Joe Rogan Experience #1916 - Jon Bernthal

Jon Bernthal joins Joe Rogan for a wide-ranging, reflective conversation about why he started his podcast Real Ones, which he uses to platform police, gang members, prisoners, and others whose voices rarely get heard, deliberately pairing people from opposite sides of the same streets. He recounts being a troubled kid who spent two years training at the Moscow Art Theater in the late 1990s, an experience of beauty and brutality that he credits with saving his life. He shares the pivotal July 2009 fight in Venice Beach that nearly sent him to prison and triggered the vow that reshaped his life, leading to The Walking Dead one year later. Throughout, he and Rogan dwell on forgiveness, redemption, masculinity, fatherhood, and the danger of writing people off, including his controversial decision to interview Shia LaBeouf after abuse allegations.

• Bernthal describes the July 2009 Venice Beach fight where he knocked a man out, the man cracked his head on the pavement, and Bernthal sat handcuffed believing he might face manslaughter.
  01:21:15
• Cuffed at Pacific Division he made a vow that if he got out of it he would dedicate his life to his work, his family, and service.
  01:21:46
• Exactly one year after that fight he was on the set of his first season of The Walking Dead, sober and engaged.
  01:22:47
• On his third day in Moscow he intervened as two men smashed a woman's head against a building and had a gun put to his forehead.
  00:45:46
• Having Shia LaBeouf on the podcast after abuse allegations brought him the first real public hatred and backlash of his life.
  02:06:56
• After the fight the man sued him for two million dollars in a civil case at a time when Bernthal had almost no money and was starting a family.
  02:29:51
• The first podcast episode paired a Newton-division crash-unit cop, Jerry Ballesteros, with Dante 'Bojangles' Johnson of the Pueblo Bishop Bloods.
  00:21:26

• The Moscow Art Theater auditions thousands, takes 100 students, cuts the class in half each semester, and graduates roughly 10.
  00:35:30
• Stanislavski's realism method spread worldwide via The Seagull's 1933 tour, reshaping all major American theater training.
  00:31:51
• Russian director Meyerhold was executed in his apartment after a play he made was suddenly deemed anti-state.
  00:40:37
• During communist times public audiences were illegal, so Bernthal's teachers performed the banned play Cinzano in subway tunnels and abandoned buildings.
  00:41:08
• Moscow police with AK-47s stopped him for crossing the street wrong and let him go after he handed over 20 rubles.
  00:44:13
• His cousin was in the band Fountains of Wayne and died very early in the COVID pandemic, leaving two daughters.
  00:23:00
• Rogan calls his Siddharth Kara episode on Congo cobalt mining the heaviest podcast he has ever done.
  01:56:36
• A giant JRE video plays on a roughly 50-foot screen in Times Square, which Rogan finds surreal given its laptop origins.
  02:04:21
• Marine veteran Richard McKinney planned to bomb a Muncie mosque but became a devout Muslim and its president after a woman, Bibi, welcomed and fed him.
  01:29:34

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