Several years ago, Michael Hebb hit bottom. After opening a series of successful pop-up restaurants and supper clubs, the former architect’s newly opened restaurants had “failed spectacularly.”
“But along the way I had this epiphany that my focus should be on the table, on conversations and healing,” Hebb told Built In. So he started Death Over Dinner, a company that helps facilitate one of the most difficult conversations America isn’t having: death.
Now, seven years later, Death Over Dinner has inspired more than a million dinners. But Hebb realized that it wasn’t enough to just have the conversation, people needed a place to go and actually create an end-of-life plan. So he joined Bellevue-based health and wellness startup RoundGlass as a partner to launch EOL, a new platform that connects users with all the resources they need when planning their death.
Through its social communities, content database, online courses and network of industry leaders, EOL aims to both democratize and humanize what is ordinarily a pretty sensitive subject. The goal is to ensure users make informed decisions about what they want the end of their life to look like.
Looking ahead, Hebb says RoundGlass will be launching an EOL call center in a few weeks, offering free Zoom calls to people who want to speak directly with an expert about their end-of-life plans. They are also working on an EOL app, which is slated to launch this winter.
Built In spoke with Hebb about the launch of EOL, the burgeoning end-of-life industry, and the value of talking about death in general — including his own. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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Talking about death, especially in America, seems to be taboo and difficult. How did you overcome that with Death Over Dinner and the launch of EOL?
People do want to talk about death; they’re not actually afraid of talking about death. They may be afraid of death or dying, or being in pain or alone when they die, but people aren’t really afraid of talking about death. They talk about death all the time. So I kind of saw in people that they aren’t afraid of this conversation. They wanted an invitation, and they wanted it to be beautiful and to be spoken to honestly.
We’re just pinching ourselves that it’s live and already impacting people. We’re already watching it work. We’re watching people get the resources they need, the experts they need to be in touch with, immediately. If people go on the conversation board and say they need help, they’re going to get help from the top folks in the field. It’s amazing. Like, you don’t put that on Facebook, right? It’s truly phenomenal to see.
When I was perusing the site, I was struck by how young it feels. Going in I was expecting it to be targeted to the elderly, but it’s not like that at all. It seems to be a site for everyone.
It’s a site that’s about wellness. When you think of wellness you don’t think of death, but death has a huge impact on our wellness. Having a plan or not having a plan has a huge impact on our emotional well-being. People who have a plan are much more calm. And there are many other things happening from a wellness perspective: repression and suppression create disease.
The fact is that we’re all mortal, so we want to give people the opportunity to not suppress that conversation. It doesn’t matter if you’re 99 or 19, there’s an incredible amount of spiritual and psychosocial awakening that can happen when we think about and plan for the last chapter of our lives. It’s always been that way. It’s always been strong, powerful medicine to think about and meditate on our impermanence. So we try to be inclusive of all ages, cultures, religions, etc.
Built In has only covered this industry once before when we reported on another Seattle startup called Recompose. Internally, we’ve been referring to this sector as “death tech.” I’m curious how someone in this industry feels about that terminology.
I still am a hesitant tech bro. But yea, death tech, death innovation.
We’re going to see a complete explosion in this space in the next three, five, 10 years. Some people might say it’s because of a spiritual awakening or some sort of Kundalini rising, but I’m a little more pragmatic about it. Boomers are starting to get very close to their last chapter, we’re headed toward peak death. In 2053, we, statistically speaking, will hit peak death in the United States. From today to 2053, we will double the number of people that die in a year.
That also means more wealth transfer, potentially more wills and lawsuits, and a lot more misery if it’s not done right. But the beautiful thing about Boomers is they know how to ask for what they want, and they’re now asking for a different end-of-life experience and people are providing it for them.
I think we’re at the very beginning of an exponential curve. If you think of it as the Kurzweil curve, we’re now beginning to see that curve really accelerate. That’s because we’re on the shoulders of giants — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Ira Byock — there were so few innovators doing the heavy lifting for so long and now there’s an army of us. I mean there’s thousands of end-of-life doulas, chaplaincy is the quickest growing area in pastoral education.
It really comes down to the fact that we’ve over-medicalized death just like we’ve over-industrialized food. When you do that, you take away a thing’s nutrients. Death is a community act, not a medical act, and if you make it a medical act you take away its nutrients, the ability to learn and grow from it and transform. Otherwise you just get pain.
I have to ask, have you planned for your own death?
Yeah, definitely. People are like, “What’s your plan?” It’s a little bit like asking Willy Wonka what his favorite candy is.
OK, that is not at all what I expected you to say.
Like, it’s amazing that you can be turned into a stone. Parting Stone will take your cremated remains and turn you into like 30 beautiful polished stones that your loved ones can distribute and hold onto. You can be turned into a diamond or a coral reef or into redwood grove. This is an extraordinary time to be thinking about how you want to be memorialized.
Yea, I’ve heard of a service where they will take your ashes and turn you into an LP.
There’s a woman in New York, a brilliant artist, who will paint a portrait of your loved one using their ashes. And they’re stunning. And it’s like, wow, that is such an emotional thing to think about. Another woman in New York is teaching people how to macrame coffins for loved ones. She has people that have Stage 4 terminal cancer macrameing their own shroud as a way of involving the family in it. That is powerful. I bet you the conversations they’re having while doing that are very healing.
I can’t even imagine.
The thing is, all of this work is about life. We don’t know anything about death, so every conversation about death is about life. It clarifies why we’re here, what we want to do with our life, what our priorities are and what matters most. If we believe in having a destiny, thinking and talking about our death is definitely the quickest route to understanding what your destiny is. There’s no question.
I don’t mean to be Pollyanna-ish, like “It’s great!” Death sucks, it’s terrible. To lose the people we love most and to think about people losing us is fucking awful. But what are we going to do with it? How do we reduce suffering around it? That’s what we’re about.
