Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast today is Friday, August 6, 2021.

I'm John Pudhord, the editor of commentary with me as always executive editor

Abe Greenwald. Hi, John. Sorry, associate editor Noir Rothman. Hi, Noah.

Hi, John. Christine Rosen is out today. We had a recording disaster early this morning. So our

friend Daniel Cass had joined us for an entire first podcast that was improperly recorded by our

recording program and so we are doing a second go round. Just the three of us Dan will join us

next week sometime and we will go through a fresh as a daisy program with him. So we had talked

about Gavin Newsom and his recall. We had talked about job numbers. We had talked about Cory Bush.

Maybe I think we're going to downshift and not do that because we I don't know how to recreate

the conversation that we were having because it was fresh and it was good and it's only going to

sound worse on the second go round and so we're going to be uninspired and have deja vu and it's

going to be creepy and weird. So one of the things that we ended up that we concluded with was a

conversation about just general cultural stuff that we are going through and experiencing and I

think maybe that's what we are going to focus on now as we attempt to entertain you for the next

45 or 50 minutes. So I will start because I want Abe and know it to be able to gather their

thoughts and I'm going to start with the weird idea that what everybody needs to do is watch

Smoky and the Bandit because last night I ended up watching Smoky and the Bandit. A movie that came

out when I was 16 years old in 1977 was an unexpected gigantic smash it made really for when people

when this is the way things worked for Southern audiences and drive-in audiences and it broke huge

nonetheless all across the country I believe it was the second highest grossing movie of 1977

next to Star Wars and it is a fun, fizzy, exuberant, laid-back but exciting

and all together fascinating cultural document that I commend to you very highly because

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