The $2.5M Problem No One Is Planning For: AI, Aging, and Your Financial Future with Lily Vittayarukskul

When it comes to AI in the society, if there was ever time to work hard and actually understand how business works and how you should be learning how to make money, it gets 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 people that built the AI that everyone uses, the people that use the AI but don't have normal wealth, and the disparities are 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, 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 six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and caching checks? Well, it starts right about now. 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 Vittoritz School, the CEO of Water Lily, is building a company using artificial intelligence for DICT, those costs, years, in advance, and help families plan the forwards too late. Lily, welcome, it's right about now. Thanks for having me. 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 playoff your name, but you had me at Water Lily. Tell me about Lily. We built the first-ever AI that predicts what an individual's future agent 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 get 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've 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 intensely. It's a good time because boomers are one of the biggest generations in there 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 it's 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. It seems like a gap in and of itself. 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 when you're good to go, things have become so much more complex. Then whoever expected, I think technology has made our life more complex, and more expensive stuff where you might think I could live on rice and beans. We don't have that situation mark. There is more wealth disparity than we ever have, 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 someone? 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. In some ways, it's fascinating to say this, the data, I look this up actually a few months ago. It's perfect, because it's hard to believe, because 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 then we all do. It's a certain time, I'm sure we all go. And life's hard, but you want to have longevity, but with longevity comes cost and time, because 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 in a time period where you're probably a little slower getting around, a little slower processing. If 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. I don't blame the average person that wakes up their 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 them, because times have shifted faster than I ever expected. It was just a silent generation, or two that is like aging right now. Before, where the families who 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't. 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 do 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. Why do you think people haven't been and aren't planning more for long term care? The first generation that's never really wanted to talk about an interview. 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. If you talk to baby boomers nowadays, they're a lot more open. And if you talk to young extras, they also say like, hey, we have read it. We talk about our problems online. And more people are spreading their problems online ever than before. So, we don't have more dialogue around this. It's a relatively new thing to have dialogue around roles that you have, being able to get anonymous person that 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, I already were 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. Yeah, exactly. Waging multiple generations. We skewed 25 to 45 60 40 male to female. Hey, we're getting 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. I mean, 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? Where is humans and is Americans? 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. 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 it's going to happen, it's national averages easy for you to scare yourself with, but not easy for yourself to prepare for the topic. And that's what we notice as the really massive gap is how can we make this topic more relevant to the first person sitting in front of it 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 piece of mind? That's why it designed Waterland. And that's where AI is a really fascinating use case here. It's not chat GPT. 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 could actually tell you what that should look like when, how many hours could you step in for that care? How much is it going to cost? And that's when when it becomes concrete like that, you realize how 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. Fascinating. You went to where I was going next. Talk to me about the platform. Are we talking? Oh, Emma? Are we talking something bigger? Which it sounds like we are. It's processing the about volume of data 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 in the bolts of Waterland? 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 searcher, 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 to store what data on and tell them, hey, what's your likelihood of need care? Would a journal 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 feature 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 family. So if you actually want to waterlily.com, you can 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 you can 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, it didn't change anything. Two is that if you know what that future cost is going to look like and we help 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 a pocket and in a not strategic manner, that's a difference of punches of thousands of dollars to those of us that are really young millions of dollars because of the inflation of cost. And we get more sustainable for the end found in that piece out of pocket and help the professionals more strategically have that conversation. We've helped that the space become more affordable. 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 really. I think of now college savings plans tax-free, the tax benefits. We should have parents savings plans for an HB 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. 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's had a long-term care of it and they'll just pay for it, the government would go bankrupt really fast. 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, it was more of my suggestion. You could look into HSAs, for example, putting some money in there. You're right. The max that you could contribute to an HSA that has its triple tax benefits, it does, you know, long-term care is qualified under that account, but why is the tax so low? And when you think about it, it's like, well, if you wanted to change things in government, how do you vote for change things in government? Well, first, the governor has to essentially like, legislation has to say 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, if you want more dollars to go to a social net, it means more taxes usually. And most people just blanket, don't want to pay more in taxes. They're really paying more than enough. And so it's not just enough to say like, it's just putting 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 type of account we should build that 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. Really, does your platform do tracking the reality that census data or standardized data is not personal enough? How is water lily maybe personalizing this on a family or individual basis to make it relevant? If you feel that they take form, I'll just like say like for you, for example, I'm not going to guess your age, but I just say you feel that they take form for yourself. That's actually when a lot of folks start to become aware of this topic. So when you mention like, oh, my where the topic is because of your age and parents, for you, we would predict your thing 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% likelihood of having that event sometime in your life. And if you were to have that event, we think that it'll happen around age 83. If you were to have that event, we expect that it'll be roughly about four to 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. If you're a family based on your health structure, they would 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 $2.5 million by the time you need care when you turn age 83. When we count for health care 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 care needs, like you want to stay at the home, but what happens when you have nursing home level care needs? What do you want to do? Then most people say like, you know, I'll go to professional setting in that case. Now, I'll consider that. We're like, okay, great. When you age at the home, we 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 a care per week to start. Your kids about 10 hours of care per week, other family members about two hours a 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? 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 was at as moving as fast. We'd 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 fed or be comforted with that. You'd probably look at the six hours on your wife, and these are physical care giving errors. I'm not even talking about care coordination. I'm not talking about them being a part of returning. You might say, okay, my wife, she is like, if I'm age 83, she's going to be, let's just say, age 80. She's going to be frail herself, how she's going to physically take care of me, and most of them need care first, if that happens. And women actually like me care afterwards. And actually 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 and I'm sure like, what does that per hat risk of? And 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's going to be $2.5 million, by the time I need it, two things I'll tell you. The first one is, okay, we remove this ours from your wife. The cost went up by a little bit. It 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 in your Roth IRA accounts, you never touched it. You decided to max out in your 40s. You kept putting in nearly a couple thousand dollars every single year up into your cares and dates. 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 the future. 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 do you think my pain for this? How is that going to grow? People are super surprised on the power of compound. This sounds what a state planning should be. But do you think of a state planning? Okay, the will, where's stuff going, all that sort of stuff. And I'm sure there's some of this, but this sounds a state planning in 2026. That's what I'm hearing. I'm hearing evolved a state planning. Am I making the right leap, Lily? Yeah, the 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 give you up my, you know, assets 50, 50 months? 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. It's that of being in the life of state planning. It should be last 10%. Imagine if you had done your finances. Yeah, I'm going to have two million bucks by the time I pass. Well, what if you had a lump from the event? You don't have two million bucks in your, 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, going on 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 have it? 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. Lily, they will close out more on specifics within what water lily. I'm sending fascinated like the business side of starting, growing and running this company. Our audience is also a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of marketing executives, business people. We're being informed by, oh shit, we need to plan for this and we need to get on water lily or whoever, whoever it's available, we'll get to all those deeds. What's it like building, starting, running a company like this? Both incredibly rewarding and incredibly painful. It's definitely not the path I would put most folks down. Imagine how hard it's to build a company. You're just imagining it, but you haven't built it or you're in the middle building the company. And then imagine it was 10x harder, just imagining that and then it's actually harder than that. Not so when people say like, oh, you know, all your passion and 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 going to sweat the details on this thing. You're going to be great at it in a competitive market. It's incredibly fortunate. It's still hard to fundraise. I went to college at 14. He went to at 11 and I started an airspace where he went out from 12 to 16. It didn't matter if I looked like a prodigy. It's really still hard to fundraise to bid on that company and it's really hard for me to build my 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 and break your business at the end of the day. When I focused 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 home? 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 this space. Waterloo itself has been recognized by World Economic Forum. I spoke in twice at Davos and in China, on the topic of aging, was also named Forbes 30 and 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 what people expect from you afterwards. You can't really slow down success, but get success and somehow you have to just get smarter about maybe don't run 89 hour work weeks. Maybe run 70 to 80, maybe find the right folks around you to help you manage how you feel about your problems. And that was a bit of a spiel. 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 last 10 years. I've owned multiple businesses. 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 reflect 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. It's easier than ever has been to raise money because like VCs are now more of a commodity to raise money. Career business is still really hard. And even if it's easier relatively speaking, it's harder than it ever has been a 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 copy cap. It's really easy for someone to use loveable 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 amount of 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 a thing in your people, but it's a really cut-throat environment. If you never put your face out there, you never put your story out there. People just want to listen to your stories all the time. And it's rough when people want to just yell at you all the time because you're thinking 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. 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 to? It is exponentially harder to get 40 into 40. Majority of entrepreneurs start in their 40s. So not only do you have the largest volume of people that start to start the businesses in that, but also the people who started earlier or whatever, kind of somewhere to financial planning and how Roth are kind of compounds into millions if you start earlier for a competitive subrunning 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 pick it to the next one? I maintain that philosophy. That'll make me happy. I don't know if that's going to put me on 40 or 40. As soon as I turn you to talking about yourself, the thinner, like, oh god, I have to do it. I don't want to do it. You have those friends where you have the black cat and a golden retriever. I'm totally the 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've been kind of personally 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 the society, if there was ever time to work hard and actually understand how business works and how you should be learning how to make money, it gets 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. It's that you're going to have more and more wealth disparities. Unfortunately, you're going to have people that built the AI that everyone uses, the people that use the AI but don't have normal wealth. And the disparities 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 safe or whatever else. 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. 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 that 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, I had seven more companies. I wouldn't control. I would have more money with 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. People are going to be leaster than you expect. There's going to be a ton of procrastinators. AI is not an area you procrastinate. You learn the tools. If you figure out how to use it, you will see ahead of the curve. And from there, just try to figure out how does the way you use AI make money and really figuring out how is the work that you do making money for a society. And if you could figure that out from first principles, you will be competitive in our market. 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 on all those other details. If you want to get ahead of just using an AI tool that's incredibly powerful, just go to water lily.com water lily like the flower and you click on start for free. There's no funky necessarily. It's 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 headed the curve like on LinkedIn. And you'll of course see us in the news as well. It's really fortunate to consistently get covered whenever we're kind of launching that next new thing, pushing on below on this topic. So you might see us in the paper. You might also see us like online and go for read up on the article or probably do something new then. I appreciate you for coming on. Keep changing the world, baby. Hey guys, you're to find us. Ryan is right.com. You'll find the highlight clips the entire episode 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 by now. This has been right about now with Ryan Alfred, a radcast network production. Visit Ryan is right.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.