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Home » Bialik’s Breakdown: w/ Vincent Tolman – Dead for 90 Minutes (Transcript)

Bialik’s Breakdown: w/ Vincent Tolman – Dead for 90 Minutes (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Vincent Todd Tolman’s interview on Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, May 12, 2026.  

Editor’s Notes: In this profound episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, Mayim and Jonathan Cohen sit down with Vincent Todd Tolman, a man who was declared clinically dead for over 45 minutes after an accidental overdose. Tolman recounts his extraordinary near-death experience, describing how he watched his own body being placed in a body bag from above and met a divine guide who shared ten life-altering messages for humanity. Now a best-selling author of The Light After Death, Tolman discusses the “miracle” of his return and the spiritual lessons he learned about love, consciousness, and the true nature of our reality. This conversation offers a unique look at what lies beyond our physical existence and provides a “PR campaign for heaven” to help us navigate the struggles of life on Earth.

Welcome and Introduction

MAYIM BIALIK: Hi, I’m Mayim Bialik.

JONATHAN COHEN: And I’m Jonathan Cohen.

MAYIM BIALIK: And welcome to our breakdown. Jonathan, that was a pregnant pause that I just inserted because I don’t know that I can do justice to what you’re about to experience here.

JONATHAN COHEN: I’ll give you the Cliff Notes.

MAYIM BIALIK: Give us the Cliff Notes, Jonathan.

JONATHAN COHEN: This man defies all medical explanation. He was dead for between 45 minutes and an hour and a half, and he came back with an unbelievable experience of what it is like in the afterlife, how souls get here, what we’re doing on Earth, and how to free yourself from the struggles that you’re experiencing.

Introducing Vincent Todd Tolman

MAYIM BIALIK: Vincent Todd Tolman is our guest today. He wrote The Light After Death: My Journey to Heaven and Back. And yeah, as Jonathan just said, Vinnie, as he goes by Vinnie, died in the bathroom of a Dairy Queen when he was 25 years old. No one knew he was in there. By the time they found him, his body was cold. There was no pulse. They called a time of death and they zipped him up in a body bag.

However, he was watching the entire scene unfold from some sort of place above the Dairy Queen, is how he describes it. He ended up not even realizing that it was his body until he was almost to the hospital, zipped up in a body bag. Not only did he come back, he was then placed in a coma, brain dead for 3 days. In that time, he experienced an interaction with the world after this one. He came back with 10 very specific messages, reentered his body, and began to live a life as someone with a completely different experience of reality, of consciousness, and of the quantum realm that we are all in. We are thrilled to have Vinnie here in person. Vincent Todd Tolman, welcome to The Breakdown.

VINCENT TODD TOLMAN: Thank you.

Preparing for the Story

MAYIM BIALIK: We’ve heard a variety of NDEs, and we’re very, very eager to hear the uniqueness of yours. So before we kind of tell the story or have you tell the story, if you had to tell people one thing that they should prepare to understand from the journey that you went on, what would it be?

VINCENT TODD TOLMAN: To understand that what you’re thinking is real is not, and that there’s a whole other reality that you were tapped into as a child that you can tap into as an adult.

MAYIM BIALIK: I think where we should start is, tell us how you died.

How It Happened: The Supplement

VINCENT TODD TOLMAN: Well, I was an amateur bodybuilder. This is back in 2003. It wasn’t like anything I made money off of, but it was definitely a major hobby working out twice a day. Me and one of my best friends, we were doing that, and we found this supplement back then that would help your muscle recovery happen like twice as fast. So when you’re building muscle, you rip it by lifting, tear that muscle, it repairs itself bigger. And that’s how you bulk up.

So we were in a bulk up on our arms, on our chest, on our back. And so we were doing these really heavy routines and we want to do them every day and not wait for the recovery. And you could do that, or you could have back when this product was still legal. And so we ordered probably maybe 30 bottles across a year and a half.

And all of a sudden it was so popular, couldn’t get it anywhere anymore. You’d have to go on a waiting list no matter where you ordered. And then product would show up and it would get sold for like $10 on the dollar out the back door. No one was getting their orders. So we found some from Thailand. I had lived in Thailand at one time for a while, so I thought Thailand’s safe. They have really good food and drug safety, at least in the manufacturing sector. So I thought that’s going to be pretty safe.

So we ordered a bottle, but the bottle came with all Thai writing on it and no English. So we cracked that open, we sniffed it, and it smells just like the American stuff. And it’s a liquid. You just take a liquid bottle cap. So we both just said, let’s do it. We’re going to go do a workout, go get something to eat, go see a car show, some new cars. And that was the plan for the day. And then maybe do a second workout on the way back.

MAYIM BIALIK: How big is this bottle? Like, is it like a drink? It’s like a shot?

VINCENT TODD TOLMAN: It’s like a 1.75. It’s not that big. And you would just take the lid to the bottle and use that lid as your measure.