"Wake up, go again. Get a little sharper each day."
Griff Sombke walked away from his life after 2016. He came back as the co-host of "Did Nothing Wrong".
Griff Sombke is the co-host of Did Nothing Wrong, a podcast all about “politics at the intersection of extremists, propaganda and Cold War 2.0”. Didn’t we just have his partner on board? Yes, we did - that would be Jay McKenzie - but Griff is a fascinating guy with a life story that’s unique. Plus, I fucked up the title last time. And the subtitle.
This is a wild ride.
Topics include: training for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for 11 straight years, founding a gym, walking away from that gym, not answering the phone for years, bad science, bad fitness advice, the Joe Rogan Podcast and its immense cultural influence in the MMA / Jiu-Jitsu world, being a small town punk rock scene kid, conspiracy-prone taxi drivers and how to handle them with "Risk Assessment" and "Distance Management", researching the Radical Right, finding a Jiu-Jitsu academy that works for you, what Griff did when he dropped out of his old life for a really long time, former police officer Michael Fanone as a TV talking head, and the importance of waking up, going again, getting a little sharper each day.
Enjoy.
You have the distinction of being another dude whose life radically changed. You were a big Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner – you competed in tournaments, you taught classes – but you took a break from it for several years. Now, we know people in the sports and fitness world did see a lot of disturbing events coming, with the way “bad medical science” and “bad fitness advice” could create the conditions for a person to entertain overall conspiratorial views. It's still surprising to think you would cut ties with any kind of social environment, though: you come across as a super personable guy on the podcast. Was there a “last straw” event for you, or was it all a matter of accumulation ?
Definitely a matter of accumulation. I started training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in 2005, and didn't really take a significant break until 2016, when nagging injury, a general sense of burnout, and the rising tide of political activity around this thing that previously had been pretty non-political, for the most part, combined to put me in a place where I didn't feel like I could do it anymore. 11 straight years of training is a lot, especially when the last 5 of them was an all-consuming every day thing. And the flavor of political discourse had just gotten incredibly toxic at the end. A lot of the really bad ideas that came from guys like Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, Stefan Molyneux, Chuck Johnson, Gavin McInnes and a whole lot more were seeping into the culture through the Joe Rogan Podcast. And it's exhausting to deal with the day to day drama of running any kind of gym, but when you throw in people who are seemingly incapable of not intentionally pushing those buttons, it was more than I had. So I bailed. Sold out to my partner and another guy and walked away.
I knew it was coming, somehow. I remember telling the people at the last class I taught that they should ask me anything they wanted to ask me, because I wasn't sure if I'd be around there much longer. I took my medals off the wall that day after class, and they're all still sitting in that bag in my closet. And I didn't answer the phone for years. I needed a break more than I thought, I guess, and it gets harder to talk to people the longer it's been.
The thing is, though, it wasn't the first time my life radically changed. Before Jiu-Jitsu I was basically your average small town punk rock scene kid, and then I moved to Seattle and kept doing all the same things (playing in bands, putting on shows, etc). I ended up tapering that off around 2004 after the band I was in broke up and subsequent attempts to start something new went nowhere I wanted to go. So I kind of flailed around for a year or so, and then I ended up working this IT job, which, while I enjoyed it, wasn't the best for my health. My boss suggested I take up martial arts, and while I don't think he meant that one specifically, that's where I ended up. I couldn't get through warmups the first few classes (cigarettes and a lousy diet will do that), but I absolutely knew that I wanted to do this thing. So I kept training, kept learning, and had the crazy idea that someday I wanted to start a gym. That someday came in 2011, after a layoff from the big tech company I was working for. I took my severance, found a cheap space, got some mats, and we were in business. I had a good run, and I don't really regret much, but it definitely was time to move on. (I wish I'd been able to articulate that a little better to some of the people around me, so if any of you end up reading this, get in touch.)
An old friend who boxed for fun told me there was a certain low-level vigilance effort on the part of gym owners – if you became the place where far-right militants came to hang out, then you'd become the far-right gym, period – but it was more of an ethical business consideration: “choose your patrons to set the general tone and attract the clientele you want to attract”. Is this something doable for people in the field? Or is it a case of stepping on rakes all day?
“Choose your patrons to set the general tone and attract the clientele you want to attract" is definitely a good way to do things, and I should have been more selective about that. When you're a startup, however, you don't always think about that as much as you should. Plus, some of the people who were the clientele you want to attract in 2013 weren't those same people any more in 2016. Hell, I wasn't the same person in 2016 as I was in 2013. So sometimes you can't really predict where that's going to end up, but I definitely did my best to not become the "far right" gym. Not that anyone would have mistaken me for a "far right" person pretty much ever. With that said, however, there really wasn't a "far right" gym in the area in that era. Certainly that scene trends pretty conservative, but up until about 2015, you wouldn't necessarily know that about any particular gym. The Northwest USA has a pretty diverse group of people in the grappling community, and until then, we all mostly got along. If someone did something shitty at one gym, the owners and instructors were pretty good about trying to warn each other about potential rakes that are out there to be stepped on.
I have SO MANY QUESTIONS here. Let me stay on what you just said, but we're definitely circling back to you being "a small town punk rock scene kid": I just listened to a 2016 Rogan episode and there's a WILD difference. It's the Leah Remini episode. Rogan clearly likes Leah Remini as a person, he lets her lead the conversation, but he's alert, attentive, and he makes pertinent comments - little in the way of the weird tangents the show became famous for. And I remember when he had Bernie Sanders on in 2020: that was regarded as a huge coup for the Sanders team. It feels like the pushback got to him at the same time several right-wing guests were making a point of being nice to him. Does this track with what you've seen, or was this always the baseline for the show and I just happened to tune in for very different episodes ?
So, full disclosure, I got most of my Joe Rogan Experience secondhand. I was not a listener. People would come in with these ideas that they'd heard on the JRE, and argue with other students about them. Things like this from 2015, for example:
Deleted Joe Rogan episode featured guest claiming Black people had a genetic ‘proclivity to violence’
My experience with Joe Rogan up until that point was his comedy sketch videos with Eddie Bravo, and his UFC commentary. So I thought dude was mostly harmless, and he used to have a lot of Jiu-Jitsu and MMA guys on. So the fact that he was having guys like Chuck Johnson on to spew this kind of shit was a revelation. And because he is far and away the number one cultural influencer in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, anything he platforms will get traction. So I think that stuck in my head, and once I looked into it further, I realized that this is where some of this stuff was coming from. And people were moving on to darker stuff from there. For example, if you do as Chuck says in the clip and Google "MAO-A gene violence", you end up in a pseudoscience rabbit hole pretty quickly. And I've got people coming to me and telling me that they don't feel safe around these other people, who when told to knock it off, immediately launch into a "You hate freedom of speech" diatribe. Plus, the 2016 election was looming heavily in the background, so everything was extremely tense. And I'm literally just trying to run a Jiu-Jitsu academy! This is not stuff I need or want to deal with at this point, but here we were.
All of this is probably an extremely long winded way of saying that I don't really know how much of a change there's been in Joe Rogan's tone. Spotify made him clean up his act somewhat, and episodes like that one got memory holed, but they did their damage.
Oof, last November I took a cab (MY FAULT) and I ended up becoming hostage to an Extremely Pilled taxi driver, who treated me to a vast array of "population control" conspiracies, until he mentioned the Georgia Guidestones, and there I found myself saying "OH DID YOU KNOW THEY BLEW THEM UP?", and that interrupted the guy's monologue for ten precious seconds - meaning that wherever he got his conspiracy news, they hadn't updated their info with that development. (I'm betting on "antivax Telegram channels"). The fact this happened in Portugal of all places should let everyone know just how pervasive the stuff can get - it takes a minute to repeat any piece of information without context, and it can live on for years, reaching far and wide.
STILL, a feature of my life, regardless of the name I've been using, is "you will end up becoming a hostage to anyone who takes you anywhere". What would have been the ju-jitsu way to deal with this situation ?
That's a fascinating question. While there's no specific "Jiu-jitsu" way to deal with the situation, the two things that immediately come to mind are "Risk Assessment", and "Distance Management".
Risk assessment in this context simply means "How much trouble are you actually in?". Does this cab driver intend to harm you, or are they just a slightly wiggy conspiracy theory enjoyer? If it's the latter, then odds are you are going to be ok. Your best move is probably to do what you did and play along, and I suggest you get your phone somewhere accessible, unlock it discreetly, and have the button for 911 ready to go, just in case. Better to be prepared in case things go sideways. Because it might change quickly.
If it's the former, then things could be about to get quite dicey. Even if there's nothing overt, but your spider sense is telling you that something is wrong, then you should listen. Hence distance management. You want to be as far as possible from the person who is intending to harm you. This means your goal is to get out of that cab. So hit that 911 button. You don't necessarily have to even talk, maybe just start saying things to the driver that would clue in the dispatcher that there's a problem. Pretending to be sick loudly and emphatically would be a good thing here. If you are saying something like "I need to throw up, please stop the car and let me out", and they don't, pretty much any 911 operator will catch on to what's going on. If the car stops, try to get out and run. Even if it just slows down a lot, sometimes road rash beats the alternative. If you are locked in, kick out a window. Scream. Make a huge scene. Do not go quietly regardless of what you are threatened with. If they stop the car, try to get out on the passenger side. You always want to sit on the passenger side in a cab anyway for the same reason. You do what you have to do to survive at that point.
One of the best things you can do in this situation is to prepare for it before you need to, so I think the best preparation for this situation would be to start taking Jiu-Jitsu classes before you need them, which means that you should go sign up for classes now or ASAP. You can generally Google "(your city) + BJJ" and go from there. When you find a place, Google the instructor's name, and by instructor I mean "whoever actually teaches the classes". Most Jiu-Jitsu schools operate on an affiliation system, which means that they are usually affiliated with, or "under" someone more well known. So don't just Google "Rickson Gracie". He's awesome, and everyone knows this. Google the staff of his local affiliate for a much better understanding of what exactly the situation is in that specific school, cause it really can vary. If it seems legit, go check it out in person. The most important thing at that point is how comfortable you feel with the environment in the gym, and there's no wrong answers here. If it feels like a good environment, you like the people, and it fits into your life and schedule, congratulations. You just found your first Jiu-Jitsu school. Train as much as you can, and you have a better chance of your skills working in the situation you need them to work in.
At this point I really have to ask. I get why you wanted to distance yourself from BJJ circles, in light of what you've been telling me here, but you're so passionate about it, all this drive must have gone into SOMETHING ELSE when you dipped out of the scene. So... where did you go when you left for a while? What occupied your time?
(In the spirit of disclosure: when I dropped out of public life, I lived hidden for a full year, I "disappeared" into reading, sleeping and trying to write original horror movies; when I came back, I was just a writer, no baggage attached.)
I definitely read a lot. I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do. I actually fired up my Twitter account for the first time in years, and started trying to understand just how this website that I had written off as useless became so influential. I had a lot of random conversations with people on the "other side", as it were, because I for the life of me could not understand how ideas that you used to only find in the very dark corners of the internet had become basically mainstream in GOP circles. How does a guy like Douglass "Ricky Vaughn" Mackey who is spewing rhetoric straight out of Stormfront become ranked among the top 150 Twitter influencers of the 2016 election, ahead of Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher and NBC News, according to the MIT Media Lab? For the life of me, I could not square that circle.
I had spent quite a bit of time researching this stuff when I was younger, because I grew up in Spokane, Washington during the period of time when groups like the Aryan Nations were active in the area. I actually wrote my senior paper in high school on the white supremacist movement, and I went and interviewed people like Bill Wassmuth from the Northwest Coalition against Malicious Harassment. I also interviewed Justin Dwyer, who was the director of youth recruitment for the Aryan Nations at the time. So I was familiar with the principals at the time. And one thing I knew is that this stuff is extremely fringe. You had to really search for it. So how did this massive white supremacist media ecosystem come to be in such a short period of time, because most of this stuff was relatively new. So I read lots, and immersed myself in what they were reading and listening to. I was trying to cram the previous 25 years of that history. And the more I read, the more started realizing where some of the rhetoric I heard in BJJ circles in 2016 had originated. I also started reading the people who were covering this stuff from the left, like Luke O'Brien and Michael Edison Hayden. And at some point the thought occurred to me that, rather than arguing with people who were getting these ideas second and third hand, maybe it would be better to take this stuff on at the source, because the people who were spreading this shit were literally right there, and they would respond to you.
And the wheels started turning...
Your partner Jay McKenzie stressed the importance of "going outside and touching grass" in your current line of work, so that's something I endorse wholeheartedly. Double question: is it possible your upbringing as a punk kid and your adult life as a jiu-jitsu guy prepared you to do this on a mental level?
Jay is, hands down, one of the smartest people alive. He is, as usual, completely correct about "Touching Grass". You have to. We've seen plenty of people lose themselves completely in the information war, and the nature of the conflict incentivizes that. So it's best to have things in your life that have nothing to do with it and that, preferably, require you to completely unplug in order to do. I make sure to get to Jiu-Jitsu several times a week, because it's one of those things. I'm at a really cool gym, and I keep politics completely out of the equation. I hear that the arguments still rage on the Facebook pages, but I think that's very counterproductive. I also play bass a lot, and I'm learning how to make beats using various tools. You will hear some of them periodically in the production stuff for the podcast. So I try to make sure I'm spending my share of time touching the grass and doing the stuff that keeps me reasonably sane.
And I'm absolutely convinced that all the various aspects of my background helped quite a bit. In a way, this is exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up. I learned how to put on DIY shows and book bands to play them because I loved going to shows and watching bands play, and I thought there should be more of that in the world. Sometimes if you want something to exist, you have to figure out how to make it happen yourself.
Jiu-Jitsu taught me that some things aren't going to happen right away, and that focusing too much on the distant goal rather than the journey is a bad idea. The first belt you get is a blue belt, and that usually takes about a year and a half to two years. Lots of people quit at that point. Some think it's that the blue belt was their goal all along. I disagree. I think it's the point where you realize just how long the journey is going to be. And people get overwhelmed, they think about all the work they did (and it's a lot. Don't @ me unless you're at least a blue belt. Mad respect for blue belts.), and they think that no way that they can do another 8+ years of that level of work. They get overwhelmed, and they bail. The only way you keep going is by "embracing the suck", but it's not all suck. Not even close. You meet truly amazing people. You learn skills that might save your life or the life of someone you care about. You will have crazy adventures. You will learn a lot about who you are, and what you do under a kind of pressure that's really hard to get any other way. And you will have the opportunity to improve on that. Yes, it's really, really hard. But it's worth it. You just have to put your head down and get through it sometimes. "Wake up, go again", as we say.
So all of these things have been great preparation for being involved in this low-intensity information conflict where you're always outnumbered, outfunded, and fighting for a stalemate at best most days. There are plenty of times in Jiu-Jitsu where getting through a round or a match without tapping out is absolutely a win, and it's the same way here.
In the immediate aftermath of January 6 I watched former police officer Michael Fanone become a presence on TV because of his actions during the day. That said, a huge reason he got asked to be on camera so much was, the camera fucking loves this guy: his looks, the way he carries himself, his body language, and, frankly, the fact he's a former hardcore guy (with the ink to match) who happened to pursue a career in law enforcement - it makes an impression. Now, I do refrain from calling him my CNN boyfriend Michael Fanone in public, but the way I'm framing this question gives it away already and I do think we need more people like that in the public eye - even though I know "becoming a personality" takes an awful toll on people. Has this ever been a factor in you coming back ? The knowledge if something comes from a guy like you, it's much harder to dismiss it as "liberal whining" ?
Well that's a hell of a question, isn't it?
I've definitely thought about what you're asking me. You're correct, my background opens doors, and makes it harder to dismiss what I'm saying in some cases. I don't want to abuse that and make it seem like I'm milking that side of my life for credibility.
However, I strongly believe that the things we are saying need to be said by as many people as possible, and we are here with the platform and the opportunity, so I think it's our responsibility to say those things and use our platform, whatever the size, to say those things. I'm not in this to be a celebrity, but life is uncertain, and weird shit happens, so if for whatever reason that's what happens next, then we will deal with it.
I started this project once I fully appreciated my overall frame was (still is) "expectations, reality and the inevitable crash". Looking at the many ways you changed your own life, and the work you're spearheading now with Did Nothing Wrong, is there one moment that stands out to you as a case of "expectations crashing into reality" ? And is there any lesson you learnt in the aftermath ?
The example that jumps out at me from the last few years was probably the Mueller report. I, like a lot of people, thought it would move the needle more than it did, and then it came out, and basically nobody changed their mind about anything. People just kinda shrugged. That taught me that it's not about the big story, it's about the consistent day in, day out grind for the narrative. So that's what we do. Wake up, go again. Get a little sharper each day. Make slow, gradual progress, and accept that you'll probably never "win", but you might change a few minds here and there.
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