Podbit · 2 Bears, 1 Cave with Tom Segura & Bert Kreischer
The flight to Patrice O'Neal's funeral in New York cost $900. Bert didn't go. He could hear Patrice's voice saying he wouldn't pay $900 to go to Bert's funeral either — and going anyway just to meet Chris Rock would have been exactly what Patrice accused him of all along. So he stayed home.
Where this was said
At 47:00 · chapter starts 41:28
Bert is riding high — TV show, money, Hollywood apartment — and rents a party bus to take his friends to watch Patrice tape his Showtime special at the Brea Improv alongside Gary Goldman and another Jim Brewer nobody can look up. He warns everyone they won't like Patrice, because he's not friends with him — or so he tells them. Patrice sabotages the first taping with material that isn't his best. After the show, at the Embassy Suites after-party, Patrice pulls Bert aside and asks what he's doing there. Bert says he came to see Patrice do stand-up. Patrice says: 'Because we're friends.' Bert, not walking into the trap, says yes. And Patrice sits next to him all night, almost proud. [1] — Bert Kreischer "While shooting Bert the Conqueror in San Antonio, Bert learned that Patrice O'Neal had publicly tweeted his pride in Bert's success. The tw…" 45:56 The confirmation of friendship comes later: while shooting Bert the Conqueror in San Antonio, a producer rushes in to show Bert a tweet. Patrice has publicly called Bert 'a real G in the game of comedy' and expressed pride in his success. It was so unlike Patrice that Bert knew immediately it was genuine. Six months later, Patrice had a stroke.
Bert Kreischer watched Patrice O'Neal deliberately sabotage his first of two Showtime special tapings at the Brea Improv by doing material he knew wasn't his best work.
While shooting Bert the Conqueror in San Antonio, Bert learned that Patrice O'Neal had publicly tweeted his pride in Bert's success. The tweet was so unlike Patrice — warm, direct, calling Bert a 'real G in the game of comedy' — that it confirmed they were actually friends. Then, six months later, Patrice had a stroke.
Patrice O'Neal tweeted that he was proud of his friend Bert Kreischer's Travel Channel show Bert the Conqueror just months before suffering the stroke that eventually killed him.
Bert Kreischer did not attend Patrice O'Neal's funeral because the plane ticket was $900 and he could hear Patrice's voice saying he wouldn't pay $900 to go to Bert's funeral.
Most people confuse things they value instrumentally (because they get them other things) with things they value intrinsically (for their own sake). Greenberg's friend stayed in a miserable relationship for years because she was living by her parents' values, not her own — the values map made the mismatch instantly visible.
Jungian analyst James Hollis distills a good life to four things: shut up (have gratitude, stop whining), suit up (prepare yourself to fulfill a role), show up (do the actual work in service of others), and daily get out of stimulus-response to ask what your deeper wish actually is. The whole landscape of self-help slots into just these four bins.
Toward the end of their 20s, many men discover that all the strategies that earned them recognition and success have stopped working. It's a second adolescence — more important than the first — where the question shifts from 'how do I play the game?' to 'who do I actually want to become?' Most people going through it look fragile from the outside. They're actually building a foundation.
Boys are told from childhood not to cry, not to feel, not to be weak — but anger gets a pass. The result: a generation of men who reroute every emotion, including sadness and fear, through the only acceptable channel. Emotional avoidance isn't toughness, it's misdirected sensitivity.
Men need a 'bank account' of masculine status — muscle, money, success — before society grants them permission to express vulnerability. Chris Bumstead can cry at the Olympia and get celebrated. A struggling nobody doing the same thing gets contempt. This creates a tragic paradox where the men who most need emotional support get the least of it.
Emotional sensitivity isn't a defect — it's a high-resolution scanner for human experience. Highly sensitive people pick up body language, tone, and unspoken tension that others miss entirely. In the right environment, that's not a liability. It's a superpower.
Her supervisor told her she was too emotional for the pediatric ICU. So she asked herself: 'What area of medicine can I cry in?' That question led her to psychiatry. Finding the environment that holds your emotional sensitivity isn't retreat — it's strategy.
For someone with RSD, ghosting isn't ambiguity — it's a self-verdict. Their brain doesn't read 'this relationship ended,' it reads 'I am the reason this failed.' No closure means the brain fills the gap with evidence of personal insufficiency, and it keeps filling indefinitely.
More freedom doesn't produce more happiness — it produces more anxiety. Kierkegaard identified this 180 years ago: the more options you have, the more you feel the 'dizziness of freedom,' a paralytic unease at having to choose any single one. The freest generation in history is, by his prediction, exactly the most anxious.
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