NASA, Formula One, and Your Healthcare: The Surprising Uses of Digital Twins
And should you keep your long-term care insurance? Ric answers a listener question.
Ric Edelman: It’s Thursday, September 12th. Are you a twin? 3% of us are. Well, not us, them. I'm not a twin. 3 percent of us are. But soon I am going to be a twin. Everybody's going to be a twin. You will have a digital twin. Companies are already doing this. They're creating a digital version of you.
Uber uses digital twins to optimize your route. Goldman Sachs calculates the different kinds of risks facing different financial assets. Amazon can forecast demand for 400 million items two years into the future. J.D. Power is collecting data on the auto industry to predict sales trends: everything from brands to colors. Oracle Red Bull, they build digital versions of its Formula One race car. They make thousands of design changes virtually, before they attempt to do it to the actual car. 250 sensors on the real car send data to the digital twin so the team's engineers can test tweaks in cyberspace.
Companies have been using digital twins for 50 years. NASA used them to mirror on Earth what was happening on spacecraft. Remember when Apollo 13 ran into trouble? They figured out how to fix it in the twin they had built? You remember that from the movie. Today, the Air Force makes digital twins of all its jets. And before anything happens in the real world, it's all proven online. And now the healthcare industry is making digital twins of the human body. It's not going to be long before they make one of your body.
It's all part of personalized medicine, which I wrote about in my bestselling book, The Truth About Your Future, back in 2017. They're making digital hearts, digital lungs, digital kidneys. Researchers are simulating the connections of neurons in the brain.
And they're playing with levels that alter the impact based on digital diets, and lifestyle, and age, gender, and physique. All to see how these will affect the human body long before they try to invent a drug or a new medical treatment. Look at cardiac arrhythmia. It can cause stroke and heart failure. The most common treatment is ablation. You freeze or heat parts of the heart to block electrical signals that are causing the arrhythmia. The problem is that different patients react in different ways to ablation. So you create a digital twin of your heart, and you test the procedure on a computer before you go into the OR.
This way you know the results, before you even start. Researchers are even creating a digital twin of the entire planet to try to predict weather and the impacts of climate change. One day, you won't go to the doctor. Your digital twin will.
I did a podcast last month on long term care insurance. The link is in the show notes if you missed it. It caused Beverly from New York to write to me, and here's what she wrote:
Beverly: "We have about $3 million, not including our home. We take $100,000 from our IRA every year, and we also get pension income and Social Security. We've paid for LTC insurance for many years at a cost of about $500 per month. Should we keep it? I feel comfortable with it."
Ric Edelman: Well, Beverly, since you're comfortable with it and you can easily afford the payment, yeah, you should keep it. An additional reason for keeping it? You can argue that it's an estate planning tool for you. In other words, every dollar you spend on long term care, should you or your husband need it, is a dollar that won't go to your kids and grandkids. So wouldn't it be more cost effective to pay for the insurance as opposed to the actual cost of care itself? I mean, the cost of care can be $10,000 a month. The policy is maybe six grand a year. So, you could regard it as an estate planning tool. But if neither of those arguments work, meaning you don't really care that much about making your heirs richer than they're going to be anyway, thanks to your wealth, or you're not particularly comfortable with spending $500 a month on the policy, go ahead and get rid of it.
You have enough assets to pay for your care out of your pocket, should that care become necessary. It's a perfect example that all aspects of financial planning depend on your individual situation, circumstances, and attitude. The most common answer to any question is: well, it depends. In your case, you see why.
You can send me your question as well, just send it to AskRic@TheTruthAYF.com. The link is in the show notes.
And hey, did you miss our two webinars that we hosted this week? The first one was on bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs…how to make an informed crypto allocation decision. This was a really terrific webinar, very fast paced, gives you the answers of what's the difference between bitcoin and Ethereum, the difference between the ETFs and whether you should invest in one or the other or both. And if both, in what combination and how much of your portfolio you should allocate to them. Check out that webinar, which we just did earlier this week.
And the second one was on the coming interest rate cuts. What does it mean with a reduction in interest rates on your bond portfolio and your cash holdings?
If you missed either of these webinars, the replays are now available.o each of them is in the show notes today. Be sure to check them out.
If you like what you're hearing, be sure to follow and su The link tbscribe to the show, wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and remember leave a review on Apple podcasts. I read them all. Never miss an episode of the Truth About Your Future. Follow and subscribe on your favorite podcast app.
I'll see you tomorrow.
-----
Subscribe to podcast updates: https://form.jotform.com/223614751580152
Ask Ric: https://www.thetayf.com/pages/ask-ric
-----
Links from today’s show:
Ric's bestseller - The Truth About Your Future: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Your-Future-Money/dp/1501163817/
August 19th Episode on Long Term Care: https://www.thetayf.com/blogs/this-weeks-stories/guess-who-s-living-with-this-95-year-old-woman?
9/10 Webinar – Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Both? How to Make an Informed Crypto Allocation Decision: https://dacfp.com/events/bitcoin-ethereum-or-both-how-to-make-an-informed-crypto-allocation-decision/
9/11 Webinar – Rates are Poised to Drop, Now What?: https://www.thetayf.com/pages/rates-poised-to-drop-now-what
Become Certified in Blockchain and Digital Assets: https://dacfp.com/certification/
-----
Follow Ric on social media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RicEdelman
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ric_edelman/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricedelman/
X: https://twitter.com/ricedelman
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@RicEdelman
-----
Brought to you by:
Invesco QQQ: https://www.invesco.com/qqq-etf/en/home.html
State Street Global Advisors: https://www.ssga.com/us/en/intermediary/etfs/capabilities/spdr-core-equity-etfs/spy-sp-500/cornerstones
Schwab: https://www.schwab.com/
Disclosure page: https://www.thetayf.com/pages/sponsorship-disclosure-fee
-----