Empowering Peers | Melissa Dittberner – Dr. Mo

Whitney | she/her (00:45)
today’s conversation is a little different than normal. Today we’re actually talking to Dr. Mo, the co -founder and CEO of Straight Up Care, which is the producer and sponsor of Recovery Conversations. Dr. Mo, thank you so much for joining me today. So what we’re hoping to do today is just help everyone understand.

Dr. Mo (01:02)
Yeah, I’m happy to be here.

Whitney | she/her (01:08)
the history of straight -up care and learn a little bit more about you. So can we start with, you know, what, why are you in the space of peer support services, substance use, mental health? What’s your why in that space?

Dr. Mo (01:24)
Yeah, absolutely. So I think there’s a few different whys. And I think I’ll start with kind of why I got into recovery in general. And it kind of started with a loved one that I had that was very close to me and partner who struggled with addiction. And I really couldn’t understand how somebody went from being absolutely amazing to being not so great to me in a kind of a short amount of time. And I really wanted to understand addiction better. I didn’t really realize at the time that I was also struggling with my own.

pieces of addiction until a little bit further down the road until it kind of grabbed me too. Some of it probably started as coping from that relationship and then turned into my own kind of issues. And then that really slung shot my need to better understand. I had a life change that happened in my work. I was a welder and I decided to go back to school. I reached out to a lot of people and said, hey, I’m really passionate about addiction and what it looks like. And I would love to tell my own story and the story of, you know, loving someone.

who struggle with addiction and people were kind of like, nah, you don’t have any education. I was a high school dropout. You don’t have any education. We really don’t have space for you. And I was like, oh, OK, I see the connecting piece here. I see that my education is what’s holding me back. And so I got my GED quick and I registered for college at the university and I have been here ever since. And I really just I took addiction counseling and prevention or addiction studies. I really wanted to understand what does addiction look like from all levels? Why does it happen?

How does it happen? Why, why, why, why, why, why? I got my bachelor’s degree in addiction, a master’s degree in addiction, and then my PhD in human development and educational psychology. After I got my PhD, I really wanted to understand why treatment wasn’t working or what was going on in the world of treatment that wasn’t meeting the marks for lots of people. Why was there return to use after treatment stays and what was missing?

And so I started doing a little research in South Dakota specifically and said, you know, what’s going on? What would you want? What would you need? Did you fall through the cracks? And I really found peer support. Peer support says you and I supporting other people. And then I found peer specialists and the work that they could do. Because I’m in recovery, I was like, hey, I could do this. And so I became a peer specialist. And then I was like, wait a minute.

I think I can do a little bit more than that. And so I applied for a National Institutes of Health Challenge grant just to see if my idea had any clout and we won. And luckily I was introduced to Jonathan Lewis right away and we just have been running ever since. And we just wanted to be able to reach people where they were. We wanted to cut down all the barriers that existed in peer services. And we just wanted to make something that was accessible for anyone because we know when people struggle with addiction that they get isolated.

And we know a lot of that isolation can be geographical. It can be, you know, personal, it could be whatever. And we wanted to just take out any of those barriers that we could to let people get services with anonymity, if they so choose, or just allow them to meet with other people that they could have rapport with. So maybe you and I have been through the same thing and our rapport might be greater in that way. And really seeing if we could connect those pieces for other people. So that’s kind of like a little bit about me and where my story kind of headed and how we got into straight up.

Whitney | she/her (04:45)
just, I mean, I’m a huge fan of yours. You know that. And luckily, I get to call you a close friend now. And just your story, I don’t use you, you have clearly told it so many times. So I know you’re used to kind of hitting all the big marks. But I just want to highlight, you were told, there’s no room for you, you don’t have education. And you said, screw you went and got your GED all the way up to a PhD, and then said, Oh, wait, I can do more.

And that is just incredible. I mean, you gotta give yourself props for that. I mean, that’s just amazing.

Dr. Mo (05:22)
Thank you. I’m a big fan of yours too, you know that. Thank you. I appreciate that. I’m very driven. Sometimes my drive comes out of spite. Oh, you told me no? Well, watch me. So.

Whitney | she/her (05:33)
Well, and I think that’s exactly like what’s needed in the recovery space is it’s a space of people being told you’re not good enough, you’re less than, you’ll never make it. And yeah, let’s prove them all wrong. And that’s exactly what you and Jonathan have created as a platform for the people who have been put down the most and told there’s no opportunity to thrive.

Dr. Mo (05:45)
Exactly.

That is what we hoped for, right? And I know like I’ve been stigmatized in a lot of different spaces for a lot of different things. And I know once I stopped stigmatizing myself and saying, oh, I can’t do this or I’m not that or I’m this, then it was like, get out of my way. Cause I can do whatever I want. I just needed to be put in the right place with the right people who would support me. And that’s really another piece of where straight up care came from. Because what if I would have had a peer at the time when I couldn’t, you know, I was really struggling to get through my addiction and just get through everyday life, being a single mom of two young kids.

I couldn’t just really use someone’s hand to hold, not to drag me, not to push me, but just to walk me through and say, it’s gonna be okay and you are okay. And it took getting in contact with those first people. I met my mentor, just him saying like, you can make a change, you can be the change, you can do these things. It’s just not gonna be easy. And that was all it took for me was having one person say, dude, I believe in you. And I wanna be that and I wanna create a space for other people because I know it happens, I know it works, I’m living it. So.

Whitney | she/her (06:57)
You’re definitely a role model for everyone to be able to see that it’s possible. There are definitely barriers and it’s not easy. And then here’s straight up care. And it’s funny, I work for straight up care. I’ve known of straight up care for over a year now. And yet I don’t know where the name came from. Can you tell like what, how did you come up with straight up care?

Dr. Mo (07:18)
That’s a really good question. I always tell myself that I don’t name things because I’m not great at it. And so Jonathan was like, we’re just doing like straight up care. And I was like, oh, and he was like, yep, that’s, that’s, that’s it. I’m like, okay. That was just the end of it, right? We just want people to have straight up care. And so that’s where it came from. There was no debate. There was no nothing. He was just like, I think this works. And I was like, yep, I trust you. Let’s do it.

Whitney | she/her (07:39)
It just gets.

It’s just straight up like that is just cut all the fat. It is straight up caring about people and giving them opportunities. That’s amazing. And we just launched last week. We’re recording this a week after the app went live. Our peers are on the platform.

Dr. Mo (07:53)
Absolutely.

Whitney | she/her (08:05)
What’s it like for you? I mean, you started the, if I remember correctly, the company was founded in the spring of 2022, two years later, almost. What are you feeling right now?

Dr. Mo (08:19)
tired. Being honest, a huge sense of joy, right? Being through, like going through Babson with you and being able to go to Yale and MIT being like so extremely impactful and just people showing me like this is the path you could take, these are things you could do, don’t give up, don’t stop. And having Jonathan just like constantly working and saying it’s coming, right? And I know like the development has been a little slower than we wanted it to be.

because he didn’t want to put out anything that was kind of like an MVP. He wanted to put out the big shebang, right? So being there, like, you know, walking with him every step of the way and having days that were like, oh my God, today’s gotta be the day, but it’s not the day yet. And like, I don’t know, when the day did happen, I was like, oh my God, we did the thing two years later, which is much longer than we had thought, but we bootstrapped this bugger. We didn’t want to give away anything that…

We wanted to make sure that we help people and not harm people. So we worked like so hard just to do everything ourselves where we’re working our own other jobs and like putting things behind and maybe losing other businesses and like really, you know, putting everything into it. So I’m exhausted and I’m super proud because it is so difficult and it’s hard to live in the startup world. You know that you’re watching it, you’re with us, you know, you know how hard it is. And so it’s really exciting to know.

you know, getting those messages like, hey, I have clients that are booked and oh my God. And like, thank you for believing in me and thank you for taking me on and allowing me to be part of this. And this is huge. And like having people that are on the platform, like dude, Dr. Mo, you don’t know what this has done for me kind of thing. Like that it’s, it’s all worth it. Like every sleepless night, every paper cut, every whatever it is totally been worth it, but I’m tired. I’m a little tired.

Whitney | she/her (10:00)
I’m kidding. Yeah. As I –

would expect you to be. And I think that’s something that in startups, you know, there’s always talk about bootstrap, but straight up care truly is bootstrapped. You and Jonathan have been intentional about not seeking those like venture capital investors and things because you want to make the peers the center. And whenever you start accepting money from other sources, they have to have some say and you have to make them happy. And that’s something I’ve admired as an employee of the company is that,

at the center of every single decision are the individuals, the peers that we want to give the opportunity to.

Dr. Mo (10:46)
Yeah.

Whitney | she/her (10:47)
And I want to hop back a little bit to you mentioned Babson, Yale, MIT for those of you who aren’t familiar. NIDA sponsors these entrepreneurial innovative boot camps essentially for individuals in the SUD space who want to bring an innovation into being. And Dr. Mo has attended three of them. Her and I attended Babson together in August of 2023, which is

We’d known each other for almost a year before that, but when it really solidified that we needed to work together. And when we were there, and this is no disrespect to Babson or anyone else participating, we had a moment of, wait a minute, there’s something missing here, an awareness of the lived experience. Can you, do you mind sharing just what…

it’s been like in those spaces with hardcore bio -neurological researchers, you know, people creating new pharmaceuticals and being able to be like, hello, person who’s in recovery here.

Dr. Mo (11:59)
Yeah, so I kind of, you know, I’ve kind of set my whole mission to break stigma. Like I will go to a research conference where I’m talking about other research and I’m like, hi, my name is Dr. Mo and I’m in recovery from methamphetamines and alcohol. And people are like, holy shit, did she just say that? You know? And I’m like, yeah, I did. Because these are the spaces where I want people to know, you may look at me like one thing, like I’m this nerdy researcher up here presenting.

Whitney | she/her (12:14)
Yeah.

Dr. Mo (12:24)
but I also want you to know that I have a past behind this and that you need not judge people who look and sound like me. And so I’ve put myself in all those spaces to be like, I’m gonna share this even where it doesn’t belong because it’s absolutely where it belongs. And so at Babson, I was like, I heard a couple of comments that kind of made me feel uneasy, mostly as a person in recovery when people are like those people or those kinds of people or things like that.

And not that anybody was bad or anything, but I just wanted to bring to their attention that this was a space that we needed to make sure, if you’re gonna get into this world of substance use disorder, you need to make sure that you’re not accidentally stigmatizing people. And a lot of times, the words that we use, we don’t even think about as being stigmatizing. We don’t need to use alcoholic. We can use person who drinks alcohol or person with alcohol use disorder, or somebody struggles with alcoholic. There’s so many better things that we could say.

Excuse me, but because it’s been a word that we’ve used for so long, it’s kind of hard to take out. I get it, but we can do it. And so I’ve kind of set myself out to like make sure those little things change too. And some people are fine with being called that and some people call themselves that and that’s totally cool if you are that person. But as an outsider, it’s not okay, right? And there’s lots of other ways that we’ve realized that our vernacular can accidentally harm people and that we just have to…

be a little more intentional about the words that we speak. And so I, you know, I love to be able to bring it to people’s attention that it is, you know, I’m not calling you out, but these are things, right? I was at a conference here in South Dakota and the speaker kept saying those people and those people. And I did not intend on doing this and I normally don’t do this, but I interjected and I was like, hey, can I ask how many people in this room are in recovery? And there was probably 10, 15, 20 of us. And I was like, okay, we’re.

We are those people in case you didn’t know, just to give a little context because I could feel other people getting angry and I wasn’t, but I could just feel the like, the energy had shifted, right? So I wanted to like speak up and say, hey, it’s not, it’s not those people, it’s us, it’s all of us, we’re in this together. And so I’ve kind of put myself in that space where I’m like, okay, I get it and you may not know, but let me let you know so that way you know, right? So yeah, it’s.

Whitney | she/her (14:36)
Right.

Dr. Mo (14:36)
It can be difficult, but it’s also really rewarding to be able to help in that way too.

Whitney | she/her (14:41)
You really kind of bridge it, which shouldn’t be bridged. There is no separation. There is no us and them. And I mean, I’m a person who is not in recovery from substance use. And it would be wrong of me to see you as an other.

You, I respect your lived experience and I see you as a human being, just like I’m a human being with different backgrounds. And whenever you stand up and say that, because I’ve seen it, I’ve seen you do it. And it really, you know, it busts the whole addiction as the sole identity of a person or the sole label, because that’s what’s happened. Oh, they’re an addict. Oh, you know, they’re a recovering addict. Well,

Dr. Mo (15:02)
Right, right. Yeah.

Whitney | she/her (15:25)
No, that’s a person who is a mom, an entrepreneur, a PhD, someone who is the executive director of a street medicine team and happens to be in recovery. And that’s not to minimize recovery. That’s a part of who you are, just like all of us have different parts of us. And it’s just amazing whenever people are able to stand up and say, hi, I’m in recovery and in all these other things that you think highly of.

Dr. Mo (15:54)
Right.

Whitney | she/her (15:54)
And you prioritize and you need to understand that I’m also in recovery because that’s important too. Yeah.

Dr. Mo (15:59)
Right, right. Yeah, I totally agree. Last night I was teaching my PhD class and we were talking about prior experience and I was talking about prior experience in terms of educational psychology. So what does it look like to use your prior experience to understand other things? And I’m like, this is the perfect explanation. I have students who are doing research on peer supports, which is so cool.

Whitney | she/her (16:21)
Yeah.

Dr. Mo (16:22)
And I didn’t even know they were doing it until they were in my class. And I was just like, mind blown. And they did it based off of coming to my Ted Talk, which made my heart explode all over everything. But talking about what that prior experience means in educational psychology and how you can use, you know, learning one thing. One of my things that we talked about was, you know, a hockey player who can then play soccer because they kind of match over, right? And then we talked about, you know, having lived experience and being able to utilize that with your education to help other people.

just like a peer support, right? So that prior experience really makes you not always an expert, but it does make you somebody who understands that just a little bit more and can gravitate to those other understandings in that space. And so, yeah, we’re just even, even in every way, we talk about lived experience and what it can look like in so many different areas. So, yeah.

Whitney | she/her (17:09)
Yeah, that’s great. And you know, I mentioned the street medicine, because I think that’s an important thing to also, I mean, this is about getting to know Mo. So can you just share a little bit about what you do with your street medicine team?

Dr. Mo (17:24)
Yeah, absolutely. So not quite a year ago, we started a street medicine team in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. A co -founder was like, hey, I think I want to do this thing. And connected by another co -founder was like, hey, Dr. Mo needs in on this. She loves this. She’s been looking to do this for a long time kind of thing. And really we do, we bring medical, mental health and addiction care to the people, right? So we go down the streets with backpacks on our backs and.

full of doctors, peer specialists, addiction specialists, just kind of all across the board, people who are willing to volunteer their time to go meet people who are unhoused and get them the care that they need. And oftentimes it looks like, you know, hanging out on the street curb, just chatting with people and saying, hey, is today the day, especially for me, is today the day we go to detox? Are you ready to get into recovery? What does this look like? And if you’re not, that’s fine. You want a hug? And do you need a piece of cheese and a water? Like whatever, whatever that might look like. So just really, um,

Reaching the vulnerable population with the care that they deserve is really what we do.

Whitney | she/her (18:27)
It’s just, I don’t know how you do everything that you do. I’m tired here. I mean, everything though is about busting down those barriers, meeting people where they are seeing the human and not the label. And, you know, there’s a lot that you’re going to be doing moving forward. What’s something that you’re looking forward to maybe in the next six months in any of your endeavors?

Dr. Mo (18:52)
That’s a really good question. That’s a really good question.

Whitney | she/her (18:57)
I know you have a lot going on.

Dr. Mo (18:59)
Yeah, so there are a lot of cool things. I am going back to Hawaii to teach this summer and so I’m always pumped about that. I really love the culture. I love meeting different people and I kind of got wiggled into the recovery world over there now. So I think it’s going to be like a cool experience to have some people who are in recovery that I can hang out with hopefully and you know friends coming out and things like that. But I’m also working on kind of some super nerdy stuff.

with like RNA and DNA and wearables and how we can help people better understand their body makeup and what it looks like in terms of recovery and addiction. And so I’m excited to see where that can go and how we can help. So I’m excited to see that. I got a new mentor when I was at MIT and I absolutely adore him. And I’m hoping to do some stuff with him and kind of educating other people in the space of SED and entrepreneurship in that way as well.

I love where the peer, the peerpreneur program is headed and I’m excited to see where we can take that. You and I are gonna be working on a training for people who are incarcerated and getting their certificates to be peer specialists and what that can look like and that’s super exciting. And then one of the people that I’ve been working with is working on a grant to get into the women’s prison to do trainings. And so I’m really excited to get behind the walls and be able to give people a skill that they can use something that.

you know, they know intimately, whether it’s just incarceration or reentry and being able to, to lift them up in that way and say like, Hey, when you get out, there’s a workforce for you and you may not think this, but let me tell you why you’re great. And let me tell you how you can use what you’ve already known and been through to make dollar bills and to relate with people and to keep yourself in recovery, whatever that might look like. And so I’m super pumped to start getting behind the walls with you and stuff. So yeah, there’s lots of good things.

Whitney | she/her (20:51)
I am too. There are. And just to kind of help everyone understand exactly what straight -up care is doing. So how would you describe a straight -up care? What would be the way that you tell someone?

Dr. Mo (21:05)
Yeah, so I always say like, straight up care is administrative and compliant tools for people to reach their clients remotely, but it’s become so much more than that. But I need a new tagline. I learned this. Like Babson told us this, right? We know I need a new tagline. But really we’ve, and I think I’m stealing this word from Jonathan or maybe you, but we’ve really started creating an ecosystem of what it looks like to be in recovery and be supported. So whether that’s hitting syndicate 12 or whether that’s,

Whitney | she/her (21:16)
Thank you.

Dr. Mo (21:34)
following Whitney on this channel, right? Or all the TV channels that you’re now on, you rock star you. Or whether it’s, you know, working on the platform and what that looks like, what’s peer day. There’s just so many things that we’ve created to create a full space for people in recovery to have somewhere to go. And I think that that really was my goal. It’s just turning out to be so much bigger and greater than I ever thought it would be. Because again, we know what isolation looks like. And when we isolate is when it gets scary.

Whitney | she/her (21:39)
You

Dr. Mo (22:00)
Right. And that’s, and I watched myself, like, I think even in my Ted talk, I talk about like being on an island all by myself. I think that’s why I talk about it. I don’t know. I talk about it somewhere and it sticks in my brain, like being on an island all by myself, which I now know what that feels like. And it does feel like addiction when you isolate yourself, you really have nothing. You don’t know where to go. You don’t know who to turn to or look or to look for for assistance or help or anything. Right. And so being able to create a space where no one has to feel like that is, is really my goal. So.

Yeah, it’s created an ecosystem. We have an ecosystem now.

Whitney | she/her (22:32)
We do, we do. So there is the HIPAA compliant virtual telehealth platform where peer specialists can subscribe and have access to it. With that comes access to the peer specialist social network. So you can connect with other peers. Dr. Mo mentioned peerpreneur. We are truly helping peer specialists become entrepreneurs and we call it being a peerpreneur.

because we know that there are unlimited potential and possibilities for individuals in recovery. We have training. Dr. Mo has designed an amazing NADAC approved training for those who want to become a peer specialist and it qualifies for NADAC’s national peer specialist certification. So there’s just so many things. There’s a HIPAA training, a sexual orientation, gender identity and expression training.

Syndicate 12 is a place to connect with people as well, reduce the stigma. I mean, all of this is coming out of the brainchild of Dr. Mo, the recovery brainchild of Dr. Mo and co -founder Jonathan Lewis, who is the chief technology officer. And someday I’m going to force him onto an interview with me. But it’s, yeah, it’s really just, you know, about.

Dr. Mo (23:45)
Good luck.

Whitney | she/her (23:51)
again, it all comes down to that person and what does that person need to be their optimal self? What goals do they have? How do we help them achieve it? And that is just, man, every time I talk about it, I just kind of get lost in how amazing it is.

Dr. Mo (24:10)
Yeah, it’s a pretty exciting space to be, right? Like I said, like that one mentor who was that person for me is exactly what we hopefully get to be for other people. And I see the power of telling someone, you can do this and I will hold your hand along the way and you will ask questions that you think are silly that I know the answer to only because I asked a silly question 10 years ago or whatever the case may be, right? And so yeah, being able to be that for people is…

I don’t know. It’s overwhelmingly awesome. And at nights when I’m like, I am tired and I maybe didn’t do all the things that I needed to today, I still kind of live in the moments where we’re like, we are making a difference and I know we are. And that’s really what it’s all about.

Whitney | she/her (24:39)
Thank you for listening.

We are. And I forgot to mention Peer Day. So Peer Day, if you want to come and enjoy Dr. Mo and I live, come to Peer Day. Maybe you’ll regret it. I don’t know. But Peer Day is a free opportunity for anyone who is a peer specialist or wants to become a peer specialist working towards it or has had just the passing thought of, hey, maybe. It’s a space, an online virtual meeting where we provide support.

Dr. Mo (24:58)
I’m going to go to bed.

Whitney | she/her (25:18)
We share wins and celebrate where we learn and talk and just continue to build up recognition of the value of peer specialists. We have our next one coming up in a couple weeks. I’ll.

put some details in the notes here. But you can always find us on social media as well because we do Peer Day monthly and it’s pretty fun. Yeah. But Mo, I want to kind of wrap up with my typical questions I ask people and I’m excited to hear your responses. I’m going to throw one different one in at the end though. I haven’t asked before, but.

First, let’s start with stigma. We’ve talked about stigma. Stigma is huge. That’s why we’re doing reduce the stigma in these conversations. If you could say just one thing to blast stigma, what would it be?

Dr. Mo (26:10)
Oh, that is that is a hard question. I feel like I said a lot of words about it. But I think it’s just I don’t know. Remembering that humans are humans, right? Like we are all just people walking different paths and everything looks different. When I break down stigma, when I’m talking like publicly, I like to tell people, think about that time that you got made fun of as a kid, because kids can be difficult, right? They’ve done as they don’t understand and they’re trying to figure out and navigate. Right. So think about that thing.

that sticks with you from childhood that you got made fun of for, bullied for, whatever that might look like. Now, this morning when you looked in the mirror, did you still see that thing or hear that thing? Right, those are the kind of things where stigma can stick with you, right? And so when we say things that are inappropriate or don’t match with people, we tend to accidentally harm them for a long time to come. And so, and I even like, when we talk about racism, I say that, you know, what if that was your skin color? Like a thing that you can’t change.

But also if we’re talking about addiction or a dopamine disorder, also a thing you really can’t change, right? Like you can work with it and you can navigate it and you can get medication to help you with it. And you can, you know, try to do everything that you can, but addiction really is a difference in the brain, right? And so sometimes you can’t change what that looks like without the help of other people. And sometimes,

you never actually change it, right? Like it doesn’t change change. And so that stigma around it is so unhelpful. And I think that if we can just remember that people are people and everyone’s different, you can look around and if you don’t look far in your little town, you can look around on the globe and see that everyone is different and we believe in different things, we do different things, we walk different paths and we just, the stigma isn’t helpful. And if we can celebrate people’s differences and celebrate their cultures and what makes them them and…

how they navigate the space around them, we’re going to be a lot better off. So that was long -winded, but stigma sucks, man.

Whitney | she/her (28:06)
Yeah, it does. I was expecting you to just say, fuck stigma. And if people, if there’s one thing someone takes away from this conversation, what would you like it to be?

Dr. Mo (28:11)
That’s true too, if I didn’t go long way then that might have been.

Oh man, just that you, you, you can do it. You can do literally. I remember hearing that though, when I was younger, like you can do anything you want. You can be anything you want. You can go anywhere you want. And thinking like, man, I don’t know, maybe not me, right? Because of my past or things that I’ve done or like shit that other people have told me that it wasn’t good enough or I couldn’t make it or I was down or I was this or I was that, right? But it turns out once you put yourself in the right circle and you have the right support, when they say you’re like a portion of the

people that you spend most of your time with, that’s legit, man. Get yourself some people who lift you up, support you. And if you don’t have that, come hang out with me. Shoot me a text. I’ll tell you why you’re great, right? Find me on Facebook, whatever, I don’t care. I’ll be your person if you need somebody to be that person.

Whitney | she/her (29:11)
Amazing. And here’s my curveball that I haven’t asked before. This is just for you. We are five years into the future and straight -up care is what you’ve dreamed it would be. What does that look like?

Dr. Mo (29:28)
Oh man, we have a ton of people on the platform helping other people. It’s something where you see in your YouTube ad, a way to get help for people who are struggling with addiction of every kind, right? Sometimes when you hear the word addiction, you only think of substance use, right? So we can think about work, sex, gaming, like there’s so many codependency, love, all these things. So people are actually understanding what addiction looks like.

We’re cutting down on rates of overdose because people are getting connected. So we’re not having those gigantic numbers. Maybe we’re even moving into drug policy and how we can help people. Maybe there’s a harm reduction leg of straight up care, because that would make my heart so happy. Doing research, pumping out information that says, hey, this can help. Finding rapport is successful, not only in addiction and mental health care, but care across the board.

And so doctors are starting to see what it’s like to have rapport with their clients and what that can look like. Peer specialists are in every space that they can be. They’re in the treatment courts, they’re in the jails, they’re in the prisons. And if I’m dreaming big, we’re cutting down on recidivism rates and we’re able to truly, truly help everyone. We’ve created the space where maybe addiction is a word that people understand just a little bit better. And that stigma is being decreased because of what you’ve created here and what Strait of Care is creating all across the ecosystem. So.

That’s my five year plan. Nothing big, nothing big. I can’t wait to watch this in five years and be like, nailed it.

Whitney | she/her (30:53)
Let’s do it.

That’s right. We’re gonna be like, oh, we did that in three. Dr. Mo, as always, love talking to you. We could talk all day and maybe we’ll start doing these a little bit more often. But just thank you for taking the time. I know you’re super busy, but I think everyone’s gonna love getting to know you a little bit more.

Dr. Mo (31:01)
Exactly, exactly. Oh, that’s great. Good question.

Thank you. I appreciate you and you know that so I am so grateful for what you bring to the table to do Thank you for what you do

Whitney | she/her (31:28)
We get to do some really incredible stuff together. That’s for sure.

Dr. Mo (31:30)
Yes, we do.