The New Big 3: Cars, Health Care, and the Metaverse

See where big companies are investing R&D dollars – and how you can invest in innovation

Ric Edelman: Welcome back to The Truth About Your Future. Hey, if you want to get a sense of the biggest innovations that are coming in the future, pay attention to where companies are investing their money now in R&D, research and development. America's biggest technology firms are investing their money in three major areas: cars, health care. Ok, both of those make a lot of sense, right? I mean, Americans depend on cars, trucks, transportation to a huge degree, and with the movement toward electric vehicles, self-driving vehicles, it makes a lot of sense that there's a huge amount of investment going on in cars and health care. Well, I think we all agree there's nothing more important than health care. The amount of money we spend on medical technology innovation, everything from disease management to patient care, et cetera. The whole bit. Yeah. Cars, healthcare. Ok, I get it.

But what's the third major area where America's technology firms are investing? The metaverse. The what? Well, Facebook changed its name to Metta platforms. That gives you an illustration of how much Mark Zuckerberg thinks this matters. So we need to recognize what the metaverse is. Well, you're familiar with it more than you realize. Remember the movie, Avatar? What a wonderful illustration of the metaverse, where you have a digital version of yourself, essentially in a video game, interacting with people, engaging in your life. A lot of people do this by playing video games now. They do it with those Oculus headphones. That's what the Metaverse basically is. The metaverse is huge and going to get much, much bigger when you consider how much money is being invested in R&D. Last year, a trillion dollars in both government and private funding of research and development. The Big Five themselves: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Metta spent $150 billion, just those five. That's more than the Pentagon's R&D budget.

The Big Five published over the past five years, 16,000 scientific papers. Anywhere from five to 20 percent of their research spending goes toward exponential technologies, not just the metaverse, autonomous vehicles and healthcare, but also space, robotics, fintech, crypto and quantum computing. If you think that these companies are going to be successful at launching new technologies, well, that would suggest that maybe now is the time to invest in those investment categories. Talk with your financial advisor about exponential technologies. You're listening to The Truth About Your Future.