The interview seems a little biased by Spiritualist and New Age views with the promotion of wrong assumptions in relation to quantum theory. There is no mention of how the latter has helped us technologically. Also, the term non-physical doesn't sit well...
The term "non-physical" is flawed. If there is an afterlife, it is more likely to be part of the physical reality than anything else, and this may well involve hidden dimensions. I often imagine that thoughts are part of another frequency of reality yet to be discovered by science. We may be in a similar situation that we were before when we thought that what we heard was all there was in terms of sound waves. Now we know that isn't true because new gadgets have revealed to us the reality of ultrasonic frequencies beyond the range of human hearing.
Could the realm of thoughts be a frequency of reality yet to be technologically detected? Is this the realm we visit when we have lucid dreams? Is consciousness quantum mechanical in nature? It sounds feasible to me when the apparent nature of dreams is closer to "quantum logic" than human logic.
His attempt to differentiate between OBEs and lucid dreams using his analogy is also very poor. What he's just described, unknowingly, is that there are different degrees to lucidity and has not, in any way, shown in clear terms, two distinct experiences.
Here is a relevant excerpt from a reliable source of information:
"During a WILD, or sleep paralysis, the awake and alert mind keeps up its good work of showing us the world it expects is out there -- although it can no longer sense it. So, then we are in a mental-dream-world. Possibly we feel the cessation of the sensation of gravity as that part of sensory input shuts down, and then feel that we are suddenly lighter and float up, rising from the place where we know our real body to be lying still. The room around us looks about the same, because that is our brain's best guess about where we are. If we did not know that we had just fallen asleep, we might well think that we were awake, still in touch with the physical world, and that something mighty
strange was happening -- a departure of the mind from the physical body! The unusual feeling of leaving the body is exciting and alarming. This, combined with the realistic imagery of the bedroom is enough to account for the conviction of many OBE experients' that "it was too real to be a dream." Dreams, too, can be astonishingly real, especially if you are attending to their realness. Usually, we pass through our dreams without thinking much about them, and upon awakening remember little of them. Hence, they seem "unreal." But waking life is also like that -- our memory for a typical, mundane day is flat and lacking in detail. It is only the novel, exciting, or frightening events that leave vivid impressions. If we stop what we are doing, we can look around and say, "Yes, this world looks solid and real." But, if you look back and try to recall, for instance, brushing
your teeth this morning, your memory is likely to be vague and not very life-like. Contrast this to a past event that excited or alarmed you, which is likely to seem much more "real" in retrospect.
Lucid dreamers often comment to themselves in dreams, "I know this is a dream, but it all seems so incredibly real!" All this goes to show that the feeling that an event is real does not mean that it is happening in the physical world that we all share when we are awake. This is not to deny that that inner experiences are real, in that they have deeply profound effects on our lives. However, as lucid dreaming so amply demonstrates, we can learn to distinguish between our personal dreams and events in the consensus dream we call physical reality. When we do, we find that what we thought was one thing -- the waking
world -- is actually another -- a dream.
Proof that some or even most OBEs are dreams is not enough to allow us to say that a genuine OBE is impossible. However, in the interests of lucidity, if you have an OBE, why not test to see if the OBE-world passes the reality test? Is the room you are in the one you are actually sleeping in? If you have left your body, where is it? Do things change when you are not looking at them (or when you are)? Can you read something twice and have it remain the same on both readings? If any of your questions and investigations leave you doubting that you are in the physical world, is it not logical to believe you are dreaming?
Another point to consider is that a dream doesn't always have to happen in REM sleep. Most do, but there are probably quite a few other conditions in which people can lose touch with sensory experience and enter a mental world. Some such states that we know of are hypnotic trance, anesthesia, and sensory isolation. OBEs have been reported from these states (Nash et al., 1984; Olson, 1988). Thus, the argument that an OBE cannot be
a dream because the experient wasn't asleep doesn't hold water."
http://www.lucidity.com/NL32.OBEandLD.html
On spirits, there is not a shred of good or reliable evidence out there. Science hasn't detected anything like that either. What would a spirit be made of when we can't even find evidence of a "self" in the brain or anywhere else in the body? Please note that, just because I say I don't believe in spirits doesn't mean I rule out the afterlife hypothesis. I'll explain why...
There may be an afterlife - but, if that's the case - it seems more probable that we die, become unconscious, and re-emerge as another lifeform with no recollection of the previous life. We'd start from scratch, empty-minded, like a baby, and thus consciousness perpetuates the mystery of life and death.
In my theory (which I believe is the strongest one - and I hope I'm not being presumptuous here), there is no spirit that leaves the body and roams free to reincarnate at a later stage. No. There is no need for this and this scenario is not evident. There is only the universe experiencing itself through us. We are the universe observing itself. When a being dies an idea has expired in the anthropological perspective of conceptual reality.
Intrinsically, our awareness is the same. There is only one awareness emerging through different organisms or physical systems. In the end, the dying being is only returning to the pre-birth state and the universe may pop its awareness back into existence. Like the subatomic particles in the purest of vacuums! It might even take a million years for the universe to pop you back into being after death... from your perspective, the passage of such a period of time never was if during it you were absent from life.
If I'm wrong about spirits then I will hold my hands up, but, as you said, and I agree, they will be part of a physical system. There is no such thing as "non-physical" as the term is somewhat oxymoronic. The metaphysical term is more acceptable but never pertaining to anything actual, and if it doesn't really act it cannot affect the physicality of existent systems in any way. You see where I'm coming from?
Meanwhile, as I have stated before, the same "mental playdoh" that makes the perception of physical reality possible is involved in the reality of dreams.