Endless Thread - Teach us how to Dougie

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

Long before TikTok dances, there was the Dougie. In 2010, Cali Swag District’s “Teach Me How to Dougie” went worldwide, and for the decade-plus since, people have been trying to learn the viral moves. More than 15 years later, a Korean TikTok creator went viral for doing the Dougie… badly. He claimed to be learning how to do the Dougie day-by-day – but his moves were so stiff and awkward, viewers from around the world – including Endless Thread producer Kalyani Saxena — were suspicious. Was @JBStarMax faking being bad at the Dougie? Kalyani presents her investigation to Ben and Amory. Show notes: “Day 1 of learning to do the Dougie until I can do it smoothly” (@JBStarMax on TikTok) Breakdancing (@JBStarMax on TikTok) Know Your L.A. Hip-Hop Dances: The Controversial Origin Story of The Dougie (LA Weekly) Ben does the crabwalk, and Amory does the worm (WBUR) This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and co-hosted by Kalyani Saxena, Ben Brock Johnson, and Amory Sivertson. It was edited by Dave Shaw. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

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WBUR Podcasts, Boston. What's up, Koyani, who just so happens to be a producer Benless Red. How are you doing? I am so Gucci, Ben. Oh, you're Gucci. That's what matters. That's something new I'm trying. What are you here to teach us today? I am here to ask you a question.

Okay. Can you do a little jig? A little boogie town, a little worm on the dance floor. I mean, two of those things feel easy. This is a broad. I wanted to give you options. The worm is a violent dance, depending on how, you know, how large you are. The worm is a violent dance performed by the blah, blah, blah, blah.

But I can break dance. I got some break dance moves just to say that. What are your break dance moves? I don't know their names, but one of them is kind of like a rotating crab walk. A rotating crab walk? I can't even... I'll do it. Someone just messed with you, Ben, and was like...

Yeah, yeah, that's a break dancing move, bro. It's a break dancing move, the rotating crab walk, for sure. My go-to dance on the wedding dance floor, I will say, is kind of like a lawnmower, a version of the lawnmower, if you guys know that one. Of course. Amory, what do you think? I can do most of it. I can do the worm. You can do the worm?

I can do the worm. Do you do the worm? I haven't done the worm in a little bit, but I can do the worm. I am confident of this. Really? Yeah. The one, are we talking about the same worm where you are literally lying on the floor and undulating? I am undulating.

I can undulate with the best of them on the ground. You can? Yeah. I wanted to ask you about another dance move. Taste me how to duck, taste me, taste me how to duck. Taste me how to duck. Can you hit the duggie? Can both of you hit the dougie? Do you mean hit the dougie? Is that what the kids say?

Like, can you do it? Yes, that is what the kids say. Well, maybe. I don't know. I'm a little older than some of the kids. You know what? I'm going to admit that, like, I'm not sure that I know what it looks like. Like, I kind of have like a vague sense. It's like a double, it's like a double stirring of the pot maybe. Is that it? Is that duggie-ish? No, it's more like a, it's more like a, like an upper body roll from one side to the next. And you have to kind of like, like your arm, you're, you, I can't describe it. I just feel it, man. I can't describe it. It's just a feeling.

Well, that's exactly. It's exactly right. I have a quick history lesson about the duggy where I'll explain a little bit about what it looks like. But first, when would you place the dougie? Like, when do you remember people starting to talk about this dance? Like, when in history was this a thing that people were doing? I have a specific answer, which is 14 years ago. The only Dougie reference I know is there was a very famous model, I guess, Kate Upton.

Does anyone know who that is? Yeah, yeah, I know Kate Upton. Okay. So Kate Upton did the doggie at a basketball game. And that was a video that went crazy viral, I think, or viral enough that I saw it. Okay, Amory, when would you play Suddugey? I feel like I didn't know it by name until that song came out. So when did that song come out?

Was that like 2010s? Yes, ding, ding, ding, ding, you've nailed it. So the actual origins of the Dougie trend are contested. But here's a few things that people agree on. The dance was named after the rapper Doug E Fresh. It's like E dot fresh. And he does a signature move, which is kind of like what you were describing, Amory. He runs his hands over his head and dips his shoulders at the same time.

And that's sort of a key part of the dance move. So in 2010, Cali Swag District releases this song. It's a track called Teach Me How to Doug E. And the move and the dance are everywhere after that. When most people think about doing the duggie, they're specifically associating it with that moment in time and that specific song. So we're thinking the 2010s, which is about kind of when you were talking about also, Ben, in 2012. Okay. But the reason we're talking about the duggy today is because a few months ago, I started seeing videos of this guy on my TikTok for you page.

His name is J.B. Star and his username is at J.B. Star Max. He lives in Korea. He does some acting. and his whole schick is that he's trying to teach himself how to do the duggie and filming his progress day by day. I'm not really a girl with rhythm, so far be it from me to throw stones while living in a glass house. But this guy is like, he was not good. He was really quite bad, pretty stiff. And I'm going to send you a video so you can sort of see,

this is day two of his duggy trend, so you can see kind of what he was working with at the time. Okay, these guys. He's got a white t-shirt on. It's not a Lane Benis level failure to dance, but it's pretty Aki. Yeah, this happens with learning new dance moves where, like, your body, it is very hard to make your body to, like, put your limbs right where you want them when you want them to be there. I'm sort of doing me a lane Benis dance as I say that. I know. I'm picturing you doing it.

Yeah. And so I'm like watching, I'm emulating him as I watch this. where like he just can't get his upper body loose enough to like get. There's a real lack of fluidity in this situation. So he's quite bad. And I have to say and I have to confess that when I. He's quite bad. He's quite bad.

And I'm just being honest. I have to tell the facts. It's my profession. Yeah. Sure. Although one might say he's quite bad at dancing is not necessarily a fact so much as an opinion. But please continue. You're right.

And I appreciate you fact-checking me on that. So I have to confess that when I saw his clips very early in the challenge, I thought this guy is like obviously rage-baiting. And he's faking being bad at the dougie because he's so bad, in my opinion, that I couldn't believe that it was real. And I wasn't alone. A lot of the comments thought the same thing, too. There's one person who left a comment that said, this has got to go on record as the longest running rage bait in history.

So that's a comment from day 45 of the trend. He's been doing this for a minute. This is a side, a quick side comment. Yes. I feel very sad that we are in the era of the internet now where it's no longer about authenticity. You know, it had to change. But now we're in the rage bait fake zone. Trust, we will get there.

And that's very sad to me because we used to be all just about authenticity. That was what was being rewarded. That's what everybody cared about. And now nobody believes anything. And I'd love for us to think about that too because that is sort of where I was coming from where my instinctive reaction was like, this guy's faking. There's no way he's that bad. And I think that that's probably an attitude a lot of us have.

We're like, well, that's definitely not real. But anyway, as many things go on the internet, I forgot all about it. I saw one video, swipe past, forgot all about it. And then a few months later, I actually came across a progress video from J.B. Star. And he made some, like, really huge strides. He was good. He had rhythm. And then I started thinking, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, was I a little hasty here? Was this guy faking for real? I mean, he got kind of good. And the thing that's really started to have me unpack my thinking here was, how do you even fake incremental progress?

He's been doing these videos every single day for weeks. How would you fake that? And then I started thinking about what you were saying, Ben, which is like, am I just a cynic? The internet has crushed my hope and my faith in people. I remembered, I'm a journalist and I can find some answers. And so I reached out to J.B. Star. And he agreed to talk to me. Oh.

Yes. I have the inside, the inside Duggy Scoop. So I reached out to J.B. in Korea. And I spoke to him in the middle of the night for him, which shout out to him for staying up that late. And he introduced himself in Korean, which was pretty awesome. When I asked him, why did you even start attempting the Duggy all this time later? He told me that it was a New Year's resolution for him. I'm in my 30s, so I'm kind of like, now I don't really care about what other people think and stuff.

So I just decided to just take on the challenge and, you know, put myself out there. I'm not like... Pretty much immediately his video started gaining traction. And also pretty much immediately, people started to think it was fake. And yes, internet cynicism is part of this, but there's also kind of a good reason that people thought J.B. was faking because turns out there's evidence online that Mr. J.B. can dance. Oh, no. Yes, so I'm going to send you another clip.

Oh, see, this is actual breakdancing. Not Ben dancing. This is break dancing. I'm pretty sure J.B. Star and I would have a great time together. Break dance off. Break dance off. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't be nagging me like you are right now. But this is different than the duggy to me.

Like, I don't know. This is a different category. Okay, well, it's interesting that you say that, because we're going to get to that in a second. But yeah, he's a pretty good breakdancer. And he actually gets why that might make people skeptical. I do breakdancing. And so I've been doing that since kind of like towards the end of high school. So when I was in L.A. for a couple years, I was doing shows and performances with breakdancing too.

Now, when it comes to choreography, I'm basically like just anybody else in the room type of situation. You know, if they start counting like five, six, seven, eight, I'm just like, oh, I don't know what to do. Yeah, that makes so much sense to me because like picture someone who is a ballroom dancer and that's what they know and that's what they're good at. And then you throw them in a hip hop class and they're like, my body literally doesn't move that way. It's totally different. I'm with him. Yeah.

Also, this breakdancing video is. mesmerizing. I just keep watching. He's doing the like gymnast leg windmills. I should know what that's called. But I don't. And then he's like, it's called the beetle back hop. That's the name of this dance. Oh, Ben's got the knowledge. It's sort of vaguely related to the side crab crawl that I do. And I'll believe it when I see it, Johnson. I'll believe it when I see it. Well, I mean, what's interesting to me, Amory, about what you were saying is like, I, I don't know. Maybe this is because I've never been a dancer or performed in that way. I always assumed that those skills were transferable. And if you look at his break dancing, there's a certain fluidity to it that you would think would apply to the duggie. So, Amory, I know you're sort of subscribing to his explanation. What about you, Ben? It's tough, man. Like, I would relate this basically to music. There is a level of skill that you.

you can reach as a musician where you can kind of ear out totally different versions of music. And there's no question that you'll start at a disadvantage. But if you're like a really good strong studio musician or you're, you know, somebody who's like really honed your craft over years, you can, I think you can fake things relatively quickly if you're a careful student. Like the thing I'm imagining, for instance, right, is like a classical cellist, like, sitting down with a, you know, a group of Mongolian musicians and, like, figuring out how to play in a folk tradition, for instance. Or, I don't know, like, there's a world where I'm a little, I'm still a little skeptical. Yeah, well, that's really interesting. So Amory's sort of a believer.

Ben's still a little bit of a skeptic. And at this point in my conversation with J.B., I'm starting to believe him, too. that he's for real about this whole thing. But in the process of our conversation, J.B. also disclosed to me that there was something else I hadn't seen that was part of his journey online. And we'll get into that after the break. Dance. Hey! You want to talk about poetry? Yeah, we do, Henry Winkler.

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And one thing I think that we need to talk about is through the process of this whole thing, J.B. was getting help from the internet on his stance moves. I kind of thought of this as like a, he's only relying on the crowd, on the help of the internet and his own practice to get better at the ducky. And people in the comments, they would roast the hell out of him. Like, don't get me wrong. The internet loves to sort of make fun of people. But then they'd leave other comments. Like, I had to go check out how to Dougie again. Your upper body is moving opposite to the lower body.

I think that's why it looks awkward. Keep it up. You were reading my mind waves because I was just wondering like, yeah, how do you teach someone how to do a dance move just in words? I'm not sure I would know how to do that other than like, will you just watch this link? And people did say that. Just tell me where you live. show up, we're going to get that upper body moving differently. That's exactly right. So somebody else left a comment that said, hey, so the bottom part is almost right, but the top is

inside out. I don't know how to explain it any better. Inside out. So it's really hard to explain this kind of thing in just words. And the internet can really only truly help so much. And something I didn't know, but I learned in talking to J.B. star is that he did get help from someone in the outside world. This wasn't just a J.B. and the internet exercise. He told me that when he hit a wall in the sort of day 20s, he reached out to a friend who was a dance and hip-hop teacher in Korea. And then she taught him how to do it. And he says his form got immensely better. Oh, my God, which makes me wonder why was he turning to the internet in the first place? Just meet up with your human friend and do the damn doggie

with her. And he did make some pretty huge strides. Here's another video. He's doing the head move. He's doing the head move. It's a lot smoother. I'm not wondering about my internet bandwidth

anymore. This is way smoother. You know what I mean? Interestingly, he did post a clip of him collaborating with this other hip-hop teacher, but the algorithm doesn't favor all of videos. So casual viewers like me missed it. And I never thought that he was getting help. And this

wasn't the only time he went for professional help. He actually started to hit a wall again around day 40. I was like, oh, like I'm not improving by myself. So I found a dance instructor in Korea from a video, I think it was on TikTok or Instagram. I can't remember. But he was like teaching the doggie, like just the dougie. Like he had like a dougie class. And so I was like, okay, I have to go and learn from him. And he's like a pro. These are the only two lessons that really J.B. took outside of the internet. Everything else came from just doing it over and over for the internet.

And he admitted to me that in retrospect, he did not realize how bad he actually was early in the challenge. I just did like a compilation day 1 to 30 video a couple days ago. And I'm like, wow, like it's terrible. Like it's actually worse than I thought. would be like day like 20 like something. I'm like, at that time, I remember, okay, like I'm getting better. But then looking at it now, it's like, because I'm day like 85 or 6 right now. And I'm like, wow, how did I think I was good?

So before I move on, I want to give you both a chance to give your final verdict on whether you think J.B. Star was faking or not. I'm saying he's for real. I want to believe. I want to believe. What about you, Ben? I think he's for real. Yeah.

But again, it sort of saddens me that I'm in a, that we now, like, the internet now is this place full of rage bait, full of like scripted, you know, not sort of authentic moments, but skits that people are creating for rage bait and other reasons. And of course, like, there's something to be said for that kind of content as well, right? But I guess if he's to be believed, that gives me hope. I think that's totally fair. And for what it's worth, I sort of landed in the same place. I believe him. But the sort of final twist to this conversation is that whether or not he was faking, it's kind of besides the point. I asked J.B., whether he actually cared that people thought he was faking.

And he had a really interesting response. No, not really because it actually boosted my engagement. So it was actually good for me. People watched my videos that I posted like a year ago, two years ago, like my breakdance stuff. Because back in the days, like two years ago, whenever I post a video of me breakdancing, like not a lot of people would watch it.

I would get maybe like a thousand views or something, right? And then now people are finally watching my videos from two years ago. And then getting a lot of views. So that actually, I'm glad there's the doubters out there. Thank you, doubters, for bringing my old videos back. Oh, I'm starting, I'm starting to turn, Clea. Oh, no. I'm starting to turn.

You're not so much turning as you are crab walking. I'm starting to turn because, you know, J.B. to be like, I'm in my 30s. I don't care what people think of me as much anymore. I just want people to watch my old videos. To suddenly like, yeah, this is up to my engagement. No, no presses bad press, basically. Now it feels like if you really don't care what other people think, then... Why are you trying to be an influencer? That's an interesting take because when I sort of heard this from him, I thought it was like,

I don't, I mean, was that the goal or was he just sort of happy to see that this happened, the side effect that it led to more engagement for him. He really was learning how to do this dance online. He saw that people were engaging with it in a way that boosted his engagement. And he benefited from keeping that mystery alive. And now he's telling the truth. Well, I will say something that is very charming about this whole thing to me is that I do think that as we get old. older, like, you know, 20s to 30s. So that's, that can be, that's an older transition.

We do, we do tend to think that we kind of like, we know what we know and that's it. And if we don't consider ourselves like a dancer, we kind of just say like, no, man, I don't dance. And I will always appreciate the spirit of someone being like, but maybe I can. Maybe I can learn cello. Maybe I can go back to gymnastics 20 years later. Maybe I can, you know, I don't know. I am definitely a personal challenge kind of person, not so much a post about it on the internet kind of person, but I appreciate a personal challenge.

And that's part of me wanting to believe that this is real. Ben, what do you think? Any world in which Internet content inspires us to reach for self-improvement in healthy ways and learn something new and be humble is good content maybe, no matter whether or not you're secretly better at doing the doggie than you might let on. I like that idea. I like the idea that whether or not it's fake. I mean, my takeaway was whether or not it's fake. It's more engagement. But maybe the takeaway is whether or not it's fake, maybe this will challenge you to try something that you may have never tried and probably may not be any good at, but maybe you will be someday.

Yeah, the metric should not be more engagement. That is a metric that has created most of our problems in recent years, if you ask me. The metric should be like, did it inspire you to do something in the real world that was like kind? and helpful and fun and good. Like that should be the metric. And if you want to see a video of me rotation crab walking, I will post one on the subreddit

and on in the at wbUR.org.org slash endless thread. And you can tell us if there's a better name for that dance. Benny? The crabby? The Benny. Teach me how to Benny. Teach me how to Benny. Teach me how to Benny.

Endless thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by Amory Sebertson and me, Ben Brock Johnson. And me, Kalyani Saxana. I also reported the story. This episode was edited by Dave Shaw, mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, our production manager, Paul Vikis, and our senior managing producer, Summa to Joshi.

Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between being bad at the dougy and pretending to be bad at the dougy. Do you have an untold history and unsolved mystery or another wild story from the internet for us? Email us at endless thread at wbUR.org.