From an outsider’s perspective, it might be tempting to say that Jon Sundt has a charmed life: a lifelong resident of La Jolla, the happily married father of two is the president and CEO of Altegris Investments, a company that provides investors with access to hedge funds and is quoted in a variety of leading financial publications.
But Sundt’s early life wasn’t quite so sunny. The second of four children, Sundt’s two brothers began experimenting with drugs in junior high school. Immediately taking on the role of leader, Jon led interventions on his brothers long before the practice became common enough for it to be documented on television. Yet despite all the efforts, Sundt’s brother Steven died of a cocaine overdose in the back seat of a police car in 1988 and his brother Eric committed suicide after a lengthy battle with addiction in 1994. Always interested in what it was that got them hooked in the first place, Sundt decided to focus whatever time and resources he had on drug prevention.
In 1994, he launched the Sundt Memorial Foundation—a group dedicated to doing what other drug prevention groups have often not been able to accomplish: actually preventing kids from doing drugs. Their main focus has been on their highly acclaimed Natural High DVD Series, five videos targeted to middle schoolers (see two of them below) that star drug-free role models kids admire—from pro surfers like Kelly Slater to skateboarders like Tony Hawk to Hills star and bestselling author Lauren Conrad. The Morgan le Fay Dreams Foundation, founded in 2005 and endowed by Paul McCulley—recently retired senior partner of financial giant PIMCO—has been a major sponsor of Natural High for many years. (And, as disclosed in a recent SEC filing, McCulley is also the sole outside board member of Recovery Media, the parent company of The Fix, leading its major equity infusion.)
Each year, a new Natural High video is sent, gratis, to every educator in the Sundt Memorial Foundation’s Education Network (videos from previous years can be purchased for between $20-$30 from their online store). The foundation’s major event is a gala fundraiser—this year, it will be held Friday, October 28th at 6 pm at the Scripps Seaside Forum in La Jolla and will honor Cassadee Pope, the lead singer for Hey Monday. (Tickets can be purchased here). Sundt sat down with The Fix to discuss his family history, the Natural High videos, and his mission to make drug prevention look cooler than drugs.
What made you want to do this?
My brothers and I were very tight, just a year apart—we were like triplets. And they took a turn in junior high and started getting involved in drugs. When I buried my second brother, Eric, I was just really despondent. We had gone the recovery route—at 18 years old, I was running interventions for my brothers because my dad was out of the picture at the time, and we ended up losing that battle. I realized that I wanted to do something. Something inside of me said, “I’ve got to do something about this,” and I decided to focus on prevention.
Did you want to focus on prevention because recovery didn’t work for your brothers?
I’m really a fan of recovery programs but they’re messy, expensive and are really dramatic undertakings. I’ve been involved in several interventions, and they’ve been successful. But I felt that I wanted to focus on prevention. I wanted to know what was it that got my brothers interested in drugs in the first place, what was it that tickled their fancy and got them to think it was cool. And I realized it was really the drug culture. The drug and alcohol culture markets itself, either implicitly or explicitly, as cool. Kids want to belong, they don’t want to feel left out, and they want to fit in. If you’re at risk with a kid, if you don’t have a strong family, and they don’t have a strong interest in sports or natural highs, or they’re predisposed to addiction, it can become a disastrous chain of events. So I thought, “What would it take to convince kids what adults already know—that drugs aren’t cool, that alcohol addiction is not cool, that it ruins lives?” When you’re 25 or 30, you get that, but when you’re 15 or 16, you don’t.
Why do you think you weren’t tempted to use drugs the way your brothers were?
I had a lot of responsibility as a big brother, and I saw what happened to my brothers as it was happening, and I didn’t want to go there. I was really into rock climbing and surfing and the outdoors. I remember being in small groups at local hospitals with my brothers and thinking, “I don’t want to be like those people, I don’t want to be like my brothers.”
Do you think they were just genetically predisposed in a way that you weren’t?
I think there’s probably a lot of evidence to suggest some people are more predisposed to addiction than others, but I also think there’s a tremendous amount of pressure for kids to fit in, to join the club, and they brand drugs as being cool. If you look at how smoking became uncool, and you look at how AIDS in Africa spread—where nobody used condoms, despite all the warnings, and it became a socially acceptable thing not to use condoms—they had to change the perception in the hearts and minds of kids. So I thought, “This is the key, if kids can be educated in such a way that they realize that drugs aren’t cool, and if they want to achieve their best success in life, there’s a better alternative,” that became a calling card. I was going into schools and talking to kids and showing slides and telling the tragic story of my brothers, but I’d bring in an athlete or a model or a dancer—the idols that the kids love, and I’d say, “Talk about why you’re clean and sober,” and these heroes to the kids would say, “When I dance, when I play my music, when I skateboard, I’m getting a natural high, I don’t need drugs,” and the kids responded to that. I don’t think you can lecture a kid not to do drugs. I don’t think that works—in the same way that I can’t get motivated not to eat butter just because someone tells me it’s going to get me fat.
What about kids whose parents are working two jobs and don’t have time to take care of them—kids who aren’t raised under the best circumstances and want to check out?
While we’re not going to solve a lot of the root causes that cause kids to be in despair but if you look at someone like Terry Kennedy, who’s in one of our Natural High videos—here’s an inner city black man and his clip is powerful. He says, “I was in the ghetto, and my choice was prison, drugs, death, or something else.” And he got turned on to skateboarding and identified his natural high as skateboarding, and it took him out of the ghetto. Maybe that’s idealized and that’s not going to happen for millions of kids, but it can happen for some, and maybe it’s not skateboarding—maybe it’s getting involved in an after school sport, maybe it’s art, maybe it’s poetry. So how cool is it when a kid comes home from school, even in the inner city, and if this program is taught right, the kid comes home, and maybe his home is a wreck, but he’s got this little thing that he did that day, and he comes home with this kernel of truth and nobody can take that away from him. Instead of learning about dead presidents, instead of learning about the Constitution, which is all great, fine and dandy, how cool is it for a kid to go, “Hey, man, this is my gift, this is my natural high, I’m going to pursue that”?
How are the videos used?
The videos can be used as a tool in intervention or to re-tweak a framing that kids have in middle school before they get to their at-risk years in high school or after school. It’s not in and of itself the end all be all, but the goal is to get to 50 percent of the population. We’re a little over 12 percent of the kids right now. When we get to 50 percent, it will become a part of the vocabulary, especially if we can keep it cool, if I can keep the hip celebrity factor in it. I’m trying to take what my brothers thought was cool, and that lie killed them. Once they got on the train, they couldn’t get off it.
Some kid in some city I don’t even know will write, “Dear Jon, I was so impressed with your video, I never knew my heroes didn’t do drugs and if they can say no to drugs, I can say no, too.”
What’s the budget?
The first one was made for $10,000, and the second one was made with $50,000. We’re moving up the quality scale, and now that we have 12,000 teachers using it and we’re documenting six million kids now that are seeing it, it’s becoming easier to go to a celebrity and say, “Wait a second, do you want to be in front of six million kids, saying something cool?” because it’s actually good for their career. It would be nice if everyone did it through the goodness of their heart, and most of them do, but I think when we get the numbers up as high as we’re getting them, their agents will take notice.
Who shoots the videos?
I tapped the surf industry, because the surf industry creates these videos that kids watch and listen to, and I actually found a guy that won an award for a surf documentary he did between the relationship with Al Merrick and Kelly Slater. I watched one of his movies and said, “This guy has talent and he knows how to speak to kids.” Kids now have really good radar—they know authenticity.
Do you think about your brothers every day? How much do they drive you in what you’re doing?
I think about my brothers a lot, because we were so close—we were triplets as much as we were siblings. I think about them every time I do something around Natural High.
Do you feel any guilt about surviving while they didn’t?
Perhaps I do, but I was a really good big brother. And in the last five years I’ve started getting these letters from these kids or these emails from these kids. We get hundreds and hundreds of unsolicited testimonials, and it just breaks me, man. Some kid in some city I don’t even know will write, “Dear Jon, I was so impressed with your video, I never knew my heroes didn’t do drugs and if they can say no to drugs, I can say no, too. My natural high is X.”
How does the funding work?
I have a nonprofit and we raise money through my friends and I write a big check every year. Now we’re at the point where we’ll probably be able to get grants, because we have a lot of testing that we’ve done in the classrooms, and 80 percent of the kids said it affected them. So now we’re at the point where we can probably go out and get professional funding, but this has all been a dedicated group of people that are one or two degrees removed from me.
Do you have kids?
I have a 12-year-old daughter and a four-year-old boy.
Is there a way you approach them that you wouldn’t have had you not had your experiences?
Oh yeah. I’m pretty real with my daughter about what’s going on, what she’s about to get into and what she’s going to see. She knows what her natural highs are, she knows what drugs can do, and I’ve visited the gravesites of my brothers with her several times. My son’s a little too young yet, but she gets it.
Your natural high is surfing and love, right?
Yeah, that’s me. Giving and receiving.
Maer Roshan is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Fix. Previously he was Deputy Editor of New York Magazine, Editorial Director of Talk, Features Editor of Interview, Founder of QW, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Radar Magazine and Radaronline.com.
