“There’s no money in abstinence.”
Duke Rumely joins us from Sober AF Entertainment. They are on a mission to create “SAFE” and sober events that include connection, activity, and community while having a lot of fun. He talks about his own recovery, preparing and protecting his kids from addiction, and Sober AF Entertainment’s mission to help shrink the 82,000 deaths per year by accidental overdose. Enjoy.
www.soberafentertainment.com
The Illuminate Recovery Podcast is about Mental Health, Mental Illness, and Addiction Recovery. Ways to cope, manage, and inspire. Beyond the self care we discuss, you may need the help of a licensed professional. Curt Neider and Shelley Mangum are a part of Illuminate Billing Advocates. They are committed to helping better the industry and adding value to the lives of listeners by sharing tools, insights, and success stories of those who are working on their mental health.
there's no money in abstinence duke roomley joins us from sober af entertainment they are on a mission to create safe and sober events that include connection activity and community while having a lot of fun he talks about his own recovery preparing and protecting his kids from addiction and sober af entertainment's mission to help shrink the 82 000 deaths per year by accidental overdose enjoy welcome to the illuminate recovery podcast we shed light on mental health issues mental illness and addiction recovery ways to cope manage and inspire beyond the self-care we will discuss you may need the help of a licensed professional my name is kurt neider i'm a husband father entrepreneur a handyman and a student of life i avoid conflict i deflect with humor and i'm fascinated by the human experience and i'm shelley mangum i am a clinical mental health counselor and my favorite role of all times is grandma i am a seeker of truth and i feel like life should be approached with tremendous curiosity i ask the dumb questions i fill in the gaps today we have duke rumley with us he is with sober af entertainment yes it's fantastic duke thanks for being with us i'm kind of curious about the work that you do and being able to share that with our audience today well shelley and kurt thank you for having me it's an honor to be a part of your program i am super excited to tell you a little bit about sober af entertainment i'm a guy who's in long term recovery which means uh may 15th of 89 was the last day i took a a drink or any drug um and that was uh a big part of that was there was a sober support group inside the grateful dead called the wharf rats so i was big into the dead and i'd been to about 15 grateful dead shows and i would see these guys um and then that day came my parents took me to treatment and i you know really could not stop drinking or doing drugs on my own and just kind of the idea of life being okay without alcohol was a little more manageable knowing that there was a group of people doing it already at concerts now i'm 21 years old at the time and um you know i had uh been kind of failing at life um and was ready for a change and now and having a very supportive family was all really important part of me is having this sustained sobriety um it's a long story short now it's uh 28 years later so three years ago my kids are having some issues we're here in colorado my daughter's 20 she was at a concert and needed to take an uber home and i was trying to find out what's going on and you know it turns out all the kids she went with had taken ecstasy so uh i had been in recovery a long time i had worked in the recovery field i knew a lot of people overdosed and died um and it's just a ski slope as far as the uh the projection of this you know we've gone from like 20 000 a year to 50 000 a year to 72 000 a year and the trailing 12 months right now the data says it's 82 000 people every single year die in the u.s a drug overdose so just why don't we give these kids some secondary um culture besides beer pong so that was kind of the thinking at that time so we started this nonprofit um called sober af entertainment and you guys know what af stands for right i don't you better tell us what af stands for i'm afraid of that stand for anything so sober and fun entertainment it can stand for sober alcohol free entertainment um you know uh we needed something to complete our acronym of safe so uh technically the af doesn't stand for anything but so um we started doing i thought that was a really good cover-up thank you but now i'm not so sure you sold it so well that af just doesn't stand for anything i get it we get it just whatever we want i like that you know kind of the reality is like the term sober's got such negative ramifications around it and uh you know it is ridiculous that you know uh 224 kids will overdose and die today and it's not you know the leading news um you know and it's so preventable and the majority of these kids are in their 20s and 30s and it's you know a generation that has for the first time has got their life expectancy shorter than their parents because of drug overdose it's that big a number that's crazy duke and you know the couple things that you said that that i want to touch on one tell me how old you were when you started drinking got it so i was 16 or 17 years old um i'm not exactly sure exactly how those when i first started but i do remember having that magical moment when i drank enough that i had this effect happen where i went from the scared kid to feeling like i was a notre dame football player so i i'll never forget that day that time and then it was a short period of time because then i blacked out but my brain had gotten rewired by this intense experience that i had with alcohol on that one night at a young age and without realizing it became my passion and my focus and everything everything would be better if we had you know alcohol with us or drugs with us that was kind of my mentality up until the age of 21 when i um you know was taking a treatment and um and got sober and thank goodness for parents who you know who really cared enough to really step in because that sometimes takes a lot of courage because i know it's probably not what you wanted no um actually they took me on new year's eve and i talked my way out of it so it was uh may 15th so it was five months later that they finally were like enough you're not talking yourself out of this when you're staying this time and um and it was really important that that last five months of my drinking was really the first time i tried not drinking and realized i couldn't stop drinking that's big and the other piece that i heard you say is um and maybe it was a paradigm shift for you i know that in my own relationship with my children certainly they have caused paradigm shifts for me because they won't listen right they won't do what i tell them and i have to start thinking what how do i want my relationship to look like because i think i hated my first child and and i heard you say you know maybe i shouldn't be you know coming down on them for drinking but look they're picking up the phone and calling me and saying i need a ride i need an uber i need something and and that isn't that exactly what we want them to do a hundred percent you know i kind of grew up in a very s kind of strict uh military background training dad you know and it was this way or the highway um and they were you know pretty proactive mildest of five kids and even though they did all of that i still became an alcoholic right so i just did not respond well to it's this way or the highway um but at the same time like i have a lot of knowledge about drugs and alcohol and you know i'm trying to pass this on to to my kids and they're the highest priority you have and um and just letting them know like look i just want you to wait til you're 21 because at 21 you're less likely to have your brain be rewired like i was when i was 17 and you know neither my kids need recovery neither of my kids um have an addiction issue at the moment you know they're 19 and 23. um and uh you know i'm grateful for that but they know what to do i believe if that were to happen um you know one of the coolest things that happened was my daughter came to me and her comment she she comes to our sober sections with her sorority sisters and she said you know we've learned we don't need to pre-game everything you know and um and i was very you know i was great to head i mean what i want to hear is like you know we don't want to drink or do drugs and that's not the reality right she's 23. she lives in colorado um and but for her to say that you know they they kind of looked at this thing and it was like well we're going to the sober section we can't you know why do we pre-game everything we don't need to pre-game everything um and i just think if we offer them some secondary culture you know there's going to be a group who are going to be like sober curious um you know as a as a father has a a 23 year old who you know i'm always concerned something's going to happen to her if she gets roofied or is you know was over served too much alcohol i understand how important you know giving these um kids but especially you know young women the opportunity to be in a place that alcohol is not around um you know and that community support uh i think they just they know they're they're safer my daughter actually calls it the dad zone like we know we're safe in the dad zone and um that's pretty cool i love that and that they want to come and be with you right they want to come to the games or they want to come to the concerts but they want to find a place where they can really enjoy it and start to think differently about that um that's pretty powerful to be able to send that message i don't know maybe you can talk a little bit about that that transition in your relationship with your kids and maybe that happened because you went to treatment and maybe it happened as they got older but if you were you know we have people on here who have kids and if you had to give them advice as to how to interact and think about that relationship with their children what would you tell them um so i've uh would was blessed i got sober early before my kids were born once they were born you know i was still going to 12-step meetings and so i think this discussion of either addiction or alcoholism would come up um and i had both kids do this program called the betty four children's program and we have it i think it's in denver dallas and in california and it's just like a three-day semi-intensive training of uh why dad needs to go to meetings and um what to watch out for for alcohol so that's between the ages of seven and 12 because once they're above 12 they're it's a different group trying to to speak with um so in my case we did that you know farther along um my kids are in school and you know i would you know jokingly threaten their friends like you know i can drug test you with one of your hairs and uh you know if a friend of mine's dad that said that to me and i was getting high i would not show back up at that guy's house so you know just trying to you know let everyone know that at this house we're not afraid to talk about being sober so um my uh some would have poker nights here and i would say these are sober af nights which means no one's getting high no one's getting drunk and no one's getting pregnant but you can play poker to three in the morning and i'll buy the pizza and i'll buy the red bull um and then kind of let them do their thing and it was really powerful just to kind of watch this uh group of kids you know 12 uh 10 kids spend the night play poker um they would you know have uh rituals it was your first time there you got shocked with electric flyswatter you know the first kid to go out get shot in the butt with a bb gun um and uh but it was great so i think it was his junior or senior year he's doing this and he comes running into my bedroom like hey it's okay i'm like what do you mean he's like you didn't hear and i said no so some girl had walked in and said who wants to get high i got weed and the whole group was like we got to get her out of here like no no no you're not gonna ruin what we've got a you know a poker base set up here um so it was really cool that you know a all these kids are talking about it really um that's really important to me and they kind of appreciated the the environment here and kind of the cost to keep it was was to stay sober so um was really you know sometimes you do stuff and you don't know why you do it and then it works out that way and that was kind of one of those like god was in the room and you know the idea of poker is not probably the most um sobering or you know probably not a lot of parent books um but freshmen boys don't know how to hang out and talk to each other you know especially without alcohol and drugs but you know have this community based on you know kind of hanging out and having fun and playing five dollar poker was was i think really bonding for his community and then you know me not being afraid just to have this five second conversation everyone knows that this is a sober f house and um and just leaving it that so um you know we don't do a lot of uh victory laps in parenting um you know especially at the ages of 19 and 23 we're we are not over uh any um any goal lines yet but uh so far um i would say that was one of the things that i don't even know if somebody told me to do it or how it all played out i think i was playing poker with buddies in my freshman year or my son's freshman year i'm kind of watching his community not know or not knowing how to build community and that was my suggestion and um to his credit he took me up on it and we had a good uh you know three or four year run of these kids hanging out at the house that's incredible duke and and i love the way you set that up right yeah i mean you set them up to succeed or at least educate them and help them think about what they're gonna do together differently um and you kind of you put that in place so i i really love that that's incredible i um i'm wondering so talk a little bit about your you know the sober af entertainment what different environments do you um do you do you go to like what different places do you do you go to schools obviously you're at games where else do you um integrate right so as a nonprofit we started off um thinking we're going to create this community by hosting a kind of like a sober um support event so people can kind of charge up their battery their sober battery before either a concert or a sporting event um and we would you know go to red rocks for a concert we would get the word out to our community we'd throw up um some balloons out of the trunk of the car we would have some food and we'd all go sit together and that was kind of the concert um and concerts are hard because um hey they don't need help selling tickets and b um you all gotta if there's usually not reserved seats if it's you know non-reserve you all got to go in together but we did one for a rockies game and i would say we sold about 140 tickets in six days for a rocky's game so to me like there's really a want right we know there's a need right there's this insane need that for whatever reason is not being fulfilled out there but if we can make it cool enough that it's wanted is a big deal so um kind of there's a newer uh non-profit the first two years we really stuck to concert venues music festivals and sporting events um music festivals were easy they would give us a tent they would give us like six or eight um free uh day passes we would you know man a kind of a recovery support booth and then just use a team and kind of rotate through and you could go out and see a bunch of stuff and then come back and work for two hours uh sporting events were pretty easy because you buy a ticket we get discounted seats using the non-profit status we throw some type of recovery support or sober support event beforehand um but concerts have been tough just trying to figure out i mean we all like different music and it's expensive and um how do you kind of sit together so we're still in the process of kind of figuring that part out so we did 64 events in the first two years so we were busy we were doing about three a month and uh it was a lot of rockies nuggets abs uh cu football and then kind of local music festivals in colorado and then in 2019 we did a sober college game day tour where we went to the biggest game every week and hosted a sober support uh [Music] event beforehand i don't want to use the word tailgate but it was a tailgate so grants don't like tailgate so this is not a grants call so we can use the word tailgate um and we would contact local treatment centers uh collegiate recovery communities so we did the penn state at maryland game and both collegiate recovery communities came to the event so we had about 40 kids all sit together we invited local treatment centers and recovery residencies um so we had this big uh tailgate and what we've learned is like you have to have a lot of fun things for them to do because being sober is a little extra awkward and if you can get kids through the first 10 minutes of that awkwardness then it's not a big deal but you got to teach them how to get to that 10 minutes so you got to have cornhole you got to have a big screen tv maybe play wiffle ball just have some activity to get them engaged and once they're engaged they're in you know and i would say that was one of my aha moments just kind of watching this kid come in you know and he's a pink mohawk 24 year old kid who's you know staying at a 500 a month uh lower cost sober living and this kid needs another layer of support and just showing up and just seeing the look in his eyes like oh my god like we're going to have popsicles and hot dogs and go to a baseball game like this is going to be fun and it's moments like that you know if you give people hope that they can have fun in not drinking then the odds of them trying it and staying it longer term i just think increase you know 10x wow well and you're not just talking about people in recovery kids and youth in recovery you talk about everybody i don't know of too many people i mean there are few but too many people that come into a group and feel comfortable especially teenagers right right that just feel comfortable like they can show up and be themselves so i can see how this could expand and and be really instrumental in helping um engage kids all across the you know the world for that matter and it's going to be needed now after we've been sequestered at home for the last 12 months you know i was out at a an event i got invited to by music cares and i remember pulling in the parking lot and i'm like i'm going to know maybe three people at this thing and my body's telling me like don't go in go home it's nighttime it's netflix time it's not time to go meet new people and i was like wow like this is real like i really have some anxiety just walking into this building and you know so i think uh we're all gonna have to have some kind of readjustments getting back into group activity so we're hoping we can help in that area yeah we're hoping that that covet lifts pretty quick because everybody is in need of some face-to-face time for sure this has been challenging for everybody for sure well we've tried to do virtual recovery support we had three music festivals last summer where we hired uh artists to play and then in between the artists we would have a three or five minute interview with different recovery support so we had there's a recovery support um gym athletic group called the phoenix there is a we had different like suicide prevention we had the attorney general speak we had miss america 2020 speak um and uh we ended up having three of these festivals and having a total of 40 000 people watch so at one point we yeah we were the number one station on twitch for for about an hour um so we had a lot of eyeballs watching it and it was more to see a cool band that they knew and it was different fans i think of the different artists that we had but still we had 40 000 kids hear the word sober each each artist had to say thank you sober af entertainment and they choked on the word right you could tell this was not a normal word for them to use um and then so but really trying to build community on that we we kind of failed right we got people to watch and i think maybe that's what we're about we hopefully motivate people and this is one of the aspects that help them stay sober because i think really at the end of the day one out of 100 people show up to our events but the 99 who don't show hear about it and it helps reduce this excuse of i can't have fun sober uh you know i hear every once in a while you know hey i've heard about your group and it's usually not a group to hear about something else especially early on but there was this flight attendant who said she'd heard about us and she said i was trying to quit drinking and i couldn't do it because i was afraid that the fun would stop and my friend emailed me a news article that you had and and it just i think there's a much larger community out there you know looking to take a week off or a month off and still want to have fun so i i think really were i mean there's 23 and a half million people self-reported in some form of recovery from drug addiction or substance abuse so 23.5 million is a big number you know there is uh 40 million kids in college of which half are under the age of 21 that could use a secondary culture so there's a big enough group out there there's just no money in abstinence right so we're just trying to figure out so we went from a kind of a treatment center donation model to a grant model so we've been getting um some grants we've been really fortunate with the cdc and the colorado uh department of public health and environment and caring for denver has given us some uh some grants over this last 12 months and uh one of our grants the cdc grant was just extended for another seven years so nice good work really excited about that now i'm like oh what are we doing for the next seven years like oh my god this is a i've never had seven year job security [Laughter] more of the same thing it sounds like right i think that's that statement is powerful there's no money in abstinence and i think it kind of it it kind of points responsibility towards some of the corporations and entertainment you know of of individuals in that age group right but um one of the things that i think's cool about your organization you know in recovery you're obviously familiar with connection and the power you know that comes from that and community and all that kind of thing and what's what's awesome about your organization is that it kind of does that in a way that's not just a support group right like your traditional sit in a circle and talk about our feelings in a room which is not going to be appealing to you know someone between 16 and 24 who doesn't think they have a problem yeah right so if you can kind of create that connection right add an activity whether you're going to an activity or creating the activity um and that creates those relationships you you've got those icebreakers right which help kind of break through that because that's it's awkward at that age but like you said it's not awkward any it's not it's not any less awkward later in life right you're intentionally going to this activity with a plan you've been invited you've got an agenda and it's still there's a level of anxiety right right that never goes away and so the the fact that you've been able to kind of create this formula where you can get people there it's fun have a good time where they can they can shortcut the i need a substance to help me get to you know this perceived connection right where i think they think okay i've got my substance you know body armor on i can go and meet people and have fun and have a good time if we can skip that anxiety to hey all you really got to show up and and there's an easy icebreaker we're going to have a good time you're going to leave with you know a couple of friends or at least somebody that you know you can smile at in school or whatever um teaches that ability of hey i just gotta show up all i gotta do is show up and i don't need to meet everybody i don't need to be the life of a party right all i gotta do is show up and say hi to one person and that's enough right because that connection turns into that you know stable place and safe place in that environment so that system that you've put together is awesome and you talked about the the grant and ongoing you know where do you go from here right because to me you you've got an awesome thing going and it seems like there would be so much value nationwide right so how do you how do you get sober af entertainment nationwide right have you looked at other chapters or or growing what's what's the goals right what's the future look for look like for you right uh thank you kirk i i so appreciate that really was my daughter kind of pointed out like look this is not like some self-help group like we need an activity so it's been really helpful having her part of the nonprofit just you know i'm 53 i'm i can tell it was like getting sober 31 years ago i really think i know because i go to these music festivals with my kids but i really don't know what it's like to be a 23 year old girl or a 19 year old boy growing up with social media and in this world so really trying to help them make sure this doesn't feel like group therapy um so secondly really we're in this 2.0 stage of our nonprofit where we do want to go national so when we did this um college game day tour where we were in usc uh for football games and i thought for sure there would be something like us already out there right at least on the east coast or maybe on the west coast um and shockingly it's not uh there's stuff that's similar to us but they just stick to one one one uh area i mentioned the phoenix has the sober gym and um they've got a big grant in there and i think 25 states um there's another support group that does large music festivals so they're at about 15 or 20 music festivals but our goal is to be this national do-it-yourself recovery support movement so we want to teach people how to do it and then we outreach for them so they come to our website they you know we wanted so the university uh virginia tech reached out to us and they said we wanted to do one for the virginia virginia tech game september 2nd and we're like great we will help promote i can't use promote i can say outreach you can tell i'm thinking grant terms too much um anyways but we're gonna help them put this on um we've also been contacted by texas christian university tcu wants to do like a sober rave in the quad before the game and then have a sober section um so we want to use our nonprofit status to really get sober section tickets inside the venue to me that's that's really the end goal we don't want to force this down people's throat because nobody wants to be told this but we want to be able to offer you know it's like a no smoking section 40 years ago right was a crazy idea we want to have the no whiskey drunk section right we don't want people in our section throwing up so that's what we're looking to to build and um maybe it's just having this conscious thought of like oh there's a sober section and it's no big deal what what i've learned is that there was one at the rockies and there was one at the broncos here in colorado and they both got rid of it um because they couldn't manage it um so you know it's got to be kind of community managed right like if it's if they have to if they have to post bodyguards around the section that's not cool right nobody wants to be in that correct right but if the crowd is if that area is a group that's like oh hey that's that looks fun but you know this is not that crowd feel free to go drink right over there or whatever then the the community can kind of manage it a little bit right yeah the what you said about those other groups is interesting too because college is tricky because the kids cycle through right right there's nobody at any of those schools who's staying there from now on so what i think is interesting about your model is the fact that you have been able to get the grant status and you keep you know kind of tip-toeing around words to be careful that's something that either a college kid or even an adult doesn't know right they don't understand that part and so to me that's part of the model that is valuable because it could be you know an administrator or an employee at the school or it could be an individual in that area right in every metropolitan area there could be an individual who looks at the model that you're doing and says hey i'm actually i like this i've got kids or i'm in recovery i'm i'm invested in the idea this is actually a job right this is the potential for hey i actually if i if all if i can follow the grants and i can follow the program that you know sober af entertainment has put together i can be the pillar in the community that stays here right right and you can kind of help create that you know outline or process and that becomes kind of a sustainable long-lasting like i say pillar in the community so that's awesome that you've been able to do that well to your point like the collegiate recovery community really is in trouble um part of the reason why you know even if somebody does good and stay sober you're right they kind of graduate out and then it's always new but currently um you know i work closely with the ones here in colorado and these kids are isolated um they're they they've been on their computers or phone too much they play video games and they swipe right and date and they don't have epic recovery was the the verbiage that uh the director used with me and that i'm we're just afraid that you know if you don't have kind of this wow recovery you know at some point you're gonna go back to drinking you know and be it just that you don't have kind of those tangible connections to get you through the hard times so that's what we're trying to like rebuild like look we're gonna help you get some epic recovery and you're going to have an experience and feel a part of that will get you through the hard times if if somebody wanted to like say somebody we're in utah right if somebody in utah wanted to connect and and create an arm or branch of your organization is that possible could they do that yes so shelley thinks uh that's a great question i should have brought that up earlier you can go to our website silberafe.com and click on become a volunteer and we are training ambassadors to be able to be the local representative so um and that will will teach them how to um set up uh an event um how to invite people how to use our nonprofit status typically we we educate people on uh recovery coaches or uh peer support specialists um and that is what one of the things that uh we try to add we also we've given out about 700 drug deactivation kits so it's a kind of a specialty little bag you put pills in you put water in it it's biodegradable you don't have to take it to a police department no one can steal it out of your trash can and you can just put it in the trash um but uh kind of the exciting part is uh i was in phoenix at a thing called the recovery open and i've met with some people who work with the uh university of utah so we're looking to do the utah versus byu game which is supposed to be the big game so um we will meet in person um in uh i think that's salt lake if it's at uh utah um yeah right so uh that's in the works um so at the moment because of covet everything is like in the works uh but june 18th we've got a thousand tickets for the rockies we've got miss america coming we've got colorado's attorney general coming um we're gonna do this big party uh five blocks away from the stadium um we're in the works of country jam as a music festival in grand junction if you guys like country i've got four days of country for you so uh we're also going to be manning a sober support tent and sober campground so that'll be you'll get your quota country over four days at country jam i'm a little bit listening i'm just a little bit jealous dude because it sounds like you get to have an awful lot of fun working on sobriety you are on to me yes that someone's gotta i guess be the pied piper but yeah that is really the goal is hey it's gotta be fun and it's gotta be cool and it's gotta be just as over the top as the other tailgates the last thing we can do is throw something that you know smells lame and if that's the case you're doing more damage and good so you know we're really there trying to make it um we want it to be so cool that we're fishing people out with beer cans out of there out of our section like no i'm sorry this is the sober section we know it looks really fun you're more than welcome to stay if you're sober and hopefully they'll come back um and you know like i mentioned earlier we've learned you got to have you know a big screen tv if it's a football game or you got to have um all different kinds of uh events for these kids to do at the event that's awesome that's awesome kudos on their success so far okay i have i have another question and this is something that i mean i think this was relevant maybe years ago i don't know how much it is now but sometimes you know in 12-step meetings or other ebe have an addiction in order to participate in those activities it sounds to me like your group is not exclusive that anybody who wants and chooses to be sober can participate and they don't necessarily have to be in recovery to do that correct 100 this is a all-inclusive group we just ask that you're not high or drunk at the event so um that that's the bar if you can show up sober and if you're on methadone or suboxone or subutex or have a vivitrol shot we don't care you're more than welcome to come so if you're using some medically assisted therapy or treatment or recovery you are more than welcome to join our movement uh and if you're not in any formal recovery you're just looking to take a night off or you don't drink and you want to bring kids there's no age group so we're open to any and all and uh we really want to kind of be this uh this bridge building communities together um and it's hard to be mad at somebody you know eating a chicken wing watching a football game so um hopefully we can you know bring everyone together that way that's pretty incredible and it puts family back in perspective maybe right because you know if you're going to the game to drink and and not be sober it makes it a little hard to figure out where the kids fit in and the kids probably have a hard time with that so i love to hear that that's you know that that's part of the move as well is to bring the families back together and and create that strength because we all need um we need a support network regardless of our situation right it's so true that you know we can recover together as a family right and i think it's really important for us to kind of back up our words with our kids so it has been really um interesting and fun bringing my kids to events like this and having them bring their friends and having them kind of figure out what does you know being sober mean to them and and why is that a big deal and you know it's um and i just think it's a discussion we're not taught how to have yeah i agree well i know when i come to the games i'm going to look for you i'm coming i'm coming to your games because i like the environment you're creating it's pretty powerful well it is really wild it is um you know kind of like one of the other aha moments i had is when we did one with cu versus csu football game um i was contacting the athletic department at cu and they called their collegiate recovery community asking about who was the sobre f guy and i felt like i got them in trouble and i was trying to like make amends for that and they're like no like we've been here for 10 years and athletic department never knew we existed like you're doing like they thought we were the only one on the planet they didn't realize that csu also had a collegiate recovery community and they were just very appreciative of kind of the amplifier we can be and you know that's what i'm learning is you know maybe because of anonymity or misunderstanding of anonymity um you know we're just not a community that stands up for ourselves very well you know if there's funding cut from like breast cancer awareness you know senators hear about it if there's money cut from drug and alcohol treatment there's usually not a lot of follow-up um so we'll see if we're able to kind of build a little more legislative uh initiative around this um we did a sober support tailgate at the super bowl this year in tampa and we had the white house's deputy director of the national office of drug control council fly down for the event on his own nickel and attend the event and speak at the event so um you know i think he asked earlier like what are we doing kind of nationally and you know really trying to figure out is this idea grant fundable on a national level um because if you gave me a little bit of money we could do a lot of things right it doesn't take much money to really host um an epic night you get 50 pieces of chicken for 40 bucks you get some six dollar pizzas you know and we know how to do it uh pretty inexpensively let's say um but really it's all about that kind of communication and how to get the word out and who are kind of the key leaders in different states so i would say 2021 for us is going to be building the army and building kind of the the infrastructure through the website so people can host their own and you and you mentioned reaching out to the athletic department and i thought that was interesting because the athletic department when it comes to supporting the program and making a dollar go a long way right the athletic department benefits from all of that alcohol sales right so they're not on the side of like trying to get rid of that as fast as possible so when you're talking about you know how do you grow and extend that outreach you know one of the ideas could be pharma right because big pharma does not exactly have you know a spotless reputation right now and so it could be that suboxone or methadone or you know some some of the companies that make some of those things that do actually help with recovery it could be that it's an opportunity for somebody like that to say hey this is this is a place where we can spend nothing of our bottom line and have it still go a long way right so be interesting to see where you what you can do with that as you proceed so um to your point yeah no university wants to stick their neck out and say they have a problem with drugs and alcohol so universities have been difficult to work with more so than i thought um colorado state university where my daughter went to you know was not able to support us because they have all these sponsorships with local breweries and that was kind of the feedback the uh kind of the marketing team told me and i was like well i'm glad you're honest but you do see that half your kids are under the age of 21 and you you can't support this this is not anti-drugs and alcohol this is just secondary culture yeah um so yeah and the it's what we're trying to see there is a bunch of opioid settlement money coming down uh the track that's going to go through the local attorney generals and then to the county commissioners through different counties i think that's how it divides up so i am trying to learn along the way um where the money goes and what we can do to make ourselves a little more fundable to use some of those funds so ideally it is you know education and outreach are the two uh things they like hearing so um you know we're very unique that we don't you know we don't have a civic center or we don't have a heart building where you know we're more trying to create an infrastructure so people can do it themselves nationally so i don't know why i didn't announce this earlier but earlier this year we announced project 72 where we're asking our community to host 72 sober sections at 72 different events this fall to honor the 72 000 people who died a drug overdose in 2019. cool that's awesome so we have maybe eight so far but it's good it's a it's a good start people are excited they're just um i think a little fearful that's a coveted situation though right like there just aren't events so as as i think as events pick up this year that's going to make that a lot easier for you so uh we've got i mentioned the rockies game uh we're looking to do a big event with the mets on august 31st which is um the international overdose awareness day we're going to be at virginia tech uh october 2nd we've got 150 tickets for cu versus usc on uh october 2nd um we're also looking to do the baylor at uh tcu game um september 25th rutgers at michigan um penn state his game is in the word so we got we got some stuff in the works um i don't know when that utah byu game is but uh that's for surely in the season good because i don't want to be there in the winter i've learned you only go south in the winter no it's it's usually nice that used to be a really cold game and when they got in different conferences now it's an early in the year game to fit it in so that'll be fun let's uh let's connect on that i'd love to i'd love to come see the booth and and the crowd and see what you've got right on and follow up right bring a bunch of people we'll have a lot of fun fantastic i also love to hear that you're not um excluding people that are um you know on medications to help with sobriety i know that that's been a big stigma in the industry so i love what you're doing i love the way you're gathering people and making it inclusive and safe and you know incorporating the families into that so luke thank you so much it's incredible and um and definitely when you come to town let's connect they'll be fun all right well i should know the date i apologize for not knowing the date off top my head but yes we will see each other um in a completely different world it won't be on zoom it'll be at a game they'll be high energy everyone will be sober everyone will be having the time of their life that's our goal we want to you know host the best night of your life sober september 11th all right time time to be determined but it's september 11th i can help i can help with the research right there you go conversation so okay awesome thanks duke appreciate it tip number 11. can't wait