'I founded Omaze after dying in hospital and what I saw has never been explained'

The man behind Omaze once had a terrifyingnear-death experiencethat saw him flatline for four-and-a-half minutes – before a stunned surgeon said “something larger was at play” after the patient returned from what he claimed was the afterlife.

Matt Pohlson is best known for fronting Omaze, a for-profit fundraising company that gives away luxurious mansions in places like Devon and Cornwall to people who spent as little as £10 on prize draw tickets. But none of this may have happened if the American CEO had died in 2018.

He went to the hospital because of swelling in his stomach – an issue that began when he was a baby after being born with his tummy twisted in a knot.

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And all those years later, scar tissue from the surgery broke off, creating a bowel obstruction. This triggered what is known as takotsubo cardiomyopathy (also called broken heart syndrome) where the heart muscle becomes suddenly stunned or weakened.

While in the hospital, the pain became excruciating and he went into cardiac arrest, and his mother fought to get into the room where her son was being treated.

His mum, who heard the phrase ‘code blue’ being shouted in the room her son was in, was told she couldn’t return to his bed because an immediate resuscitation was underway.

However, Matt, speaking on the This Week in Startups, said: “My mom said, ‘Look, I was there when he came into this world, if he is leaving this world right now, I’m going to be in that room.’”

After being allowed in, she saw her son being shocked by defibrillator compressions, but he was still not responding.

And although he was ‘dead’ for four-and-a-half minutes, Matt claimed he visited the afterlife, and he shared what he saw.

Asked did he see the light at the end of the tunnel, he said: “I didn’t see the light but my experience was almost as if looking up at the surface of the ocean and it was very far away and you would see the light coming through and it felt like a universe of time away.

“And I felt the water was kind of this cosmic energy field that I was a part of, like I was myself, but I was connected to everything around me. And I could hear my mum saying, ‘Matthew David Pohlson, you have to fight.’”

The podcast host said this was comparable to the sense of self fading away as described by buddhists or in psychedelics.

Agreeing, Matt continued: “Definitely and that is what happened man, I remember the more kind of determined I was to get there, the more energy was on my side because all of my friends were praying and people were standing outside.”

Matt was reportedly given just a 0% chance of survival and he said he received the “greatest gift in the world” – which was to come back from the dead.

He is now much more spiritual since his near-death experience and said that the biggest thing he learnt was to love more and care less.

And he also revealed the extraordinary conversation he had with the “world renowned surgeon” who he credited with saving his life after he made a full recovery.

Matt, who studied in Harvard like his surgeon, said: “He says to me, ‘Look, I want you to understand something, when I finish my career, 30 years from now, and I’m talking about the most extraordinary case I have ever seen, this is it. We had you at 0% chance of survival for three days, even after we resuscitated you, so the fact we have you going home with your whole faculty – we have no medical explanation."

The surgeon went on to say that Matt’s mum, who grabbed medics by the cheeks to say that her son was now their son, and their brother, and to do anything they could to help him, inspired them to keep going, even when it looked like all hope was lost.

Matt, who since his scare has raised £3million for the British Heart Foundation, continued: “He is like, ‘outside of that (his mother’s influence), there were larger forces at play.’

“I was like ‘how did you define those larger forces’ and he said ‘really it was love and it was optimism that brought you back’.”