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When it comes to AI in this society, if there was ever a time to work hard and actually understand how business works and how you should be learning how to make money, it's now. Because what I anticipate with AI is just with the lack of government regulation. I don't see that happening anytime soon in the US is that you're going to have more and more wealth disparities. Unfortunately, you're going to have the people that built the AI that everyone uses, the people that use the AI but don't have normal wealth and the disparity is going to get so wide that it's going to have economic ramifications that we're going to hit a place where we'll be in a post scarcity world. This is Right about now with Ryan Alford, A Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month, taking the BS out of business for over 6 years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now.
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People are living longer than ever, but financially, most people aren't prepared for what that actually means. When it comes to long term care, it's one of the biggest expenses people will face, but one we're the least prepared for. Lily Vi Rit School, the CEO of Water Lily is building a company using artificial intelligence. Predict those costs years in advance and help families plan before it's too late. Lily, welcome to Right About Now.
B
Awesome. Thanks for having me.
A
Lily who the hell are you? You got a great story. I'm excited to tell that and I love Water Lily. I mean what a great play off your name. You had me at water lily. Tell me about Lily.
B
We built the first ever AI that predicts what an individ future aging trajectory is going to look like in their future long term care needs. I built out the company that focused on this topic because we personally navigated a long term care event. It was super devastating for us. A lot of folks don't realize how this long term care or aging is not something that's taken care of by Medicare or traditional health insurance and you have to pay for it out of pocket. Most people don't have funds and you have to have family members step in and it's all incredibly stressful, breaks up relationships. So I found this to be one of humanity's biggest problems that we could try to solve for. So here I am going at it very intentionally and very intentionally intensely.
A
It's a good time because boomers are one of the biggest generations and they're right here in this time period. This is a relevant topic for a lot of people. I want to lean into a little bit of that emotional impact. It's fascinating and hearing you say it, I have guests on, I read the notes and I think about it. But then when I actually talk to them, things start to crystallize a bit. It's fascinating that sophisticated as we think we are and doing all these things, planning all these things, the reality is we're all aging and we're all sort of headed towards these situations every day. And the fact that we haven't developed systems, plans, healthcare, more dedicated towards it seems like a gap in and of itself.
B
It's now more important than ever has been to be a planner. There's older generations where if you worked really hard and you found some opportunities and you're good to go, things have become so much more complex than we ever expected. I think technology has made our life more complex and more expensive. Stuff where you might think I could live on like rice and beans. We don't have that situation where there is more wealth disparity than we ever had. And society, at least in the US that tells us like, hey, you have to buy more, you have to get the nicer thing because that other person has that nicer thing. Life is just way more expensive than it ever has been, relatively speaking to other generations. How are you supposed to take care of yourself when things are a lot more expensive? You have to plan smarter and we have to get on top of all these technologies to help us plan smarter.
A
In some ways it's Fascinating to say this, the data, I looked this up actually a few months ago to prove it because I was like, it's hard to believe because we eat in a lot of ways, we're unhealthy eating and processed food and all that stuff. But we are living longer than we ever have. You want to live longer and we all do. And at certain times I'm sure we all go, man, life's hard, but you want to have longevity. But with longevity comes cost and time. Time is money. And that's even more to plan for because, hey, just more dollars that are spent every year. You're supposed to be at a time period where you're probably a little slower getting around, a little slower processing. We all age. You've got to plan for a longer period of time and thus a larger amount of dollars to support yourself over that. I'm sure that's a lot of what your platform does. These seem like obvious no duh things, but we haven't been doing a whole lot about it.
B
I don't blame the average person that wakes up, they're 60 and they're like, oh my God, wait, I should probably plan for this event. I'm about to retire. I don't blame. Times have shifted faster than I ever expected. It was just a silent generation or two that is like aging right now in the generation before where the family used to live under the same roof. It wasn't too long ago, a couple of decades ago, when you'd raise your kids, those kids would grow up in the same roof. You know, you would find a job kind of in your city. And when parents got older, you took care of them or you lived right next to them. But times have changed. In order to make more money, most people go to college now. When you go to college, you try to find the best job that you possibly can. You go to the coastal areas, you move away from home. This is like the first time ever where we now have single generation households. When parents age, how are we going to take care of them? When we age, how are kids going to take care of us? We weren't taught to think about it that way. When we kind of feel like we woke up, we're like, oh crap, I have to plan for this. It's because who had to do it before us? No one really and no one really talked about it until right now. So feels new.
A
Why do you think people haven't been and aren't planning more for long term care?
B
The first generation that never really want to talk about long term care. If it happened, they had an assumption that like, yeah, my kids will take care of me. I'll definitely never go into a nursing home. You talk to baby boomers nowadays, days, they're a lot more open. And if you talk to Gen Xers, they also say like, hey, we have Reddit, we talk about our problems online. And more people are spreading their problems online ever than before. So we now have more dialogue around this. It's a relatively new thing to have dialogue around rules that you have. Being able to get anonymous person to chime in here. And we now finally have language that we can use on. What does it look like to retire? What does it look like to age? How are you thinking about it? But the reason why we didn't is because aging is not a fun experience to think about. You also don't want to think about mortality. We're not really deaf first sort of kind of like, we're not like, oh yeah, let's talk about it all the time. It's like you actually really try to avoid it. You really try to avoid talking about when you're sick or thinking about getting sick. And it's not to our benefit and we're recognizing it now. That's the whole point of this episode. Is that education?
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Yeah, exactly. If you've got kids in middle school or high school, you already know homework can turn into a whole situation. What should take 20 minutes somehow turns into two hours. And half the time it ends with frustration on both sides. I've got four boys, three of them right in that middle and high school range. So I see it all the time. They hit a problem, get stuck. And it's not that they don't want to figure it out. They just don't know how to get there. That's why I've been looking into Brainly. Brainly is basically a 247 AI powered tutor that actually walks them through problems step by step. Not just giving answers by helping them understand how something works so they can build confidence and keep moving. And as a parent, that's the part I care about. It's not about the shortcuts, it's about them actually learning the material. It's also just practical. You don't have to deal with scheduling a tutor or trying to find things that line up around sports and everything else. It's there whenever they need it. And it's a lot more affordable than traditional tutoring. Honestly, it just takes a lot of pressure off. Finals are coming up. Build your teen study plan now. It only takes minutes. Go to brainly.comryan to get 50% off your first Brainly subscription with my code Ryan that's B R a I n l y.com Ryan hey guys. Most teams think scaling issues come down to headcount or budget, but honestly, it's just that no one's documenting how things get done. So every time you onboard someone, you're re explaining the same process over and over, or worse, people are doing it differently. That's exactly why I started using Scribe. Scribe is a workflow AI platform that captures what you're doing in real time and it turns it into step by step guides automatically. Just turn it on, go through the process like normal, and it records every click and builds the guide for you. I'm using it to onboard SOPs and internal tools. Something that used to take hours to manually document now takes like 30 seconds and it's done. It also automatically redacts sensitive info like emails or account details, which is huge when you're sharing this stuff across a team. And the part I like most, the guide me feature, it actually walks someone through the process step by step inside the tool, so they're not guessing, which saves me and my employees so much time, which is crucial in a growing business and team. Plus, it even suggests ways to improve the workflow itself, not just document it. Multiply that across a team of hundreds and you're talking serious hours. Back to book a personalized enterprise demo, visit Scribe. How Ryan that's S C R I B E dot H O W R. Waking multiple generations, we skew 25 to 45, 60, 40 male to female. Hey, we're getting you ready for yourselves and your parents. I mean this now, Lily. My parents are in their 70s. They're healthy, but I'm seeing this. It's funny, you almost switch roles of parents and kids and then role reversal of taking care of them. In some ways, I've thought about it. My wife and I talked about it. What does that reality look like? We're as humans and as Americans, we, like, we don't want to talk about death. We don't talk about mortality of ourselves. There are huge implications across not just money, but societal, social, where they live, where they go, all those things. And I'm sure that's what you encountered in your situation.
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What we see is not that many people talk about this topic. And when they do, what you see online roughly is the same old stuff. You're probably looking into this for your parents right now. You're like, okay, they're growing older. What does that Mean, if you looked up my parents are growing older, what does that mean? You get a whole slew of stories that are not relevant to you or if you try to look at the statistics and when is it going to happen? It's national average is easy for you to scare yourself with, but not easy for yourself to prepare for the topic. And that's what we notice as a really massive gap is how can we make this topic more relevant to the first person sitting in front of them and make it helpful. If they want to touch on this topic, let's go ahead and make it immediately use. So immediately helpful. What can we do? How do we give you that peace of mind? That's why I designed Waterland and that's where AI is a really fascinating use case here. It's not ChatGPT, it's not Gemini, it's not Claude, it's not large language models. It's traditional machine learning models that are trained on real data. Where we have over a half a billion data points of families that we've been following for several decades. We looked at the patterns so that we can look at the families that look like your parents. In this case, if you tell us this information, we can actually tell you what that trajectory is going to look like. When, how many hours could you step in for that care? How much is it going to cost? And that's when it becomes concrete like that. You'll realize, can my parents afford that? Can I afford to step in in some way? If not, how do I solve this? Understand the problem? Now we can talk about solutions.
A
Fascinating. You went to where I was going next. Talk to me about the platform. Are we talking LLM? Are we talking something bigger, which it sounds like we are. It says processing the volume of that's out there that you've collected. Who is this platform helping? Are we helping the institutions? Are we helping individuals walk through a little bit more of kind of the nuts and the bolts of water lily?
B
We help both. What's really fascinating about this aging industry is that if you help both people, you're helping the end family. The way that works is with waterlily. We first designed our software tool that has an intake form. It's a three to five minute intake form. We ask basis social, demographic info, medical info, financial info. From there we look at the massive amount of data that we have. We look at, okay, based on this data, for the person that just told us who they are, can we look at the people that look like them that we have historical data on and tell them hey, what's your likelihood of needing care? What age it'll begin at? How many hours to start? At the tail end. We gave that to wealth advisors, we gave that to financial advisors, we gave that to estate planners, we gave that to retirement communities. So whenever they bring up the topic as a part of helping families understand what this future risk is going to be, those professionals want to help prepare these families for that risk. They have all the information that they need to be able to do that. Families though don't always have access or they're not always talking to those professionals. That's where we have given the software also directly to families. So if you actually went to waterlily.com you could actually click on start for free and start that process. Two main problems that we're solving for is one, the motivational problem. Most people will say throw their hands up and say like there's nothing I could do on this topic. It's really scary. Why try to scare myself? It's motivational. First off, you can actually do some pretty incredible things financially for yourself and health wise if you were to learn what your future self would look like if you didn't change it anything. Two is that if you know what that future cost is going to look like and we helped you try to solve for that cost as efficiently as possible either in your 40s or for your parents in the 50s or 60s instead of just reactively paying out of pocket and in a non strategic manner. That's a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars to those of us that are really young. Millions of dollars because of the inflation of cost. Make it more sustainable for the end family that pays out of pocket and help the professionals more strategically have that conversation. We've helped the space become more affordable.
A
Interesting. I could see how this could be leveraged and I wouldn't be surprised. I might be going there. I'm just like, my mind starts working. Lily. I think of now college savings plans tax free. The tax benefits we should have parents savings plans for and they should be tax free or we should have tax benefits for what's necessary. Because look, wouldn't the government rather give us a tax break to save tax free to take care of our parents instead of the government have to take care of them. Let's solve it on the front end and not the back.
B
Yeah. So first off you're asking like why doesn't the government step in? Like if this is such a massive problem at scale, why isn't the government stepping in effectively? And it's because in Its current shape and form. If they just took on the families that ran out like that, had a long term care of it and they'll just pay for it, the government would go bankrupt really fast.
A
Yeah, I can imagine that they would. I just meant help. But assisting the ones that will pay for it, that have the money making tax benefits or whatever was more my suggestion.
B
You can look into HSAs for example. Putting some money in there. You're right. The max that you could contribute to an HSA that has it's triple tax benefits. It does, you know, long term care is qualified under that count. But why is the cat so low? And then when you think about it, it's like well if you wanted to change things in government, how do you go and change things in government? Well first the governor has to essentially like legislation has said like oh yeah, we should put a petition. Does it get approved? Is it on the ballot? And then you have to educate, you know, citizens, hey, vote yes on this. And if it's going to mean more taxes for them for words, if you want more dollars to go into a social net, it means more taxes usually. And most people just, just blanket don't want to pay more in taxes. They're already paying more than enough. And so it's not just enough to say let's just put in dollars. But how do we become strategic about when we start to allocate those dollars? When is it on the government, when is it on ourselves? Is there a new type of account we should build that's insurance products nowadays too? I would love more of a dialogue here because it's complex. A lot of citizens just don't even know about this topic and how expensive it's going to be. That's what we don't talk about.
A
Lily, does your platform do tracking the reality that census data or standardized data is not. How is Water Lily maybe personalizing this on a family or individual basis to make it relevant?
B
If you filled out intake form, I'll just like say like for you for example, I'm not going to guess your age but let's just say you filled out the intake form for yourself. That's actually when a lot of folks start to become aware of this topic. So when you mentioned like oh my where the topic is because of your aging parents for you we would predict you're thinking about having a long term care event. If you were to have a long term care event, let's just say, you know, you grow older, you slow down and then we expect you. If you were to have an event, we think you have 61% of having that event sometime in your life. And if you were to have that event, we think that'll happen around age 83. If you were to have that event, we expect that it'll be roughly about four and a half years of care, starting with about 20 hours of care per week, kind of coming into the home and ending with about 65 hours of care per week. When it comes to nursing home level care needs, your family, based on your household structure, they will take on roughly 20% of your care needs, or about 3,000 hours in total for all of your care. And the rough cost is going to be about it's $2.5 million by the time you need care when you turn age 83. When we count for healthcare inflation and how when family steps in pay for that, we tell you that story, we double check it, say like, okay, we predicted based on your preference that you want to start to age at the home, then you want to stay at the home. If you have assisted living level of care needs, like you want to stay at the home, but what happens when you have like nursing home level care needs, what do you want to do then? Most people say, like, you know, I'll go into professional setting in that case. Now I'll consider that. We're like, okay, great. When you age at the home, we also also predict how your family members might step in if you're at the home. We predict how much your wife would step in. It looks like she would step in roughly about six hours of care per week to start your kids, about 10 hours of care per week, other family members, about two hours of care per week. And roughly 20 hours goes to the professionals. Do you want that to happen or do you want to change those numbers in any way? So if I said that to you, Brian, like what would you immediately what are immediate questions or comments you have?
A
The first thing I would say is, did you put the PETA tax on it? That's the pain in the ass factor tax on for me, you'd have to have extra care because I'd be grumpy and pissed that I wasn't as moving as fast. Have to add some extra dollars to that thing for the PETA tax of dealing with me. But no, I would say what I'd be okay, eyes open, I'm an independent person. I take care of myself and my family. I don't want anyone else being fettered or encumbered with that.
B
You'd probably look at the six hours on Your wife, and these are physical caregiving hours. I'm not even talking about care coordination. I'm not talking about them being a power of attorney. You might say, hey, my wife, she is like, if I'm age 83, she's going to be, let's just say age 80, she's gonna be frail herself. How's she going to physically take care of me? And most men need care first if that happens. And then women actually, like, need care afterwards. Naturally. A lot of men assume, oh yeah, my wife, if anything happens to me in sickness and in health, she'll take care of me. That's different when you're both aged. She can't physically get you in, out of bed, in, out of the shower. Like, what does that put her at risk of? You're like, yeah, I don't want that to happen. But no one has that conversation today. It just happens. And the wife just goes ahead and takes that on. But if you said to me right now, hey, if my care team be two and a half million dollars by the time I need it, two things I'll tell you, the first one is, okay, we remove those hours from your wife. The cost went up by a little bit. Went up to 2.6. That's the cost of taking care of your family members. We put on more of that to the professionals. And two is, hey, if you're in your 40s, did you know that your Roth IRA account, you never touched it. You decided to max out in your 40s. You kept putting in yearly couple thousand dollars every single year up until your care's end date. Did you know you'd have a couple million dollars in that account by the time you need care? Most people don't think about that. It's not just saying, oh, I have two and a half today. Well, what's a financial habit you should probably have that could try to cover this in and that gives people peace of mind. Oh, I could do something about it. I could protect my family members. Felt smarter about my finances. But how. And so we do that projection. Okay, what do you have in what accounts? How are you thinking about paying for this? How is that going to grow? People are super surprised on the power of compound.
A
This sounds what estate planning should be. When you think of estate planning, okay, the will, where stuff going, all that sort of stuff, and I'm sure there's some of this, but this sounds estate planning in 2026. That's what I'm hearing. I'm hearing evolved estate planning. Am I making the right leap Lily Ye.
B
A lot of folks that think about state planning, they're like, oh, well, when I die, how much money? How do I want to like divvy up my, you know, assets? 50, 50amongst my two kids or something like that.
A
State planning to start when you get sick or you should be thinking about that. This period that you're describing when an event happens or disease or whatever it might be. Instead of being end of life estate planning, it should be last 10%.
B
Imagine if you had done your finances and yeah, I'm going to have 2 million bucks by the time I pass. Well, what if you had a long term career, you don't have 2 million bucks anymore. Whatever you're telling your kids about what you'd have for them by the time you pass. Some people make real decisions and plans off of that, building a much more realistic plan about, hey, the state plan is about the legacy. It's about what is the legacy you want to leave behind. And that means the legacy that you're establishing when you're sick as well. How do you want your family members to step in? How do you want to protect them even from that? Not just about how much money you're going to leave them when you pass.
A
Lily maybe we'll close out more on specifics within what Water Lily I'm sounding fascinated. Like the business side of starting, growing and running this company. Company. Our audience is also. There's a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of marketing executives, business people. We're being informed by, oh, we need to plan for this and we need to get on Water Lily or whoever, wherever it's available will get to all those deets. What's it like building, starting running a company like this?
B
Both incredibly rewarding and incredibly painful. It's definitely not the path I would put most folks down. Imagine how hard it is to build a company. You're just imagining it, but you haven't built it. Or you're in the middle of building the company and then imagine it was 10x hard, harder just imagining that. And then it's actually harder than that. That's why when people say like, oh, you know, follow your passion, you know, does this all. It's like you kind of have to marry just what are you going to be really obsessed with? Are you really good at noticing that there's a market opportunity that no one else actually sees? And people buy because you're really passionate as well. People like buy what you have because you're gonna sweat the details on this thing. You're gonna be great at it in a competitive market. We've been incredibly fortunate. Still hard to fundraise. I went to college at 14, he went at 11. I started in aerospace working with NASA from 12 to 16. It didn't matter if I looked like a prodigy. It's really still hard to fundraise to build out that company. And it's really hard for me to build a company. It's all about relationships. Whatever you're particularly interested in, what you want to prove, how you want to help other people. The more and more you surround yourself with people that allow you to do that, that is going to make them break your business. At the end of the day, when I focus on aging, I'm so obsessed with it. It's such a big problem. I focused on who were the sharpest investors in this space. How would I stay really humble. I don't know much, but they could tell I'm passionate. They could tell I'm going to learn what I need to learn and build a relationship with them. And we've gotten money from some of the top VCs in the space. Water Lily itself has been recognized by World Economic Forum. I've spoken twice at Davos and in China like on the topic of aging was also named Forbes 30 under 30 speak very often at industries like on this topic. But that also means I run 80, 90 hour work weeks myself. Every single week. I travel 40% of the time. I always feel like I'm really behind. There is the accolades that you get but also kind of what people expect from you afterwards. You can't really slow down. Success begets success and somehow you have to just get smarter about like maybe don't run 89 or maybe run 70 to 80. Maybe find like the right folks around you to help you manage how you feel about your problems. And that was a bit of a spiel.
A
People like that vulnerability and the realness of what it takes. That's the truth. I own multiple companies. I worked for other people for 15 years and then the last 10 years I've owned multiple, multiple businesses and it hasn't been in Silicon Valley, but they haven't been small projects. And it's 89 hour week. But you got to be passionate about it. It's fascinating for me we live in a really interesting time with what's happening with AI and the speed of which in a lot of ways you can do things. You said something kind of resonated which is you don't feel like you've done enough or you can't catch up. We can do more faster than we ever have been able to, but yet we can't ever catch up.
B
It's easier than it ever has been to raise money because like VCs are now more of a commodity. Raise money, create business. It's still really hard. And even if it's easier, relatively speaking, it's harder than it ever has been to build a lasting company. Just because there's all these people that like when you're doing something really successfully, it's really easy to try to build a copycat. It's really easy for someone to use lovable and try to copy what you do, create an AI version of you. What I found to be really important is whatever problem that you're going to tackle, you just have to have more insights. Then you have to be the person that you think you're going to have the most master insights with this new thing you want to build. If you want to build something really lasting. So you're always ahead of the curve, you're always building and improving what you're doing. And how do you build real relationships? Like when you build that business, not just offer thing and you know people buy it, it's a really cutthroat environment. If you never put your face out there, you never put your story out there. People just want to listen to hear stories all the time. And it's rough when people want to just yell at you all the time because your thing that you gave to them isn't perfect. Especially if it's going to be consumers. You have to be okay with just taking that hit, having really great customer success, resilience and just try to solve the problem. You've done this, you've seen this, you've cut your teeth on this stuff.
A
Once you've run 30 for 30, are you going to go for 40 for 40 or what are you a complete failure if you don't get that too?
B
It is exponentially harder to get 40 under 40. Majority of entrepreneurs start in their 40s, so not only do you have like the largest volume of people that try to start the businesses in that, but also the people who started earlier or whatever else. Kind of similar to financial planning and how Roth IRA kind of compounds into millions. If you start earlier for competitiveness of running a business, the smarter your decisions are earlier on, that just compounds over the years as well. That's where consistency really matters. Consistency of making good decisions or if you made the wrong decisions, how quickly do you pivot to next one? I maintain that philosophy. That'll make me happy. I Don't know if that's going to put me on 40 under 40.
A
As soon as I turned into talking about yourself, the tenor, like, oh, God, I have to do it. I don't want to do it.
B
You have those friends where you have the black cat and a golden retriever. I'm totally black cat of a friend. So when I make friends, it's because people pick me as friends. That's how I've made friends. Like, they think that person looks interesting, I'll go be friends. I'll always be around her. And that's how I hang out with people. So that's my issue when it comes to AI in this society. If there was ever a time to work hard and actually understand how business works and how you should be learning how to make money, it's now. Because what I anticipate with AI is just with the lack of government regulation. I don't see that happening anytime soon in the US is that you're going to have more and more wealth disparities, unfortunately, you're going to have the people that built the AI that everyone uses, the people that use the AI but don't have normal wealth and disparity is going to get so wide that it's going to have economic ramifications that we're going to hit a place where we'll be in a post scarcity world. We could be in a post scarcity world today, but we'll get there. The middle part is going to be particularly unstable. That's where I would say, if you can build your wealth, try to have enough so that you could make sure that you have resources for whatever circumstances, if you need to move to somewhere safer or whatever else. Genuinely, where in interesting time, where technology is dictating our quality of life, it's well said.
A
It was tempered. I was picking up, reading between the lines. You hear people say all the time, well, is it going to take jobs? Well, yeah, it is going to take jobs, but you need to learn it. If you aren't applying AI in whatever you do, you will get left behind and be on the other end of the spectrum that Lily just described. I'm a freedom guy. I'm a control guy. I could make as much money as I want to make. I know how to make money. I make what I make. But if I made more money, it would mean I would work more and I wouldn't control more of my time. I like to control my time to do that. If I had seven more companies, I wouldn't control, I would have More money but less time. What AI is enabling or inhibiting is your control. If you don't learn it and understand it and leverage it, your time, where you move, what you do will probably be dictated versus controlled.
B
People are going to be lazier than you expect. There's going to be a ton of procrastinators. AI is not an area you procrastinate. You learn the tools, you figure out how to use it. You will stay ahead of the curve. And from there just try to figure out how to. Does the way you use AI make money? Really figuring out like how is the work that you do making money for society? And if you could figure that out from first principles, you will be competitive in our market.
A
Yeah, 100%. Lily, fascinating discussion and really congratulations on everything you're doing with Water Lily. I know it's a hard work, you know, you've been honest, real and raw about what it takes. But that's what it takes to build something that doesn't exist today. If it was easy, everybody would do it. Talk to me about where people can keep up with what you're doing with Water Lily, where they shouldn't contact you too much because you're shy and all those other details, tools.
B
If you want to get ahead of just using an AI tool that's incredibly powerful, just go to waterlily.com water lily like the flower and you click on start for free. There's no funkiness there. At least all very transparent. Like, hey, you could use it and figure out what your predictions are, how you want to plan, reach out to our team, people who are less shy than me, of course you could follow our work. I post a lot on what we do, how we're ahead of the curve like on LinkedIn and you'll of course see us in the news as well. We've been really fortunate to consistently get covered whenever we're kind of launching watching that next new thing, pushing the envelope on this topic. So you might see us in the paper, you might also see us like online and go freed up on the article. We're probably doing something new then.
A
I appreciate you for coming on. Keep changing the world, baby. Hey guys, you know, to find us ryanisright.com you'll find the highlight clips, the entire episode and of course links to Water Lily. Look, it takes a lot of work to change the world, but somebody's got to do it. Lily's doing it. You can do it too. We'll see you next time. Right about now.
B
This has been right about now with Ryan Alford a Radcast network production. Visit ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show, or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.
Right About Now – Legendary Business Advice
Episode: The $2.5M Problem No One Is Planning For: AI, Aging, and Your Financial Future
Host: Ryan Alford (A)
Guest: Lily Vittayarukskul (B), CEO of Water Lily
Date: May 1, 2026
In this deeply relevant episode, host Ryan Alford sits down with Lily Vittayarukskul, founder and CEO of Water Lily, to discuss one of the biggest but least-discussed financial threats facing Americans today: the skyrocketing cost of long-term care in old age, and how AI can empower families to plan ahead. Together, they tackle the realities of aging, wealth disparities, intergenerational care challenges, and why both individuals and the government are woefully unprepared for the multi-million-dollar costs most of us will face. Lily shares personal insights, candid truths about entrepreneurship, and how her company leverages AI—not the flashy kind, but robust predictive analytics—to ease some of these looming burdens.
“A lot of folks don’t realize how long-term care or aging is not something that’s taken care of by Medicare or traditional health insurance—and you have to pay for it out of pocket. Most people don’t have funds…and it’s all incredibly stressful, breaks up relationships.” – Lily ([02:28])
“We’re the first generation that’s really talking about this. Aging is not a fun experience to think about. You also don’t want to think about mortality…we’re recognizing it now. That’s the whole point of this episode.” – Lily ([06:07])
“For those of us that are really young, millions of dollars—because of inflation of cost. We make it more sustainable for the end family and help the professionals more strategically have that conversation.” – Lily ([12:07])
“If I said to you right now, hey, if my care’s gonna be two and a half million dollars by the time I need it—two things I’ll tell you…If you remove those hours from your wife, the cost went up by a little bit—to 2.6. That’s the cost of taking care of your family members.” – Lily ([18:08])
“Instead of end-of-life estate planning, it should be last 10% planning. The legacy isn’t just financial; it’s also how you want your family to be treated as you age.” – Ryan/Lily ([20:01]–[20:43])
“Imagine how hard it is to build a company…now imagine it was 10x harder. It’s actually harder than that…You have to marry what you’re obsessed with, and be good at seeing a market opportunity no one else sees.” – Lily ([21:08])
“There’s going to be a ton of procrastinators. AI is not an area you procrastinate. Learn the tools, figure out how to use it. The way you use AI should make money. If you figure that out from first principles, you will be competitive in our market.” – Lily ([27:22])
Tone:
Candid, insightful, “no fluff”—true to Right About Now’s ethos: real people, real problems, real strategies.