Elon Musk fork in the road email to veteran crisis line employees

elon musk fork in the road email to veteran crisis line employees leaves DOGE legacy fragile

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
Podcast. This is a show where we discuss
the critical crossroads, the Shape, SpaceX, Tesla X, The
Boring Company, and Neurolink. I'm your host, Will Walden.
I'm but it should be more common.
I want to follow up on that on the on the question Miss Blaine
about productivity, Where, wherethe where the where the people

(00:25):
in the call centers under pressure to do so many calls a
day or not have calls be longer than a certain number of minutes
or that describe to me the the, the metrics that were being
applied. Sure.
Thank you for that question. So the metrics that were being
applied was the amount of time that you were staying on a call.
What a lot of people fail to realize is that veterans that

(00:49):
are getting help from the responders at the crisis line,
they call back, for example, even though we're told it's not
a clinical role, a lot of us that are licensed, we will
literally de escalate, give themsuggestions on homeworks, walk
them through deep breathing. But those things can be easily

(01:10):
frowned upon because it takes the call longer to be completed.
I am not willing to leave anyonebehind that needs my assistance.
So the idea of production didn'twork for me because that Human
Services and human life was morevaluable than the numbers.
Well, I fully understand that. I'm amazed that there would be

(01:33):
such. I mean, the last thing you want
to do if you're talking with someone in crisis is to say, I'm
sorry, but our time is up. I mean, maybe if you're a cable
TVI mean a, you know, a cable services call center that's
different. I'm surprised that that would so
anyone would even think of applying that metric.
Well, we would frequently receive direct messages in team

(01:56):
saying, hey, I noticed that you've been on this call for a
long, a long time. Do you need any help?
Well, what kind of help are you going to help me with?
If I'm the one de escalating someone, you can't come in and
take over the call. You don't know what's going on
within the call, so you're literally distracting me from
completing the call and paying attention to the veterans.

(02:19):
Is this when did this metric system come into place?
In I believe it was 2018 when we, so we had a director and
then he hired a new person and that person had come from a
background in a call center thatwas more production guided

(02:40):
versus being able to be human guided.
I noticed that you left in May, so you went through at least
several months of the new administration at the agency.
It's no secret that there firings, hiring freezes, threats
of more firings, reorganization.Did that affect the the

(03:01):
operation of the of the the callcenter in terms of of people
morale and dedication, people wanting to stay or go talk to me
about whether the the difficulties at the agency level
affected the call center. Thank you so much for that
question in in bringing the humanism back into it, it

(03:24):
absolutely affected the morale. One of the things that happens
when you're a crisis responder is you can develop vicarious
trauma by listening to listeningto the repeated situations that
individuals are going through. However, when you're concerned,
if you're going to be able to pay your bills, if you're going

(03:45):
to be able to keep your health care, if you're going to be able
to function, that is going to impact your ability to stay
focused. Now, I have to admit my peers at
the Veterans Crisis Line, as Mr.Cone said, are rock stars.
They stayed focused. We all came together in teams

(04:06):
and I would say, hey, here's my phone number.
If anybody needs me, text me. We had to create situations
outside of teams to offer support to each other because it
was so overwhelming every week having to the.
The the chaos. The chaos was overwhelming and

(04:26):
it was distracting. Every week you're having to
write or what did I do next weekor last week letters to send off
to an invisible e-mail that that.
Was the famous 5 things you accomplished?
Yeah, the 4th enrolled I. Sent one of those in myself to
Mr. Musk. I never heard back.
Yeah, because you weren't the The mailbox at one point got
completely full and nobody was answering it.

(04:48):
Let. Me, let me ask another question
and this just this is not about this subject, but what are the
issues that are there? There must be a pattern to
issues. Are they financial?
Are they you mentioned Healthcare, is there any?
Can you give us a summary of what for the most likely calls
are about? So most of the calls that we

(05:09):
received are usually individualsthat have faced levels of trauma
from military sexual trauma, remembrance of their their time
in combat, individuals that may have not gone to combat but may
have been on a ship and felt like they were in a sleeping,
coughing, marital issues. We became notorious for being

(05:30):
marriage counselors, sometimes having to break up arguments
over the phone between spouses. And so it just varied between
that individuals that were homeless or individuals that
specifically just felt unseen, unheard and easily forgotten.
And did you have the capacity torefer them to VAPSPTSD programs,

(05:54):
for example? I mean, in other words, did your
duties go beyond listening? So the referral process, the
first referral process is to thesuicide prevention coordinators
and those individuals are usually housed at the VA medical
centers, a social work department that takes those
referrals and then tries to disseminate them to the

(06:16):
appropriate areas directly. Referrals, we will send
individuals that are facing homelessness, we go send them
over to the to the National CallCenter for homeless Veterans.
When it comes to things like needing appointments, I was a
little different from what the SOP said.
If I have a veteran on the phoneand they needed to get through

(06:39):
to make an appointment, I'm going to make the call to get
them through to make that appointment.
The SOP says transferring blindly let them pick up on that
end. To me, I believe that we needed
to be more of a one stop shop sothat we would not.
Can you imagine and 90 year old veteran calling in and the call

(07:02):
just keeps circling because he doesn't know what button to
push. I'm not going to send them over
blindly. And those are some of the
things, some of the stressors for our our our elderly veterans
because everyone was wanting to force them to use a computer, go
and navigate a phone system. They can't.
It's not a part of their generation.

(07:23):
And why would we want to do that?
So I mean the most. Frustrating things in the world
to be on some kind of call like this, tell your story and then
have somebody say, well, I'll move you over to this other
department and then you're on hold listening to music.
Well, your testimony has been very important and impressive.
I, I hope you can, I'd like to assign some homework.
Could you supply to the committee further thoughts about

(07:46):
how this system can be improved because that's the business
we're in here. And to the extent you have such,
both of you have first hand experience, to the extent you
can make suggestions about the standard operating procedure or
the productivity metrics, those kind of things that would be
very helpful to it. Hey, thank you so much for

(08:08):
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(08:28):
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