Right About Now with Ryan Alford - The $2.5M Problem No One Is Planning For: AI, Aging, and Your Financial Future with Lily Vittayarukskul

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

In this episode of Right About Now, Ryan Alford sits down with Lily Vittayarukskul, founder of Waterlily, to explore the intersection of AI, aging, and financial planning. The conversation highlights how advancements in AI are enabling more personalized predictions around long-term care needs, helping individuals and families better understand future costs and risks. Ryan and Lily also discuss the broader implications of AI on wealth creation, economic inequality, and the importance of adapting to new technologies in order to stay competitive. This episode offers valuable insight for anyone looking to better prepare for the financial realities of the future. 🔑 Topics Covered Long-term care planning and financial risk AI-driven predictions and personalized data insights Wealth building and protection strategies Economic impact of emerging technologies Business and entrepreneurship in an AI-driven world 🤝 Connect Ryan Alford 👉 https://www.ryanalford.com 👉 https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanalford Lily Vittayarukskul 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/lily-vittayarukskul/ 👉 https://waterlily.com

When it comes to AI and 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. It's 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 and 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. This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a radcast network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one 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 cash in 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 Vidirich School, the CEO of Waterlily, 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 write about now. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Lily, who the hell are you? You got a great story. I'm excited to tell that, and I love Waterlily. I mean, what a great playoff your name. You had me at Water Lily. Tell me about Lily.

We built the first ever AI that predicts what an individual's 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 intensely.

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 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. 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 whoever expected. I think technology has made our life more complex and more expensive stuff where you might think I can 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 U.S., 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 so 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 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 time, I'm sure we all go, man, 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 at a time period where you're probably a little slower, getting around, a little sore 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-duff things, but we haven't been doing a whole lot about it. 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 them because times have shifted faster than I ever expected.

It was just a silent generation or two that is like aging right now and 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, he took care of them or he 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 our 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 never really wanted to talk about underpair, if it happened, they had an assumption that, like, yeah, my kids will take care of me. I'll definitely never go into a nurse home.

You talk to baby boomers nowadays, 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 than before. So we now have more dialogue around this. It's a relatively new thing to have dialogue around goals that you have, being able to get an anonymous person to chime in here. And we now finally have language that we can use on. What does it look at 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 run out 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.