Are NDEs Evidence of an AFTERLIFE? feat. Austin Archer

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Hi everyone, thanks for watching. Most of the content on my channel is supported by generous patrons but made available for free to the entire world.

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[00:00:15]This clip, however, is from one of the many programs that I do on YouTube, On the Line. And if you liked it, feel free to visit, like, subscribe, and watch The Line Network live. Thank you. Jason is calling from Indiana. Pronouns are he/him. Jason's an atheist who wants to talk about near-death experiences and what we think of that. Well, hey Jason, how are you?

[00:00:37]Hi Matt. Hi Austin. How are you guys doing?

[00:00:41]Not too bad.

[00:00:44]Uh long story short, I never really I brought I was brought up to believe in God.

[00:00:53]I don't know much about the Bible or anything like that. I was pretty I'm going to be I'm going to be Excuse me. I'm a video editor and I was, you know, living my life, doing videos on all these so so different sorts of topics and, you know, religion and God and all this was the furthest thing from my mind.

[00:01:21]Well, in 2024, I ran into a heart problem.

[00:01:27]And as goes the ER, and then there I really started thinking about it, you know, and um And after that, I found this show.

[00:01:45]I've been listening to this show for quite a while, and I like you guys I like the the deep thoughts on philosophy and just the the conversations that go on here.

[00:02:00]And um I f- I just want to know what what you guys think of near death experiences cuz I was looking into a lot of that [ __ ] after my episode with my heart.

[00:02:14]It scares the [ __ ] out of me, honestly.

[00:02:18]Yeah, there's there's several things that I could say about this, Jason, just off the top of my head. One is uh I'm just going to go right into the the unreliability of memory. So, and the way that people can tell a story so many times that it takes on new characteristics every time they tell it, and then eventually it becomes this really clear thing that they swear they remember seeing when maybe it was I mean what we know about the process of of dying is that uh your brain is releasing a chemical called DMT that can have hallucinogenic and psychotropic properties. But, let's say that it starts off as I had this really wild experience where I was dying in a hospital bed, flatlining, and I started seeing some like pretty intense geometric shapes and colors because I was tripping on DMT. But, then as you tell the story more and more and you want to relate it to a particular spiritual practice, you start to go like and I saw the face of Jesus and he was welcoming, you know, and you start to and and people can really do this. I mean there's one of my favorite uh podcast is called Heavyweight and there's this great episode with the comedian Rob Corddry where his whole family swears that he's making up this story about breaking his arm when he was like 13 years old. And they think that he is stealing the story from his brother, that it was actually his brother who broke his arm, and Rob is such a narcissist, he's so self-obsessed that he has made that story about himself.

[00:03:44]And it is this crazy odyssey where they're interviewing everybody in the family and going, "Do you remember Rob breaking his arm when he was 13?" And they're all going, "He's lying about that. That did not happen. It was our brother that did it." And they have to go through they track down the hospital records for the hospital he was at and all this stuff and like and they have to go through it it's this long process of trying to verify what actually happened, who's telling the truth and it turns out they finally find this photo of him in a school play with this cast on and they have that in accordance with the hospital records and they're able to prove to the family that everyone is misremembering this and the reaction from the people in this family when they realize that they have been accusing their son and their brother of lying about breaking his arm for like 30 years, that they've just been telling this story wrong for 30 years and they've been telling the story so specifically that they all swore everyone in the family swore it was a matter of established fact that this never happened, but then objective evidence shows them like, "No, he broke his arm and you guys are just misremembering it." But there's something about the way that we photocopy and then re-photocopy and then re-photocopy memories where it could start off as I had a pretty trippy experience while flatlining in a hospital bed one day and over the course of 10 to 15 to 20 years you're telling some very very vivid specific story about how you spoke to Jesus and he told you this very specific message and you swear in your brain it's real. You swear that it that that's what really happened but at some point you might have known that you were a little bit embellishing and then you added another little little embellishment, but at some point you forgot about the which parts were the embellishments and which parts were real and so I you know, as a starting off point I would say that that like there's there's a lot of stuff going on chemically in the body while the body is shutting down and dying and then also Uh, humans are tend to be unreliable narrators, especially when it comes to really, you know, heightened fantastical stories that they tell a lot. Stories that are repeated a lot.

[00:05:58]All right.

[00:06:00]Um, okay. Well, it is, you know, like Matt Matt, I think Matt probably Mark Twain a few episodes back, you know, that that saying, "I've been dead for billions and billions of years and I wasn't an inconvenience at all."

[00:06:20]Um, Yeah.

[00:06:23]It just >> is, on the I mean, I I don't understand cuz you're you're like it terrifies you.

[00:06:30]Is just the notion of dying terrifying you, the notion of being dead terrifying you, or does the specifics of the near-death experience accounts, is that what terrified you?

[00:06:42]Just knowing one one day that's going to be me.

[00:06:48]The kind of the notion of dying.

[00:06:50]The process >> going to happen to everybody.

[00:06:53]I don't See, I don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to minimize or belittle this at all, but first of all, I find near-death experiences boring and useless other than what they tend to tell us about human psychology because there's no reason to think that any of them are in fact telling us anything about a life after death because they're not after death.

[00:07:20]Most of the time you're talking about a brain that's starved of oxygen, and then you're talking about a brain that recovers and has to invent a story to make sense of what they just happened, what they experienced, what they didn't experience, all the things that Austin was talking about.

[00:07:35]But let's assume for a second that um, we could trust our brains. Like I would say that near-death experiences are one of the times when we absolutely, most obviously, cannot rely on our brains or our memory.

[00:07:52]You know, an oxygen-deprived, recovering damaged brain is I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, by definition less reliable than a normally functioning one.

[00:08:06]But there are competing stories out there from these near-death experiences.

[00:08:12]And the fact that they don't all agree is, I think, incredibly strong evidence that the various afterlife narratives that they're pulling from, none of them are true.

[00:08:26]Because if there was an afterlife that they were experiencing, you would expect it to be the same reports. And instead, what you get are Catholics report Catholic imagery, and Protestants report Protestant imagery. And I'm by the way, I'm talking about by and large, not everybody. There are people who've had experiences from other religions that they've heard about. And there are people who claim that they had visualizations and imagery from religions they never even heard of before, and those people are liars, or or at least failing to remember that throughout this robust experience of living a life, you're going to encounter all sorts of stories. There's just no way you can live in the 20th and 21st century, at the end of the 20th and the early 21st century, where you have the internet and television, and, you know, "Oh, I went to I went and saw K-pop demon hunters, but I'd never heard of any sort of, you know, I can't never thought of any iconography from, you know, Asian influence." Yes, you have. It's all over the place. Uh you just don't recognize what you're soaking up.

[00:09:35]Why would near-death stories ever be different if they were real?

[00:09:43]Right.

[00:09:45]Uh I don't know.

[00:09:48]I mean it's not like you take 10 people in to go see um the new Spider-Man movie and it's not like there's 10 people that went in and four come out talking about Spider-Man, two come out talking about Superman, and and there's four others that are talking about Harry Potter as if that's the movie they watched. But that's what you get from near death experiences.

[00:10:15]Yeah.

[00:10:17]Well, um I don't want to take up too much more of your time, but it's just I'm disabled.

[00:10:27]I can't walk, you know.

[00:10:29]I got [ __ ] over at birth by God or what whatever you want to whatever you want to say. Um and I spent a lot of time in my room watching TV and, you know, editing videos, whatever, and I just I think a lot, you know, and I get stuck in my head a lot and I'm 43 now and we Yeah, you get billions and billions of years of nonexistence and all of a sudden boom, you exist and you come out of the womb and you're aware and you have [ __ ] you know, you learn through school, you know, math math and English and all this [ __ ] and you grow up and you find out what you find out what you're good at and you know, if you're lucky, you have years and years and years of, you know, happiness with people around you, you know, doing what you like to do and you become established and then, you know, one day people get sick, pass away, and, you know, it it it's it all starts to get taken from you.

[00:11:49]And then you die. It just seems like life is just one big [ __ ] tease.

[00:11:55]So, here it is. Be happy for a while and then nope nope nope.

[00:12:00]Nope. Your mom dies or whoever dies and nope. Here you go. It's just like one big tease, you know?

[00:12:09]Uh I may be going off. I'm sorry.

[00:12:13]No, it's completely understandable in the sense that religions have completely, thoroughly poisoned people's perceptions of the human existence, human condition, and built up incredible misrepresentations of death and dying.

[00:12:38]Um It is I think it's one of the more atrocious things that that religions have done.

[00:12:47]Um And what it means is that, you know, my my friend Greg Johnson, I just did a show with him recently uh talking about his new documentary, which is um I bid you peace. It's a story about the accusations against the the Frugal Gourmet. But prior to that, he did um he did another documentary about 100 atheists providing their explanations for meaning and purpose in a life without God.

[00:13:17]And it it's all my answer's been the same for ages.

[00:13:22]And life is its own reward.

[00:13:26]And it there's going to be a a mix of good or bad, and it's not going to be the same mix for everybody, and it's going to change. And there are going to be there going to be occasions for some people where life is no longer generally preferable to to not being alive.

[00:13:44]And instead of pretending like there's a happy land to go to or some purpose or that some god or being did this to you for a reason or being frustrated that the universe is this this bait and switch and they only get a couple of of seconds of what all every second you spend, and I'm not just coming after you, Justin. I'm just saying it's globally.

[00:14:09]Every spec second you spend upset that life hasn't turned out the way you wish it had or isn't currently operating the way you wish it had is a second you didn't spend trying to make life what you want it to be.

[00:14:22]And you may not always be successful at making life what you want it to be.

[00:14:26]There's some things you're not going to have any control over.

[00:14:30]But I think we do have control over how we respond and react to things. And if you start by working to eliminate the unrealistic expectations that life's going to be fair without people working to make it fair.

[00:14:47]Um that we should be able to live forever instead of recognizing that we're going to die. I think if if you start knocking down those false expectations, it becomes a lot easier to meet life where it is and address it honestly and saying, "Oh, yeah, that completely sucks. Is there a way that I can make it suck less?"

[00:15:10]And there's not always going to be any kind of easy answer, but it's the closest thing I can come up with as to I don't suffer from fears or thoughts about death or dying. I don't um I don't get anxious or or upset that the universe isn't fair or that it doesn't care about me or that things didn't work out the way what I just I just don't. And I get that I'm definitely in the in the weird category there, but all I can do is describe what goes through my head as to it's one of the reasons why I get so irritated at callers who just refuse to honestly address the question because I'm here not to [ __ ] all over Christianity. They do that fine on their own or Judaism or Islam or pick your religion.

[00:16:02]I'm here to either get a good reason to believe something that I don't believe or to help someone else find out that they didn't have a good reason so they don't have to stay in that belief.

[00:16:14]And if I'm just dealing with reality on its own terms I find that I suffer a lot less.

[00:16:24]Less less frustration.

[00:16:27]I outside of the outside of the shows where where we get calls like that I don't have a ton of frustration about life in general. I get frustrated when things aren't working the way they're supposed to.

[00:16:40]Yeah.

[00:16:42]Mhm.

[00:16:45]Yeah. So we got to change how we expect things to work.

[00:16:50]Yeah.

[00:16:51]Just take things as they come. Pretty much is what you're saying.

[00:16:57]Yeah, I mean you know, it's the the Serenity Prayer of you know grant me the ability to change the things I can and to know the difference etc. Um I just think that's kind of pragmatically good advice across the board. I don't need to ask a God for that ability. I can just ask myself, is there something I can do about this? And if the answer is clearly no, uh it then the next follow-up question is is there something else do I need to spend more time on this for some other reason? And if that answer's no, it's time to [ __ ] move on cuz I got 99 problems and that I'm going to be dead someday isn't one of them.

[00:17:40]That is a problem that is not something you need to spend any time trying to solve cuz you're not going to.

[00:17:49]Yep. Jason, I'm going to let you go. If you're If you're interested, I see it listed as a theist. Um you want to call back in another time and actually tell us, you know, what you believe and why you believe it or if you still believe it or whatever else, I'm happy uh to do that with you, but I want to I want to get some I don't I don't want you to come in and and feel like, oh, they're only going to talk to me if I defend theism. Mhm.

[00:18:15]All right. So, yeah, I'll call back some some other time. You guys have a good rest of your day and thank you for your time.

[00:18:23]All right. Thanks, Jason.

[00:18:25]>> Take care.

[00:18:26]If you'll indulge me for a minute, >> Of course.

[00:18:29]I just want to say and it's it's my fault for looking at chat. I shouldn't have been looking at the chat, but I do this on every episode and then I I hurt my own feelings when I look at the chat.

[00:18:38]But uh uh I want to say this is this is a a channel where we talk about ideas. We have conversations about people's positions and their ideas and their beliefs and their behaviors. That's the things that we are here to discuss.

[00:18:55]We're here to talk about, you know, a person and I and it's and it that's the stuff if you're going to judge someone on how they're living their life or or or anything, the like their behaviors and their ideas and their beliefs are a good place to start. I just really I it really gets to me the way that so many people who are otherwise you know, seemingly thoughtful people go to appearances and these strange juvenile ad hominem places. And I'm sort of saying this on behalf of Jason, but I'm going to use myself because I don't want to I don't want to talk about what everyone was saying about the last caller. But every single time I do one of these shows, there are people in the chat talking about my physical appearance and talking about how ugly I am. And it is a thing that like I'm always so perplexed by it. I'm like, what a strange thing to say about a stranger who you don't know. And I'm aware of what I look like and I'm also aware that the headshot that they use for the thumbnail for the show is 5 years old and that I'm 30 lb heavier than that photo. But people will always jump in and be like, why do they use that photo? He looks like so much worse than that photo. And I'm just like, what is I like I always just think when people do that cuz it's just not something that exists and it doesn't even occur to me. I'm I debate and and contend with people who I am ideologically opposed to on the internet for a living. I respond to conservative people all the time who dress in ways or look ways that I I could make fun of if I wanted to or sometimes they have a speech impediment or sometimes they they misspeak. I always keep it focused on the substance of their ideas and the substance of their argument because that's what matters. It doesn't matter what my subjective opinion of their appearance is. That couldn't be less relevant to anything. And I just find it so odd the amount of people who are so comfortable making making unsolicited comments about a person's appearance or in the case of our last caller who announced himself as a disabled person talking about the way that his speaking voice sounded. What the [ __ ] is wrong with you? Why I just I got to take a second to admonish our audience here a little bit and just go what the [ __ ] is wrong with you?

[00:21:24]Keep it focused on the the opinions that are being shared, the perspectives, the ideas, the behaviors.

[00:21:33]Almost every single time someone in my comments tells me how ugly they find me, I go to their profile and they don't have any public photos of themselves shared and I go, oh, I wonder why that is.

[00:21:43]Could it be that you are projecting your own insecurities? I just, you know, like and also like what an irrelevant thing.

[00:21:51]Why do you feel so comfortable commenting on that?

[00:21:55]I'm aware that I'm heavier than I was 5 years ago. That tends to be how the process of entropy works on a human body.

[00:22:03]You don't need to talk about it. It couldn't be less relevant. You don't need to talk about the way a person's voice sounds. It couldn't be less relevant to the substance of the call.

[00:22:13]That's all I'm saying is is here we are here to talk about behaviors and ideas and beliefs and and opinions.

[00:22:21]We are not here to talk about what a person [ __ ] looks like or sounds like. That's it.

[00:22:26]>> It's never ending and it's it's in part because um the internet is a [ __ ] cesspool of people with beliefs they're too cowardly to defend and it's all about can we get a reaction? A good chunk of the callers are just calling in just because they like to see me get pissed off and react and you know, years ago when when I was doing AXP um and was heavier then there'd be people that call in and be like, you're fat and bald. And I'm like, tell me something I don't [ __ ] know.

[00:22:57]I mean You think I'm I literally shaved this in part um because in the early days of me doing Atheist Experience, we were in the public access studio. And you're working with not the best equipment, but you have these big lights. And I had incredibly thin uh and very very fine hair. And so if if we were just sitting here, it looked like I had a head of hair. But on TV, with the light coming down on it and the camera there, it looks like there's no hair there because it you know, in part because of the way it's lit. Yeah.

[00:23:34]And there was gradually less and less hair there. It's undeniable, you know, I I come from a fam- But I was like somebody said, "You you should probably shave that so that it doesn't look weird during the show." And I was like, "Okay." And I shaved it and I've been keeping it short ever since. And now I keep it short Well, ooh, look. I'm like a hippie right now. There's stuff on the side.

[00:23:55]It's like, "Peace and love, yo." It's starting to get up there. Uh but yeah, it is so wild. It it is it is the admission that you are not just not a good person, but that you have nothing substantive to offer.

[00:24:12]Nothing of any value. There's a reason why we set policies of don't comment on those looks. And it's because somebody will be in Matt's bald and fatter. Or if I don't have my cuz I I wear dentures.

[00:24:25]And if I don't have my upper teeth in, people will be like, "Matt sounds funny today." Or "Matt looks funny today." Or "Why is she talking like that?" What?

[00:24:32]Sorry. Um That's That's just the way it's going to work sometime with the It's wild.

[00:24:39]And and it's uh and to be fair, I get a little irritated when people ostensibly on our side do the same thing. Like I watch um I didn't I didn't watch for a number of times because he used to be a much more in favor of Rogan, but I watch Kyle Kulinski a lot.

[00:24:55]Um cuz he's he's helpful and he's right on so many things.

[00:24:59]And yet the other day uh Emma Vigeland went on to CNN, which Yes, the the day that Emma uh Emma runs for office, uh I'll be I'll be backing her for all kinds of stuff, but uh Kyle not only went on all right, you know, did did a clip to celebrate Emma and good job, but then just sat there and mocked the looks of this other dude there. And I'm like you don't you don't have to call him, you know, whatever it was, a a pasty fat [ __ ] He can just be a [ __ ] I mean you didn't have to go there.

[00:25:39]Yeah, the only time that I've ever found it like like even appropriate to bring up another person's appearance is when they do it first. Is when someone like is the whole crux of their argument is, "Well, look at look look at how this person looks." And then it's like, "You want to talk about looks? Okay, you are opening that book. I'm going to go ahead and go into my roast book here and give you a taste of your own medicine." But only to drive home the point of how what a stupid way to to to debate our our ideological differences. That you're saying that it's wrong to be a liberal or a progressive because look at this liberal.

[00:26:17]Okay, look at you [ __ ] What are we talking about? I just don't get why so how so many people genuinely think that that is in any way a substantive or relevant argument about anything. It's it's just so And I also say to people all the time, "Also be careful even when you think when you're paying someone a compliment." When you you know, sometimes someone will people will share like old videos of me from like 5 years ago and people in the comments will go like, "Austin, have you been working out? Have you lost weight? You look great." And I'm like, "Guys, just don't say anything." Like you you don't what you're saying is you looked better 5 years ago than you do now and you're trying to make say it as a compliment but like you just don't it's just not you it it it doesn't you don't need to comment on it. You know, you just don't even when you think you're saying something nice. I think more people just need to get used to like there's no reason for you to comment on someone else's appearance unsolicited, you know.

[00:27:17]But when someone opens up the door for hey, we're talking about looks now. That is a solicitation. It's like okay, you know.

[00:27:25]Trump wants to call someone a piggy?

[00:27:27]Okay.

[00:27:29]All right, cankles. Let's let's have at it.

[00:27:32]You know. Hi, if you enjoyed that content you can watch this program and a number of others on The Line Network right here on YouTube. Link below.