Clarity is love in practical form with Jermaine Ee.

0:00 Hello everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Arthur's Roundtable. Super grateful for people that are paying attention and the Family Office Insights community, which we're also super grateful for because they pay attention a lot. And thanks for joining us today. We're happy to have Jermaine here with us and we're going to talk about his journey, but he also has a company that is interesting to the group. I'm sure you'll find it interesting once we get into it here. So, Tremaine, thanks for being here and welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Let's start with your journey. Start at the beginning if you'd like. Yeah, so born and raised in Los Angeles to immigrant parents, I am Malaysian Chinese. So in Malaysia is very much like the United States. It's a multicultural place, multi ethnic, multi religious place.

0:46 And so, you know, I, I've kind of grown up with this concept of living next to people who are very different and getting along and finding common ground. And so for that I am grateful because I think that has informed a lot of the way I look at the world. So I spent about 10 years in Malaysia and then I moved back to the US, did high school, went to USC and then graduated but could never get a job because everything that was interesting to me, I was either under qualified or overqualified for. So anybody who looked at my resume would just think this is a risky hire. Either he's not going to stay for too long or he's just too under qualified. And so I was 21 years old, between 21 and 24, I drove for 4000 rides in Uber so that I can spend the other 8 hours of my day building startups.

1:37 And so about five years in, you know, I, I've been building this company that helps virtual reality, implement virtual reality and augmented reality filters onto Snapchat. And so I would go to restaurant and say, Hey, would you like someone to take a picture around you and have branded content based on the, the Geo fence, the targeting based on the location. And they pay me a fee. And what we wanted to build technology, but what ended up happening was we build an agency model. You know, client services has its funds and and frustrations. So when the 2016 election happened, I was sitting in San Diego with a friend from Alabama and a friend from Seattle. And what I noticed was that they were both incredibly kind and thoughtful human being, but they were talking over each other. They couldn't just there was a lack of empathy. Do you think I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it's only because I've been around for a long time, not because I know what I'm talking about, but when I experience what you just described.

2:47 Smart people and kind people have not learned how to listen, and they're often waiting for the people across the table to stop talking so they can say what's next on their mind. And it's not malicious, it's just not a well honed skill to listen well, right? Does that make sense to you? Yeah, I think a big part of it is that we live in such a information heavy life now, right? We we're constantly bombarded with things and things that pushes us to have opinions without even forming, not even having enough information, right. And so and I think a lot of times our default setting is just tied to our ability to defend an idea or ability to have an opinion that is either accepted by the masses or feels good, you know, to our community.

3:39 So I think oftentimes we just forget to challenge what our default settings are. Yeah, Jermaine, I'm so glad that you said it that way because it's very clear and it's what we're experiencing in the large part in the world today, especially the US, where people attach themselves to an ideology without that serves them because their echo chamber validates that, right? And they haven't really dug deep, but they like the idea that they're defending, right? Yeah, I, I think we all like to be right, you know, and we, we all like to be validated. And, you know, I am no exception. You know, I, I have my biases and I do think we live in the greatest country in this experiment, but it is definitely not perfect, right?

4:23 And that's kind of the beauty of it is that we're we all have and are entitled to our opinions and whether or not we can put it to work and play the game and get the things that we want. I think that is the experiment. And so, yeah, I I thought after that conversation that I didn't want to spend the next year selling more augmented reality ads. I didn't want to just sell ads, basically. And so I cold emailed the treasurer of California at the time is a guy by the name of John Chung, very, very incredible man. And I aligned with his policies because he's a fiscally conservative but socially fairly progressive guy. And what he was famous for at the time, we don't, I won't go too far into politics, but what he was famous for at the times, yeah, it was that he helped the the pay of the California legislature because they couldn't pass a budget that balanced.

5:18 And so he made a lot of enemies on both sides. And I thought would what a refreshing idea to have someone who looked at the books and say, hey, this budget just doesn't make sense, right. And so I cold emailed him and and got a job with him and ran his. I didn't run his entire campaign. I I was his finance deputy and we ran a campaign against Gavin Newsom and lost. But what I'm. Sorry to hear that, sounds like a he sounds like he would have been a better candidate based on what? Gavin's managed to do with California, and I can be political about that. So I mean, I, I have have a lot of thoughts on it because I was in the campaign. Yeah, I imagine you do. You probably saw the plumbing right? We have we have a lot of competitive research and things like that, but but I think what it taught me the most is how the game is played.

6:07 It's like, how does money affect power? How does attention come around? And how do we time things in the media cycle that can win a campaign? And what what is a campaign? It's just you have a set of the way that you look at this world that you think should be and you're out there convincing other people to do it. And I think that's also a lost skill these days because I think people shy away from defending what they believe it. And then then you have the other side of the spectrum where people defend something that they believe in so strongly without a lot of thought, a lot of information and a lot of validation. And so, so for 18 months, I was able to sit in these meetings where I really got to see, you know, how are, how do things work?

6:48 And it's incredible. It's made me very jaded, you know, And now if a kid comes up to me and say, Hey, I want to go change the world, I'm going to go to law school and then be a public defendant. And I'm like, no, no, go to Goldman Sachs, right? And make more money, right. And perhaps you can learn about lobbying or something like that. Because unfortunately, that's how the world works. And for better or worse, that's, that's where we are in the experiment that that is this democracy that we have. And so after the campaign had ended, I moved to New York because if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. And so I raised some money, started a company with the goal, the mandate was to create 10 locations of a education startup.

7:33 And then once I create a 10 location, I can scale it by franchising it. And so this startup was the whole theme of it is to train children's brain to help them focus better. And the way we came about that was we had met a woman from Korea who was the best at mental math. So we hooked her brain up to MRI at Stanford, studied the data and things like that, took the research and created a curriculum that essentially was like a Kumon and Mathnasium model, you know, so every location had the unit economics work out to be probably walk away with 2K per year net for the owners. And when I got to location #5 ramping up six and seven, COVID hit and you know, real estate, that was probably the first time I had multiple threats of real estate lawsuits and things like that. And we got out of that company still going in a completely different form now.

8:29 And it's actually expanded to Indonesia. It's it's doing fairly well, I think. And then I went into a time where I wanted to spend more time with family. So I think COVID did that to a lot of people. And I just planted my entire life next to my parents. We got a Co working space. They sat across from me in the hallway. They ran their own business and I ran my own. I was consulting at the time doing some head hunting for VC and private equity backed companies and I was just fascinated by the talent game, by the ability to put a team together and, and make a really big impact and kind of a random tie into family offices. I actually hired ACOO.

9:10 No, I'm sorry. I hired a VP of finance for a family office here in LA and the goal was to just build proper systems and build a proper CRM to manage everything. So I have a little bit of exposure to your space, so. Hired them for your firm. I hired them 40 family office, so the family office had. Hired. So you did a placement? Yeah, got it. We did a placement for it, yeah. And that's what, that's the first time I got to tap to probably 80 or 90 back office, family office folks and it was quite fun. Yeah, I bet. Yeah. Yeah, so can. We just go back one second because it's timely and if you don't mind, and if you do, it's OK too. What seemingly is going on with political campaigns, some of them when you were working there? I'm wondering whether what we believe to be true is often really happening where somebody who's writing the checks, meaningful checks to get somebody in power, have some ideological position on something. Let's just say the one that's very clear and Gavin is not willing to admit because it sounds like somebody's got him under their thumb.

10:22 I don't understand this. But, you know, where should we have your men and women's sports? I mean, it's pretty obvious to most people. It's probably not a good idea. And I'm not asking you to confirm or deny that. I'm just saying. And so, you know, the allegation with Gavin is that Alex Soros has been funding him that whatever Alex says he's going to do. Did you find the case where your candidate was more true to what they believed to be the truth or was he also? And I'm not asking you to throw him under the bus. I'm just saying in the process of learning how all this works, what you were saying how this works. Is it often the case where the the checks big enough? I'm going to fly in the face what I really believe, so I make sure I get the money.

11:09 So there is a few layers to this. I, I have helped on a presidential campaign and it's on it's Andrew Yang's campaign. You know, I, I like him as just, I think just got along. But so I can't speak to everybody because I think it's a little bit general. I think there probably are some ideological things that are happening. However, I do think in a perfect world a good candidate will question if this check, what does this check? What weight does this check come with? Yeah. What's it going on with? Yeah, and and why I like John, why I went to work for him and that's the only campaign I've ever worked on. I basically quit politics after I helped around a little bit but never had a job after was because he say no to money to a lot of places and maybe because maybe that's also why he couldn't win, right?

11:59 Yeah. So you're talking to a candidate with I think with a spine and was willing to stand up to things that are wrong. And so it is hard to get to the peak of politics without compromising some things that you really care about. I think actually it's it's impossible because I think the way the country is set up is that you have to build some coalition, right? And if we really think about the way things are right now, probably 30% of Americans are on one side, 30 on the other. And then you have 40 that don't really care or can be swayed a little bit. And the goal isn't to win the 30s because those are kind of set. It's really the middle, like how do you dice it up and how can you win the rhetoric and, and you know, on the Democratic side, it will be like the labor union monies and things like that, the labor influence on that side.

12:50 And, and the Republican side, you know, would be churches, you know, and, and there are like organized groups like that where ideology is the main reason why they do something. But it is a little bit up to the candidate, you know, how they want to approach these. So does that is does that a OK answer? Super helpful. Yeah. And by the way, I think Andrew has a lot of good ideas. There's, there's no doubt about it, Like he's solid. There's some ideas I don't agree with, but that's going to happen in every case. Yeah, yeah. And I think the dangerous part, yeah, the dangerous part is for us to want to agree with a candidate 100%. You know, I think that is just impossible. I don't agree with anybody 100.

13:34 Yeah, right. Exactly. All right, so you sold the OR exited from the learning company and then what now? So I went to do, I thought I was going to become a investor in AVC setting because I love tech. I love things that can scale. And I met a guy, his name is Todd Gitlin. He's a he's a headhunter, he's a recruiter, executive recruiter. And we had a chat and he told me this one thing that completely changed the way I thought about it, which is ideas and, and monies everywhere. But it's the ability to put a team together to, to identify talent, not in skills, not only in skills, but also just aptitude in emotion, intelligence, you know, and on all of that. And how do you pair that thing together to build an incredible organization?

14:24 And so I was lucky enough to learn from him for about a year and a half where I worked on and supported mostly the deals that he was working on. Just incredible. I think I've gained an MBA out of those 18 months just by. Talking to. Super smart people all the time and also very humbling. Yeah. And shortly after my mother who raised 4 kids, she went back to work essentially as an admin, a very low paying admin, because she didn't think that she deserved the better job. She hasn't. She had an MBA since the 80s and she's worked prior to becoming a full time mom. But I think like many women, you know, after raising kids, they didn't, don't want to go back and they're not as aggressive in what they deserve. And so they don't fight for it.

15:11 And my mom did the same. She started as an admin, worked eight years up to being the vice president of a import department of a shipping company during COVID. And that was great. That was a great time to be doing imports. And, and what we had realized was that she wasn't happy about some of the arrangements of a company and how she was treated a little bit. And so I told her, hey, why don't we start something, I have some free time, let's work on something to get her. So we partnered up, we got an office to get her and she had built this little company into a a healthy sub 10 million positive EBITDA free cash flow company.

15:54 And so it's like a great lifestyle company. You know, talk about a woman who immigrated to the US and and was working in restaurants in the late 70s to she wouldn't ever admit this, but to become a millionaire, right? That's the American dream. And so and so the the best thing about it, though, I was so grateful that I got to spend all my lunches with her. You know, we got to talk all the time. We got to disagree on what should we pay employees because she's an, you know, an old school kind of let's pay them just right. And, and I come from the world of let's pay them above market. So we retain them. And so so we had our little conflicts there. And in all those conversations that we had while we were hanging out for lunch, I realized that there was this underlying fear of running out of money before you die. And the woman that had worked all her life and saved all her life didn't know what it looked like to spend all her savings or any of her savings.

16:53 And in these conversations, I ended up building her a chat bot to talk to her about what are who were you before you were my mother? You know what, what were your hobbies? What relationships that you would stories that you want to remember. So she she would have to tell this chat bot in whatever language you wish to. That's the beauty of AI. And the chat bot will remember these things. Her assets, relationships are dreams. Super cool. Yeah. And, and so a few months into this, I realized if I have your assets in your relationships, I can make a will for you. And so that's how air light came to be. And you know, someone who's not from legal tech and not from this field, I have, I have basically 2 sets of attorneys, one to work on the tech side of it and the other side to keep me out of estate planning trouble. And we're doing it state by state. We're only live in California right now. We're, we're going to expand to the rest of the US hopefully in the next 12 months or so.

17:51 And. What is the? Is the barrier? Just making sure you have the idiosyncratic, the idiosyncratic nature of the state laws properly in the chat box and the documents. Is that the barriers just work like that or is there regulatory? There is no regulatory, there is some ethical problems. If my app were to give you legal advice, that would be crossing the line of ethics and I think official is UPL unlawful practices of law. So, so companies like LegalZoom has gone through these. So there's some precedents that we're following. And Trust and will, right? Trust and will as well.

18:34 Yes, Trust and will was a San Diego based company. So where we are is when somebody wants to create a will or any estate plan, they first Google or they asked their friends, right? So right, Google is free, is uncertain. And then you move up one step. ChatGPT is free, but it's it's very uncertain. It's actually horrible at drafting anything because there are no guardrails. And then you move up one step in the consideration chain. You go to companies like Trust and will free will.org, which is a free service, and LegalZoom. And these are essentially form fillers. They tell you what you need to fill up in these these columns and you fill in your information and then you go up one more than its attorneys. It's expensive, but it's certain, right? It's tailored.

19:25 And so if you think of this chain of consideration, a lot of people, first of all, won't even take the step to do it. So our biggest, our biggest competition is inaction and in a second, second competition, sorry, go. For it's not a very pleasant thing to think about. Right. And there's an ego element to IT. People who may be at 45 years old, they feel like they should know something about estate planning, but they don't. And because of that, they refuse to start a conversation. They put it off. Let's, you know, let's make it a little lighter. They put it off. They say, oh, we'll do it next, next year. And so the solution that we're building right now that we have is a chatbot. That immediately ask you the most important questions.

20:07 For example, do you have kids? Are they minors? Do you have pets? Do you have homes? And we built this users context and then we're able to chat with the user and clarify things of what they want, what they don't want. And because we have all this context, we're also able to educate the user. So if the user is saying, what is the difference between a guardianship and a conservatorship based on the context of that user, we're able to to tell them, you know, like here's what it is. Our biggest constraint is we cannot give legal advice. And so the best thing we can do is based on their context, we give them the best practices of other people and they have to choose.

20:49 And so our job is to translate what they choose into a legal document that is valid in their state. So it's very interesting their storytelling to you, prompted by questions and then the answers frames out how you would explain to them why a guardianship or conservatorship is different for them as opposed to in general, right? Yes. And that's the beauty of AI is that we get to explain this in English and Spanish, you know, in Vietnamese or whatever other languages. Of course, whenever I I bring this up to my lawyers, they, they get nervous because now we're we're toeing the line of what is legal? What can we say, what can we not? But if I think to its core, what is AI good for in everyday consumer?

21:38 It's problems like these, right? It's things that feel daunting, but because there's a low barrier of entry as well as there's no ego behind it and now you can actually fill the information gap. And there's some anonymity about IT, people, your ego point. I think it's important because if you go to your local attorney and you have to disclose everything to them and you also have to disclose that you don't know what you're talking about and you might feel intimidated by the knowledge that you don't have. And then of course, you have to write them a check. And the, the, the, as you, I'm sure you know, the, the business of writing wills, unless you someone has a lot of money in a complex estate is the, the historically, the real value is having the wills in the vault and then the law firm will prosper once you die. So it's like a, an annuity asset, right? Because then they could administer the will and that's when they make the money.

22:36 They don't make the money on a $5000 will, right? Yeah, we, we have, you know, the one of the common pushbacks from attorneys is a lot of our users really do need a trust. And to that I say I completely agree. You know, however, how do we get them from zero to 1? How we, how do we get them to even consider doing this? And I have so far recommended over a dozen of my users to attorneys based on what they asked me to. Because sometimes, you know, I, I understand someone's situation because I, I call my users just to understand what they're building and their life and, and everything. And I tell them like, Hey, I'm not supposed to give you legal advice, but I think you should talk to a lawyer because there are things that my app will flag for us, where we're finding a little bit of challenge is that we're at 179 a year.

23:24 If I send my user to any attorney, the price will 10 times, right? And so then there's a sticker shock factor where I now no longer am able to fulfill a promise to my user which is to give them an estate plan. Right. Yeah, but you look, I don't know where this is going to go. Sounds super interesting. It gets people from zero to 60, right? It's better to not die intestate. It's better to have a will or what do they call the the a living living will or living trust or something like that where you don't have to go through probate. I mean, all that's better than leaving it alone, right? So I think that you could help a lot of people getting from, you know, disaster to at least some form of organized so the heirs don't have to deal with nonsense if you no go ahead.

24:19 Yeah, on that point, you know, if you kind of think back to why I started this, it was to help my mother gain clarity of what she has. I think this is the thing that I'm trying to do in my startup. That's the vision of the startup. It's clarity because I, I believe a lot of times people live on just on like an autopilot and the moment you stop and think about what you currently have and what does it really mean to have enough, right? Because there's, there's kind of this endless chase of either things or relationships and experiences and things like that. But I would love to help people to think about what they currently have and what does it mean to them?

25:04 And maybe when you identify these things, do a little bit more of that, the things that you like. So, you know, clarity is love in practical form, and I think if we can help the people that we love have more clarity, that's the whole business. I think you're on to something. In fact, I've spent a lot of time with people who have lots of money, enormous amounts of money, and some of them that are closer to me just because I've seen this movie before so many times. And I sit on advisory boards of family offices and I see the conflicts with the children and I know the kids are on drugs and whatever, whatever. All the problems that whether you're rich or not still exist is that people often don't think.

25:53 They don't want to get off the treadmill. And they don't think about, wait a minute, should I be living my best life because I only have 30 more years left? And they don't think about it in that context. And I think you're on to something because, and I've only experienced it where there's just endless amounts of money. But even when there's endless amounts of money, there's a certain level of lifestyle that someone might, especially if it's not new money, right? That they, they don't need to, you know, go and spend a lot of money to demonstrate to the world that they have it or feel like they need to do it. But I've, I've spent a lot of time with people who finally realize, wait a minute, I can spend some of this money and not feel guilty and enjoy my life with my family and not even think about it anymore, right? It's like, and, and of course the main element of that is fear, right?

26:50 Or the, the awareness that you truly won't be running out of money, right? It's different if you don't have a lot, but you could run out. But I think you're on to something. I think that's, that is the message is kind of this reminder to, to each other. So I'm 34 now and in my 20s I, I worked every day. I, I think I didn't do anything except for work. And sometimes I go to Europe now and I spend my summers mostly in Europe because my partner's European and I look at this hostels and I thought I should have, I should have backpacked Europe and stayed in a hostel in my 20s because I, I wouldn't do it in my 30s, right. And so I'm thinking ahead now, what would I not do in my E that I could do in my 30s now?

27:35 And the answer is simple. It's why I've been traveling so much with my partner because we know that one day we'll have kids and we're probably not going to have strollers going to the Taj Mahal in India. You know, we'll do that to Copenhagen, where the streets are fairly easy to roll a stroller. And so now I'm thinking about all the things that I want to do in my 30s and this period of my life. And there's the same version of that for the 40s, fifties, sixties, 70s and and so on. And so I think, you know, this concept of time flies is kind of crazy to me because we all have the same amount of time. I think it's just that we kind of forget about how we spend these time and so. It is the most valuable asset we have. It's yeah it time and and health is like the only thing that we got to protect.

28:22 Yeah, you're going to laugh, but my my kids laugh at me all the time because I say to them, I have 32 1/2 more years left. And they go, well, how'd you come up with that? And I said, well, it's just an estimate, but it's probably pretty accurate. And I don't want to spend a minute doing things that I don't want to do. And I admit that I'm in a position where I can make that decision. You know, I'm not worried about where the next meal is coming from, but being discerning about your time is huge. And it also plays into the health part of it because if you're always stressed out, we know heart disease happens because of stress in large part, right? So yeah, I think you're you're really something. Yeah, I I don't think this, I don't think I told you this before, but my mom suddenly passed away in August. You didn't tell me, but I read it. Yes, I'm sorry to.

29:16 Hear that five months ago from today, which feels like a long time ago now. And because of those three years that we have to get her, we did so much right. We went all over the world. And my dad, my mom, and sometimes my brothers and sisters are coming along. And I always think that would I have lived any differently if I knew she was going to be gone? I think probably not. I've squeezed every trip out of it. That was reasonable. You know, there's still life that we got to do and we we just, you know, if you've got to work, you got to work. That is part of living and part of being in a society. But I do think a lot of people put off. Yeah, no doubt.

29:56 And some people put it off because they don't have a choice, like they have to get up and toil away to make sure the kids can go to school, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, right, and eat, I mean some. I would even actually I would even challenge that a little bit because you know, we I had this conversation with my parents. They wanted a bigger house, right? And they wanted this American dream for white picket fence and like a single story house in Pasadena and that that will set of this back a few $1,000,000 in Pasadena. And and I, I did the calculation. I say, hey, look, if if we didn't get a bigger house, we would have this more amount of more money to travel and to eat with. Never looking at the menu, right? Never looking at the price and to live a life that focuses on the things that actually matters versus on what's an extra 2 bedrooms going to do for you, right?

30:46 You're just going to store more things that you, you communicate mostly. And I think like at different levels of social economic, we can have this conversation very differently. And, and because my family have lived through from nothing to having something like we are more conscious about how we spend and how we save. And I mean, my dad has been an entrepreneur his whole life and that's where I got it from, you know, to keep going back and keep trying. So we've lived with very little, and we've lived with not abundance, but with more. Yeah, yeah, that's super interesting. I'm interested to know the archives that you have as a result of the storytelling your mother put into the chat box.

31:30 Must be priceless. One of the things that we did was we went to Oklahoma in May OK was the place that my parents had arrived in the US in the late 70s, and we decided to go back to see where they started their journey. And we drove around Edmond and OKC. We visited these homes, the neighborhoods that they lived in, they don't look too great. And we went to even the place where my dad worked as a cleaner at a Funeral Home because that was the student job that he was assigned to. And somewhere along the way, my mom had suggested that we go to the first restaurant, if we can call it a restaurant, that she ever had food in the United States.

32:12 And it was a Burger King in Edmond, OK. And we walked in. I had my camera with me. Actually, I have this big camera here that I film everything. And I miked her up. And I said, hey, mom, why don't you order what you ordered all those years ago? Because I'm sure the menu's the same. So she did. Yeah. She, she got a chicken sandwich. And then she sat down and I asked her, So what were you thinking? You know, this, you didn't speak really any English at the time. You got a student visa, and you just pack your bags and came to the US knowing that you had to work for the whole, your degree, basically. And she said, well, when I first got the sandwich those days, I split it in half because I had just converted the USD to Malaysian bring it price in my head and I can only afford half of it.

33:03 Yeah. And I think, I think it was really in that moment that it we both, all of us, actually all four of us standing right there, notice this significance of this moment of how far she's come and really how incredible it is that in one generation we went from, you know, whatever she was doing in Oklahoma to me walking around making money just by talking all day. And it's just incredible. It is incredible. It speaks to the resilience of your parents and the decision making to just keep on pushing forward and wanting a better life for you, for them and your kids. But it also speaks to this truly is the land of opportunity. It's a, it's a 250 year experiment. It's not perfect like you said at the beginning, but it's pretty darn good.

33:54 Yeah, it is pretty darn good, I think, for being entrepreneurs. This is maybe one of the only places in the world that celebrates both the wins and the losses. You know, one thing that I cannot stand being in Europe is when you tell somebody an idea, they'll tell you 10 ways why it wouldn't work. And you're and you're you're sending in ballet in New York and you tell somebody a crazy idea and you're like, oh, what about this? And have you thought of this and what about that? And you know all the ways that it could work. And so, yeah, it is incredible. It is incredible and, and what are the things that I've learned in, for example, you mentioned in the UK, if you have a entrepreneurial failure in the UK, you're hit with a scarlet letter like no one wants to talk to you and that's part of their culture, right?

34:45 You failed. And what's really interesting and Silicon Valley's more like this. I don't put it to you this way. The the contrast between New York City and Silicon Valley from entrepreneur and business perspective is both different, but good. Meaning when you're in Silicon Valley, everybody wants to help you. Not saying they will, but they talk like they want to help you. In New York City, people are more interested in talking about or getting to the meat of the matter. Like when you sit down in a meeting in California, and I'm not, I'm just generalizing my experience. I'm not throwing arrows at anybody. When you sit down in California, everybody, oh, well, how was your weekend?

35:25 What did you do that? What are you do in New York? You sit down in a meeting and say, OK, what are we doing? No, we're not doing that. OK, but we'll do this or or yeah, let's do it. So it's a, it's a completely different environment, but the results are the same. Meaning you get to a place, right? You just get to a differently. It's really interesting. They, they say that in California, people are nice to you outwardly and they may be very toxic and judgmental internally, whereas New York is the opposite, right? They, they not, they're not going to be talking nice to you. But I think New Yorkers are very kind. But they're super kind. Yeah. Some of the kindest people I know. I always use this example where, you know, you have a German family walking down 5th Ave. for a stride and they don't realize you can't do that. New York.

36:16 You have to just. You got to because people are going to move around you and you're blocking them and they're walking at a slow play pace. But the really interesting thing is that when somebody who is not familiar with New York and is visiting, especially as a tourist, they get lost and they come and they say, excuse me, Sir, may I ask you to get directions? And the New York is going, hold on a second, just tell me where you want to go and I'll get you there. But none of this fluff. Just tell me where you want to go. Or you take the 6:00 train to 14th St., you get off, you go 2 blocks West and you know that's and then they just keep on moving. Yeah, it is incredible. When I go back to New York, this there's a shift in my brain that I noticed, which is all my friends probably wear the same 5 watches. They all talk in Aums and evaluations and things like that.

37:07 And then when I'm out of New York, my life slows down a little bit, which I've starting to enjoy a little bit more. As my girlfriend used to say that I don't understand how you do these meetings where it's 25 minutes to the dot. Like how do you connect with someone 25 minutes increments throughout the entire day for 12 hours in a row. And I used to do this all the time because we're, we're just, you know, productivity driven. And, and so now I've really pushed myself to slow down a little bit. You know, I've eliminated more people that I don't want to talk to and just try to focus on a conversation that matters a little bit and don't go a little bit deeper in it. So it's been a nice shift. It's really valuable to without prejudice, eliminating people in your life that either are not aligned with you, aren't productive, are negative.

37:58 It's just, it's just it's not worth having their energy around, right? And it could be people you've known for years, but I've done a lot of that over the last few years just because I've become, as you get older, you're more, there's a heightened awareness about how much time you have left, right? It's really, I think I would say the same for family too. You may not be able to get rid of family, but you can certainly reduce the time spent with them. Totally. And if you have toxic people, the energy is just bad. It's not good for anybody, right? It's certainly not worth having that bad vibe for sure. You know, what's really interesting about, you know, prior to COVID when you're talking about learning from people, like when you learn from the headhunter that you worked with, for example, we, we've for years done these in person pitch sessions.

38:48 Now we do them on Zoom because of COVID and I'm out of the city most of the time. But what invariably happens is you've got somebody, an entrepreneur pitching an idea. It could be a startup, it could be around ABC, it doesn't matter. And you've got 30 family offices, really smart rich people. Not all rich people are smart, but in the room and you're pitching to them and IA 100% of the time, the person who's pitching walks away out of that room with an idea that they never even thought of because the people in the room are really smart. And so the byproduct of being in that ecosystem was, holy cow, we never even thought about that.

39:34 And so they would probably walked away with some money, but they walked away with something more valuable, something that they hadn't thought about. And it's really is productive to be with smart people and thoughtful people and, you know, kind people. Sometimes you don't get that, but it's it's good to have that. Yeah, I, I had a conversation with someone who built authentication tools. He's a software engineer. And from that conversation, I just, he, you know, realized that actually we're over engineering some of our things. What we should be focusing on even more than we already do is how to build trust and how to build trust by design. But the fonts, the colors and animations and things like that. As a founder, I think it's very easy to be distracted by many things.

40:26 But yeah, I I got to just constantly remind myself that the only currency I have of my user is that they trust me. They trust me with their most personal data, which we do probably a lot to protect. We encrypt everything. And I think sometimes talking to smart people just helps me realign with what I should be focusing on, and more importantly, what should not be focusing on. Yeah, it's really important. So you talked about by the way, that your company, not that you set out to do this, it not that it's a great idea, but you might end up being the place where the lawyers get their business, right? You could be the feeder system, right?

41:07 If you scale it enough, there'll be a certain amount of people that just need a little bit more complexity. But you got them over the hump. You got them over the hard part actually starting to think and do something about it. And then you could get a referral fee to to. I mean, I'm sure you thought about this, but it's not out of the. Question right. So there is a ethical issue with referral fees for lawyers. There's guidelines about how you can or cannot split fees with non attorneys that are, you know, it's a client attorney privilege. There's a lot of rules around that. And there are there's some workarounds that I'm thinking about. And you know, at this point what I tell the lawyers that I send clients to is, hey, look, I'm going to export my users data with their permission for you. So you can not have to ask them all the same questions that they already gave me all the context to in return, can you please give them a discount, right?

42:06 Because I can't take that discount. There's there's some ethical issues there. So I'm working through this right now. I'm trying to figure out what to do. Maybe I'll have to be acquiring a law firm. Maybe. Acquire a law firm. Like I'm not here to split the hairs on the legal issues with you, but for example, there are tons of law firms that advertise on TV and pay to do the advertising to get the leads to the like mesothemolonial, whatever the asbestos cancer is, whatever it is, you know that I don't think that's a Gray area. But anyway, we're not, I'm not here to give legal advice either. But you know, there's, you know, we have a a friend that does mitigation finance and he'll go on and pay for the ads to get identify the people that need litigation and then sell them leads to the law firm and then finance the litigation because he's got a bucket of money, right? So, yeah, but he's also a law firm, so that like, you know, professional.

43:13 Yeah, there are, there are rules around non lawyers being limited partners at law firms, but the, you know, the personally injury field industry has opened up a lot of these because, well, private equity moved into personal injuries and with private equity, everything changes. And so I am very aware of some of the possibilities and I am very focused on building the user experience right now. But you know, truthfully, a lot of these companies, one way we can grow is to work with every credit union in the country, right? We can just offer it to their users. And I've seen models where Trust and will I, I think most of the traffic comes from affiliate deals, mid market banks and things like that.

43:55 At least that's the public available data of their website traffic. And so I am studying them and understanding where the revenue sources are. I think I am a little bit different. I want to say I'm different from them because I estate planning is not my end goal. It's a product that is very tangible. My end goal really is to help people live their life to the fullest. And whatever those products look like in the future, it's going to be part of the company in some form or another. Does the process produce a work product, like, for example, the storytelling that you now have from your mother for the heirs as well? We will be building that part of the product in two fold. 1 is more of the family nostalgia side of it, the family archives in some ways.

44:45 The second part of it is what happens when someone pass, right? There's a lot of things to do. I I'm still going through this right now. And the reason why I'm very clear about this is we have a trust. We have attorneys and accountants and still there's so much work. So I can't even imagine what it's like if somebody has to go through probate, you know, and like this entire process is quite stressful and overwhelming. And so we will be building those tools right after we figure out this estate planning site. I don't know the nuances of the California inheritance law, but is there a way to avoid aside from the trust? There's been a lot of talk over the years about avoiding probate and how you do it.

45:32 Is a living trust or living will or something like that? Is that also available in California? It is available in fact California. I think it's one of the more, the easier states to set up a revocable trust, which essentially is a entity or container that holds all your assets. And instead of passing it on when somebody dies, the trustees of this entity gets to take it from the entity. And the challenge there for most people that I want to, I don't know what the exact data is, but a lot of people who created the trust never end up properly funding the trust. So they didn't move the deed into the trust. There's all these things. You have to retitle everything, yeah. Exactly.

46:15 And then the county assessor, you know, will write to you. As you know, I have this right here. Look, it's a county assessor of Los Angeles asking me why I'm moving something around. And so all these things are even for someone who's living in this topic, it's a lot. And so I can't imagine you know someone who's avoiding this topic. Yeah, totally. Well, I think that it's a noble task to help people get started because it's, it's, it's a not only a daunting task to get it started and then finish it because you have to think about who's the trustees, who's the guardian of the kids, who, I mean, holy shit, right. It's like, there's a lot to think about. And you know, I've seen so many estate plans that sit on the shelf for two years before anybody decides who they're going to have to do the be the trustee or the guardian, right? Because they're just, you know, thinking about it. We are, we are combating inaction. You know, my biggest competition is an action. It's human nature that is dealing with a topic that is not urgent and not top of mind.

47:28 Until it is right, until it's, until it's everything. Do you have titles? If you imagine you have, you've dressed like titling insurance properly and keeping it out of these stage and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, we're actually exploring to build a way where, you know, for example, if you have a child Schwab account or one of the fidelity, those things actually don't go through probate. They have a beneficiary designation and so they don't even have to touch the court. The the issue though is that a lot of people don't update those. And so we're trying to work out a authentication tool so that our app can speak to, let's say child Schwab and just update these things. Yeah, it's an API to update these things, tiny right now, so I can't imagine Charles Schwab entertaining us, but we'll get there.

48:17 So I think it's going to be good for the whole ecosystem to have it. Yeah. I want to touch a little bit on something before we wrap up. That, I think is really important, that you learn working with the folks at the Headhunter. I keep home Headhunter, but I'm not sure that's a proper term. But I don't really care. I've interviewed a lot of the very interesting tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, and building the team, as your friend told you, is crucial. And the competition in Silicon Valley is brutal because you've got people throwing a lot of money around, right? How have you? One of the people I interviewed was Ahmad that was Co founder of Mercury. You know Mercury.

49:02 The bank. The neobank, Yeah. Yep, I think I used them for one of my. Startups, yeah, we definitely use them. We we love them. We've got a little partnership going on with them. But I interviewed him and he said multiple times and I and I know him personally, so it's not like it's a big surprise. But the reason he's been able to pull it off is because of the teams that he's been able to cobble together that not only have technical skills, but the sentiment from the top down for the company has worked like he's done a really good job. Have you experienced that even in the size of your company? I think talent is everything.

49:45 I, I know I've said that before. I've, I've always been shocked by what people would give up to do a job. So, you know, there's, there's six forms of compensation. I know we normally think of it as like cash and equity, but cash and equity is really just one of it. There's also the aspect of learning, you know, depending on age and interest, learning is huge. There's personal brand, which is someone's pedigree. So someone who went to Harvard or Penn or Stanford or worked at Google or worked at Bain, that's the pedigree and the title and the companies. And then there's a relationships. If I can, I would keep every engineer I've ever worked with close to me and bring them along to every project that I work on because those relationships and team chemistry is kind of replaceable.

50:32 And then we kind of move down to there's fun and fulfillment, which is one thing, and then there's legacy, right? I think my company is probably a bit of a mix of the legacy of my, one of my engineers who's doing our AI. He lost his father a year, a year before I lost my mom. And so in one of our first phone calls, we aligned on this, on how important it is to have these things. And so the ability to convince someone to join you on your journey, I think is the secret sauce for founder. Yeah, yeah, I've, I've learned I'm a terrible person to hire people. So I don't like I'm the worst.

51:14 I have 30 operating companies and I don't manage any of them because I know I'm really bad at it. But I managed to find people who run them that I'm good at. But and part of it, I think was the perspective that I couldn't imagine myself ever working for anybody. But I just don't have that chip, right. I mean, and we work for people every day in the context of making sure we get things done that we promised to do. But I never had this employee E employee relationship thing and that I, I ever felt comfortable with. But anyway, I think that being able to identify and hire the right people is a huge, huge skill set.

52:00 And, you know, congratulations on being able to do that. I would sometimes argue that people skills are is really the only thing that I'm really, really good at. And I think that's sometimes enough, yeah. So tell everybody how it's really airlight.com, right? Airlight.com HEIRLIGHT. The name came from air, you know, with the whole theme of estate planning and Lite, something that shows clarity. So air light. Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, we have to wrap it up, but I'm super happy we were able to do this and thank you, Jermaine, for spending the time with us today.

52:40 It's really fascinating stuff. Thank you for having me on. You're welcome. And everybody, if you're interested in connecting with Jeremy, I'm sure you'd be happy to do that and take a look at the website and really, really appreciate your insights, Jermaine. You're welcome. Thanks everybody for joining us today.