We're at McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast.

Today is actually the 500th episode of the AOM Podcast, which is a cool milestone.

Thanks to everyone who's been with us from the beginning for a long time now or if you just started listening.

Thank you for joining us and if you just started, you've got 500 episodes.

You can check out our podcast archives and you can check that out at artofmanliness.com slash podcast.

Thanks a lot. It's been a fun ride and here's to 500 more and let's get down to today's show.

When you invite people over for dinner party, you likely think of some delightful conversation topics to bring up to keep your guests engaged.

My guest today argues that one of those topics should be death. His name is Michael Hev and he's the founder of Death Over Dinner,

an organization that encourages folks to have dinner parties talk about death and the philosophical aspects to practical matters like wills and funeral planning.

Today on the show, we discuss why you should invite friends and family to your house to talk to death over a playtled lasagna.

We begin our conversation discussing the downsides of not talking about death and how ill-prepared Americans are for death both emotionally and financially, also practically.

Michael then shares the best ways to invite people to a death over dinner party and then we dig into questions you can use to get people talking about death in terms of both the practical and the philosophical.

And true story, after I recorded this episode, I had dinner with some friends and we discussed death and estate planning over some pizza pie.

It was a big success after the show is over. Check out the show notes at a.m.is slash death over dinner. Michael joins me now via clearcast.io.

Alright, Michael Hev, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

So you wrote a book and you're the founder of a thing called Let's Talk About Death Over Dinner.

So how do you come up with this idea to host dinner parties where the topic of conversation is death?

It's kind of a long story. So I'm glad we've got a little bit of time.

Like it started actually with my interest in architecture, which may seem like a bit of a departure to how we get to conversation about death over the dinner table.

But I went to architecture school. It was just about to graduate and then ended up starting an architecture firm as you sometimes do.

Instead of going the standard process of finishing your degree, putting all of your time in, getting your stamp and becoming an official architect, I decided to drop out of school and with another designer start a project called the City Repair Project.

And an architecture firm called Communitexure. And long story short, what we started doing was look at the city, it was Portland, Oregon, where we were living.

...