 Okay, let us start with Roy. Okay, so I'd like to talk about Valley of Tears. Yes. First of all, thank you for recommending it. Had you not recommended, it's very unlikely that I would have suggested. Just to give you a context, Valley of Tears is a show on HBO Max. It is an Israeli show. So it's in Hebrew and in some Arabic and it is a show about the Yom Kippur War. So it's 10 episodes, 10 episodes. Highly recommended if you can tolerate violence. It's very violent. Go ahead, Roy, sorry. Yeah, so I can't recall a more intimate or convincing portrayal of soldiers in battle. Any movie I've ever seen or any video. I also can't recall one that was more gripping. Some of the scenes were almost unbearably heart-wrenching. Tears flowing and it's just, yeah, heart-wrenching. And there's no happy ending just to let people know. Yes, I mean, it's a battle the war then continues off-screen. And a lot of the people you follow, bad stuff happens to them and it ends with you not knowing what their ultimate fate is. Yeah, and some you do know what their ultimate fate is. Yes, no, it's not a romantic comedy. Exactly. But another strength I've found is the clarity of the battle scenes. In many other films, battles are just like a largely undifferentiated tangle of soldiers and shooting and stabbing and bombing. And at the end you hear what happened but you're just watching a lot of action and movement and you can't, I find it hard in most of these other films to really be involved with it. But here, the dialogue very smartly lets you, the audience know what the strategy of the operation is, the strategy of the battle is. And then the action, you can follow it as an audience. And so there's much more of a sense of participation and involvement. I think it's an extraordinary technical accomplishment of writing and direction and editing. So, an exceptional piece. Now, here's where I have the question. When you told us about the show, you said something in passing about leftist, some leftist stuff. Yeah. Like, oh yeah, yeah, sort of obligatory. And that's where I have some questions about it because some of it I didn't understand and I thought just about none of it belonged in this film or in this piece. So we have, I'm not giving, these are no spoilers because this stuff, you know, right off the bat. Yep. Malachi, Marco and Alush are all members of some sort of resistance or protest movement. Though it's not clear at least to me and non-Israeli what that movement was. So that's part A of the question is what movement? Let me finish the part B and then that'll be all ears. And also the relevance is not clear at all because all three are corpals in the Israeli army. They all fight with determination. So it's not as if they're sort of giving it a half heart or would we have to do this to cover our ass. And then also the other character who I think, well, Ben Dror, who plays a writer, he's a self-about socialist and pacific. Yep. But that's almost irrelevant. His role in this that has any dramatic impact is that he's there trying to find his son who has enlisted or maybe he was a director, I don't know. He moved back to Israel so that he could enlist, right. So that has no relevance. So the two parts A, what movement are they talking about? And B, why was this put in? Because this seems to me irrelevant. And I know I'll shut up. Yeah, I mean, they called themselves the Black Panthers because they were trying to mimic the Black Panthers in the United States. So, and they would definitely, it was what you'd call today kind of a social justice movement. It was about both fighting against racism in Israel and I'll get to that in a minute, but also poverty in Israel. I mean, this is a period in which there was a lot of poverty in Israel. And the poverty in Israel is primarily manifest in a certain group of people. And that has to do with the racism. The writer is there to give you lines like this war could have been avoided. Dayan and Golda Miu could have signed a peace accord and didn't. Now, I don't think any of that is true, but part of what the writers are trying to convey is that this was an avoidable war. This was not a necessary war. The Arab wanted peace. And because of the Israeli government's kind of hawkish, even though it was a labor party where they were socialists, even though there were socialists in power, they were hawkish, attitude towards their countries, they declined that peace. And therefore this war happened. So it's trying to shift the blame to the Israeli political class instead of to the Arabs and to create a certain model of equivalency. That's the purpose of having him there. And then the, I think having the Black Panthers, these young guys, it's there to say, Israel's not such a great country. It wasn't such a great country back then. And yet, they still fought for it. And then what did we do to them? What did we do for them? What have we done for them since then? Has they a lot really improved in life even though they shed their blood for the country? So it's trying to make a social commentary. It's not, none of that is necessary qua war movie. The war movie stands on its own. The war, as you said, the battle scene stand on their own. They don't require any of this. But it is a little bit of a undercutting of Israeli society and the Israeli political. Now, the Israeli political class needed to be condemned, but for other reasons, not for not signing a peace treaty because there was no such treaty on the table. It's primarily because they missed all the intelligence signals and didn't prepare for war. It turns out, here's an interesting story for you, vis-a-vis American foreign policy in Israel. So this is 1973. And from what I recently read from unearthed new documents about the war, Golda Meir, who was the prime minister of Israel, about a day before you that the war was gonna break out. And she faced the choice. She could have launched a preemptive strike like Israel did in 1967. Probably saved the lives of 80% of the Israeli casualties that Israel took in this war. Probably a couple of thousand Israeli kids, 18-year-olds, would have, their lives would have been saved if they'd gone preemptive. However, she had been told by Kissinger, Kissinger was Secretary of State under Nixon at the time, that the United States would not support Israel ever if Israel did what it did in the 60s war and started the war preemptively. So she had to make a decision between, a choice between, do I save the lives of these kids by going preemptive and not letting this war get out of hand? Or do I wait knowing I'm gonna take huge casualties but not pissing off the Americans and getting American support once the war starts. And she chose the second. She chose to appease the Americans. And to a large extent, those casualties that you saw there were a consequence of that choice. Now, they also didn't let the troops on the ground know that a war was coming. They also did not round up the reserves and get them in place to be prepared for the attack. So that the troops on the ground were completely surprised. The reserves took three days to get to the front lines. Israel took massive casualties, almost lost the war, had nukes in the air because they were worried about losing and the nukes on airplanes in the air ready to bomb Damascus and Cairo. All of this in anticipation of losing because it was so bad. The plus side is, from her perspective, from Goldemir's perspective, is that once it was clear that Israel didn't start the war, America immediately was on Israel's side and started sending massive quantities of weapons over, starting, I think, on day three, one of the largest air lifts of weaponry in history occurred on that day, starting that day. And Israel, of course, rebounded and basically won the war and crushed, for the most part, crushed the enemy. But those are the kind of political calculations I think they should have been criticized for rather than what the movie does. Now, in terms of what were the Black Panthers fighting in, so Israel has two, I mean, many groups, Jews from a lot of different parts of the world, but there's a basically a differentiation between Ashkenazi Jews who are mostly Eastern European, some Western European, but mostly European Jews. Again, mostly from Eastern Europe and Central Europe. And Spardic Jews. Spardic Jews are from North Africa, from the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Eastern Europe. But primarily Northern Africa, these are primarily the Jews who were kicked out of Spain during the Inquisition. Some of them went to Western Europe, so the Spardic Jews in Amsterdam, London, certainly in France and a lot of other places. The founders of Israel were primarily Ashkenazi Jews, and not all of them. And there was certainly Spardic Jews in Israel at the time before Israel, well before Israel was founded. But there was a massive migration, most of it forced by Arab countries in 1949 and into the early 50s from Morocco, from Yemen, from Iraq, from all over the Middle East and North Africa. Forced migration of Spardic Jews into Israel. They were kicked out of the Arab countries. They couldn't bring their wealth, whatever wealth they had was confiscated by the local governments. They were put on planes and sent to Israel. And when they arrived in Israel, Israel was ill-prepared for them. It was a poor country. They were put in tent cities and they never, for many decades, they never really recovered. In addition, the European Jews treated the Ashkenazi Jews with a lot of disdain. They were viewed as less sophisticated, less civilized. There was real racism in Israel between Ashkenazi Jews and Spardic Jews. Now, I never really felt it, but that's because I'm an Ashkenazi Jew. So I never experienced, I never felt, I wasn't, I never discriminated against Spardic Jews, but I never saw it around me. But my wife, who is a Spardic Jew, definitely felt it. So she was clearly experienced, the equivalent of racism in Israel from Ashkenazi Jews towards her because she is a Spardic. Spardic Jews tend to have darker skin. The three heroes in that scene in the tank corps that you mentioned, are all Spardic Jews and they all come from Arab countries. That's why they all speak Arabic and they constantly throughout the movie, throughout the series speak Arabic. They are fighting for, against discrimination, they're fighting for equal rights, they're fighting and they're also very poor. So they're fighting against poverty. So it's a mixture of legitimate struggle and a socialist struggle that comes from poverty. And that's kind of where they come from. The author that you mentioned, the leftist author is a socialist Ashkenazi Jew who is, you know, very, you know, he's with the cause and everything, but he's with the cause of those discriminated, but he's never experienced it. He doesn't know anything about it. That's kind of the, and you know, Israel still has a little bit of that discrimination. My wife and I got married. It was a little bit of this Ashkenazi, you know, like a mixed marriage, like you would view here. It's ridiculous and bizarre and we never thought in those terms, but certainly people around us did. So it's, Israel's an interesting place. People talk about Israel. Israel's a, you know, one race in Israel. No, I mean, they're all Jews there, but they don't look alike. They don't have the same features. They don't have the same skin color. They are literally people who are black, Ethiopian Jews are black. And, you know, so it's a very multi-ethnic or multi-cowracist racial culture because, you know, I don't believe in race, but from the perspective of the common culture, it's a very multi-racial culture. So it's an interesting, it's an Israel is an interesting place. Anyway, that was very interesting and thank you. Yeah, and this is a war. I think I said when I introduced the show, this is a war I was 12 years old when it broke out. I was in synagogue when it broke out. And because it was Yom Kippur, it was, we went to synagogue. In those days, I, you know, we went to synagogue in the high holidays, but also sometimes on the Sabbath, but we certainly in the high holidays went to synagogue. So I was in synagogue and you could tell something was up because every once in a while, a military, somebody in a military uniform would come into the synagogue, go up to a man who was praying there, whisper something in his ear. The guy would immediately fold everything up and leave very quickly. And this kept happening. It was clear that they were calling up the reserve. This is in the morning before the war actually broke out. And then suddenly the sirens go off. And we all run into the airway shelter. And at that point, you know, I'm getting choked up weirdly. At that point, my dad leaves. He says, you know, and he basically says, you know, I better go home, better get my uniform, better get my gun and leave. And he does. And we stayed in the airway shelter until they stopped. And then we went home. I think, no, I don't, I think we saw him off, but I'm not sure. Maybe we didn't see him off. But man, it was gone. And remember, no cell phones. So he was gone, gone now for weeks before we saw him again into a war that was brutal, into a war that people were clearly dying. My father was a doctor. She was a medical doctor on the front lines. He was at, there's a scene, a big part of scene in the beginning at the Chermon, which is this outpost on the tallest mountain in Israel. And when they recaptured that, it was a very bloody battle. He was there. He was on the Golan Heights where this show occurs most of the war. And it was, you know, and we basically, I was, when we got home, we went back into the airway shelter at the apartment complexes, apartment with six, five different condominiums. And I was the oldest male in the building because everybody else was off at war. I was 12 and I was the oldest male in the building. I had a young sister who was at the time, had just been born. She'd been a born a week earlier. So we had a week old baby. My brother was two years younger than me, myself and my mother, my father off to war. And then the other thing I remember vividly is every, every few days, a car would come into the neighborhood, drive down the street, stop somewhere, and a soldier, female male soldiers would get out carrying flowers. And you knew, you know, now you watched, which door were they going to? Because, you know, they were coming to tell somebody that father had died, their spouse had died in the war. So you watched it from the window of the condo. Which condo, minion building were they going into? You know, and you were, of course, always worried they were coming to yours. And so that's, you know, you grow up fast in Israel. I always say that you grow up fast in Israel because you experience things that, you know, a typical American doesn't, even the Vietnam War was far away, as many soldiers has died there as a percentage of the population far less than has died in Israel and the Yom Kippur War. It's a tiny little country. Everybody knows everybody. You certainly know people who lose. So it's a very intense experience, the terrorism, the wars, it's there in your face. So, yeah. All right. Oh, somebody asked about just about what type of tank did you crew in the IDF? I crewed on a Centurion. It was, I was the, I think probably the last, or among the last people in the Centurion, the M60s were coming in and the Israeli tank, the Merkava was coming in. So I was on the relatively primitive old Centurions that they were still putting up in the Golan Heights. I was the gunner. I was a gunner on the tank until I was in tank command school, tank command school. So they had identified me as gonna be a tank commander and then an officer in a tank commanding school, already before tank commanding school, but I ignored it. But in tank commanding school, basically my back let out, I had two rupture discs. I landed up having massive surgery and couldn't go back to the tanks. We shifted to military intelligence where I spent most of my career in the Army. So that is my, but, you know, I could tell stories all day about this stuff. But, you know, when I was in the tank school, this was in the winter of 1980. We were in training in the desert but heading up to the Golan Heights, heading towards the Golan Heights. And there was a, they basically stopped, you know, usually you went home for like the Saturday. Every two weeks you'd go home or every three weeks you'd go home. But they stopped sending us home. And they stopped sending us home because there was intelligence that a war was gonna break out in the spring. And we knew that in the spring, we would be the counter fodder. We would be the frontline, the first tanks in a confrontation with the Syrians on the Golan Heights. And the intelligence was that the Syrians had to mass tanks on the border with Israel through the winter under cloud cover. And the war was gonna break out. So we had the song that we were singing that, you know, the words to it were, I know I'm gonna die this summer that basically became our little troop song during that winter and early spring. And then it turned out because later I was in military intelligence and I was adjacent to the unit where the call had been made that a war was gonna break out. And it turned out that they had made a mistake that they had thought that a bunch of clouds were tanks or something like that, bunch of rocks were tanks and they completely screwed up and the intelligence was false intelligence. I gave those guys hell because I didn't get to go home weekend after weekend after weekend because they screwed up the intelligence. Anyway, don't get me started on stories because like I could go on forever. Thanks Roy, that took me on a half an hour tangent. That was good. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes, that should be at least 100. I figured at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it, but at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So, you know, and if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. But if you like it, don't just sit there, help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share and you can support the show at your own book show.com slash support on Patreon or subscribe star or locals and show you support for all, for the work, for the value, hopefully you're receiving from this. And of course, don't forget, if you're not a subscriber, even if you just come here to troll, or even if you're here like Matthew to defend Marx, then you should subscribe because that way you'll know when to show up. You'll know what shows are on, when they're on. You'll get notified, right? So yes, like, share, subscribe, support. Like, share, subscribe, support. There you go. Easy. Do one or all of those please.