. Was that aroid?**

**Yeah, e-r-w-i. E-r-w-i. So if you'll zoom in on here, the vault of aroid. And this was the site you were talking about where people share their experiences from different psychedelic techniques and methods?**

**Yeah, psychotropic drugs. Uh-huh. Psychotropic drugs. And it also says on here there's breathing, dreaming, drumming, fasting. So it seems like there's a lot of different modalities people used to get to diff. Now, maybe all these are un—while they're under the influence of psychedelic drugs? No, you know, these are obviously different ways in which an altered consciousness can be achieved. And that's what's so cool about this site. I mean, here are the original firsthand accounts. Yes, a lot like my own ndr.org website, where there's really no—they're posted typically anonymously. There's no real incentive for them to make any of this up. These are people that just want to share with the world what happened during their experiences. Often they're going to select out their most dramatic, interesting experiences, but it is a treasure trove of altered states of consciousness.**

**Yeah, I love this. And so some of these on here are somewhere it seems like it's not just drug-induced, not just—so psychotropic, that means drugs, right? Okay, so some of these that have breathing, dancing, dreaming, drumming, fasting, meditation, prayer, martial arts, yoga—just as different modalities people used. I've used a few of those. Breathing—I worked with a comedian, this girl Blair Soi, and she does breath work. And I had an experience there that was very—it wasn't like a near-death experience, but it was beyond something I'd ever had before where my—it locked up all of my muscles, and I was just with my, um, some—like, way my conscience was, you know? And that took a—I remember just tears coming out of me. Like, it was like a cleansing of some sort. Martial arts, I've done MMA, where at the end of the class, you just sat there and just started crying because you've done so much, like just different—your muscles and releasing things and stuff. And I think a long time ago, they used to do a lot of sweating, a lot of meditation, you know? Historically, that's kind of what I was getting at. I was like, I wonder if there was more connection with the afterlife in previous centuries and ages of time because they used less technological modalities and more like actual physical practicing of things. You know, even if you go look at, like, the Egyptians, they would draw and bury their dead sometimes with tombs, sometimes with tunnels that they said would lead to another little tomb that just had gifts of the afterlife. Like, they had just—it feels like they had a much more spiritual connection maybe with here and something beyond because they—I mean, to build a tomb and to bury somebody with all your worldly goods, that you have to take all your money and bury it with a friend so that they can use it in the next realm, it's just a lot of—that's really fascinating because we don't practice a lot of that anymore. Now, somebody will slip you a perk or slip you a thing of cigarettes or something on the way, you know?**

**Okay, you know, I'm so glad you brought that up, Theo. Does that make any sense what I'm saying?**

**Oh, absolutely. And in fact, I'll take that and run with it. Near-death experiences, as dramatic as they are and as much as they point to that afterlife, they're really a subset of that bigger picture, just like what you were talking about. The umbrella is spiritual experiences in general. You know, absolutely, you can have that type of spiritual experience with martial arts. I was a brown belt in karate. I get that. I've walked a mile in those—I can't say shoes because we're barefoot. Yeah, so, but on top of that, you can have certainly meditation experiences that can produce some dramatic experiences. The scholarly literature describes these as mystical experiences. Okay? And there's a whole wealth of literature out there about people that can have very dramatic experiences. Sometimes they even reproduce many of the characteristics of near-death experiences, and yet they're all part of that, if you will, the umbrella, that bigger picture, all converging with evidence on the fact that there's consciousness far beyond what we're aware of in our earthly life, that there's an afterlife, that our consciousness is much more than just what we think with how we interact with other people. Our conscious earthly everyday experience, that's just a subset of a much bigger picture of consciousness, just like what you were saying.**

**Yeah, all of those things seem to touch. Yeah, they seem to find ways. I don't know. I just feel like historically we probably—even though now we're able to catalog things better, I mean, back then you had to draw it on a cave wall or you had to whisper to your buddy, you know, and if he gets damn, you know, he comes across a rare STD on a mountaintop, and it's, you know, nobody knows what happened. And so it's like, you know, just different times. Or, you know, it just—now we can catalog more. I feel like, but the connection, the experience we have is kind of—we have less experiences maybe. I don't know. I just—it seems like our forefathers, they—this was like a Saturday night. They get together in a sweat lodge, and they wanted to see something, you know? But it was—you had to, you know, make your own Netflix in your brain. Yeah, you know, I think you're right. I think you're really on to something there. Here's my take on that. I think years ago, centuries ago, I think there was probably more openness to these types of experiences. I think there was more, you know, when we didn't have that sort of scientific rigidity about what the brain can do and what it can't do. I think people collectively were more inclined to share these stories, to have people believe them, to value them. And as a result of that, allow them to be shared in a verbal tradition, probably much more so than we have today. Because people were probably less afraid to share that. These were more tight-knit communities. I mean, they knew each other; they interacted with each other. And so I think there was more trust than we have today. Today, we're sort of apart from each other more. I think it's harder to develop that interpersonal trust, perhaps, as much as existed centuries ago. That's a shame among many other reasons. People today may be less inclined to share with others their spiritual experiences because they're afraid they'll be judged.**

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**And that's really, really exciting. Yeah, or there's not as—there's C—well, it's interesting because there's—it used to be—I mean, sometimes you would be the chief of a village if you had had, like, if you had gotten to, you know, connect with the third eye, you know? Like, there was a lot of enhancement in—and, yeah, there seemed to be a lot more of a social value to it. I think we're still going through this metamorphosis, maybe, where, you know, we tried a lot of medicines to cure people, like a lot of Western medicine that has proven to be—or slowly more and more proving to be very much not as helpful as we thought, more causing more addiction than it is, like, probably benefits overall, maybe. And maybe I'm saying that to a doctor; maybe I shouldn't be. But that we're getting more to where people are—I feel like we're trying to get back to nature and to finding ways to take care of ourselves better and then, B, use other modalities to solve particularly things that we struggle with thinking and feeling-wise than medicine. Does that make any sense or not?**

**Oh, I think I see where you're going with that, Theo. Now, more than ever, we're focused on—we start with a focus on the patient. What's best for the patient? Well, prevention, you know, certainly treatments that have less toxicity—a very strong focus in my specialty, radiology, where we treat cancer. We're more interested in the totality of the patient. How are these treatments affecting them? How can we mitigate these adverse effects? How can we sort of consider the patient totally—mentally, physically, spiritually—and help be everything that we can as healthcare providers in a way that we perhaps hadn't even thought about before? So there's a real—it's kind of interesting. We're really kind of at a threshold now where there's—with a focus like that, I think we're—I know we're curing more people, especially with cancer, my specialty, than we ever did before. But I think importantly, we're helping people to live better than ever before because we're so focused on the total patient.**

**Have there been experiences where you've been able to discuss with cancer patients who weren't fortunate enough to get into remission that you felt like talking about the afterlife and possibilities and people's experiences have been helpful to them?**

**Oh, absolutely. Of course, I'm a well-known near-death experience researcher, so over and over, we have patients or their family members Google, 'Who is this Dr. Long guy?' And oh my gosh, you know, here's my hundreds of times I've talked to the media and been around. And for people that are aware of that, they will generally come talk with me about that next time they see me. That can be profoundly inspirational to somebody who's got a life-threatening illness. They're in fear about that, their family, their loved ones. They know they might not make it. And yet here is the research, the information I have—powerful evidence that there is life after death, that there's a bigger picture for who we are, what we are, that we're not just physical brain function, that we are a consciousness that's going to survive our earthly death. It is incredibly important to patients that come to that understanding. I've spent huge amounts of time talking about that with patients, and I love that. I consider that to be a very special and important part of how I practice medicine, going in that extra dimension like that.**

**Yeah, well, it's just—it's, you know, for one, it's a blessing that you care about this because you're also in a field where people are having to deal with death, you know, sooner maybe than they expected. Do you ever—have you ever been there when somebody was passing away and just kind of like, like, 'Hey, come on back?' You know?**

**Well, yeah, I mean, I've done CPR for real a few times, and you know, that—I tell you what, that look around while you're down there, the first thing they say in the books is when you have it—someone codes or heart stops and you have to try to bring them back from the brink, check your own pulse first too because you're—ah, that's pretty eerie. Why? Because you can freak out. Oh, it's spooky. I mean, your heart rate—I mean, it's frightening when you have to do CPR. Well, when I do it for real, yeah, when we brought people—I mean, this is literally unexpected. Typically, it's life and death. You know, we're frantically trying to do the best. I would be worried, like, say if there's house music playing in the place, I would be worried. I would just—what if you just tap into it? You're like, 'What is going on, dude? Come on!' No, Theo, I just don't want to be laying a James Blake track on somebody, you know? Like, at least—I mean, I can't speak for others, but I'll tell you when I've done CPR, yeah, you stay focused, and you want to make sure you're doing just the right number of chest compressions per second. You get some guy like me in there, and it's just, you know, get out the way for Cotton Eye Joe and just playing that, you know what I'm saying? I don't want—you'd make an awesome doctor. I love that, Theo. We need to get—because that would be—I haven't heard a doctor ever share that. But hey, you know, that's—I think I would be disbarred immediately. I'm just saying that, like, if you're not really locked in on what you're doing, if you're doing CPR on somebody, you know, and somebody just, you know, lays some kind of a track in the distance, anything can happen. You know, have you ever had a near-death experience?**

**No, I haven't, thank goodness. So now, have you— is there part of you that—because at some point, you got to, you know, put your muffins where the oven is, you know what I'm saying, bro? Like that, and like, you know what I'm saying? At some point, okay, people are going to, you know what I'm saying? If you want to write the third book, you got to have to go over there. But let me tell you how it works in the real world here, Theo. People that have had a near-death experience, in general, typically are not near-death experience researchers. And I think the reason for that is they know about near-death experience. It is grippingly real. They understand it. They understand its implications in their life. And so as a result of that, they're not asking questions like me and so many other people that do research in this area that want to know, 'Is it real? What happens?' So again, near-death experience cures any near-death experience disbelief. That's for sure. Does part of you ever wish, like, you know, and it's not—nobody wants to, because near-death experience, you got a death is in the middle of it. That's the tricky part of the rest of it you can handle, but death is the part you got to risk, you know? But is any part of you ever like, you know, where like, 'Oh, where if you say you ever been skiing and then you fall, you're like, "Oh, this could be it. Let's see what happens here."?'**

**Yeah, I'll tell you. I have so many irons in the fire in my life. I've got a full-time medical practice. I love doing research and sharing about near-death experience. I've got so much going on. I'm very careful not to get into a life-threatening event. I mean, one, you know, I get where you're coming from. Sure, at one level, it would be, I think, an adjunct to my research to say, 'This is what I experienced, and here's what happened.' But don't you think that might—you get a little confirmation bias, and then I'd start to see other near-death experiences through the filter of my own experience? Yeah, dude, I can't believe earlier I was like, we have a—don't you think there's a lot of confirmation bias? And then I just tried to talk you into confirmation bias. Well, I—yeah, again, when I start my near-death experience research, my scientist coat goes on. I have to be very careful to use the best scientific methods and avoid those kind of pitfalls that are common in science. I mean, you know that still science, so you're still applying science to absolutely. And I think that's one thing that makes it more valid, you know? We had a guy, Dr. Max [__], do you know who this guy is?**

**I've heard the name. I just can't place it.**

**He runs the—what's it called? Where they froze Walt Disney? Oh, the cryogenics. Oh, yeah. He's a—he's like a—he's like a philosopher. He's like a futurist. He's the director of—he was the CEO and a president of Alcor Life Extension, and that's where they do, like, cryonics and cryogenics, where they freeze people, right? So I—we talked with him one time, and some people were like, 'Oh, this whole thing's a scam,' right? And I looked at the financials of it. It wouldn't really be worth it, I don't think, if it were a scam. It's just not that much money, it doesn't seem like. But it does seem like there's just sort of this blind hope that one day they will be able to, like, reincarnate or rehabilitate the physical us that's here, right? What are your thoughts on that? Because it's not really the same world that you're in, but there's—there's this—the afterlife is part of you. You don't hear much about the afterlife, you know?**

**Well, you know, Theo, as a researcher and a scientist and as a physician, I'm interested in pretty much any aspects of possible survival of consciousness. And here we have groups that are freezing bodies, cryogenics, hoping that people will be able to be resuscitated decades, centuries from now and literally be brought back to life. Well, a couple thoughts on that. First of all, I can't get over scientifically the fact that when you freeze cells, human cells, below 32 degrees, the water in the cells expands. Boom! It busts the cell membranes, and the cells are literally dead. How you can bring back completely busted, trashed, if you will, cells in an entire living organism back to life is absolutely outside. I know they're using liquid nitrogen to do it, right, or something? Oh, yeah, that's cold. So that would be—and I think they do it at a quick enough level where they're saying that that doesn't happen, that decomposition doesn't happen. That's what their claim is—the ability to suddenly freeze an entire physical organism. I mean, I'm not freezing or whatever that would be. And again, I'm not an authority on that. That kind of doesn't pass my sniff test. But I think moreover, the bigger picture here is people are so afraid of leaving the earthly life, so believing that earthly life is all that they are and all that they can be. I think if they knew what the overwhelming consistent message is in near-death experiences, that our physical life isn't who we really are, it isn't the end, that what we are, who we are, is that eternal, infinite consciousness that goes on living after our physical death here on Earth. Yeah, so tell me about some of that because—so, yeah, that's an area we haven't really gotten into. What are people saying? Because these are people that—they came back, right? So they didn't go, you know, they either didn't get accepted or whatever, right? Now, we're not judging them, you know? There's tons of applications, right? You know, the afterlife gets countless applications every day. These are interviewees who it feels like got over there, right? And that's funny. I mean, there's actually been a study. Someone went through literally over a thousand of our near-death experiences, and when people are, say, over—**

**You guys, you mean? Yeah, are we—the ones we have posted? When I say we've studied over 4,000 near-death experiences, those are posted on our NDR. All the ones you get posted or not all of them? Every single one that gives us permission, which is way over 95%, is posted. But man, you don't have any—there's no, like, let's make sure—let's have—there's no protocol for you guys to, like, be like, 'Come on, this one didn't—you know, this one has Joaquin Phoenix in it.' You know, like, this one didn't. It—yeah, I have—I—the integrity of the research I do requires that no matter what the content of the near-death experience, if it appears to have occurred during a life-threatening event, you know, sometimes I'll—you know, unless it's blatantly falsified. I mean, hey, we got two near-death experiences in a row where they encountered Pamela Anderson, and there are obviously some teenage boys. They were having a good old time, and boom, boom. Okay, I get that. That's fake, and that's rare, thank goodness, because again, it just takes too long to do that. But we have—I have a whole write-up on how we very carefully validate these near-death experiences as real. I understand we have a responsibility to the world to make sure that we have posted valid experiences because other researchers are using this. Interestingly, artificial intelligence has gone through the internet, and that's one of the major drivers of artificial intelligence understanding of near-death experience is the over 4,000 we have posted, right? So you guys have so many of them that obviously people are using it. But yeah, I was just trying to get if there's any barrier to entry between your site. So there is some—if people are saying Pamela Anderson or Samuel Jackson or whatever, you're like, 'I don't know.' You know? Yeah, so the integrity of the research we do is such that there's some integrity. There's—well, there's a lot of integrity, but there's some barrier to entry. Well, not really if they—I mean, this is less than 1% of people that have shared what we consider to be obviously falsified experiences. So it's—it's—I mean, it's rare with that order of—but you take some down that are obviously falsified. Well, it's not—we will, and sometimes we learn. We will post it, and then subsequently, as they—and again, these are usually people that have a commercial interest in their account. And as time goes on, we may come to understand that they falsified, embellished their account using—you guys absolutely—and they're out of there if that happens. So that, again, that's rare, and that says a lot about the integrity of humans in general. I mean, people that have a near-death experience, that is in general the most amazing, influential experience of their life—sacred to them. Yeah, okay, so—so that's interesting. So people say it's to them, you know? What are some—yeah, what are some of the things that people talked about the afterlife? The one thing you said that was interesting was being able to make a decision maybe to come or to go. So there's some—like, it's almost like, do you want to stay? Do you want to try this new thing? You know, that's interesting. What else?**

**Well, you know what? Interesting. What's interesting, Theo, is that when they're in that realm, when they're in that beautiful unearthly realm, feeling love and peace beyond anything, the new on their earthly life—that's not unfamiliar. They often say this is a strong sense of their real home and not their earthly life. And that's one reason they want to stay there. They know their friends, family, and loved ones that they leave behind are going to be okay, that they too will be in that realm when their time comes. Feeling you get to when you hug somebody that you love, I think I like that. I like that a lot. And that, exactly, that feeling—it's almost—it's not even about the—you're happy that it's them, you know? But it's really not even for—there's a little bit of sometimes in a moment in a hug where it's not even about them. It's just about this, like, other little space that gets created, kind of, that just feels welcoming. You know what I'm talking about, kind of?**

**Yeah, I love talking about love, so we'll focus on that. But yeah, when you've got a hug and you've got that intense sense of love, you can understand in personal experience the words in the dictionary that it's like a connection, like a unity. And you often can feel that, and because the love described in near-death experiences is one of the most common words you see that in the afterlife described in near-death experiences, one of the most consistent themes, amazingly, is they do feel that, and they use a stronger word—the connection—much more commonly saying it's a unity, it's a oneness of us and of everyone. It's sort of like the super, if you will, ultra love is what our destiny is going to be in the afterlife. Oh yeah, that 70s love, baby. You know, because the 2020s love is a little—you know, it's definitely—it's got—it's been, I think, cut with something, you know? Probably baby powder, I'm guessing. But I—you know, I think it's definitely different. But that 70s stuff, that sh—that was some pure love, it seemed like back then. Oh, one thing that stood out in your book, I remember reading that blind people had similar near-death experiences.**

**Absolutely. People of sight. That is a very good point, Theo. I interviewed Vicki. Vicki was born totally blind. Oh wow, she's really all in. Oh, to Vicki, vision was unknown and unknowable. I interviewed her, and you know, you simply cannot explain vision—how we see—in terms of the remaining other four senses. Impossible. And so I learned a great game show. They like a Japanese game show, you know? That would be interesting. We had a beautiful young blind lady. Will you bring her up? We had a blind woman that came on here, and we learned about being blind. Oh, fascinating. It was really, really interesting. That's great. I interviewed Vicki. She was very good at singing. She was a professional singer. So she was singing in a bar one evening, which is what she did, and was involved in a terrible auto accident. And I'm going to jump in on what you and many others are thinking. Wait a minute, she's blind. No, she wasn't driving. Okay? She had an inebriated patron driving, which was not a good idea. So, bash. Also, if you're drunk and you—the last person you need to help you get home is a blind person. Yeah, that she was probably not real helpful with navigating down. Yeah, it's just like—and let them be, dude. They're doing their own thing. You're a drunk driver. Yeah, very at least, you know, take somebody that can see. Yeah, well, sorry, whatever. Well, you know, that just shows, you know, exactly the problem of drunk driving because he nearly killed her, of course. He is like, 'Yeah,' and you're like, 'And you're like, "Oh, I'm so drunk. At least if we get in an accident, this person won't even see what happened." You know, so they can't lie to the cops too. Yeah, there you go for you. You know, that's just the [expletive] that guy was probably thinking, probably. Well, anyway, so Vicki was taken to the emergency room, and the first time in her life that she had vision, she was in what we've talked about—that out-of-body experience, consciousness over her body. And you—it's interesting to understand her first emotional reaction of suddenly having vision, which was unknown and unknowable to her. She was actually—**

Frightened because the sense of vision was so unfamiliar, she was initially horrified. "What is this new sensation?" she thought. She had to actually calm down and then finally correlate what she was experiencing.

She didn't even know who that was down on the gurney below, but it was only after Vicky correlated the feel of her long hair—man, I can't do that well, uh, because I don't have long hair—but Vicky did. So, if you need it, she correlated the feel of her long hair and an interesting ring that her father had given her. She only knew it by the sense of feel, and now she was seeing it from up above in an out-of-body experience.

So, when she calmed down, she then had a tunnel experience, had a review of her life—a life review—and went on into those unearthly, heavenly realms. It was a beautiful, highly detailed, and highly visual near-death experience, but with a twist. Theo, her vision, as she was explaining it to me, was what we hear from many people that have near-death experiences: it's so-called 360-degree vision.

Amazingly, she was simultaneously understanding vision in front of her, behind her, right, left, up, down. The proper term would actually be like spherical, and that was the vision she knew. So, when I told Vicky that those of us in our Earth life have these pie-shaped visual fields because of where our eyes are in the skull, Vicky laughed at me. She said, "That just can't be!" She didn't get it; she couldn't grasp it because her whole life experience with vision was that spherical vision.

Wow, wow, that's so fascinating! And then she came back here and didn't have any more vision. Yeah, so when she returned to her earthly body, Vicky was back to being totally blind. I mean, this is pure blindness—no sense of light, no partial vision at all. I mean, this is like to her vision unknown and unknowable.

Interestingly, I asked her, "Did you see colors?" Well, how could she answer that? She had no life experience of knowing what color is. She said, "But I knew I'd seen," which almost makes you believe that there's just one sense, then it's a holistic sense.

So then, why do we get stuck here in these entities that only have five senses? We almost feel like a split end. Have you ever seen a split end of hair? You know, like when we get split ends in our hair or something, and it looks like it's been doing drugs or it's rattled? You know, it's not been doing that well.

And so, that's how I feel—something like a human, where this erratic or if you see a live wire on the ground and it's just not connected. But it's like, you know, just that's how I feel humanity is—where this split end of existence that's frayed, kind of from what it seems like even nature is supposed to be.

Like nature, even though it's violent and it's beautiful, it's everything at the same time. It's decaying, it's birthing, it's like this, um, it's constantly occurring, right? And we sometimes feel like this weird thing that's able to stick our head out of nature and just look around at it, right? We don't know what we're really grasping; we're trying our best. Some of us are, you know, wearing driving gloves and thinking we're neat, but most of us are just like, "Dude, we don't know what's going on here."

Anyway, I don't know if that makes any sense, but yeah, I think it does. I think it shows, like, you know, here we're so used to our five earthly senses, and yet in so many ways, they're limited. I mean, you hear these accounts like Vicky's, and you go, "Wow, our senses in the afterlife are going to be much, much more than we possibly knew here."

I mean, it's just really breathtaking to think about how consciousness functions. We're not limited by who we are or what we are in our earthly life. I mean, we're stuck with our vision, our hearing, sensation—you know, we got five senses and that's it, you know, at least for most of us.

Yeah, and there are some pretty dull senses. They're nothing real, you know? They seem like kind of over-the-counter senses, under-the-counter— which one's the one you got to get a prescription for? Yeah, I like they're kind of, uh, kind of marginal. I mean, medically, you know, we see people that have impairment in their senses, and that's very, very sad.

So, which one do you have to get drugs for? Which one do you have to get a prescription for—over the counter or under the counter? Oh, over the counter is... oh, so these are under-the-counter senses. These are just like basic, you know, like your regular shelf senses, you know, on-the-shelf senses. Yeah, nothing special. It doesn't feel like anything special.

And yet, you know, it's all we got to live on. Well, shoot, I guess one way of looking at it, Theo, it's kept us alive for all of our lives. I'm grateful for it, but I think when we start to look at Vicky's sense—even a blind person coming back and saying, "Look, dude, you guys can have your vision or whatever BS you do, whatever two-dimensional BS you guys are looking around and stuff, that's fine."

Just knowing on that next level that you get all the, uh, you know, you get like, uh, all the—you get everything that they have. Exactly! We're not limited. You know what I think too sometimes, Dr. Long, is like I used to have this theory that like, um, four-legged animals, right? They complete a circuit, right? Because they're on the Earth, right? There's four legs; they complete a circuit.

And then us, somehow, we ended up two-legged, so we kind of have these loose ends all the time. I feel like we're just this uncompleted circuit sometimes, and that's sometimes how I think why we—that's something that happened to us. We're maybe supposed to be more four-legged.

Because you look at some two-legged animals—kangaroos, I think, are two-legged, and they are, yeah, they're obtuse, brother. They're bouncy, yeah, they're fighting. They have children on them. They're just like us, really. They're like us at Disney World, you know?

And it's like, so that was a theory I had like a year ago or something that popped into my head. I was like, "Why do we not fit sometimes with nature at ease?" You know?

That's an interesting point because, you know, so much of nature is that four-legged, and you know, it's fairly consistent in terms of how animals go around. Here, we're the anomaly. We're not—that's the thing. We're the anomaly; we're not the norm.

Why did we end up the anomaly? But then you start thinking, "Well, is there a higher power that wants us to be the anomaly?" That's taken us from this four-legged and stood us up to have some enlightenment, which I also think feels very warm and wanting, you know?

So, it could be a mix of the two. I don't know; I'm just thinking out loud. What have you garnered from speaking with people who have been close to the afterlife? What have you garnered from that?

Oh, that's where my research gets amazingly interesting. What I'm seeing is, well, Theo, it's a basic scientific principle that what's real is consistently observed. And that's where it's exciting when you look at the afterlife in near-death experiences because what's described now times thousands is so amazingly consistent.

I mean, it's a beautiful unearthly realm, that strong sense of peace and love, but off the scale beyond anything they knew in their earthly life. The encounters with deceased loved ones, interactions—by the way, deceased pets are often described in near-death experiences, and these are, again, joyous.

You know, for animal lovers out there, tremendously good news from near-death experiences. I mean, hey, Theo, you name it—dogs, cats, birds, horses. I've seen—not rats, we pet—well, I mean, I haven't heard that, but you know, certainly, it's not at all unusual.

And like other deceased humans that they knew, these are joyous reunions. And you know, sort of back to that sharing like they did on Earth, only here they are in the afterlife.

So, do they see that? They see these people in the afterlife. What do people say? They physically see—they see their father, cousin, or grandparent or something. They see them in the way that they saw them on Earth.

Not any—is there any information about that? Oh, a lot! Like, how do people see people when they have a near-death experience? How do former humans that they knew or humans that they knew on Earth that are now gone, how do they see them in the NDEs?

Right, they're essentially always in picture-perfect health, even if they died of an advanced age or a disfiguring, debilitating accident or injury. When they're encountered in the afterlife, they're essentially always in absolutely picture-perfect health.

Interestingly, if someone died in an extremely advanced age, they may appear even decades younger. Yes! And if they died in very early childhood, amazingly, they may appear in older childhood. Really!

And so, it seems to be that kind of interplay. Usually, yeah, usually they look pretty much, you know, and they can tell.

And another interesting thing: you almost never have people say, "Mary, is that you?" It's an immediate and intense deep understanding that this is their beloved. They can share from the issues, you know, what they had and experienced in their past life.

There's a predisposition for genetic relatives, but you can be anything, obviously—spouses or, you know, pretty much friends, loved people. So, it's again a beautiful, beautiful part of near-death experiences where you have that joyous reunion.

And in fact, even if the earthly life was strained, in the afterlife, that's not an issue anymore. There's joyous sharing. There can be sort of like the analogous of interaction—touch. You can't really touch non-physical, but there's certainly a lot of that kind of very close sharing and interaction—a very beautiful, very touching part of near-death experience.

So, there's no needing to get over past things; everything's just equal there? Yeah, that makes so much sense, man. I think even whenever I did some DMT or something, my feeling was just that these intricacies, or these idiot ways that we interact with each other and how we treat each other, it's all so pointless to whatever that value was at.

We're like, it's like there's a whole equation going on, and we're over here like on a, um, one of those Nimbus counters—whatever is it? No, that's a cloud. But like one of those little, you know, I don't know what I'm talking about, dude. Jesus Christ!

But I do understand that. I mean, it's like we're infantile in understanding the value of each other, right? And here we have our earthly things that separate us—those anger, resentments, jealousy—and yet none of that matters.

I wish everybody on Earth could hear you say that, Theo. None of it matters when you're in the afterlife because you're letting go of all those things that kept us apart, that separated us on Earth.

And here we are in the afterlife, intensely feeling unified, connected, one with everyone and everything—literally, you know, a concept of super love, if you will.

So then, why does this happen? Why are we on this leg of life, do you think? Are you able to grasp—does anybody get that sort of information, or does it not really go there? It's just more of this, "Okay, now I'm this. There's the opportunity when you die to get embraced into this everlasting, warm love, all-knowing place."

But do they get any intel on why we're in this realm now? Yes, I asked a specific survey question: if during their near-death experience they got any specific information about the meaning and purpose of life.

So, Theo, I've had hundreds and hundreds of people give that narrative response in direct answer to that question. And what is fascinating is that our earthly life, first of all, is very important. What we learn here—lessons about love, relationships—what we experience is important, but way more important than we could have possibly known.

It seems to ripple through an eternity and through the lives of many, many other people. So, that was fascinating for me to understand as I kept getting these narrative responses.

So, there is value to what we learn here? That's what you're saying? Yeah, oh, absolutely! There is value, and it seems to be extremely important.

And here's another concept, which a lot of people wouldn't think of, and that is, you know, all we know here is our earthly life. I mean, this just seems to sometimes drag on forever, but our real consciousness, our real beings, is that which is eternal and infinite.

This physical earthly life that we're living seems to be the tiniest slice of our eternal existence. This is literally the one time during our eternal existence when we can know non-eternity, non-infinity limitations.

What an interesting way to think about it! So, that is literally, as opposed to trying to be told or learn from other people's experience, there is no other way for us to learn all that we do in the physical earthly realm of life other than to experience it, right? As a tiniest slice of our infinite existence.

Wow! Because, yeah, you think like, "Man, I want to get back there where everything's interesting." But maybe when you're there, you're like, "Dude, we got to go back to Earth where everything's all kind of piecemeal and weird, and you got to figure it out, and you hit puberty or whatever, and [ __ ] strange."

You know? Absolutely! I mean, it's only during a physical earthly life—well, in the afterlife, you're not going to have that anger. You're not going to have that want. You don't even remember any of that.

Oh, yeah, absolutely! It doesn't matter if you saw somebody that you hated. There's not even the—all of that friction or whatever doesn't exist, I don't think, in the afterlife.

Well, you've got that overwhelming sense of love and compassion and connection. I mean, you really think you would forgive somebody, or you don't even have to forgive them; it's just known.

I think there's one thing that's overriding in the afterlife: it's free will. You have the free will choice to forgive someone or not to forgive. But shoot, that's what they say in the afterlife.

Well, that's what we see from many near-death experiencers describing. Is there a grudge over there? You would have, I think, if out of free will, you would have the ability to hold a grudge. And yet, I don't even know that I've seen any near-death experiencers describe that.

In other words, this is completely off the scale in terms of love, peace, that sense of connection, that sense that in our earthly life, even if we made mistakes—and, geez, we all did!

Oh, yeah, I know I did! Oh, I know that those referees who didn't call that pass interference about six years ago when Drew Brees was in the playoffs—I know that they did!

Talk about mistakes! I'm going to take that one to the afterlife. Honestly, you might have a different perspective when you're in the afterlife. Like, you know, I thought about that. I can let a lot of stuff go, man, but those guys—they just should not have done that!

Well, anyway, maybe I will. You're right, I'm sorry. But you have the choice; you'll probably have the choice to do that. And yet, you'll understand that in a realm where literally the guiding force is love, that that might not be loving, and so that might not be who you are at that point in time.

And I think it's tough to put yourself in the mindset of that infinite, eternal, beyond earthly love and unity that you have there. But that's what I hear times thousands.

No, look, I think that part relates to feelings that I've had under some psychedelics or under ayahuasca. Just this all-knowingness—this, I can't remember if it's ayahuasca or DMT, whichever it was. Something I haven't done in a long time.

But, um, where it felt like, yes, all this silly stuff of the earthly world didn't matter. But there must be some long-term thing to it. But like you're saying, it does matter to be here and exist and go through this.

My friend Megan, she's like a therapist in Oregon, and she's really a neat thinker and a deep thinker. And she would say sometimes that some of our souls that you come across, and some of our souls—and maybe me and you—are like baby souls. It's like their first time doing the Earth show, you know?

So, some of them have been here a long time, maybe, and they're, you know, they're smoking or whatever, and they're, you know, they're complaining outside of the library. But some of them, it's their first time, and they're like, you know, having a blast or just—I don't know. I thought that was kind of an interesting school of thought that she shared with me one time.

Yeah, it's a concept of old souls. You know, I've heard of that before, right? You've heard of that before? I just never heard of the young—I'd never really thought of the other side of it—that it's some souls that are just like they're fresh out of the bassinet, and they're just, you know...

Well, if you have old souls, you have young souls together—a binary. But again, I think it's all, you know, in the afterlife. I don't know if there's really a judgment or that it's so critical. I think we're all here to learn.

You know, we're all here to share and interact with each other and learn from those relationships and grow from those relationships. I mean, that's going to be a part of the consciousness of who we are, what we are, and literally what we can share with eternal consciousness, you know, on an ongoing basis.

So, it's really that important. It's not just our consciousness; it's what we can do as a group. It's literally—there's a shared consciousness, there's a shared knowing.

And so, we talked about briefly earlier about like a ripple effect of consciousness. So, what we do in our earthly life, the choices we make, the love that we express is actually literally rippling through eternity far more important than we realize, than we could possibly know here.

I love that! That's such a great thought, man. It's such a great theory too, and it's one that we need to put out there more. I feel like we're getting more—I feel like that is going to become—I think we're starting to realize that these ways of immense greed and like putting each other at like massive amounts of pain for profit, and just—and it just—there's no—what is the long-term value of it?

Well, anybody that thinks, "What is the long-term value of oppressing a people?" or, you know, it's like we have to be evolving out of that. And it's like I think a lot of us are starting to see that, like, it does.

Because the only way we all have to be here, and it's like we have—you have to find a way where it all works out. You know, and some of these archaic ideas of greed and of, uh, just, um, I don't know. I think about that stuff a lot.

I like that because, after all, you know the old adage: you can't take it with you. I mean, if you spend your life being greedy and hoarding and, you know, material possessions, none of that is going to exist in a physical afterlife.

But what is going to be a part of you? Your soul is going to be those loving outreaches you had. It's going to be those times that you really showed compassion, and that is to be what helps define us—our eternal soul—and will ripple out and be a part of us forever.

I agree with you, and we can do that as a— I think our leadership and how we choose to can do that. Like, I don't know. I'm not like a socialist, really. I don't think, but I guess I am a person that believes people should be capped on kind of the amount of money that they can make.

I don't believe that corporate—we should—I don't think we should sacrifice the good, the betterment overall, the betterment of people and of your experience on Earth for technological advancement for profit.

I don't—I like—I don't know. I haven't fully conceptualized some of my ideas, and I don't know what they are, but I just see how it just makes it sick. It's like we could just—we could have better lives overall, it feels like.

But then maybe part of the reason that we're here is to have this struggle and to see these things and to know what the ups and downs feel like and to know what it feels like not to care about each other as much as we should.

You know, so then when you do go to that other place, it's like, "Oh, this makes so much sense." You nailed it! It's the struggle. We're having struggles here—all of us. You know, the needs, the wants, the thinking that we should be greedy, you know, the desires we have to, you know, struggle with just being human.

I wonder if we do better—do we evolve? Like, wonder if we—if at a certain point we do like decent, good enough, then God gives us another sense. Like, "Now you got this sense, boys!" And you're like, "Whoa, bro!"

So, I wonder if we can evolve if we all got to a level of caring about each other or of doing something, you know? And I know that [ __ ] sounds kind of hoity-toity and "We Are the World" and "Magic Johnson" or whatever, or "Michael Johnson molested those kids" or whatever. I'm not saying all that, but I'm just saying, like, if we all got to a level where we could—like, could we—like, do we get to go to another level if we can beat this level on Earth?

Absolutely! I think that's a beautiful statement of a hope of a vision for humanity. If we can all learn about the importance of love, compassion, sharing—let go of those all-too-human greed, once, you know, the incredible disparities in material goods around the world, which is just incredible.

If we could let go of that, if we could all know that we are one, we are one world, one people—if we could just visualize that, work towards making it happen—absolutely, we as humanity could evolve and evolve in a very positive direction.

And we would, yes! And I think that that is a great expression of hope. So good! I like your attitude too, Dr. Long.

And look, obviously, I'm sitting here in a warm room and, you know, clothes and food and everything. I'm not like trying to, uh—but at the same time, I'm not going to burn down every moment of my own life or like achievement or something just to try and say that that idea isn't possible.

You know, it's like obviously we're privileged enough to be able to say that, you know, or whatever. You know, we have microphones, we have what—you know, we have electricity and everything.

And yet here we are, you know, talking about, you know, being able to talk about this. And yet we're learning about the importance of these values from near-death experiences, from our own lives.

I mean, it's that seed of compassion that I think every human being has. It's just a matter of bringing that out, helping people to manifest that, and how it would change the world if we all understood that.

And different ethnicities, different places, different people—they have less of it than others, I think. Different people—we all have different pieces of each other's lock, you know? Like, we're all the keys to each other's locks. That's what my friend James Basher always says.

And it's like we're all like different—you know, we do need each other. Anyway, this is getting a little bit like preachy almost, but not—it's positive, and it's good. It's a good message.

And I don't mean that, but I don't want to get to the point where we sound like we're just like, "We know!" Like we're trying to save the world.

This hope of—yeah, and yet the hope for humanity that we are expressing very directly here is directly part of the near-death experience wisdom. Over and over, we're understanding those concepts, and that's directly relevant to the greater truth, the greater understanding, and literally the hope for the world that people that have near-death experiences bring out.

Yeah, now what about this, dude? They say, "What if somebody's going to die and they're not going to do a near-death experience? They're just going to die." Right? What should you wear, you think, if you're going to die?

Because, like, so you get—some people say, you know, sometimes I think that if you—whatever you wear, you dying, you could get that job in the afterlife. They say, "Dress for the job you want." You know what I'm talking about?

Um, Theo, in 25 years of interviews like this, that's the first time I've heard this question. So, I'll address that. I don't think it makes beans worth of difference what you're wearing or what you're not wearing or nothing at all.

I mean, in the afterlife, it's going to be your consciousness, not your clothes. It's not going to be any aspect of who we are physically—clothes, hair, you know, jewelry we're wearing. You know, we are much more than that. We are consciousness, and that's what near-death experiencers are consistently describing as going on to the afterlife.

Yeah, I think I'm going to wear a chef's hat probably because I would want to be in a bakery, I think, if I'm in heaven. And you're in a bakery? Imagine how good it smells! You know, it would be good, and you're just making scones or whatever because the British, I guess, get to go to heaven.

You're making me hungry! Yeah, heavenly scones! I don't believe, you know, I don't believe everybody should be there, but I'm, you know, all right, but they're British. They're good folks, but you know, some people don't think that they are.

Yeah, but, um, have you—this is one last question I have for you, Dr. Long, and thank you so much for your time today, man. Pleasure! I'm glad this evolved. I think we stayed patient with each other, and this evolved into a cool conversation.

This is an awesome conversation! So, carry on, what you got there? Yeah, and I'm grateful to this book, man. I'm grateful just like, you know, that there's somebody who wants to care enough to think about this and collect this information because it's kind of tedious, I'm sure.

It is literally my second full-time job, and a big shout-out to my wife, Jod. She is a licensed attorney, and yet she stepped down from doing that so she could devote full time to running the website and working to share this information back with the world—the experiences the near-death experiences shared with us freely.

It's wonderful that we have the opportunity to share them back freely, literally in over 30 different languages, so people all over the world can read these. If you go to the website, nf.org, go to the homepage, you'll quickly realize, yeah, we don't have anything for sale, and we don't solicit donations.

Why? But that doesn't seem like the typical materialistic viewpoint. It's because we know that the information we have, the experiences we're sharing, are so important. We don't want to compromise the integrity of that by having any commercial interest right on the homepage.

Okay, got it. That's fair. I respect that, man. I think there's certainly ways to do that sort of thing, and there's ways also not to feel embarrassed about it.

You know, like I think from listening to you, I don't think I can—people's instincts usually are what they are, and everybody will make their own decision as to if somebody thinks you're some sort of a snake oil salesman or something, but that's not what I gathered.

And we do that for everyone. You know, we do that on all types of things. I'll tell you this: I accidentally bought four copies of the book and one audio copy of "Evidence of the Afterlife" because, uh, yeah, I had—I didn't know where I was going to be, and so I, um, if I was going to be here in LA, so I bought one, and then my friend got me one, and then I bought an audio copy as well.

But I don't have "God in the Afterlife." This is a different book. Yeah, that came out later, and that's where we went into the deeper, if you will, spiritual content of near-death experiences—concepts of God, which I want to hasten to add. Many near-death experiencers say God is a human word, and what they encountered in God is far beyond human language—far more, you know, they would be concerned about being limited in what they encountered by using typical English verbal expressions of that which is beyond the verbal, beyond language, and God.

But also, a great deal of writing in this book about love and the concept of that seems to be, if you will, the glue that holds the universe together. And what we've alluded to earlier, the overwhelming consistent comments from people that have been in that unearthly, heavenly realm—that amazing concept that we're all one, we're all unified, we're all together, and forever—which is again completely different from conventional Western religious thinking.

And yet, by the literally at this point thousands, we have people that have near-death experiences sharing that.

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that that's interesting. So, people—so that one's a little bit more of a religious aspect. This has nothing to do with religion; this is purely evidence-based. This is purely what people have—okay, their experience of what—of any interactions with what they perceive to be God.

And you're saying that overall that experience was that the God that they perceived or the energy of a higher power or of a more all-knowing power was greater than something we could actually conceptualize.

And the best we can do with that here on Earth is by saying God. Absolutely! It's just the most common word. I mean, you know, there's really no other senses. It goes to the senses of this is the best we can do with the five senses we have is create this, um, this lower level.

Now, if we believe in this higher level of communication and of sharing and an idea of something—yeah, absolutely! Yeah, you got it! You nailed it there, Theo.

Thanks, dude! It only, you know, it only took us two hours to do it! So, what about—have you had anyone who had a near-death experience from like a, um, a, uh, like a mass—like a 9/11 or a school shooting or a mass death type of scenario? Was there anything like that ever?

I know you said there was one where there was two people. Yeah, have you had anybody report from something greater like that? Wow, you—that's a good question. You know, fortunately, mass sudden death, mass shootings, mass things like that are very, very rare.

You know, virtually all people that die, it's going to be, you know, their individual death—that accident, illness, advanced age that kills them. I can't right off the top of my head think of any near-death experiences that occurred at a time of a very mass death that have been shared with, but I'll sure keep my eyes out for one.

Yeah, I'm just wondering if there's too much death in one moment at that place for the other side to like really, you know, maybe they have to just, um, you know, maybe they don't have as much of an intake, you know, person working that day or whatever, where you have enough time with them.

You know what I'm saying? You don't—I don't know where, you know, because I imagine that some things would be a little bit similar. Maybe they're just like, "All right, everybody get in here!" You know, you can't—yeah, I don't think we have to worry about that.

Every hint of information about the afterlife is overwhelmingly more intelligent, loving, and I think there's an immediate sort of wear entry into the afterlife for anybody who's permanently deceased on this world.

Any celebrities have reached out to you? Any interesting folks like that? Or like people you know that—any like interesting folks that have reached out to you to be more curious about your work?

Yeah, we do periodically hear from some. I mean, you name it—doctors, executives, some people that don't want their name mentioned. But yeah, we've had some people very interested in this that have contacted me, you know, like, "Are you sure, Dr. Long? Do you really believe—how—what is the evidence behind it? Can you share it with me?"

So, I've banded with some people, uh, way up the food chain, if you will, in this society that are fascinated with this research and want sort of a one-on-one perspective. So, yeah, I've done that.

There are plenty of—I mean, how can you not be fascinated about what happens after you die? And so, you know, people that are, you know, well-to-do, that famous, literally have those same interests that I think everybody does, certainly at least at some point in their life.

Yeah, well, it's a big conversation that we have about death, and it's a lot of times it's a conversation I think that we have with ourselves, but that we're really afraid to have.

Absolutely! You know, I don't know how much I have a conversation with myself about death, and if I do, what even is it really?

Yeah, like, what do you know anything about that? It's such an unknown; it's such a mystery.

Oh, I think just about every person that's ever walked this planet, you like, you have thought about this, and it's unknown or unknowable. The good news is, interestingly, when people have a near-death experience, as you might guess, their fear of death drops dramatically from a person who's had a near-death experience.

These are called aftereffects. They typically observe changes after a near-death experience, and one of the most common is a dramatic reduction in their personal fear of death. And that's no surprise!

Now, is it they know what lies beyond death's door because they personally experienced it? They know it's wonderful and not to be feared.

Yeah, man, that reminds me. Whenever I did that DMT, man, I remember I called my mother after. After I sent her a text, I said, "Hey, M, don't worry about getting older or dying. It's not that big of a deal. What we're doing here isn't as super important as we think it is, and that everything's going to be way awesomer than you think it is."

Which is just interesting because that's the only time I think maybe that DMT experience was a little bit more like some of the near-death experience. But I'm going to go and read—I'm going to go check out that website and see what more information I can garner because this is really just—it's neat to think about.

But man, yeah, get close now. Are there people who want to sign up and say, "Hey, put me under some type of a coma or something so I can try to have a near-death experience?" Are they kind of like astronauts of death where they want to go into that darkness and see what they can get and come back?

Are there people like that? Yeah, fortunately, people that have raised that possibility for having themselves have an induced death is, first of all, it's vanishingly rare, thank goodness.

Second of all, nobody—nobody's ever going to do that. That would be illegal, unethical, and that's not how you study near-death experiences. I mean, shoot, look at this! We've had thousands of people share their near-death experiences.

Why should we put someone's life in jeopardy to just study what we can ask literally thousands, tens of thousands, probably around the world, millions of people that have had near-death experiences? So, there's absolutely nobody's going to do that.

Right, I see it from your side, especially as a medical professional, right? But are there—dude, I bet we could damn do sign up online. You know, I bet you get six people off Twitter by midnight today who would do it.

You know, who would let you put them under some sort of a thing, and they would sign that, you know, the Red Rover agreement or whatever if they don't come back or whatever. I don't know what it would be called, but I bet we could—I bet there's a lot of people who'd be like near-death astronaut or whatever who would want to just, you know, every other day maybe.

They maybe it's an every other day job. You put them in a coma or something and say, "See what happens!" They try to come back around.

Yeah, sadly, that's true. I think there's a lot of people that so want to incorporate that wonderful message of near-death experience into their own life that they would be willing to risk it.

Again, illegal, unethical, and absolutely not a self-loving path, which we see in near-death experiences so commonly—that overwhelming importance of love. That's not loving either to themselves or to the individuals who would put them in a dying state.

That's really—it's sort of like the lessons we learned from people that had near-death experiences as a result of suicide attempts. They learned vividly that that's not the right thing to do. It was a huge mistake.

Right, wow, man, this is pretty heavy here, Theo. This—but you don't have a lot of talks where things get this deep.

No, and it's nice, though. I want to have more talks like this, and I think, you know, even us just talking about some of these things—like, I want to have more talks about greed and why do we live in this space?

Because I think some of the sickness that we feel as humans these days, that we like, you know, there's a lot of emotional unwellness and mental unwellness, and I think a lot of it is just because we realize or we feel—and we can't even maybe put words to it sometimes—that we're sick of something we've created.

A way of being, a way of treating each other, and even some of us are at fault. We're all part of it, but we're sick of it. I think we're—it's making us sick.

We are all stuck in it, kind of, and we don't—and we've never been able to see it before, but I think we're starting to be able to see it a little bit. Does that make any sense to you, or am I crazy?

No, absolutely! I like what you're saying. I think there's, you know, there's sort of that sickness innate in humanity. I mean, here we are, you know, self-focused, focused away from other people, focused on our own interests and our own concerns, our own wealth, our own everything.

I mean, it's literally—you're getting down to values. There's a sickness in the expression of values all around the world today, and that's a sad thing. It's, you know, globally, you could call it unloving.

And yet here in near-death experiences is that consistent message pointing to that's not the way—that's not how life is to be lived. You need to think about your neighbor. You need to think about other people. You need to reach out compassionately.

I mean, it's literally a profound message of hope for all of humanity. And in fact, these profound deep messages in the near-death experience are, in my opinion, the most profoundly positive message even conceivable for all of humanity.

Wow, it's crazy that we have to almost die to get a message of how to live. You know, that we have to go, you know, we have all this life in front of us, every moment in front of our eyes, and you have to go that close to the, you know, to that white vulture of the Lord Death and go over there and feed them birdseed out of your dang hand just to get a little bit of information from it.

And yet, I think we need to—if we do understand that, that's the big picture. That that's really a part of our real eternal and infinite existence and that we're all here to learn lessons to move closer to that greater reality—that we have that unity, that love, that compassion.

I mean, I think that sets, you know, really a pathway that we can all think about each day of our daily lives and maybe move one step closer to being our true selves, which is what we're going to be in the afterlife, right?

Yeah, man, it's definitely super fascinating. It's interesting to think about. I'm grateful that God let me exist to even kind of just get to think about stuff like this.

Sometimes the most fascinating thing about life, and especially of being able to stay alive and get older, is you get to see more concepts of like—that's one of the saddest things, I think, when people die young is they just don't get to see, like, how things kind of—a little bit more clarity you get and a little bit more light knowledge you get of what—of existing and stuff.

Yeah, absolutely! Was there anything else I was going to ask you about, man? This has been a great interview.

So, yeah, you've really—I mean, you've really covered a lot of material here. Very fascinating! I love this different perspective that you're bringing out in this discussion here.

I think you're coming at the concept of near-death experiences in a very special and I think very important, very positive way. It's sort of that you need to think about near-death experiences are such a all-encompassing—we start talking about infinite and eternal consciousness and our souls.

I mean, literally just coming at the concept of near-death experiences from so many different ways, I have learned in this discussion here. I've thought about things I haven't really thought about before, so this has been great.

This has been very helpful to me personally and I'm sure to a vast number of viewers as well.

Oh, thanks, man! Yeah, well, I think it's, you know, yeah, I just feel grateful that we got to chat about it, dude, honestly.

You know, it's nice to think about it, and it's nice to be just reminded about it. You know, it's interesting—the things that we focus on and listen to and stuff do have an effect on how we feel and think and stuff, you know?

I think sometimes, yeah, I think it's important, you know, where we put our attention. You know, and the dark arts have really masterminded ways to take our attention and use it for evil.

I don't think they know they're doing it for evil; they think there's other reasoning behind it. But we just have to be careful where we put our attention, you know? That's the most important thing.

It's hard, and I'm not preaching about it. I suffer just like everybody else, but to recognize that we suffer is kind of a—or that we're trapped a little bit is kind of interesting and a good start.

That's really cool, man! What a neat hobby that turns into something fascinating when you look back on that part of it, like your own attention to it and stuff.

What gifts has it given you out of paying attention to it? Absolutely! I have been profoundly affected by my study of near-death experiences as a physician, and I'm practicing full-time.

This has helped me to be much more compassionate, focused on the patients, loving to them—literally going the extra mile, really being the kind of a doctor to my patients that I would want a doctor to be with me.

And in fact, in the facility that I'm working at now, patient satisfaction is measured by a national survey called Press Ganey. For the past seven months, the facility I'm working in—yeah, I've heard of that before.

You've heard of Press Ganey? Well, how about this? Probably haven't heard of this—in the last seven months of the Press Ganey surveys in the facility I'm working with, every single patient that was surveyed on every single question, we were at the 99% level based against national standards.

But again, it shows—and I want to emphasize—I contributed to that by the compassion and love and attention and focus I give patients. But that's a whole dang team that shares that value of compassion, doing their best of making patients feel like, you know, it's their home away from home when they come in there, that they're really being cared for.

Each person is an individual, so between me and the whole team there, we have some of the highest patient satisfaction scores you're going to find anywhere, Theo.

Well, congratulations! And no, that's awesome that your own work has ended up—that your own hobbies and interests have ended up inspiring you to do your original job better.

It really, um, with Press Ganey, we had a corner in, and he was talking about once Press Ganey—they started calling people and asking them to rate how their experience—right?

Right, that it started to affect that somehow—the opioid makers used the Press Ganey scores and the—that the opioid makers were using the Press Ganey to somehow—do you know what I'm talking about?

It all—yeah, unfortunately, I am suspicious that, you know, patients that were seeking narcotics and then would get that would rank their healthcare team higher than if their healthcare team did proper medicine and didn't give them inappropriate opioids.

So, I hope that's not what this is, but I have a fe—I just remembered literally when you said that. This is the only second time I've ever heard it.

Go back to the top, please. It says, "The U.S. has—get to the writing—the U.S. has been in the middle of an opioid crisis for the past decade. Death—more than 150 people a day die from opioids."

We know all that stuff. And an interesting angle: researchers have been looking if there's a direct or indirect link between Press Ganey scores and the opioid crisis.

Press Ganey is a company that has the healthcare industry's largest database of patient, caregiver, and physician feedback, which you're saying you guys have done a great job with.

And you think that a lot of that is because of your also understanding of what people's potential life after their life on Earth is?

It has certainly helped me to be a more compassionate, courageous doctor. I mean, I deal with patients—oh, these are people that are facing a life-threatening illness. Cancer is a scary word.

But with what I've learned about near-death experiences, I can approach each patient with cancer in their journey of treatment and hopefully recovery and cure with increased hope, with increased compassion, in a way that I know is beyond what I could have done before I started studying near-death experiences.

Well, yeah, if you're a concierge for this more comfortable afterlife or existence—even just— even if you just are collecting all the rumors of it, that's very fascinating.

I think it would definitely warm me if I'm someone who's really in severe pain. I mean, it warms me, and I'm not in pain.

Yeah, um, but yeah, I just want to look at this, but patients using prescription opioids to manage their pain are 32% more likely to report high patient satisfaction scores, according to recent research out of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.

But here's my question: if a medical place gets a higher Press Ganey score, do they get a—is there a financial incentive to them?

I mean, not directly. I mean, I'm not accusing you of anything. I'm just—you just happen to be here when this is happening. I don't want you—I'm not—yeah, I—I haven't read that study, so I can't really comment on the Dartmouth study.

And you'd really have to read it to understand the nuances to really interpret it, I think, accurately. But, you know, as the study says, that, you know, there's probably many different reasons that people could rate their healthcare team higher if they get, you know, more opioids.

I'm on an opioid, damn! I'll rate, you know, I'll rate my—you know, I'll rate my neighbor's violent son higher, you know, or what—you know what I'm saying?

I'll rate somebody parked in my driveway higher, and I don't even know him, you know? But this says the surveys promote an assumption that patient satisfaction is an index of physician competence.

But then what hospitals can do is they can say, "We have the highest score!" Medical places because, yeah, I was just—because I remember he said that, and I was like, because he said he thought some of the opioid crisis was influenced more by some part of the Press Ganey.

But I could—I couldn't understand what he was talking about, and so we didn't go down that road. When you said it, it just made—and I'd have to look over the study because it's multifactorial.

It's not a simple opioid, you know? It's not—it's correlated, not causal. It could be for any medicine, really. If we give more medicine to our—some of our clientele, then some places are hypothesizing, "Well, then they'll give us higher scores."

And if we get higher scores, then we can say we're the best-ranked hospital or whatever in the area.

Yeah, I mean, I'd wonder about that. I don't know if the Dartmouth study made that point, but that's, you know, that's certainly a concern.

I can't imagine that that—who—I mean, I guess if you make that much money by being a higher ranked, then maybe it would be worth it to you to me. It doesn't seem like there's enough juice for the squeeze, really, in it.

But anyway, Dr. Jeffrey Long, I appreciate it, man. It may be longer, huh? If there's an afterlife.

Oh, yeah! We may—that's a good point. This may not be a do at the end of this discussion. There may be a continuity, a sharing of experience in an afterlife infinitely and eternally.

So, we may encounter each other again as souls. Well, nice to get to know you here on the starter block! I like that!

But, um, thank you so much for just aiding people in their cancer journeys and for being somebody that's curious about possibilities outside of just the form of modern medicine these days.

And I think that's really interesting for people to hear, and thank your wife too for being a part of your life as you guys have—that's brought y'all closer together in some ways, and she's helped.

And it just seems interesting, and I'm glad that you did all this work so that we could think about it.

Yeah, well, thank you! Great interview! We covered some very fascinating and informative concepts here. So, it's been an honor and a privilege to hang out with you and talk about all this. This is great!

You bet, man! Where can people— we'll put links to your stuff online, and you are a practicing physician?

Yep, full-time! Dear God, I tried to retire, and I failed! Went back to working full-time! But heck, you know, it's a labor of love, just like my work in near-death experiences. I love doing both parts of both aspects of my life.

Thank you so much, Dr. Long, and I wish you the best of luck!

Thank you! Appreciate it! Take care!

I'm just floating on the breeze, and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must be Cornerstone. Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this piece of my I found. I can feel it in my bones, but it's going to...