Caitlin Doughty / Ask a Morticiandiscussed

Eddie's pick: he's been circling "death as a category" and landed on Caitlin Doughty, who studied the history of death at the University of Chicago and runs Ask a Mortician. The backdrop: nearly 2 in 3 Americans are now cremated and families spend $32B/year on funerals, a huge TAM with providers nobody trusts. She built the Order of the Good Death (nonprofit, the "death positive movement"), owns two cremation facilities (Clarity, in Santa Ana and LA, despite being based in New York), and has two NYT-bestselling books with a third coming in October. Megan immediately pushed on audience definition: death is enormously broad, spanning afterlife/gothic obsessives, true-crime/grave-tourism types, and people in acute grief needing estate/funeral logistics help — who is she actually speaking to? Sam's harder pushback: he has a structural issue backing creators in the category of "things you don't want to think about" versus things people get excited about — he distinguished a hypothetical "new gothic movement" audience (people who'd be thrilled by a new video/product, which he'd back) from reactive death-planning content (which he's skeptical of, same critique he gave Caroline's GLP-1 pick). Megan's read based on the video title alone: this leans toward the former — fascination with death/history, closer to a modern 'Wednesday Addams' audience — not applied cremation-planning expertise. Caroline will trade notes (she's already met with death doulas/grief professionals) and separately flagged a logistics question (shipping bodies across state lines) that the group tabled for more research.