Podbit · 2 Bears, 1 Cave with Tom Segura & Bert Kreischer
Bert is medically required to stay sober until July 12th due to blood thinners for his leg clot. His ideal return-to-drinking scenario: three days in the Caribbean, cocktail in the pool by morning, fully unplugged from the continental US. No Chicago, no New York — you need the sand and the distance.
Where this was said
At 46:10 · chapter starts 43:47
Bert opens up about the medical event behind his sobriety: a blood clot formed in his leg and traveled to his lungs, requiring blood thinners and complete alcohol abstinence. His first reaction was panic about the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, and the South Beach Food and Wine Festival. [1] — Bert Kreischer "Blood clot forced sobriety: Bert Kreischer got a blood clot in his leg that traveled to his lungs, forcing him onto blood thinners and off …" 47:41 Three months in, he reports dramatically improved liver enzyme numbers (down to 18-20 from the mid-40s) and blood pressure good enough to come off medication. But he has no intention of staying sober beyond July 12th — and the three spend significant time debating the ideal location for his first drink back. Tom argues he needs to leave the country to truly unplug; the Caribbean is the consensus winner over Chicago and New York, which are great drinking cities but not 'go hard for three days' venues. Ari notes he's 92 days sober and also not drinking, though his sobriety isn't medically mandated.
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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