Podbit · 2 Bears, 1 Cave with Tom Segura & Bert Kreischer
Joe DeRosa reveals he drank heavily every night in Austin during the Netflix Is A Joke Fest run, still made it to the Rose Bowl 5K because his anxiety wakes him up naturally by 9 AM every day — and he sometimes wets the bed.
Where this was said
At 1:02:20 · chapter starts 49:51
Ari Shaffir arrives having just taught a yoga class at the 5K, heat-stroked and bearded, and the dynamic immediately shifts into the philosophical and anarchic. The group swaps Shaq stories — Ari relays Brett Ernst's anecdote about Shaq spending 90 minutes playing with birthday party children and paying their tab — before pivoting to Joe Rogan's stratospheric fame and the odd experience of realizing your friends have become cultural institutions. [1] — Ari Shaffir "Ari Shaffir relays comedian Brett Ernst's story about Shaq at a restaurant: asked to say hi to children at a birthday party mid-meal, Shaq …" 50:20 Bert unpacks his therapist's framing of his narcissism: he doesn't cheat because he'd be miserable without his wife, not because he cares about her feelings, and the 5K itself is a product of that self-centered drive. The gang then reconstructs 'Fat Tom' with forensic glee — the pecan pie spiral, the hot sauce kit, the body that had 'given up' — before Ari casually drops that he regularly passes blood and has no intention of addressing it. [2] — Bert Kreischer "Bert Kreischer argues that narcissism isn't inherently bad — he only does things because of how they make him feel, including not cheating …" 55:35
Ari Shaffir relays comedian Brett Ernst's story about Shaq at a restaurant: asked to say hi to children at a birthday party mid-meal, Shaq finished eating first, then spent 90 minutes playing with the kids and paid their entire tab before leaving.
Bert Kreischer argues that narcissism isn't inherently bad — he only does things because of how they make him feel, including not cheating on his wife (he'd be miserable without her) and not talking shit about Tom (Tom hasn't done anything worth it). His therapist agrees.
Bert and Ari reconstruct 'Fat Tom' — a version of Tom Segura who was broke, binge-made pecan pies, and gained 30 pounds in a month before he knew he had money. Today's Tom has a chef and red light therapy injections. The contrast is wild.
Spike your cortisol in the first 1–3 hours of your day — with sunlight, hydration, exercise, or caffeine — and you set up elevated mood, focus, and stress resilience for the rest of the day. Miss that spike and you get a flat cortisol curve: brain fog, poor learning, and bad sleep. The bookend is equally important: dim lights, no caffeine, and wind down the final hour.
Bottom-up impulses — just eat the cookie, keep scrolling — are driven by deep brain structures. Top-down prefrontal control is the thing that lets you wait, learn, and grow. Every small act of choosing the harder thing, from picking up trash to doing the workout you dread, greases that top-down circuit — and it transfers to everything else.
A Washington University in St. Louis study found that the attention-improvement effects of Ritalin are effectively equal to a great night's sleep. Stimulants also stunt growth and reduce sleep quality. The new direction is combining lower medication doses with genuinely better sleep — not replacing sleep with pharmacology.
Two big inhales through the nose, then a full exhale to empty — that's the physiological sigh. It fires a specific vagal pathway to slow your heart rate, offload CO2, and tip the autonomic nervous system toward calm instantly. Doing just 10 deliberate exhales throughout the day measurably elevates HRV by nighttime.
Presence isn't a state you fall into — it's something you actively produce by anchoring perception to the immediate environment. Ask 2–3 trivially specific questions about your surroundings (how many cans, what does it smell like) to pull your brain out of past/future mode. Then deliberately choose what to think or say next. That's it.
Acknowledge the thing, feel all of it, uncouple the emotion from the memory, then transmute the experience into something meaningful. Most people stall at step 2 — feeling the feelings — and never reach uncoupling. An entire generation is stuck there, confusing emotional processing for healing. Moving through all four is the actual path out.
Nicotine creates a uniquely alert-and-calm state ideal for learning — but only at low doses used occasionally. If you're using 3–6 mg pouches multiple times a day, you're not getting a cognitive enhancement, you're just rescuing yourself from withdrawal. For a genuine performance effect, use it once or twice per week at most.
Two injections of BPC-157 (100–200 mcg) eliminated shoulder pain Huberman couldn't shift for months. The peptide pinealon gave him 2.5–3 hours of REM sleep inside 6 hours — an effect that persisted into subsequent nights and scaled down to just once per week. Neither is in the book because the human data aren't there yet, but the animal evidence is strong.
Long, slow cardio builds capillary networks and mitochondrial richness; high-intensity intervals push VO2 max. You don't need huge volumes of either. Huberman's protocol: one 45–60 minute long slow session, one near-maximal effort HIIT session (Airdyne 20-on/10-off for 6–8 rounds), and one medium 30-minute effort per week. That's the complete cardio picture.
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