East Meadow resident Spencer Cook wants to help people who are struggling with addiction. Cook struggled himself, starting when he was young, and he got involved with illegal substances in early adulthood, which resulted in his arrest in a joint operation by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in 2014, when he was 27.
Initially facing a 20-year prison sentence, Cook was commuted under the Second Chance Act for a reduced sentence. In 2020, after six and a half years of incarceration and a year under house arrest, he dedicated his new lease on life to becoming sober, rejecting the way he had lived his life up to that point.
“I’m going to do everything in life that is completely opposite from what I’m used to and what feels normal,” he recalled thinking. “In order for me to do that successfully long term, I needed to understand my disease on a scientific level.”
Cook is now 38. He spent his days in prison reading scientific papers and studies about addiction and behavioral science, and creating a sobriety program in which he would be the first client.
“I was doing it for my own self, for my own survival, out of a combination of pure boredom and desperation,” he recounted. “What this ended up becoming was the SoberIn40 program.”
Cook’s program is designed to “hijack the mind,” he said. He boiled his struggle with addiction down to two problems: cognitive dissonance and emotional bias.
Cook invested $700,000 of his own money saved after three years working in various sales roles into working with therapists and psychologists to develop the program after his incarceration.
“It’s a new industry — computational psychology,” he said. “We ‘learn’ you in real time, and our algorithms figure out what you’re struggling with. Our course and content changes with what you’re struggling with in real time.”
N.G. Berrill, a forensic psychologist and founder of New York Forensic, was one of the first medical professionals who got involved with SoberIn40’s development. “It sounded like he had an interesting idea,” Berrill said of Cook, “something that was innovative, and would provide to individuals struggling with substance abuse a method of intervention that doesn’t really exist at the present time.”
Berrill described the program’s use of machine learning, combined with the work of clinicians, as a “very positive” development in the field of substance abuse treatment.
“Substance abuse is just so destructive,” he said. “It’s so terrible for people’s lives, their families … rather than turn away, I think the real (solution) is to turn toward this.”
The first phase of the SoberIn40 program lasts 40 days, takes about an hour a day and consists of videos, questions and more. It is followed by a 120-day, half-hour-a-day after-care program, and after that it opens up to 300 maintenance courses.
A police lieutenant in Nassau County, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Herald about his experiences with SoberIn40 as he battled alcoholism, and its impact on his life. “As somebody who is in the world of law enforcement, we are not the best at asking for help,” he said.
The lieutenant’s therapist and Cook met, and decided to suggest the program as a solution. The lieutenant is now 14 months sober.
“(SoberIn40) has certainly given me a much better shot at stabilizing my marriage, being a more active father, and not blaming everything on the stress of life and what I consider the disease of alcoholism,” he said.
The program now has 2,200 incarcerated people participating in 16 state and federal facilities, and about 400 members on mobile devices using the program’s app.
“This is my calling,” Cook said. “You really do find purpose when your life is at its lowest.”
SoberIn40 is an outpatient care program — not a replacement for urgent treatments or medical emergencies. A free version of the program is available, and the full program can be accessed for $39.99 a month. To learn more, visit SoberIn40.com.
