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Don't Let AI Write This For You With Jermaine Ee · find your cause

• Joseph Smalzer: Forty years ago when I bought this chicken sandwich, I split it in half. Because after converting what it cost in the Malaysian ringgit to US dollar, I realized I can only afford half of it. It was in that moment that I think it hit her and hit all of us. How far she's come. Right. And the sacrifices that she made, the leap of faith that she took, the courage she took to move to another country super far away. For that reason, that's exactly what Airlight's about. Alrighty. Thanks everyone for tuning into this episode of Find Your Cause. Today we have Jermaine E, who's the founder of Airlite. Jermaine, thank you so much for your time today. I was gonna say tonight. It's a little bit later for you where you're based, but thank you again for your time. Thanks for having me. All right. So per usual, we would like to start with the mission or the purpose of the companies and organizations we're interviewing. So what is a mission of Airlight and what are you trying to do? My mission is to make something legal, something that feels difficult and unaccessible to a lot of people. in this case, estate planning. I want to democratize it. I want to make it feel doable for most people. Awesome. I have a lot of questions on it. But before we do, why you? Why is this something that you have taken up as a huge time commitment and life commitment? Yeah. Yeah. The truth is I am definitely not a lawyer. I'm not someone who really enjoys talking about things that are, you know, lots of words and I don't like numbers. I don't, you know, all the semantic stuff. But Why me? Because I was given this mission by my mother. And we can kind of go back to that story later on. But essentially I've been a founder six times now. And I've always just followed whatever I'm curious about. And for me, in the beginning, in my early 20s, it's everything that was like exciting in the world. Snapchat had just came out. I wanted to work on augmented reality. And as I'm in my 30s now, I, you know, one thing that I Often tell myself is it's not about how successful I am, it's about how successful at the thing that I choose to do. Right. It's it's not how good you play the game, it's what game you choose to play. And in that sense, I think that airlight is the embodiment of who I am as a person, and what I care about. And I really care about how people spend their time, how people treat the people they love, how to stay present and how to live life to the fullest. And I think if I had to productize that entire thing, that's airlight. Yeah. And and you mentioned your mother. What is the significance of your mom and kind of the inception and the motivation? Yeah. So sometime during COVID, I decided I wanted to live next to my parents and work next to them. The idea came about because I was living in New York at the time and I was able to fly home anytime that I wanted to. So every time I missed my family, I would just hop on a six hour flight and go back to LA, hang out with them, and go back to New York. During COVID was the first time probably ever that it was there was a constraint because I didn't want to bring this virus to them and I wasn't sure, you know, in twenty twenty we weren't sure how things were passed on and if quarantine worked, if mass worked. So we played it safe and we stayed away for whatever felt safe. It was the first time that I felt that I couldn't just pick up my bags and go see my family. And when I was finally with them, I realized, you know what? I think life is really just about intentionally spending more time with the people that you love. And so I started designing my entire life around my parents and really optimizing for time spent together. So from all the time that we spent together, we got to have a lot of interesting conversations about w you know, what matters to them, hobbies, dreams. And in one of these conversations, my mom brought up well I brought up the fact that, you know, I think, mom, you've made the last dollar that you ever need. And As your oldest son, I think you should maybe think about retirement. Think about stop working because at this point, every dollar you make will just go to me. And I don't want you working for me. Right. I want you to live your life. I want you to travel and eat whatever you want to and do whatever you want to. And from that conversation, an insight surfaced, which is the fact that it wasn't that she didn't have enough money, was that she didn't really know like How her 401k, her savings, and all the things that she had accumulated translated to the rest of her life. And I think it's this anxiety around running out of money before you die, one that a lot of people in the United States have, that was in the back of her mind. And so, as the techie son that I am, I built this simple chat GPT chatbot at the time, this was a year and a half ago now, to ask her. What do you have? What are the things that you treasure? Who are the people in your lives that you want to save the stories for? Why do you care about this champagne glass that you got from who knows where t 30 years ago? And what's the story behind it? And about three or four months into this process, I realized on reading this transcript, I'm like, you know what? If I know about all the things you care about and the people you care about, I can actually make an estate plan for you. And it doesn't have to be so heavy. So that's where the idea of airlight started. And I'll give a little spoiler here. The reason why this became my mission is because about a few months into building Airlight, my mom got a stroke and she passed away. And it was because of Airlight that we had these conversations, this intentional conversations, that I got to make my mom feel more seen when she was alive. And for me, that is the mission. The mission is to sit here and inspire people to have these conversations with their parents so that with whatever finite time that we have left, we live it the way that we want to intentionally. Yeah. And it sounds like one thing that you also gave her is meaning for the time she had historically spent, the things that the work that she did. the items that you said she had that she that maybe had more meaning than you thought and to keep those alive. And so like all of the hard work in in life leading up to that point, it sounds like you provided a a way for her, like you said, to feel seen and to feel like everything she did mattered and to feel, you know, good and even better about your life and the choices you made leading up to that. So so yeah, that that's amazing. Did you see any of that? Did she share was she able to share some of her experiences leading up to that before she she passed away? Yeah, so one of the things that she really wanted to do was to go back to Oklahoma. And the reason why I say go back is because forty years ago she arrived to the United States, to Oklahoma, of all places. And, you know, in the late 70s in Oklahoma, there weren't that many Asians. So she was this tiny Asian girl that came from Malaysia, a country most people have never heard of. And not from the capital, from like a small town, a tin mining village. Up north in Malaysia to Oklahoma, where the only thing she knew about the US was music and Hollywood, right? Everything on TV. So I always knew that she was a bit nostalgic for her time because she wanted to see how far she had come and how her life has evolved. But I didn't really know how important it was to her until this experience, these conversations that we had. So last May. About a year and two months ago is the time of this recording, my my father, my mom, and my younger brother and I, we drove across Oklahoma. You know, we went back to the place that she started. We went to look for the the restaurants that she worked at, the first few apartments that were no they're no longer there. They're demolished. It's been forty years. And one of the highlights of the trip, and there's a video on YouTube about this. was we went back to the first meal she ever had in the United States. She remembered that? That's amazing. Yeah. Not only did she remember it, it was still in the same location because it's a remodeled Burger King. Wow. Yeah. And so we walked into this Burger King and we told her, Hey, you know, go and order the same thing you ordered 40 years ago. And she did. We talked to this young guy working at the cashier and we told him about how She came forty years ago not speaking English and the first thing she got was a chicken sandwich from Burger King. And when she sat down, she opened up the sandwich and she looked at us and she said Forty years ago when I bought this chicken sandwich, I split it in half because after converting what it cost in the Malaysian ringgit to US dollar, I realized I can only afford half of it for lunch. So I saved the other half for dinner. Wow. And it was in that moment that I think it hit her and hit all of us how far she's come. Right. And the sacrifices that she made, the leap of faith that she took, the courage she took to move to another country super far away. And you know, for that reason, airlight is that's exactly what airlight's about. It's to get these stories out of our lives. Right. To document them. Yeah. So let's get into it then. So estate planning can be a very cold and calculated and not personal activity. It sounds like you're adding a lot more to that and more humanity and meaning to it. But before we get into how you're doing that, like what is estate planning for people that maybe have heard the term but don't know what fully it encompasses? Essentially what happens to you after you're gone. Right. Sometimes we think of it as a legal process. Really, there's a lot of terms that we've that that floats around like wills and trust and probate executor guardianship. Essentially what it is is when you can no longer make a decision about the things that you have, and sometimes your body, the healthcare directive, who gets to decide? And the reason why this is important is because For one, if you have decided who gets what and what goes where, it saves your family a lot of the overwhelm and the headache. Right? Because we were building airlight, my mom had set up a trust. And so when she had passed, it was much easier. It was still very overwhelming, but it was much, much easier than if we didn't have one. But then when you get into the things like trust, there's of course tax strategies and you know, how do you avoid probate, which the will doesn't do. If you understand, if you're listening to this and you understand this words out of my mouth, you're probably a lot further along in the process because the statistics is that seventy percent of Americans don't have an estate plan. What are some of the most common components of an estate plan that you start with and evolve to? Do you is it always with the last will and testament or power of attorney? I'd love to hear broke it down process of what you'd recommend. I think this is a little subjective. So generally the core documents are the last will and testament that essentially is a decision put into a legal document to tell The courts, where does everything go? But arguably, while you're alive, one of the most important things is a advanced healthcare directive, or in some states, simply a healthcare directive. And essentially this document is who gets to decide what happens to your body or what medical procedures someone will go through if they cannot make their decisions. So I'll give a very clear example here. So my mom, she when she got a stroke, she was in a coma for eight days. And because my father was next to her, it was very simple. He was the person to decide. But it's not always so straightforward in many families. You know, there was a an actress in Florida who got into a coma. And her husband and her had chatted about this. They know she didn't want to feel pain. She didn't want to be kept alive just to be kept alive. But she never write wrote those things down. She never created this document. And so what ended up happening was for fifteen years her husband and her parents fought to keep her alive or to poo the plug. And not only does it cost a lot of money, but just think of the emotional overwhelm you're putting the people that you love through by just not having these things written down. ⁓ and how is that di if you could explain the difference between that and power of attorney? Or maybe these are like synonymous terminology, but how does that fall into the estate planning process? The power of attorney, there's many, but the popular one is the durable power of attorney, which is a piece of document that essentially grants somebody the right to help you deal with your financial stuff, for example. And an example I'd like to give more casually is hey, if I'm gonna go hike ever a space camp for two weeks, I'm gonna be offline. And there's something so urgent that needs to be dealt with on my end. And if I had a power of attorney for like my sister, for example, she can then, you know, if it's activated properly, do something for me with my bank. Chances are this typically is very helpful when someone is indeed in a medical emergency. But there are other reasons why this can come in handy. Yeah. Yeah. And then what's the difference in this day and age of AI? Between using a a software or a package or an experience that you've put together and just, you know, going on ChatGPT and saying, hey, create a draft a will for me and print, sign, good to go. Yeah, absolutely do not draft a will or really any legal document with AI. And here's why. Very simply, all fifty states have different laws. You know, I as I'm coming onto this journey, I We're now live in sixteen different states, er erolitas. And with going live in every state, we have to work with local attorneys to understand different laws, different regulations. And it's even things so things that we take for granted, knowledge, such as what constitutes a minor. Because there's I believe two or three states in the US that you are a an adult at nineteen, eighteen, or seventeen at different points. Right. So there's all these nuances that are unique to state. But then there's also a lot of nuances that makes certain situations, for example, if you have minor children, guardianship, that makes it complicated. And the reason why an AI cannot handle drafting a legal document, but a will specifically is that it doesn't push back on what you tell it to do. Right. It doesn't guard will against what is unique to your state and it doesn't really pushback on situations where you need to clarify certain things or you know ⁓ we as a company we cannot really give you legal interpretation or legal advice because that's that's safe for a client attorney client privilege. Right. But what we can do as a company is that we have a state valid template and our AI is only anchored to that template and it asks you a question. It's a conversational list, right? Asks you questions about things. And when you don't understand certain things, you need a definition. We can actually define it to you, specifically to your state, but we cannot really give you suggestions. So what we can do is relentlessly re explain to you the same thing over and over again until it clicks. Right. So that that's what sets us apart from a generalist AI. Yeah. Yeah. So th this is great transition. So say like I I'm in my mid thirties. I I have a parent that is aging and and say they don't have something in place, what would be the process for me and the experience for them throughout this process? Obviously, my dad specifically, he's not as tech savvy. So so yeah, so I d and I'm sure many people share that. But what would the experience be? And how is there a personal touch that that you're bringing to this? So to be honest, when we started the process, the assumption was that if you had money, you had an estate plan. If you didn't, you don't. As we got into the process, we realized there's an abundance of attorneys, there's an abundance of online tools, there's an abundance of free tools to get this done. And what's stopping people from doing it is a whole host of reasons. Gen Z are more open to talking about this topic, probably because Gen Z's been dealing with a once in a generation catastrophe every two years. Right. ⁓ this death is casual. For someone who is older, I would typically say, you know, depending on the comfort level of this topic of someone like your pair like your father have with this topic, I would just try to talk to him about why wouldn't he just go to an attorney? Right, because ⁓ if I had to guess, he probably has some assets that would be better off in a trust, right? And I think I would like to get to the bottom of why he has avoided this, maybe not your father specifically, but we have a user. We have a user who's close to sixty years old. He's he owns three properties and he used our app. And because I'm annoying and I keep reaching out to our users and ask for user feedback and why they're on my app, he gave me an insight, which is at I believe fifty eight years old. He just didn't want to talk to a human. He just didn't want to go and admit to a grown human that he doesn't know what a trust is. Even though he knows he should do it. And what makes us different is that when you come into the app, we first ask you, why are you here? And the most common reason for us new parent, new home, finally getting it done. Finally getting it done by far outweighs the other two for us. And once we understand why you're here. We push you through the process as quickly as possible. Because the other insight that we got from our users is that many of our users have paid for the other apps that are quote unquote our competitors, and yet they didn't finish. Some of them even paid for multiple apps and never finished. Right? Because what we're competing against isn't really these other apps. What we're competing against is I'm really tired on Tuesday night and I'm finally sitting down on my couch and now I'm pulling up this website that's asking me 62 questions about what do I want to do when I die. And when I look around, I'm like, you know what? I'm probably not going to die tomorrow. So let me do this next month. Right. Yeah. So that's what we're going up against. And I think if I want to deliver the promise to my users, which is walking out of this experience with a concrete plan, I gotta make it as easy as possible to push them through to a place where they feel comfortable with the topic. And that's why I lead our conversation with story about the why that the why of why I'm doing this. Yeah. Yeah. I think one that that I've used in the past, I don't know if you've heard of them, I think they're called Mama Bear Legal Forms or something. And it was there there was no real chat interface whatsoever. It was just a long form, which is fine. It didn't seem like that complex of a process, but it was definitely a ton of questions. But yeah, what you mentioned of being able to to talk about with your mom when you were having these conversations, yeah, that that process did not at all pull any of that out. It was very, you know, black and white. And yeah, it and it was inexpensive, of course, because there was I didn't interact with a human being. It was more like a pre populated form. But yeah, yeah, I I still I I did it, but I feel like we missed something. You know, that's in my gut is telling me that there's something that that we miss doing that. But I don't know if you've had experience or know much about that and what the differences are, but but yeah, that was my experience. Yeah. We all of these online services, including mine, we face the ultimate question is, you know, when our users get to the end of the process, do they feel like they can trust the outcome of the product? And it is something that we c we constantly change. And it depends on when you try our app, it may look different. We're actually looking to revamp something for new parents. You know, we're really taking a deep look at how guardianship is. And because we realize a lot of our users are young parents and when you're a young parent and you know, God forbid something happens, you don't really want your seventeen, eighteen year old child to inherit your entire property on the day that they turn eighteen. And so there's a lot of things in there. So it is a complicated process and we are walking a fine line of, you know, user experience versus the reality of turning something so dry and so boring into something that really matters. Yeah, and feels like it's aligned to your hopes and dreams and goals and plans. We're young parents. We have a three and a four year old. And I think the first time that my wife and I went on an international trip. when we had kids without the kids was when we set up our own living will investment because they're like, I don't know. Very unlikely that anything's going to happen, but in the event it is, yeah, we needed something in place ready to go if with if worse came to worst. So so yeah, absolutely. I think that's great a great target. Because I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way. Yeah. Yeah. One thing we're looking to build out now, and we just started two weeks ago, is we think about users, they come in, you know, d They're thinking about this process and sure you export the document, you sign it, but then you think, okay, how do I store it? So we built out a Dropbox-ish system. And then we're thinking, all right, notarization. So we've essentially now curated an ecosystem of services that the bar is that all of them have to have interacted with me personally. So there's I think I've probably had interactive with about 60 notaries now and about a hundred. Hospice palliative cares. But the goal is to build out this ecosystem where, you know, in the world of AI that we're moving into, there's deep fakes that are coming, there's fake UGC content every day. And the only thing we have left is trust, right? And I'm hoping to build out this directory of even nonprofits, for example. You know, if we can collect a group of nonprofits that all care about certain cause, and there's a company that does that for free, it's called Free Will, a free promo for them. But they they do it so good and I really got inspired by them to say, Hey, probably a lot of my users care about some causes that they want to con contribute to. And when they have this clarity to do so, I would like to empower them to do that as well in their estate plan. And so we're building out this ecosystem to make it easy for a user to genuinely live that life fully, e even while they're alive. Yeah. Wow. That's so interesting. I want to connect with you offline about about that because I have some ideas. Okay. So so so so so for Airlight, talk to me about the evolution. Like when y'all started, which was pretty recently, and how you've evolved to date and where you hope to see it in the next X amount of years. It's been about a year now. You know, so when we started, we thought, okay, we want to help people organize their life so that they have clarity as to where they are today. We wanna inspire them to choose. figure out what is enough in their lifetime. Because once you know where you are today, once you know what is enough, you can figure out how to live intentionally to get there. And then with my mom's passing, I realized, gosh, this whole topic is overwhelming. It there's so much. And I'm 34 and I cared a lot about my aging parents. And my dad's still pretty young. He's my mom was 62 when she passed and my dad's sixty sixty-three. But I'm thinking about how does their quality of life stay high? And experience life as they go older. And that was the direction that I was building towards. But now that my mom is not here, it also gave me a lot of inspiration to help really the whole ecosystem of people who are approaching this topic, acknowledging that someday to not be here, you know, how can we support them? So that's very abstract, but a very specific idea, for example, is. You know, there's seasons of our lives. I'm in a season of my life that I am traveling a lot because one day I'll I hope to have kids soon. And I know I won't be traveling as much. So I think there's this season of my father's life where he's, you know, in his 60s now and he wants to do certain things. And I want to maybe create, for example, a bucketless agency where I can ask my user, maybe someone like my father, to say, What was your hobby when you were eighteen? And is it possible for me to help you relive that hobby? Sixty year old. You know, maybe it's skydiving at sixty two is okay, but maybe eighty two isn't okay, right? There's some equation as to when we can do things to live life to the fullest. So that's the direction we're going. I'm not honestly sure how it's gonna play out, just because I still gotta get to fifty states first for our estate plan. And that's it's very expensive legal. Le my legal bills are very expensive. but that's the direction we're going towards. Wow. Wow. That's amazing. So looking to the future, the goal is to get all fifty states and then use this estate planning process to maybe uncover things that could maybe lead to people being even happier during the last X amount of years, w what have you. Even me, a young person, I Based on statistics, I shouldn't pass away anytime soon due to old age. But I would probably also get value from doing that activity as well as people that are older. But just using this whole process as a way to unlock some of those things is really interesting. I think this living life to the fullest thing is so hard to sell, right? It's it's easier to sell a tangible thing where there's a legal document, a product at the end. If I can, I would just honestly w I really want to do this. And I think there's a lot of apps out there that are trying, which is like your one place where you have. your whole life, right? And it's a lot of data, it's a lot of banking connections and things like that. A lot of APIs. Yes. But I'm looking at it from an angle of once we ⁓ well, I forgot who said this quote, but we all have two lives. The first one is the day we're born and the second one is the day that we find out why we're here. Right. And I think if I can somehow unlock the second day that we're born, the second version of that for most people, that that's generally our mission right now. Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like the estate planning process is one of those moments where you do have pretty deep self-reflection on things. So so I think naturally that could be a good environment in which to ask some of the questions that could unlock that. So totally, totally. And yeah, I totally get you what you mean. Of you you would love to have the app just do that, but it's very hard to measure level of happiness in life. It's just it's hard to measure that. But having that document, that last will or the the estate plan in place. And then using those personal questions that a lot of times are asked during the estate planning process to unlock how to make people happier during their second lives is is a great trajectory and inspiring. So wow. Awesome. Wow. People that are maybe wanting to start this process or have started it already, but maybe paused it or haven't at all and want to get it kicked off. What's the process or what would you advise them to do? If you're listening to this and you're suddenly motivated to do this, you're welcome. But also deaf deaf is a very abstract thing. And I think abstract things are easy for us to put off. Right. When we get busy, we just think, all right, I'll do it some other time. So instead of thinking of this entire process as deaf, as this abstract thing that's not gonna hopefully not gonna happen anytime soon, flip that around and think of the people that really matters. Right. Start with the people, start with the things. The reason why you want to do this to be to begin with, one of her users that I finally got to sit down with told me that for the first time in her life, she sat down with herself and wrote her husband a letter for the deathbed. And the things that she uncovered made her realize that their day-to-day stresses is so small in comparison to what really matters at the end. And that reflection, the fact that she paused and, you know, in our app reflected on this brought so much value to her that made me realize that's what we need to focus on. That actually uncovered a pattern of all our users coming in, not starting with an item to protect, but rather a person. So if you're thinking about this process, start with the people, right? Write down a list of names that people you care about first and really write down why you even Feel motivated in this very moment to do this. So that when things do get busy, you kind of look back at this and be like, all right, I remember why I wanted to do this in the first place. Right. And your avenues are, we talked about this. There's unlimited lawyers out there, there's airlight, there's also free forms out there that's usable. And, you know, if you're like my best friend, you need a checklist. There are some tools that are better for you. We have a checklist as well. But if you're a conversationalist and you just want to have conversation, then give Airlight a try. Yeah. ⁓ This is amazing. I'm personally going to try this out. So I'll probably be one of the users that that pops onto your feed here in the next few days. Because I think one thing that I learned when I initially did this was these are like living documents that change over time. And that was like an aha moment for me. Like when you have Buy your first house or when you get more assets or when you have kids, when maybe family members are getting older, or maybe have something that happens that makes you think, ⁓ I should probably have something like this in place. When you get targeted, I feel like untipped by ads of tax strategy that say you're gonna lose all of your money if you don't do certain things with estate planning, like little things that trigger these moments, I think are more and more common. So yeah, so I'm I'm really interested and and want to look into it deeper. Is there anything that maybe we we didn't cover that you wanna to also bring up? Yeah, I'm gonna piss my lawyer off at this point because I'm gonna give you legal advice. This is for entertainment purpose only, but I I think at this point you should certainly look into getting a living trust. Sorry, a revocable trust. Because, you know, the truth is I consciously know that a lot of people in my circles should get a trust. Because In in very simple terms, a trust is like a a basket where you put all your things into and when you pass away, instead of having to transfer each one of those, you just hand the basket over to someone, right? And say, you know, don't go through a court process, just take my basket. I'm part owner of the process of the basket. And we had to confront ourselves with this fact that you know, a will doesn't avoid avoid probate, which is a process where the court decides if your document is valid and all that. And what we come to realize is that we had to sit with ourselves and be okay with the fact that most pe most of our users will either use our app to create a will or have nothing at all. And every day we have to ask ourselves, is what we give our user better than nothing at all? Because the truth is we're not really going for the entire piece of the pie of estate planning. We're not going for people who have Properties and actually for one case you can just write your beneficiaries and your accounts. But there's a lot of things that that just having a will isn't necessarily enough, but we want to get people to do the zero to one. We want to get people comfortable with the topic to have to first step. And this is why we've referred over three dozens of our users to attorneys. And that process is also so very delicate because. We can't really tell our users, hey, based on what we know about you, a legal interpretation, you should talk to a lawyer, right? We can't do that. And so we try to surface like, hey, have you heard about a trust? And we don't do trust, by the way. So it's not something we can make money on, but we just want to make sure that we're doing right by our users. And my goal is out of the seventy percent of Americans that don't have a will, if we can capture even one percent of that and help them go from zero to one, and if they graduate from airlight and go into having a trust, that's fine by me. Right. So I know as we're having this conversation and getting to know you a little bit more, you know, obviously probably talk to a lawyer, but also use my app to give me some feedback 'cause I'd love to hear your feedback. Yes. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Cause I've used some apps before. So yes, I'm excited to to test it out. And the ones I've used do not integrate a conversational bot AI in it. And I think there's a huge opportunity to use that in a very positive way. So especially if kind of knowledge basis associated with the right states from a legal standpoint. So amazing. Amazing. Great. I feel like time has flown by. Is there any last words or anything you want to leave us with before we wrap up here? No, thank you. I just want to also give you a shout out for you know surfacing cool organizations and talk about causes that matters. I think as someone who's very deeply connected with a lot of causes, I met my partner, my girlfriend, through helping the Ukrainian situation. So So very it's very close to my heart. So I appreciate the work you do and the things you put out there. Yeah, of course. We're here for you, but really appreciate that. Yeah, we've had a blast doing it and honored to share stories like yours that are making an impact and helping bridge some of the knowledge gaps and fear that people have, whether it's them getting older or getting having kids or having a home or their family members. So thank you so much for everything you do and we're excited to to share this to more people and hopefully drive more people and users to to get their hands on some of these tools. So thank you again so much. Thank you. Thanks for having me.