What if there was a better way to talk to all your friends than through a thousand different messaging apps on a thousand different platforms?

What if you could just find the show you wanted without browsing through infinite tiles in a hundred different streaming apps?

What if you could have all of your stuff everywhere without dealing with some crummy user interface on some unknowable file sharing platform?

This month on the Vergecast, we're looking into connectivity. How we talk to each other, how we talk to our stuff, how we find things online.

All this month on the Vergecast, available wherever you get podcasts.

If you've paid any attention to Facebook as a company, you know that it's controversial.

There are privacy problems, misinformation problems, Mark Zuckerberg problems, but there's one particular problem that's getting talked about a lot lately.

Facebook is way too big.

In fact, the company has gotten so dominant over the years that the government is suing Facebook, accusing it of having a monopoly over social networking.

And they want to see Zuckerberg unwind big purchases from the past, like Instagram and WhatsApp.

But amidst all this talk about illegal monopolies and being too big, Facebook has been quietly making a bunch of shiny new acquisitions.

Mark Zuckerberg is buying a lot of companies. That's something he has done throughout history at Facebook, big companies, small companies.

He's going out and expanding Facebook some more by acquiring lots of companies that are specifically about what he now calls the Metaverse.

We've learned a lot from struggling with social issues and living under closed platforms.

And now it is time to take everything that we've learned and help build the next chapter.

Because the future is going to be beyond anything we can imagine.

Mark Zuckerberg made a big splashy public announcements and we're changing the name of Facebook.

It's no longer Facebook. It's Meta.

From now on, we're going to be Metaverse first, not Facebook first.

But more important than that, we've already got 10,000 of our employees working on this.

We are going to spend more than $10 billion this year, 2021, on this effort.

And we're going to keep spending that for years to come.

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