I have to know--did this conversation actually occur? Haha, I'm picturing you, face scrunched in confusion as to why anyone would ever take this seriously, posing questions to these people.
Sadly people are just so desperate for assurance that there is something beyond this little life for some it seems that any will do. And the largest problem is that people are always looking outside of themselves for these answers.
I know that this life is just a temporary stop on an eternal journey, that are spirits are immortal. But I have no idea what life after this one looks like, and I don't know that it's even possible for anyone to know while they're here, in fact I lean very heavily on the probability that part of the deal of living in this material world is a memory wipe of anything outside of it.
I've recently, well my husband and I, discerned some really interesting things about the Bible. The biggest is that it has nothing to do with life outside of this one. Even the concepts of Heaven and Hell pertain to the here and now and not some sort of esoteric afterlife. Once we learned to read it right, we saw it is a script (script-ure) and a manual (Emmanuel), nothing more, also nothing less which still makes it a significant text ;)
We might be better off concentrating our efforts on what it is we're supposed to learn in this place then constantly theorizing what comes after it. Though admittedly I still find it fun to imagine :)