Endless Thread - Does Steven Seagal really know karate?

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

There's a burning question that keeps coming up in internet communities, YouTube explainers, and interviews with stunt people from the film industry: does Steven Seagal actually know martial arts? In our current news environment, where conspiracy theories abound and the truth can feel elusive, this somewhat silly question keeps getting asked. But as we explore the answer, we find that perhaps the confusion about Steven Seagal's own personal story has relevance for how we navigate the year of 2025, whether or not we're talking about Hollywood action heroes.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory, do you know Kung Fu? Nope. Karate? Not a move, not a kick. Jiu-Jitsu? Nope. Tai Chi?

No. Are you more of like a scratch-and-bop-em-on-the-nose approach? Yeah, I took a boxing class for a while. while. All right. So I can sock them where it hurts. You can sock them. But not with any sort of prestige or real finesse.

Okay. So I'm going to ask you, have you seen any of these films? And I want you to say after each one, whether you've seen it or not. Simple yes or no answer, okay? Yep. Hard to kill. No. Marked for death.

No. Out for justice. No. Above the law. Nope. Beyond the law. No. China salesman.

No. On deadly ground? No. Exit wounds. No. Under siege. No. End of a gun.

No. A dangerous man. That sounds familiar, but no. A good man. No. How about this one? Sheep Impact. Yes.

No. Sheep Impact is a four minutes short about friends Craig and Paul who are charged with bringing meat to the lovely Sarah's barbecue party. so that they can have a chance with her and how they may have to resort to desperate measures. So sheep impact, you haven't seen that one? All that in four minutes, huh? And a bag of chips. No.

These are all, as you may be able to guess. Steven Segal films? Yes. So when you, Amory, meditate upon the grandeur that is the actor, the blues guitar genius, the minor deity that is Stephen Seagal, in your mind's eye, who do you see?

Can you describe him to me? In my mind, I'm seeing like a more, probably more of a present day, Stephen Seagall. So he's stocky. He looks like a stereotypical mob boss maybe. I'm picturing him in like... Ponytail? You see in the ponytail? Oh, sure, sure, yeah.

Yeah. Okay, you're seeing the leather. Okay, that's good. These all generally fit his description. So Stephen Seagal is in some ways on this list of like huge action, hero names from the 1990s, one might say. A decade when action heroes were kind of a big thing, the kind of bread and muscle-bound butter of American cinema.

I'm talking about people like Jean-Claude Van Dam. Don't even think about it. Chuck Norris. Arnold Schwarzenegger. All right, everyone. Drews Willie. Happy trails, Hans. You're not on Bruce Willie terms with Bruce Willis.

That's true. You and your dead self. But I might be on Bruce Willie terms with Liam Nessens. Anyway, okay. Stephen Seagall is different. And he's different in a number of ways, not least of which is he is the only person on this list who has performed as the lead guitarist of a blues band called Thunderbox.

Would you like to hear some Thunderbox? Of course. All right. What do you think? It was your standard blues guitar fare. As a fellow musician, you would say. From what I heard thus far, it sounds like he is competently executing blues guitar in a way that is unremarkable, but tip a hat too. Nothing wrong with it.

No notes. Okay, moving on. The reason we are talking about Stephen Seagall today is that he really is a unique character in American culture, and he is the top. topic of much discussion on the internet. I noticed this about a year and a half ago that there were some burgeoning and raging debates about Stephen Seagal about his ancestry.

I'm Russian, Mongolian, and we don't really know which tribe it is. About whether or not he is a good guy. He did exactly what I said and exactly what I wanted to happen, happened. About whether he is the worst host to ever host Saturday Night Live. And perhaps Amory the most

important and crucial for Stephen Seagall's personal brand, debates and conspiracy theories about this action hero's knowledge of martial arts. Many people consider me, you know, one of the great masters in my own field. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Severson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from Boston's Dojo in the Buddhist enlightened astral plane, WBUR. Today's episode, does Stephen Sagan? No karate.

All right. So as I mentioned, I was on this Stephen Seagall conspiracy thing early. I swear to God, I was early. It was at least a year ago, maybe a year and a half. I saw conversations about him popping off on X and Reddit. And then I saw some things on YouTube, mostly revolving around this question of whether or not Seagull actually can perform martial arts if he's the real deal. And I want to show you a little video.

and ask you to react to this, okay? Okay. You're about to witness the most lethal mixed martial artists in the world in action. All right. We've got Stephen Seagall in the fighting square. He is kicking ass someone. Ooh, and then we got a young Steven Seagal. Looks very different.

Also kicking ass. But like not really kicking ass. He's just, this looks very staged. He's just kind of like, boop, throw you down, Boop, throw you down, boot, throw you down. These people are, they're in on it. They're willingly being tossed to the ground with a gentle nudge from Stephen Seagall. That's a perfect description.

So there's this raging debate online about Seagall's credentials and whether they're indeed legit. And I know very little about martial arts or the martial arts world. I know you've boxed, so you already know more than me. My sense is that in this world, credentials are extremely important, right? Like who you trained with, where are you trained? The belts. How many belts, exactly. What color.

What color the belts are. This stuff is important, right? Yeah. So I was curious about this. I wanted to know more, but I'm not going to lie. At the time a year and a half ago, I kept scrolling without diving deep on Stephen Segal. And then, just before this holiday season, Stephen Seagal, roundhouse kicked back into my feed. There was a viral picture of him on a subreddit called Ukraine War Video Report,

which is effectively a community where people post a lot of video and photos from the war in Ukraine. I'm going to show you this picture. Okay. How would you describe his body type and just looking at him right now, how would you, without creating too much shame, describe your impression of his life? level of fitness. He's chilling. So not necessarily in fighting shape, as they say.

Nope. I mean, who knows? I'm not going to underestimate him. But no, he looks like he's been chilling. The top comment on this is that chair is the hardest fighter in all of Russia. Oh, no. Holding up Stephen Seagall, who seems to be pretty out of shape. Look, he doesn't look like an action hero in these photos.

He's older now. I mean, he's 72 years old, according to the Internet. I hedged that because Seagal's got a lot of suspicious information about him on the internet. What jumped out to me was that Seagal was apparently fighting, or at least sitting, on the side of Russia in this fight. Why do I think he's Russian? This is a great question. We're going to get to that. Okay.

I want you to put your karate ghee on. I want you to tighten that yellow belt and come with me on this rabbit hole. That's the really advanced one, right? Yeah, totally. I think mine's white still. Okay. You know. Let us start at Seagal's origins.

So you asked if he was Russian or not. Wait, is he Russian? What is he mean? Yeah. So I want to shout out a YouTuber here. His name is Patrick Gavia, who put together a real supercut of the Seagal mystery stew, comedic supercut, I should say.

And this is from that supercut. And it's Stephen Seagal talking about his own origins. I was born from Mother who was found in a shoebox when she was born. My mother was American Indian. Are you Italian? I have some Italian on my mother's side and some French. My mother

was a Mohawk. I think that my mother's side is probably Irish. My grandmother surely looks pure Mohawk, and I'm pretty sure she is. Grandmother in Yulani that is Mongolian? They look like Russian Mongols, but I don't know what they are, but they're something Asian. Father is a Russian Mongol. Part of

his family are from. So let's put it this way. I'm a lot more Asian than I am American. I'm a Russian Mongolian. And we don't really know which tribe it is. And all of those people are dead now, so I can't ask them. Asian, I don't know what the hell I have been able to cuss on this show. Wow.

Wow. He's a man of the people then. Suffice it to say, even the beginnings of Stephen Seagall are mysterious, perhaps even to him. Apparently, his dad was a math teacher, his mom was a medical technician, Irish and Jewish descent, according to a documentary from the Discovery Channel. I really became first aware of Segal right after the time of his big Hollywood movie, which I described earlier under siege. Maybe the only other thing I really knew about him at the time was that he was connected to Native American issues. and I think was outspoken about this. According to the stories he tells about himself,

Seagal lives in California for a while as a teenager. He's born in Michigan, he moves to California. During Vietnam, Seagal apparently moves to Japan and marries a woman there to avoid the Vietnam draft, which is maybe strange behavior considering his action career. There he apparently picks up a black belt in Aikido. According to Seagal himself, he trains the CIA, in Japan to go after the Japanese mob, the Yakuza.

Hmm. There's not a lot of sources for that, beyond Segal himself in interviews on David Letterman and elsewhere. Did you or did you not work with the CIA? Did I make that up or people just saying that to be funny or did you actually have a job with a central intelligence agency? I like the way you say that. Um, well, you know, it's kind of a personal thing, Dave.

It's a little tough to talk about this. You can't talk about it? So that means you were with the CIA. Because if you weren't, you could talk about anything you wanted. Well, if you want to put it that way, it's pretty embarrassing, and I wouldn't like to talk about it because it's kind of a painful memory, you know. Also, apparently he's been interested in music since Jump. He has said, and I quote,

I've been playing since I was a baby. A little baby blues guitar. So he has also said, and I quote, I don't know what color I am. but I was the only one who knew that wasn't black who played exactly like them. Oh, boy.

Okay. So what are you getting a sense of, you know, from Seagal's narration of his own life and how much we can depend on that? He lives in a fantasy world. He does not know fact from fiction anymore, and he is constructing his personal narrative brick by brick by the day

and rearranging, bricks along the way. There's just a lot of strange narratives coming out of Stephen Sagan. I think you're right. A lot of them don't make sense or they're in competition with each other. What we do have evidence of is that he returns from Japan eventually and begins to do combat choreography in Hollywood. He apparently breaks Sean Connery's wrist, showing him how to do Aikido. And he was really, very, very good and everything. And then I got a little cocky because I thought I knew what I was doing because, you know, the principle is its defense. So, you know, It's a pyramid, and I got a bit flash, and I did that, and he broke my wrist.

Wow. And this is another whole strange narrative in the Segal lore, by the way, that he hurts people he works with on screen. There's a compendium of complaints that some people have about how Segal treats them on set, how he's dangerous, and his white scenes. It's a whole thing. And it's an important thing to say because it's part of the story that does not come directly from Seagal himself. He starts crossing over from movie star choreographer to an actual movie. movie star, an eye-watering list of Seagall movies get made. Apparently, some of his movies get funded, in part, by the way, by the mob here in the U.S.

Oh, boy. There's an extortion case involving the Genovese crime family in New York. Did you expect the mob to be involved in Stephen Seagall's story? I mean, why not? Why not? Just toss it in there. Yeah, toss it in. Okay, last insane thing to mention for now, Stephen Seagal at the height of his fame, gets to host

to SNL. This is a job. If you want to host SNL, you must be able to poke fun at yourself, right? And so we're going to give you a hint about whether or not Stephen Seagall can laugh at himself, can take himself not seriously, from Rob Schneider, the actor. Finally, Stephen Segal emerges from one of the other ante rooms in the mobile home. And he comes out and he said, I just read the greatest script I've ever written my life. He goes, really? Who wrote it? I did. So that clip from Rob Schneider should tell you about Stephen Segal's opinion of himself

and also maybe give you a sense of whether or not Stephen Seagall can poke fun at himself as the host of SNL. Spoiler alert for that episode of SNL, which came out over 30 years ago in 1991. I'm not sure the answer is yes here. According to reports of Stephen Seagall's demands, most of his skits featured a lot of him just beating people up, including Exxon Mobil executives. Oh. Who were in the news at the time.

This is what happens when you pollute the planets. I mean, I don't know if I hate the results, but I'm not sure it's that funny. Lauren Michaels had a jab at Sigol years later. Worst hosts. By lapped, every bad host. But whether or not he's a good actor isn't the question we are tackling here, right?

What we're tackling is whether or not his martial arts are legit. So we have to go to who we talked to first about this. Someone with their own fighting credentials. Uncle Ronnie. Oh. Uncle Ronnie, who is the uncle of producer Grace Tatters' boyfriend. Okay.

I mean, that's how we source endless thread. Come on, guys. Uncle Ronnie was interviewed during the holidays by Grace's boyfriend because he used to be a bouncer. Oh. In Springfield, Massachusetts. I want to give you an impression of Ronnie's first impressions of Stephen Seagall. He runs like a wounded giraffe. You ever see him running his movies?

I can't say I know what a wounded giraffe runs like, but we'll go with it, Ronnie. Okay, here's Ronnie and what I assume is a baby, which considering all the things Segal accomplished as a baby, apparently, feels relevant, giving some more impressions of Stephen Seagall. Stephen Seagal has never had a real fight ever, not once. Well, I believe it with the movies. It looks good in the movies. It looks good in the movies. They wouldn't love Steve Seagal. We could make a movie and have somebody show us the moves. We would look like Stevens and go.

They just swapped me out. I'd just be me standing over. Not even that. It's just. You don't have the long legs from it, Ronnie. You don't need them. He looks good with those long legs. He looks good with those long legs.

Like a giraffe. Like a wounded giraffe. Okay, so let's get some more work experience relevant takes from Uncle Ronnie here, who is talking about his work experience as a bouncer. And DJ in Massachusetts. Yeah. And DJ in a bar, bouncing.

Right. I kick more people, knocked the ball, punch them, one shot, took them out. Right. And I haven't even had a black boat. I've got a belt to hold my pants up, but I still win because I'm street. Right.

You learn how to fight in the street. Right. But I probably hit at least 20. by people, took them out. See, I wouldn't be scared of Stevensville. Right. Nobody's ever seen him fight. Right.

I'd take a shot at him. And I'm 70 years old for crying out. It's amazing. Michael J. White, you couldn't pay me to attempt to fight him. Never, or John Claude Van Dam. Or Chuck Norse, 80-something years old, I wouldn't punch him. Still pretty fit, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Is that Grace's boyfriend saying right? Right? Right. Okay. He is not getting a job as a journalist, I'm going to say, because he is just a firm. But he did gather some amazing tape from Uncle Ronnie. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Ronnie sounds like a gem and I wouldn't want to challenge him. He's street. He's street. He's street. You just learn it in the street. You could be his 26th person. You're not careful coming at Uncle Ronnie. Okay.

So we have now heard a lot from me, Amory, on Stephen's. Sagan. We have heard from Uncle Rami. But I think we need to like actually get someone in here who knows what the heck they're talking about from a professional standpoint. And we are going to judge whether or not Stephen Sagall actually knows karate after the break. Support for this podcast comes from Nature is the Solution, a podcast from the Nature Conservancy. When it comes to the environment, it's easy to focus on doom and gloom. But that's not the whole story, especially when there are so many projects working towards bringing people and nature together. In this moment, optimism isn't naive. It's necessary. Follow nature is the solution wherever

you listen to podcasts and discover stories of impact and possibility. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from CitySpace Productions,

the Creative Studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships Team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. I have two text groups of just trading funny facts about Steven Seagal. What?

Yeah, well, that's how this kind of came. I was talking to my buddy, Jay. You know, it's like a link up, cross friendships, whatever. And he was like, I got just the guy that might be excited to do this. And I very much was. And we do like a trade. He's like, did you know he's a musician? And then the next thing from like under siege, like, do you know he's like a pastry chef?

Because there's a scene. Yes. What is it? It's like, you could bake a cake and a microwave 15 minutes on high. You know, and I went to school for this. That's why I wanted to use that as a segment in. All right. So we're trying to answer an important question.

Does actor Stephen Seagal actually know karate or martial arts in general? Sometimes karate is used as a sort of catch-all term for martial arts. We asked a local expert to help us. I'm Scott Gugoni and I'm from Shirley Mass, and I work and train at Mass BJJ and that's an act in. Mass BJA or Mass Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Scott's a first-degree black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He's been training for 16 years. He's the MMA coach, the head striking coach, and the less self-explanatory grappling coach.

Grappling. It's like wrestling with submissions. So pick them up, put them down, hold them down, and try to submit them. Yep. What about something like Aikido, which, like, as I understand it, is like a martial art that has a lot to do with, like, throwing and sort of falling. And it's sort of more of a tumbling martial art in some ways. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Just looking at it, you're like, oh, for what you're seeing, it's working.

Yeah. But there's a play. There's demonstration, right? Like, when you're fighting, there's the fighter's chance. Anything could happen. Like, I'm not saying I would ever want to do this, but you and I fight, and let's say it's just striking. There's a chance you clip my chin, I get knocked out. And I don't know how much training you have, but I think I collapse you a little bit.

But it could happen. You could throw a fist. Maybe I'm being lax. I'm not paying attention. clip my jaw and it's over. Watching Stevens are gone doing his stuff, you know, it's demonstration. So the goal is to promote and show what he's doing and make it look good. If I said, hey, let me grab your wrist.

Okay, no, no, grab this wrist. No, this part of my wrist. Okay, now I'm going to bend the holy hell out of it. You're going to make me look good and it's going to hurt you and I get to demonstrate. And when you're demonstrating, there's a little bit of that. Now, how applicable is that live in a setting? or how efficient can it be? It's tough to tell.

But are you going to do like a forward flip in the air and fall on the ground and not get back up? I bend your wrist and you go flying over your wrist. The idea of that is if you bend it hard enough, I have to unwind it. I can maybe spin or roll. And if yes, if I flip, it looks even cooler, right? But yes, there's a way of falling

or you can fall that way. But is that going to happen? I mean, I put a D1 wrestler in front of that guy. He's going up and over his head and hit in the ground. He's not bending anything. Yeah. The joke on the internet's Bolshito.

Bolshito. Bolshito! Scott told us that he watched Stephen Seagall movies growing up, long before he himself started practicing martial arts. So I wondered, does he watch them with different eyes now, given his

own expertise? Oh, yes. And honestly, it becomes more of a comedy. It's awesome. Is it Bolsheido? A lot of it, yeah. I mean, I mean, I don't want to discredit. Like, every martial art has its moments and advantages. The question is how much? Fair. So let's watch some video of him. I'm excited. Okay, cool. This is a immediate result of, I think,

a simple search, which was Stephen Segal kicking ass. And this, I think, was the top result. Can you describe what you're seeing, Scott? Yeah. So part of the Akito's stuff is using their energy, which a lot of martial arts. Absolutely. Their momentum, use it against him, get them to fall. And yeah, he's passing the person through, passing their arm, getting their limb out of the way, so he can use their momentum to throw them. Obviously, if you hit someone to throat, it's going to be very effective. But yeah, that's all he's doing.

He's just using their energy against them and then using that to flip them or trip them. A lot of people flipping over seemingly at one point of contact from Steven Seagall on their body. So, like, he touches their throat and they, They throw themselves over a display of wine. This is definitely movie TV show footage. It's good for movies, for sure. It's good for movies. Do you see anything in here of what you're watching that feels like an actual convincing move?

When he brought, well, just that one little funny part, he had his wrist twisted, he brought it around his back, and, yeah, it becomes like a wrist lock slash shoulder lock, and it hurts. So let's look at a quote-unquote real-life example of Steven Seagall. doing his thing. So can you describe what you're seeing? So he has his arm locked out, so therefore when he turned his hips, it put pressure on his elbow, which means he's going to have to go in that direction. So is this a demonstration? This is martial arts demonstration.

Definitely. There's a bunch of people, there's like a ring and a bunch of people standing around the ring. They're all students, presumably, or, you know. They're definitely demonstrating. I would not consider that them fighting. Interesting. So demonstration-wise, he's doing some stuff that is, that is legit, but your... In a sense, yeah.

But your suggestion here is that, again, it's a demonstration, in other words, the person who he's going up against... They're giving it to him. He's supposed to win. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You can't make Stephen Sagan look bad. He's a god.

How would this translate in a real-life fight, do you think? In a real-life fight, if they were untrained, I think, I think Stevenson's... like, oh, we'll play the mountain and try to figure something out. I mean, if I grabbed your finger and just try to bend the hell out of it, I'm sure I'm going to make you move. Or if you did it to me, you're going to make me move very weird. Yeah. A trained guy, he's not going to give him the chance to grab their arm like that. He's going to, and if he does, then, yeah, you might get a glimpse of a, oh, his arm looks like it's under stress.

So a question, I guess, is if you were to judge on a scale of, like, legit action star, slash. you know, um, actual master. How strong is his martial arts one to ten? And is he legit or is he mostly faking it? When I watch him, I could just see maybe he was like, okay in class, did all right well enough. And then he got into movies and he's just how he is. So you're, you should be able to poke fun at yourself.

And I mean, I'm not trying to tell anyone I had to live, but like, he is so serious. and he is so like, you couldn't hurt me. It's like, come on, dude. Like, I think there's more to martial arts than just the physical stuff. Calm down. So I'm going to give him a three.

I'm going to give him a three. I mean, honestly, you watch the comparison of his movies? You ever watch a John Wick movie? Yeah. I'm like, I mean, that's like, it could be a whole... You're saying Keanu's on another level? Oh, he trains, and I've seen him train

and, like, he actually go shooting. He's actually pretty damn good, too. Nice. I've seen, like, some of his, like, I forget what it's called, but you, I think it's like rifle, shotgun, pistol. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Seems pretty legit. Yeah. Like, pretty legit. I think as far as Akito goes, as far as, like, what you could do in a ring with Akito, small percentage. Is he an Akito master? Sure, he got his black belt. I'm sure he worked hard for it.

I'm sure there's legitimacy there. But out of the whole thing we're talking about, I'd give him a three. Well, Scott, thank you so much for, like, seriously taking a look at Stephen Seagal's skills. I hope I did all right for you guys. You did great, man. That was funny. That was fun. Yeah, you were awesome.

Okay. So, Amory, I think we have kind of an answer for our question of whether or not Stephen Seagal has martial arts creeds. Mm-hmm. And I think where we've landed, tell me if this feels right to you, is that he did study Aikido heavily. Mm-hmm. He was a strong practitioner of that martial art back in the day, but maybe hasn't stayed in fighting shape, so to speak, or acting shape? Who among us has stayed in fighting shape? Who among us?

Exactly. If it's 72, I'm in fighting shape. I'll be thrilled. Same. And perhaps according to Scott's assessment, Seagal wouldn't do that well in the ring if it was a real fight and not a demonstration. Fair to say? Yes.

A three? Yes. But in the larger mystery of Stephen Seagall's travels through the world and why he's currently living in Russia, why he has recently been pictured in part of the Russia-Ukraine battlefront. I want to go back to this question or this long story of Stephen Seagall because it connects to something I haven't told you yet about Stephen Seagall. The apparent reason why Stephen Seagall is no longer an American action hero, according to some, or retired American action hero living in America, is potentially a more serious reason. There have been multiple

allegations of sexual misconduct from several actresses, including Jenny McCarthy, Portia de Rossi. And now, as you said, there are two other women who are coming forward and they held a news conference this morning. You hate to hear it. You hate to hear it. Here is actor Regina Simons, who worked with Segal in the movie on Deadly Ground. She was a teenager at the time of this thing that she says happened in 1993. He started kissing my neck and taking up my...

clothes, I was in shock. Whoa. So, obviously, super messed up. A big part of the reason we don't hear about Stephen Segal much anymore, I think, is that he has effectively fled the country. This happened six years ago. Back in, like, 2018, these allegations came out. I think this is a very important part of Stephen Seagal's story, because what we've learned over time is that the stories Seagal tells about himself are potentially suspect.

But the stories other people tell about Seagal and working with Seagal as stunt people, as women who have been in his films, these are stories that are the stories we should perhaps believe a little bit more. So I want to ask you a question. When you think about Stephen Seagal and how he's been dubbed a narcissist, a pathological liar who's outsized stories about himself are not likely to be true in some cases, maybe many cases, someone who dodged the draft in Vietnam, who has cozied up to Vladimir Putin, who has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault. Who does this remind you of? Donald Trump.

Donald Trump. Yeah. So I know that they. This conversation started in a silly place, a funny place, and I understand that listeners come to us sometimes to escape the news. And yet, I think we're in this moment, as Donald Trump has become our new president, where I think it's important to think about how we deal with people who, no matter what your politics are, represent a lot of problematic behavior and complexity on screen and off. how do we deal with someone whose statements don't necessarily represent observed reality and truth? How do we think about the systems and industries that gave them agency and power? How do we preserve our own sanity when it feels harder and harder to know what is real and what is, shall we say, a demonstration of an idea?

And I guess like this is what had me thinking about Stephen Seagall in some ways. I was intrigued by the mystery of like, does he actually know karate? This is just like kind of a funny concept. But then like the more I learned, the more I was like, wow, this is a person who actually in some ways really matches up with the person who is now leading the country in interesting ways. And I don't have any like answers or like deep wisdom to impart about this. but I think it makes sense to think carefully and intentionally about the world that we're entering into and, like, how we deal with that reality. Yeah, I can't say I have deep wisdom to offer myself on this, but I do think that it doesn't behoove us to discard people altogether, write them off altogether. I think that from having just worked on a series

where truth and memory and the twisting of truth is very much at the center of it, I think that oftentimes these things just snowball. You start with one fib and it turns into two and to three and to four until you really do become detached from reality and truth. And you don't have consequences, right? You're sort of like, oh, this is like, this is fine. I can just do this.

Yeah. And you lose the plot yourself. So I guess my thought, my big question would be, what good, if any, is Stephen Seagall doing in the world while all these other potential mistruths are floating around him and are being perpetuated by him potentially? Is there some good that he is doing despite it all so that you can say, yeah, there's this and this and this and this and this.

this, but he's started a foundation for blah, blah, blah, he's working with refugees and blah, blah, blah. None of that might exist, but I guess that's as much of a deep thought as I can offer is that's how I think about people like that, is people who get carried away, kind of like your ego just keeps like eating itself and growing and... To say nothing of the accusations of misconduct, I see what you're saying. It doesn't excuse it one bit. Right, right.

But is there some good that he is already doing or he can do and will he do? Yeah. That would be what I'd want to know. It's a really good question. And I don't have answers for that. The stuff that I have seen that he is supposedly doing great work on is like teaching people how to fight, which I don't know. I don't know how to feel about that. How to touch them at one point of contact and make them fall to the ground?

Yeah, and I think, if anything, to me, like, the usefulness at this moment is, like, just a reminder that there are people in the world who are willing to say anything about themselves and their impact on the world. And thinking carefully about that as you come into contact with those stories that they're telling. is really important in a world where you can't necessarily trust what people say. So check your facts, people. I don't know. I don't know what to say to listeners other than thank you for coming on this wild ride. And, you know, take care of yourselves and maybe learn some Ikeeto, right? Yeah.

But don't break anybody's wrists. No, don't go break in wrists. please stick to the Let's please stick to the Roundhouse kicks and jabs and uppercuts that you're used to That's my deep closing thought

Give yourself some TLC as they say Oh that's good That's good This episode was produced by me Ben Brock Johnson and Roundhouse kicking in from the Mix Booth Production Manager Paul Vicus Who, it turns out, is not just a black belt in sound design, but also in finding legit martial arts mavens like Scott.

This episode was co-hosted by me, Amory Sievertson, and sound designed by Paul. The rest of our team is managing producer Summit to Joshi, Dean Russell, Frannie Monaghan, Grace Tatter, Caitlin Herup, and Emily Cenkowski. If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless thread at WBUR.org. Endless thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and... Jab. Uppercut. Hook.