Twitchin & Kik'n!

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Welcome back to WSHIT.

It's five past the hour and it's time for your Hollywood Hot Pocket.

All the glitz, glam, and gossip to get your girlfriends talking.

I'm your brand new WSHIT entertainment correspondent, Skip Champagne.

Today's top T is no surprise.

The Man, The Myth, and the Man-Child Will Smith has the whole coast talking with his brand new album.

This washed-up rap mogul and roundly disliked actor has taken the strip by storm with his brand new song and accompanying video.

While this reporter is no stranger to a hot track or a hop papa, I'm wondering if this tune features either of those.

Why don't you be the judge?

Let's take a listen to this new dud-a-ba-ditty, crazy girls.

Crazy girls.

So we're chasing crazy girls around.

We don't know what we're doing, but it's a summer.

There's a lot of crazy girls coming out for the summer.

We're going to the summer break with the crazy girls.

Crazy girls come around and just say, say, how you doing?

And we just nod our heads and we're thinking, could we party with them all night or should we stay up all night thinking about them?

We should ask who they all and just come around and introduce ourselves.

Crazy girls are forever.

Well ladies, I hate to use my inside voice, but I think someone should have slapped back.

Plenty more juice to squeeze out of this lemon when we return from this commercial break.

On this episode of the Commercial Break.

If you are interested in that, if that is something that interests you, then also do us a favor and text us because that way we can gauge, you know, we can kind of take the temperature litmus test.

So if more than one of you do that, then we less likely will do it because that's exactly how many people showed up at our live Twitch on the endless day.

So if we get more than one, yeah, if you'd like to see us twitch and kick, then

if you'd like to see us twitch and kick,

then videotape me in the bedroom.

If you'd like to see me twitch and kick for over an hour, videotape me in the bedroom.

The next episode of the commercial break starts now.

Yeah,

boy.

Oh, yeah, yeah, cats and kittens.

Welcome back to the commercial break.

I'm Brian Green.

This is my dear friend and the co-host of this show, Chris Joy Hoadley.

Best to you, Chris.

Best to you, Brian.

And best to you out there in the podcast universe.

Thank you for joining us.

We certainly do appreciate it.

I want to shout out to all the listeners who have been texting in lately.

It is very nice of everybody to text in.

Oh, I love the communication.

Yes, a lot of communication, a lot of chitting and chatting back and forth.

A lot of new listeners letting us know that they're out there, that they enjoyed TCB's endless day.

They're probably not new listeners.

They probably followed the show at some point, never listened to an episode, then got 26 notifications in an hour that the commercial break was in fact alive and kicking.

Holy shit, they made it this far?

I know.

Wow.

On a Saturday.

Yeah.

I was talking with one of my

other podcasting buddies,

and he was saying, I was saying, how's the show going?

And he's like, yeah, you know, I'm realizing it's not going to be the mega hit that I thought it was and that's you know it is what it is but it's kind of disappointing and podcasting is not an easy job no it's it isn't i kind of realize this this is not going to be the mega hit we thought it was either we've settled into it yeah i realize that every morning actually when i wake up get ready to come to the studio i go yep not the mega hit i thought it was going to be

but what does keep us going the text messages and the emails and the phone calls stuff like that that's a That's a good thing because you know that at least somebody's on the other end hearing you, loving on you.

Nice to have feedback enjoying it a lot of feedback about that email that i wrote that i read that somebody had written us

online and i suspect i know who it is i think i think i shared that i suspect i know who it is though he still won't admit that it's him he claims to know not know anything about it But I think that adds more to the mystery.

That adds more to my psychosis.

And so then now I think it's extra him.

You know what I'm saying?

You know, someone denies something and you're like, yep, it's you.

For sure.

You denied it.

It's you.

Or if he would have said yes, then I would have gone, but is it really you?

You know, my paranoia gets to new levels.

But a lot of people wrote in, including,

I think her name is Amanda.

And I know she'd been listening to the show for a while.

And she wrote that she

that that email was the first time the TCB made her cry also.

And I said, well, it's not a crying kind of show.

We don't do a lot of crying here.

Not in front of the camera.

Not in front of the camera.

Not a microphone.

Yeah.

Usually every paycheck, that's when we do the crying.

That's fine.

it's out of the realm yeah we have to pay the power bill that's when we that's when we do the crying uh but i just want to take a moment and acknowledge south georgia sean and jenny amanda uh craig all these people who have been uh texting us and emailing us thank you very much we certainly do appreciate it you too can get in contact with us 212-433-38 to 1t2.

You can go ahead and do that.

And here's a little wrap on The Endless Day now that we're a couple of weeks from it and we have some perspective and we understood.

It really didn't end.

I think we mentioned this like the day afterwards.

It really didn't end up being as big of a stretch as I thought it was going to be.

Like work-wise, I felt like we were going to be a lot more underwater and tired at the end of the day than I actually was.

Yeah, no, I agree.

I mean, we did, we were here for 12 hours.

Yeah, we were.

But we had some well-timed breaks in between there when we ran some interviews.

And I think amazingly, our Twitch stream went off well.

It went off well.

No one watched it but it went off well.

We were able to do it.

Yeah that's this is kind of bringing me to the point that I was going to make but here's a little wrap-up on it over 30 downloads

over 10 people watch heard the episodes throughout the course of the last 15 days and

no coverage whatsoever in the podcast yet.

So I really think you're telling me we've got a chance.

I'm telling you

we really made waves with this one.

This was the coup ticker off, if you will, of all commercial break episodes.

This was really well worth it, Chrissy.

Did everything we wanted it to do.

It brought us no traffic, no attention.

And our guests are the one who suffered, really.

Tig Nataro is the one who suffered, actually.

She's the one that suffered.

Love that, Tignatar.

I love that.

Love that Tig Natar.

I know.

I loved her before we met her, and then I love her even more.

You know, we talk about this a lot because it's a fourth wall kind of podcast here.

Because, you know, what else are we going to talk about?

We let you in.

It's transparent.

We're pretty transparent about almost everything that happens on the commercial break, good, bad, and indifferent.

But there are some guests that you know are coming on that you are really clueless about how you're going to interact with them because there are some people that you see in other interviews on stage doing their act, and you go, Yeah, that's a very affable person.

I think we're going to get along with them no matter what.

Um, because we're pretty affable people, we're pretty easy to get along with.

And then there are some people who you think might be a little bit more difficult personality-wise.

Some have proven to be.

And then there are people who you just don't know.

You're like, hmm, they have a kind of a stage presence that's not exactly like affable, but it's not stern or mean or anything like that.

Tig is one of those people.

You watch her on stage, and she's got this stage presence that's very funny and very commanding.

It's so funny.

But then you don't know really what you're going to get.

It's kind of like a, I don't know, like a potluck.

You're like, oh, I wonder what she's going to bring to the table.

And what she brought was a very empathetic,

I'd say caring,

friendly.

Yeah.

Vibe.

It made me feel very comfortable talking to Tig.

So comfortable that I think I cried at the end of the episode.

So there you go.

There's two times we've cried.

That's okay.

Yeah, but that's okay.

Sometimes you're going to cry.

Listen, when you do a thousand hours of anything, sometimes you're going to cry.

That's just the way that it is.

Just the way that it is.

But this brings me to my next point, which is this.

And this is a little minutiae of the show.

They're doing a little house cleaning, I guess.

I think it would benefit us.

Not only might we actually do in-person recordings where you may have a chance to come sit and watch us do a recording or an interview.

But I would love it if we could start doing a Twitch or a Kick

live recording.

So not a broadcast of the episode, but we will record the episode and we will stream it so that you can see it while we're streaming it.

And then of course it'll broadcast a couple days or a week later, whatever it is.

If you are interested in that, if that is something that interests you, then also do us a favor and text us because that way we can gauge, you know, we kind of take the temperature temperature litmus test.

So, if more than one of you do that, then we that's likely we'll do it because that's exactly how many people showed up at our live Twitch on the endless day.

So, if we can get more than one, yeah, if you'd like to see us twitch and kick, then

if you'd like to see us twitch and kick,

then videotape me in the bedroom.

If you'd like to see me twitch and kick for over an hour, videotape me in the bedroom.

Oh, God.

That was funny.

That was funny.

That reminds me.

So text us.

That reminds me of an ad that I saw on if, listen, do you have an X account, a Twitter account?

I do, and I refuse to sign back into it.

I sign into it, but I have never, I mean, I think I have like three tweets when it was Twitter.

I think I have three tweets.

All of them, as you can imagine, just crushed with traffic and likes and comments

as our social media does um but i go on there just to see

i guess it's a lot like

if my house was on fire i was gonna say a dumpster fire yeah

well if my house was on fire and everybody got out safely and i knew that the fire was somewhere in the house i might pop the door open to see just how badly the house was on fire.

You know what I'm saying?

I might pop in just to see what certain destruction lies around.

And that's why I go over to X.

Sometimes I just want to pop the door open and see how bad the house is burning.

And it's on fire.

There's no doubt about it.

It's consumed all rooms.

I'm pretty sure.

What a cesspool.

I mean, honestly, I don't know if it's just my feet or it's everybody's feet.

I think it's everybody's feet because everybody's complaining about it.

But is it the cesspool of dick pill ads and pornography?

I mean, I don't care about the pornography.

God bless you.

I have porn on your platform if that's what you choose to do.

But then just the most vile kind of violence and racism and all that other stuff.

And it's just, it's not my cup of tea.

It's just not.

Words are energy.

And when they're exchanged, you know, you that I think someone said this.

Maybe Pete Holmes.

I don't know why that's coming to mind, but that's a random name to pull out of my hat.

But Pete Holmes, I think he said words have

energy.

They are spells that you can cast on people.

And I just don't like reading about that stuff.

I don't like acknowledging.

No, I was going to say, I mean, look, I try to be positive and yada, yada, yada, but I don't insulate myself with only every day of sunshine.

But there's certain paths I just know not to go down.

Yes.

Well, Twitter is definitely one of them.

Yeah.

Or X or whatever the fuck you call it, because the algorithm has changed, most definitely.

And now it favors a lot of that content because it's clickbait.

And that's what they want.

They want interactions on the platform.

And it's just spreading a lot of bullshit.

But anyway, that's not the point.

The point is, I go on there the other other day and I don't, I'm like googling something about or searching something about the Atlanta Braves and up pops an ad.

Just imagine this: like a 75-year-old woman who looks very scholarly with a British accent, standing in front of a chalkboard.

So a teacher-type vibe, right?

Older, diminutive, you know, like weighs 100 pounds, sopping wet, glasses on,

gray hair, British lady.

And she's like,

What did she say?

Did you know that almost any man can have a 10-inch erect penis

without

it?

Doesn't matter what size or race you're born or how much you weigh, your dick can be long and hard, just like the porn stars.

And I'm like, Wow.

Okay, go, grandma.

And then she was like, You can literally give instant orgasm by being thick and rich and hardy in your man junk area.

And I'm like, Wow.

And then she starts getting like super graphic about how you can increase, because now I'm hooked in.

Now I got to go, oh, can I?

You forgot about the braves at this point.

Forgot.

The braves were the last thing on my mind.

Now I'm thinking, at some point in my life, I can give Astrid the satisfaction she deserves.

If I just listen to grandma here, tell me about my girth and how I increase my length and my width and my height, all of it.

And then she goes on to explain that without,

well, whatever she goes on to explain.

But halfway through the video, I start to notice that grandma's mouth's moving a little weird.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was going to say.

You can tell that it's almost like one of those Conan O'Brien used to do a bit where he'd put

a picture of somebody like, I don't know, Donald Trump or whoever.

He put a picture there.

And then there was a comic who would put his lips in the picture.

Remember?

The funniest fucking thing ever.

And then they would switch the pictures and he would make these voices with his lips moving, but the picture was a still photograph.

It looked a little bit like that, a little bit like that.

And I realized that what I was seeing was a deep fake, essentially.

Someone had created an ad with the likeness of a grandma to get you to feel comfortable that she knew what the fuck she was talking about.

When in fact, grandma probably has no idea that her likeness is being used to try and convince you.

Grandma is probably an AI image.

I think it's based on a real image because it appear.

And also what I noticed was that the grandma kept making the same movements around the chalkboard over and over and over again.

So I'm like two minutes into this video before I realize it's a deep fake because the deep fakes are getting really fucking good.

Yeah, they are.

You can usually tell, but there are some deep fakes

where it takes me a hot minute to figure it out.

It is convincingly real, convincingly real.

So, did that make you be when you figured out that it wasn't the real grandma, did you, was it less trustworthy?

No, I still wanted to figure out how to get my dick 10 and a half inches.

I mean,

fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on, we should all get 10 and a half inch dicks.

I don't know how that saying goes, but I mean, 10 and a half inch dick, that's a pretty good reel, right there, because every guy wants to know how to increase his length.

Every guy.

I mean, I don't know about every guy, but it's of interest.

Now, I also know it's all bullshit.

Like, you can't, I don't think you can really increase your length to 10 and a half inches because I have 10 inches to go if that's the case.

You know what I'm saying?

And that just seems like like I'm too old to get that much running room out of my own anatomy.

It's just not going to happen.

But you got to imagine that there's so many people that fall for this.

So many people.

And that like piggy fronted on something that I had seen

just days earlier, which was Daniel Thrasher, who had visited our show when he did that.

Daniel Thrasher is like the online influencer, comedian, actor, young guy who had come on with Henry Hall, who we played his music a couple weeks, month back, who we really liked.

Daniel Thrasher, really funny, nice guy.

He's got like a billion followers or whatever online.

And he did a demonstration completely not like his usual content, which is very produced comedy type content.

He did a demonstration where in like 10 minutes, he took

a copy of his own voice, made it say some things, put some background noise to it, put it through a phone, and made it appear that he had really called someone to tell them something and left them a voicemail very convincingly.

You wouldn't have known the difference between the two voices.

And he had done it all with AI in just seconds, like minutes, you know, five minutes or whatever it was.

And so he was pointing out, this is our future.

We have to be careful because people can do this and they can replicate it and it can sound convincingly real.

I thought to myself, well, shit,

here I am chatting up the storm.

Chatting up a storm with chat TCB, just feeding it every inch of the commercial break, all 10 and a half inches of the commercial break,

and hoping that it doesn't go rogue one day and decide it's going to make its own version of the commercial break.

But eventually, I think it's going to get smart, just like Brian would.

And it's going to say, I can do this so much better than Brian can.

Let me get to it.

Let me get to it.

Let me stop this madness.

Yeah, let me stop the madness and make it funny for one second.

All right, we'll take a break.

We'll be back.

You make this rather snappy, won't you, Auntie?

Somebody can be thinking of it before 10 o'clock.

Hi, cats and kittens.

Rachel here.

Do you ever get the urge to speak endlessly into the void like Brian?

Well, I've got just the place for you to do that.

212-433-3TCB.

That's 212-433-3822.

Feel free to call and yell all you want.

Tell Brian I need a race.

Compliment Chrissy's innate ability to put up with all his shenanigans.

Or tell us a little story.

The juicier, the better, by the way.

We'd love to hear your voice, because Lord knows we're done listening to ourselves.

Also, give us a follow on your favorite socials at the Commercial Break on Insta, TCB Podcast on TikTok.

And for those of you who like to watch, oh, that came out wrong.

We put all the episodes out on video.

Youtube.com slash thecommercial break and tcbpodcast.com for all the info on the show.

Your free sticker?

Or just to see how pretty we look.

Okay, I gotta go now.

I've got a date.

With my dog.

No, seriously, Axel needs food.

Today is pork chop day.

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You know, Chrissy, every summer comes around and every summer Brian starts complaining about the blockbuster films we're all being force-fed to watch.

But there are a couple that I'm excited to see.

I'll explain.

F1,

which is the new Brad Pitt, the most expensive movie ever made or some shit.

I don't know.

That's what I read.

The most expensive production ever, blah, blah, blah.

It's about worse than like Avatar and all those cameras.

I think that if I'm not mistaken, I thought he liked to hold that title.

He does.

And he can fund it with his pocket change, too, because he goes down to the Titanic and he steals all those

priceless artifacts.

That's not true.

That's not true.

You see, there's that whole thing on Netflix.

Oh, we can talk about that.

I haven't seen it.

Oh, you haven't seen it?

Okay, I'll talk about it in a second.

Most expensive

movie made.

I think I read this.

Maybe I'm completely wrong.

Brian got a brief.

One of the most expensive films ever produced with a budget over $300 million.

And by the way, F1 premiered just a couple of days ago downtown

inside of Times Square.

And guess who was the host for that premiere?

Hannah Berner.

Oh, her friend Hannah Burner.

So she was standing there with Brad Pitt, you know, doing a whole bunch of stuff.

And she posted it online, to which I replied, Dez looks great in that suit.

I wonder how Dez feels about that.

Des Bishop, our other good friend.

Anyway, F1 is coming out and the early reviews are in.

And apparently it's a really fucking spectacular movie.

That's good.

I like watching F1 Formula racing when it's on and when it's convenient to watch it.

I don't hunt it down, but that's a movie I'm kind of excited to see because, you know, action, sports, you know,

good dramedy.

Let's see that.

I want to see that.

That's good.

And then that Mission Impossible, the last one.

Now, I told you, I wasn't a Mission Impossible fan until I watched this last one, not the one that's coming out this summer, but the last one, when I thought it was really fucking impressive and very action-packed.

They're very good.

Yeah.

And that Tom Cruise,

what, I mean, what else can he do?

That guy is a nudnick.

He's crazy.

How do people let him do this?

He is the most bankable movie star in Hollywood, besides Brad Pitt.

He is the most bankable movie star, maybe ever.

And they have him attached to a guide wire, jumping from a helicopter to an airplane 50,000 feet in the fucking air.

And then not only are they filming it for the movie over and over and over again as he does it repeatedly, then they're filming it to film it to film it to make sure you can see it in some fucking reel.

This, these people are idiots, they're insane.

Let a stunt person do this, pay him really good money to do it.

But that Tom Cruise, he just can't let it go.

He has, he has, it's now his signature thing.

His signature thing is letting you watch him do real stunts.

Aliens.

Aliens.

Hey, hey, aliens.

I mean,

we talk about the guy who survived the Air India crash.

What about Tom Crowd?

I think we might need to examine that.

Didn't he hang on to the side of a plane while it was taking off one time?

That's real.

There's no CGI.

I mean, they CGI out the belt that's hanging on to him, but you say, oh, he had a belt hanging on.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He had a belt hanging.

You do it, you fuck.

You get on the side of a plane and hang on while it's taking off.

That's insane.

That's insane shit.

And I saw a reel where they were showing that, like how he did that.

And some Twad in the fucking comments is like, oh, he's got a belt on.

It's not real.

He's got a belt on.

He's hanging on to the side of a C1 fucking 30.

Yeah.

That's insanity.

There is no explanation except for literally not having all of your marbles in your head for wanting to do that.

I don't care who you are.

You can have a death wish, and that's not an easy way to go.

You don't want to fall off a plane while it's 10,000 feet in the air, hanging off the side of it or trying to get from a helicopter to another plane.

It's all just silliness.

Stop it, Tom.

We can figure out a computer or something.

Listen,

it's not like I'm your biggest fan in the world, but I don't want to see you die.

Thank God those movies are over.

But I do want to see it.

I'm excited to see it.

Me too.

And then.

On the opposite end of the Tom Cruise, but Tom Cruise also seems like religious about safety, right?

Yeah, you've got to to be.

Because when I saw the reel of him in the new movie, he jumps from a helicopter to an airplane midair.

And I watched the reel of how this all went down, like how they made it behind the scenes type thing.

And he says, right before he does the first jump out of the helicopter, he says, We're going to be alive today.

We're going to get some good footage, but we're going to be alive.

We're going to make this happen.

He flew his own fucking airplane for top gun.

And then he taught other people how to fly their airplanes for top gun so that it would look as real as fucking possible.

He's dedicated.

He's a man of action.

He's a true superhero.

Except he goes to that place we don't talk about because then the episode won't be airable.

And then you got the other side of the spectrum, which is this dunce that decided he was going to make a tin can submersible out of old Coca-Cola

bottles.

bottle tops and some thin wire and take it down all the way to the titanic what

Oh, you're talking about the, yeah, I know, and I haven't watched it yet, but I want to.

This guy is

the guy who started the company.

He has got to be one of the most egotistical

human beings that ever lived on Earth.

Because anybody that didn't believe in his vision that this would work, despite all evidence to the contrary,

was not going to be around him.

He surrounded himself with yes people, and those yes people were scared to say no.

They were scared to go down in the sub.

They knew there was problems all along.

They knew it.

And yet he continued to go.

He continued to press forward because he wanted to be the next Elon Musk.

He wanted to be the next Steve Jobs.

He wanted to be the next

guy who changed the world with this technology, which wasn't technology whatsoever.

And

he wanted to make tourism down to the Titanic part of a larger plan to take people to all different places throughout the ocean.

And he would revolutionize this and become fabulously wealthy and famous

along the way.

Stockton Rush was essentially just an asshole who believed his own bullshit.

But

what's clear from watching any of the documentaries, there's a couple of them out there, actually.

There's one on Netflix.

There's one from Discovery.

They're equally good i think the netflix one is more

uh the movie is better like the actual production is better but the one from discovery is also as as informative

and i'm not ruining anything because we know the ending here everybody dies right

but this

titan submersible the one that got lost at sea that we all were holding our breath while they were holding their breath we thought waiting for them this titan submersible was never supposed to go down to depth never it should have never been made of composite materials it should have never been made with what it was what it was made with which was carbon fiber now i know a little bit about carbon fiber because jeff and i were once in the carbon fiber business believe it or not it's true story

we were trying to hawk expired carbon fiber all around the world

Somebody called us one time and said they had a load of a thing of, I don't know what you call them, a ton,

reels roms rams i don't know of carbon fiber could we sell it and we'd get a hefty commission except it was expired

no one wanted it i think it might have gone on the titan i'm not sure it might have we talked about that at the time yeah at the time i thought maybe there was a connection there i mean

We never really did anything with it.

They called us.

We made some phone calls.

No one knew what the fuck we were talking about.

And so we said, well, it was a good.

It was right at the beginning of the pandemic.

It was.

Which, strangely, is when Stockton got his carbon fiber and decided to start spinning it up around a tin can and going down to the Titanic.

I can't believe people got on board with him.

So many people, even the people that they talked to that survived the Titan, said that they really believed in Stockton and they really believed that he wouldn't put his own life in danger.

And they really believed that he was religious about safety.

When everybody else that worked for the company, it was clear that was no

well.

Wait, are we talking about?

Is this the one that blew up?

Yes.

Or imploded?

Yeah.

Well, how did somebody survive it?

Survived the other dives down to the Titanic.

There were 83 dives in this particular version of the Titan.

There were other versions of the Titan.

And here's where you learn a little something.

What do you learn?

Well, you learn that there was the original Titan, the hull of the Titan, the cylinder that held them in.

It cracked, and it cracked so bad that Stockton had to go, despite against his wishes.

He had to go and have another one created.

And they hid that in some fancy PR words.

And they never told anybody in the future that one of them had already cracked.

Because every time it went down, the immense amount of pressure that was put onto carbon fiber, which is essentially just a weave.

Let's think of it like a weave.

Carbon fiber is super duper strong when you're pushing out on it, but when you're pushing in on it, it's different, right?

For whatever reason.

And so it kept getting pushed.

And as it got pushed, it would crack and snap.

And they would hear these cracks and snaps.

And in the Netflix documentary, they have audio of the popping, what they call popping.

It sounds like you're microwave popping popcorn.

Now imagine you're in this tiny little thing.

with five other people where you have to literally like pull a curtain to piss in a pot.

And you've been down underneath the water, you're 12,000 feet under, you've been going down for eight straight hours in complete darkness, and you start hearing popcorn-like noises all around you.

I would shit myself.

First of all, I would never volunteer for

I have zero interest in going to see the Titanic.

Zero.

Those people are down there for a reason, and I don't want to be down there.

I like swimming.

I don't like being underwater.

I don't have any interest in scuba diving.

I don't have any interest in any of that.

It doesn't interest me.

No space, no scuba diving.

Okay.

It's just not for me.

It's not my thing.

But these people were going down there 80 dives before this, 82 dives before this.

People were going down.

And each time they were hearing popping and cracking.

And each time the lead engineers, one of which was sued by Ocean Gate, the owner of Titan, one of which was sued.

to the to like threatened to take away his green card and sued his family and said that he was fraudulent because he wrote an email one email, that said that we should not be bringing people down when we test this hull.

It is not safe.

People are going to die and we're going to be left to pick up the pieces.

I refuse to go in it.

You should refuse to go in it.

He wrote that email and Stockton fired him the next day.

Fired him the next day

because Stockton said in the movie on tape, I'm not forcing anyone to drink the Kool-Aid, but we're going to do this.

This is how it's going to go down.

It's not, I would not put my, I'm not, not, I don't have a death wish.

I wouldn't put myself and my life in jeopardy, but that's exactly what he was doing.

And he should have known it.

The depths that they were going to, the immense amount of pressure, the crushing weight of the ocean just

forcing its way into every crevice was going to make that thing explode one way, implode one way or the other at any given time.

And anyone who went on it was not aware that it had already almost happened.

And in multiple smaller tests, it never got to depth.

So they would go to this laboratory and they would make smaller, like one-eighth versions of it, and they would put it in there.

And they tried to get it to 4,000 meters, which is where it needed to be tested to in order to get down to the Titanic.

And it didn't even get to 3,900.

It

imploded every time.

And Stockton said, We're just going to keep going because I believe.

I believe in it.

But everybody in the entire submersible industry said

no

should be cracking and popping.

None of them.

No, no, that seems bad.

Of course it does.

It's not adjusting.

It's not settling.

It's getting ready to fail is what it is.

That's why these, like, you think of a submarine, like think of a nuclear submarine, the kind they have in the bases.

Yeah.

And you go, oh, yeah, those guys, they can shoot down to 4,000 meters and hide near the Titanic.

They can't.

They actually can't go much below 500 meters.

Why?

Because they're so big.

And the amount of strength needed to hold something that big together under those depths is so immense, it doesn't exist.

You can't do it.

It would cost so much money.

It would be so heavy.

It would just sink right to the bottom.

So they actually don't go very deep at all.

I mean, they go deep for us.

Like we wouldn't want to be 1,500 feet underwater.

That's a third of a mile or whatever it is underwater.

But they don't go deep because they can't go deep.

Only specially designed submersibles can go that deep.

And that James Cameron, he's built a number of them.

And they they look like literally like

weird spaceships.

Like the last one that he built looks like a casket and he stands up in it.

Oh, it's got a seat, but he's like kind of standing up in it and he's held in it.

And it's just like, it's a big cylinder that just goes down because it's the perfect shape to get him down there.

It's small enough that they can take steel and make it strong enough for within reason for expense.

But they're spending like $10 million to build those things.

Stockton spent like, you know, he had a group on to build a new hole for that ocean gate when he had a lot of money behind him and a board full of rich people.

This guy went to fucking Princeton, for God's sakes.

And he was so dumb and so blind to everything that was going on around him that he just blindly put himself and

shamelessly other people at so much risk.

Yeah.

God.

And then it happened.

And when it happened, Everybody who had ever worked for Stockton Rush knew exactly why.

They all were like, that's it.

There it was.

It was going to happen.

And there it was.

Yeah, it's sad.

Yeah, that guy, one of the lead engineers, the first lead engineer who's in the Netflix documentary said, you should do this on a guide wire.

Send it down there on a guide wire multiple times, test it, see if it holds up.

See if it doesn't crack.

Look at the

take the skin off of it.

Let's look and see if there's cracks, if there's damage, if there's pops, if there's concerns.

We need to investigate every pop.

We need to investigate everything.

And Stockton just blindly was like, no, not going to do it.

The weird thing is,

you know, okay, Stockton blindly led people to their own death, but Stockton himself was in the

sub.

So it wasn't like he was trying to murder people.

He just was dumb.

He just was like fucking dumb.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then you think of Tom Cruise on the side of a plane and you go, well,

you know, at least Tom's got the best people in the business working on it.

Stockton claimed he had the best people working on it, but he didn't have the best people working on it.

He had kids, essentially.

When the lead engineer and pilot quit or got fired, they made the accountant the lead engineer and pilot.

Yes.

And she was like, you're fucking insane.

I'm not going down on that thing.

And I'm not an engineer.

So I'm not doing it.

Fuck you.

No way.

She quit the next day.

So some people did stand up to Stockton, but there were a number of them that didn't.

And now they're all, you know, well, I ain't telling them so.

Well, you should have just refused to show up to work.

I mean, people were going to die.

That's, that's it.

And those poor people, that Hamish Harding and

wasn't there like a child on there, too?

Not a child, but you know,

a teenager.

Yeah.

It was the dad.

Yeah, he was, his dad was like a British Pakistani businessman, like telecom, something, I think, telecom, uh, billionaire, millionaire, something like that.

And he was proud and happy to have taken his son to be able to afford to take his son down to the Titanic, something he really enjoyed and he wanted to see.

And he was happy that he could take his son along with him and now the mother is stuck with nobody and uh just a crazy crazy story that the ending's no surprise but there are surprises in the middle and in the discovery documentary you see that in the mothership the one that was supposed to be there keeping an eye on them here's the thing

You cannot just pick up a phone and call somebody up top.

You can't do that.

So you have these big radio antennas, and those radio antennas have to be very powerful so they can send signals up into

through the ocean, right?

And then hope that it reaches there.

So I believe what they did is that they would talk, and that talk would be transmitted into text, and that text would then reach them via some signal, right?

And that's how they would communicate up and down because they didn't have a wire attached.

So at some point, they got video of the inside of the communications room on the mothership.

At the moment they heard a large explosion underwater, like a thud, like a pop.

It startled the entire room.

And then they never heard back.

They never heard back.

Actually, they heard back.

One minute later, they got the last text message they ever received.

That text message was coming up, dropping weight, coming up.

So they believe, so they hear the sound, then one minute later, they get this message, dropping weight, coming up, emergency dropping weight coming up is essentially the last message.

And why is that?

Why did they hear the thud and then get a message?

Well, because it took that long for the message to get up top, which is just fucking insane when you think about it.

It's like you sent your last message and people got it after you've died.

Yeah,

creepy.

Well, Chrissy, the good news is you'll never catch me doing anything like that.

I'll go to Bentonville, but the fuck I'm going to go to the Titanic.

I'm not going to the Titanic.

Me neither.

It's not going to happen.

All right, we'll be back.

Why don't you text us and we can text back?

And then you can text us and reply, then so on.

It's a fun little game I've been playing.

And I think you'll be great at it.

212-433-3TCB.

That's 212-433-3822.

You could leave a message too.

If you do, maybe you'll end up being the voice of the show.

But be warned, the pay is not great.

You could go to the website and drop us an email also, tcbpodcast.com.

And while you're there, you can get a free sticker.

Who doesn't want a free sticker?

Just go to the contact us button and ask for one.

Follow us on Insta at thecommercial break and watch the episodes at youtube.com slash thecommercial break.

Now I'm going to go back to that texting game.

You want to play?

Come on.

Bye.

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All right, most expensive movies ever made.

We'll cap this off.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens, $447

million.

Wow.

God, we could do just one of those millions we could do something with.

Avatar Way of the Water

had an estimated budget of about $350 to $460 million.

Pirates of the Caribbean, Stranger Tides had $379 million.

Jurassic World, Fallen Kingdom, $432 million.

And then the other Avatar movies.

Fast X apparently had $300 million.

Fast X.

Fast.

Fast and Furious.

Another Fast and Furious.

Jeez, those movies are like, they're a jergenaut.

That's a jergenaut.

Oh, yeah.

They just keep turning them out.

They were making one down the street from where I lived.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

You were telling me that.

Yeah, I just can't watch them.

I don't know.

Yeah, it's not mine.

It's not for me.

It's not for me, but I do appreciate that a lot of people appreciate it.

Speaking of Star Wars, Jeff and I went down a rabbit hole with Andor.

Oh, did you watch Andor?

Did you like it?

We really liked it.

Yeah, a lot of people saying Andor is a fantastic title.

It's really good.

And then that ties into Rogue One.

If you remember, that came out in 2016, which at the time when I saw it, I was kind of like, yeah, I don't know.

It kind of didn't make sense.

But after watching Andor, it does.

It makes much more sense.

Okay, haven't seen Rogue One.

Haven't seen Andor.

So maybe I'll watch those two.

You know, maybe that's what I'll do at night at Disney when we'll catch up on some old some Disney shows we haven't watched.

So I never told this story, but I thought now would be a good time.

A couple, maybe a month ago, month and a half ago, Astrid and I are, you know, doing what we do, hanging out, working on the show or whatever.

And both of us start to notice that we're getting a few text messages regarding sticker requests.

We think this is very interesting.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

Three, four,

seven, ten.

You got to understand.

Yes, this show has an audience.

But for every audience member, for every 10 audience members, there's maybe one that will interact with us.

And that's the law of averages for any show.

It's not just the commercial break, it's any show.

So, actually, put it way down for the commercial break.

For every 50 audience members, one will interact with us.

Right.

And so we maybe,

you know, we get quite a few sticker requests, but usually not 10 in a day.

We have, but it's not, certainly not a normal day.

So I thought, oh, okay, people listen to the show, they really want their sticker.

But we haven't announced a new sticker.

There's no sticker promotion.

Why are we getting getting so many requests that day?

By the end of the day, it is hundreds of sticker requests.

Hundreds.

But there's something a little odd about the sticker requests.

The sticker requests are just addresses and names.

Usually with a sticker request, usually.

I'd say half of them.

There's something written there also in the sticker request, like in the

comments section.

Yeah, like love the show.

Can you sign the sticker?

Can I get one of these?

I need two of those.

I've been listening to you for a long time.

But by and large, none of these sticker requests have any comments whatsoever.

Address, name, email address.

So I say to Astrid, oh, we must be getting, there's a spam bot.

Somebody has told their chat TCB to go spam the fuck out of the commercial break.

Those probably aren't even real addresses.

They're probably like, you know, industrial warehouses somewhere.

So we start looking at some of them and we start feeling this out a little bit.

They're real houses.

Then we Google the names and the addresses and a lot of them are coming up connected.

This person has been reported to live at this house.

This is the house address that you have.

So we go, well, that's weird.

Why would a spam bot give us real addresses with real names of people?

Could happen.

Could be trained to do that.

I even asked one of my friends who works in AI, could you train?

Yeah, you could ask it to go through a list of

names associated with addresses and then send that to you.

But that's a lot of work for what payoff.

Yeah, for, and for what payoff, right?

You, you, do you own those addresses?

Are you going to go show up at their house and steal their mail and hope that you get the stickers from the commercial break?

Why not just ask to buy a bunch of stickers, right?

Okay, whatever.

So by the end of the 24-hour period, we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sticker requests.

And we are

going crazy about this.

I can't believe this.

By the end of two days, we're getting close to maybe 700, 800 sticker requests.

It's nuts.

And I'm like, what is going on?

Yeah, there's got to be something.

I look at the traffic of the show.

It's not notably different.

It's a little bit up, but not notably different.

So now I'm extra suspicious.

Why are people coming to our website?

Our Google analytics that tracks traffic on our website is going ba nanas.

It's up by like 6,000%, right?

And I'm like, wow, that's crazy.

But then I people are finally catching on to the brand.

People are finally catching on to the commercial break.

Someone has said something.

Yes, Tom Cruise made a video about his stunts.

And in that stunt on the side of the plane, it said, TCBpodcast.com for your free sticker.

I don't know.

I have no idea.

I can't imagine why people would be going crazy about our stickers on these days.

It's just driving us nuts.

And she goes, Astrid's like, it costs a lot of money to send out.

We're going to have to order new stickers.

Like, it costs money to send out these stickers, two or three bucks a pop.

Like, what are we going to do?

And I'm like, I don't know.

I mean, if they're real listeners, I guess we have to follow up.

So then I go into the Google Analytics and I start diving a little deeper.

And I notice that there's a weird extension.

It says like the website that the traffic is coming from, there's a weird extension.

And I click on that extension, but it doesn't go anywhere.

It's like, you know, this website can't be found or whatever.

So then I Google TCB free sticker.

And when I do, up pops a list.

And I'm not talking one or two.

I'm talking like 12, 15 websites that are these coupon websites where it give it like

essentially catalogs all of the great coupons that are available for things around the world.

Like, you know, from lunchables to deli meets to Kmart, Target, and Walmart, and all this other stuff, right?

Tires.

Yes.

They're huge websites that just suck in, and they all have a section on free shit.

Shit, you can get for free.

And they all probably are owned or share information with each other.

They screen scrape each other's information.

So

on all of those sites, that day and the next day and the third day, at the top of the free shit you can get is the Commercial Break Podcast's free sticker.

So no good deed goes unpunished as we now have 1,000 sticker requests to fill from people who have never nor will ever listen to the show.

Maybe some of you did.

Maybe some of you are here because of that sticker request.

But we know damn well, just like they know damn well, no one's actually.

They love free stuff.

They do.

From a podcast.

I know.

It's crazy.

I mean, I remember, but yeah, this doesn't,

yes, just a stick.

Yeah, I guess.

I know, I get it.

But like, I used to work trade shows, and you know, I mean, it could be the dumbest little tchotchki stuff.

And I mean, people will just come over and grab handfuls of it.

Yeah.

Little keychains.

It has nothing to do with anything.

It must be in our brains.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Bad parents, did you say?

No, crap.

Oh, I thought you said bad parents.

And I'm like, that too.

It must be in our brains, in our DNA somewhere.

It's free.

I didn't have to work for it.

I don't have to pay anything for it.

It's free.

Let me get it and let me get it in bulk.

If it's,

you're right.

It's stupid as shit.

Listen, to our listeners, I want to give you a free sticker.

I like that.

No, absolutely.

But for other people that really had never listened to the show.

Listen to the show, no or ever will listen to the show.

Right.

No.

And so I said to Astrid, I go, okay, I know this is a pain in the ass, but dump all these people into a system, and then you're going to have to respond to them and ask them to tell you which is their favorite episode and their favorite line from their favorite episode.

And if they respond, then send them a sticker.

So I think we probably had 100, 150 people actually do that.

So maybe they actually did start listening to the show.

But otherwise.

I mean, I guess it's kind of promotion for the show.

Kind of.

I mean, it's very expensive promotion, but it's kind of promotion.

You know, when you only have 10% of people actually responding to your promotion and it's $3 a pop, it can't be very expensive.

So all this to say, I want you to have your free sticker.

I like the idea that you can do that.

And we're doing new ones.

And we are doing new ones.

And we have an endless day one coming.

So you can commemorate your endless day.

But please do this favor.

Write something when you go to the website and in the contact us button and you want your free sticker.

And you can have a free sticker every time we have one.

So it's not just one free sticker.

If we change the stickers, you can have another one.

No problem.

I don't mind that either.

But do us a favor and write something in the comments section so we can decipher the bullshit from the reality very quickly.

And I don't know, write your favorite episode, write a comment, write, say something funny that we say, ask for a signature, something along those lines.

So we know it's you and it's real and you're a listener.

I don't want to be a dick, but

I got to put my foot down.

I can't give away thousand stickers on a daily basis.

That would be insane.

We don't make any money here.

No.

How are we going to afford to pay for more stickers?

That would have been my entire paycheck if I would have sent all of those stickers.

Seriously, it's crazy.

Yeah, I remember when you sent that to me, and I looked at that site.

It was just like, what was it?

The free thing of the day or something.

Free.com or whatever.

Freeshit.com.

But then it propagated to like these other, all these other sites.

It just went on.

It was a rabbit hole that went on and on forever, and that went on for days.

It took about a week for that to shake out of the system.

And I think every once in a while, we still get people that are asking for free stickers from that website.

So, thanks for the free promotion, but the joke's on you.

It's not really free.

You must listen to the show.

I should have asked them to pay for postage

because if you really want something to free and then they ask you to do something, it probably pisses you off.

I would imagine.

Yeah.

So,

all right, well, guess what else is free?

Texting us 212-433-3TCB 212-433-3822.

Text us questions, comments, concerns, content ideas.

We take them all at that phone number.

We'd love to hear from you.

So many of you do so.

But those of you that do not, if you're that other 49 out of 50 people that do not, just text us.

Say hello.

We're friendly.

We're nice.

You never know.

It could turn into a lifelong romance.

Do it now.

Did you watch Andor?

Let us know.

Do you want to to see F1?

Let us know.

Do you not like Stockton Rush?

Let us know.

Did you go on Stockton Rush's submarine?

I want to know.

Let us know.

Anything we talk about.

Add in your two cents.

Keeps the conversation going.

You text me.

I text you.

That's how it goes.

All right.

Okay.

TCBpodcast.com.

That's where you can get your free sticker.

You say something nice in the comment section.

You can also see all of the video, hear all of the audio right there from one location, tcbpodcast.com.

Also, all of the videos are available the same day they are here on the RSS feed.

Just go to youtube.com slash the commercial break for all of those videos, every single one of them, on our channel.

I got it all?

Yep.

Well, I think if you'd like to see us twitch and kick.

Oh, twitch and kick.

Let us know.

Let us know if you'd like to see us twitch and kick.

All right, Chrissy, that's all I can do for today, man.

Love you.

I think so, and I love you.

Best of you.

Best to you.

And best of you out there in the podcast universe.

Until next time, Chrissy and I will say, we do say, and we must say.

Goodbye.

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