I watched the sunrise, I watched the sunset, when it got dark again, that's when I knew I was in trouble. I'd been swimming for too long. But in this moment, all that stuff came back to me, all everything I had rejected to become an atheist, came back to me, I knew that God and the devil were having this wrestling match over my soul. It was almost like the Satan pulled the curtain back and he said, I've got you right where I want you, And I knew it was Satan's voice. Well, welcome, everybody. This is Simon Gilbo. And this week, it's inspired with

Matt Pridgen. Matt Pridgin is in South Carolina. I first met Matt. I think it was June 2005,

which is incredibly significant because of some truly life-shaping events that he's going

to describe shortly. I mean, it's great that you are still alive, Matt. In fact, I've called

this podcast Dead Man Floating, which again, people will get to know about shortly. You came out

to Burundia in 2008, so we go back, was it it, 16, 16ish years, which is a decent stretch.

Anyway, Matt, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

So listen, let's just, you know, get straight to it.

In May 2005, you very nearly died.

What brought you to that point?

Give us a bit of context beforehand leading up to that.

Right. So it was the summer before my senior year of university. I got my hands on some LSD. I took 27 hits of LSD in about the course of three weeks and totally lost my mind and tried to kill myself in the ocean.

And this is where I met Jesus. So leading up to this i was doing drugs every day

i was a college student but over the years i went to less and less class i was a self-proclaimed

atheists i believed truly that when you die you rotting the grounds and that's it lights out so

for me there was no real sort of existential purpose to life, and I just did

whatever felt good. I was a true hedonist, and even my friends I was partying with were sort of

concerned about me towards the end because of the amount of drugs that I was taking. I just took

everything sort of to the extreme, and that's partly my personality, but a big part of it was my

philosophy. Again, I didn't believe

in anything. I didn't believe in any life after death. So I just decided you can live for 80 years

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