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.

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Episode 271. 271 is a country code belonging to South Africa in 1971. The first Starbucks opened its doors at Seattle's Historic Pike Place Market and while Disney World Resort opened in Florida, a white woman walks into a Starbucks and asks for the usual. What's that? The Manager.

Welcome to the 271st episode of the ProfG pod. In today's episode, we speak with Friedza Kariat, the host of Friedza Kariat GPS on CNN and a columnist for the Washington Post to break down the conflict in Israel, the implications that are following the region and how the US is responding.

Friedza is a role model. I just admire people that you can't tell their politics. You just know that they have a fidelity to inside facts and think he's just a joy to listen to. Big fan of Fried. Okay. What's happening? Disney is in the news again because Nelson Peltz and activist investor on sports seats for himself and a few others. According to the Wall Street Journal, the activist firm believes that Disney shares are significantly undervalued today and that the company needs a more focused

sport. In the past, they've contended that Disney has excessive executive compensation and a poor sense of expense discipline. I think there's a term for that. I think it's called Hollywood. Disney is probably a really good buy at this point. There are a few companies that have the kind of IP that Disney has. The streaming, essentially, there's kind of three businesses here, right? There's the movie studios. There's the streaming network. There's the parks.

As soon as I'm right, streaming networks, movies, parks, that sounds about right. Oh, wait, I forgot the fourth thing. I forgot the. I forgot the you look down and you just you just peed and there's blood everywhere in the basin. Yes, that's right. The broadcast networks or the cable TV affiliates, which have seen their EBITDA cut in half.

Now, this is a company that needs divestiture, probably needs some cost cutting, but more than anything, I believe that if Disney, if and when they get rid of their cable assets, TV assets, which supposedly Byron Allen and others are circling, I think the stock will just on that because it'll be a cleaner story, if you will.

They have just standalone IP, fantastic culture of creativity, talent and management team. And meanwhile, the stock is at a nine year low part of it is one of the worst acquisitions in history when they acquired some of the assets of news core specifically Fox.

And whenever you have River Murdoch and Jeff Buches, who are the two arguably the two brightest minds as a leases relates to shareholder value selling assets, you do not want to buy those assets and Bob Eiger did.

And likely or did just massively overpay for them and has put so much debt on the Disney company that it has now become similar to discovery time Warner.

Kind of what everybody sees everyone just looks at this giant debt load and is a little bit scared of the equity and the equity has been driven down.

They are they can essentially kill two birds with one son with the sale of some of their cable assets. It'll be a cleaner story.

We have movies that are synergistic with our streaming network and we have something that is the what I believe is the most defensible asset of Disney, which is in fact, it's parks.

The parks are singular, although the park attendance was down in the summer in Orlando, I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that Orlando is like 700 degrees during the summer, but even year on year was down.

I don't I wonder if people are running out of their COVID money or they've decided to do other things or there was a bit of a revenge travel bump post COVID that's now starting to obey, but I don't care long term.

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