The Corona Virus Flat Earth Mindset, Part 1

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Bill, what we’re seeing amid this global health crisis of the coronavirus especially coming out of the White House daily is shocking to a lot of people. It’s something we’ve talked about in the past, but not in this context. That is a flat earth mindset and messaging coming out of the White House in these daily briefings with the President. There’s a lot to unpack there.

Tom, the challenge that human beings faced in communication as we get these thoughts out of our heads and they translate to our words is that we’re running with a certain set of beliefs and behaviors. Also, things called winning formulas, this is the best way I can say this, this is the way to approach this thing, this is how to deal with bad news. If you’re raised with parents that communicate around bad things in a certain strategy and they use that strategy consistently, that’s the only strategy you’re going to know. Your belief and habit are going to be one that follows along with the pattern that you’re used to speaking. We don’t have to feel shocked but we do need to get some awareness about the strategy of speaking that the President is using regarding this crisis. Marketing and branding people don’t do well in crisis and messaging when there’s something that goes wrong. If you buy something from a salesperson like a car, when the car breaks down, do you go back to that salesperson to fix the car?

No. 

The salesperson’s narrative is done now. You can’t use that sales narrative. You’ve got to go to the repairman or service center. That’s where the person that’s going to give you empathy if you’re lucky. They’re not going to give you empathy because they got bad news and they’re going to charge you more for the thing that’s broken, not just the price of the car or the car payment that you’re making. You already made that deal. We have a new deal for you. The new deal is, “Your radiator broke. We have to replace that and that’s X thousands of dollars to do it.” That’s the new thing. They’ve got to sell you although you’re in big trouble because you have something that’s broken. You need to buy it.

They got you over a barrel in most cases. 

The problem is that when a reality TV show is used to selling things in 7, 3, 5, 12-minute segments and then has to go to commercial because the thing is going to be done. The take is finished. It needs to be edited because there are things you said in this episode. You said this one way and that wasn’t your best take. The problem with the live press briefing is you don’t get to edit it. It’s live.

You don’t get to do over. 

What happens is that we’ve got a communicator, the President, that is speaking in the same way that he has done on a TV show. Over 30 to 40 years of our business life and over 70 years from a family dynamic to not fully tell the person the truth. Not let the person know that, “I am buying this thing and I’m going to tear it down but I am not telling you I’m tearing it down. You all know that I tear it down until I take a wrecking ball to it. I have destroyed this piece of American history.” I’m going to say, “I’m going to leave it there.” His dad did a couple of those things. He bought some things that people loved and mothballed it and then put a wrecking ball to the front part of it so that part of the city had to live with it until somebody else came up with the money to fix it. He didn’t fix it. That’s one of the problems with this flat earth mindset. One of the things with my clients and the companies that I work with is that watch out for our own flat earth mindset.

I’m going to give you some bad news, Tom. I have a flat earth mindset and you have a flat earth mindset which is we’re going to crunch down or move our perspective lower to the least common belief. Some person’s mind went, “What is it he’s going to do, the least common denominator?” It’s the least, smallest and oldest belief that wins. It’s that what’s factual. If I’m trying to reduce or minimize crisis conflict and I stink at it, I’m going to say the following sentence. There are five cases. It’s pretty soon those five cases will go away. They’re going away from the perspective of either they are going to get better or they’re going to die. That’s the word they’re going to go away at.

They may go away but fifteen more cases are right on their heels. 

The flat earth mindset is I can only see the world’s disk because my view only falls to the horizon. That’s as far as I can see. I can’t see the curve. As I’ve heard the flat earth or we’ll say on TV, “I’m going to believe this because unless I go into space.” Why don’t you change your perspective? We’ve had other people go there.

This is like the toddler who covers their eyes with their hands and thinks you can’t see them because they can’t see you. 

It’s also the toddler that puts their fingers in their ears because they don’t want to hear the perspective. I don’t want to hear the perspective that the hotels and the big industries are going to get a bailout. I’m going like, “You do know that most Americans are not in the stock market, don’t you? You do know that most Americans aren’t employed by big business.” Main Street is the way bigger economy than Wall Street is. Not by the numbers but the number of people employed and then other people that are affected by the economy. That’s what the flat earth mindset is. It collapses things. It reduces to the smallest belief, perspective or view that we have. We can’t answer something that is outside that view set because it has no bandwidth. It’s going like, “I can’t see it.” You and I have talked about different examples of this.

It’s happening daily in this daily briefing in the White House with the President and his coronavirus Task Force and the doctors. Dr. Anthony Fauci is the one who ends up contradicting the President a lot of the time and correcting his misinformation. The problem is the President keeps delivering this information daily. 

Here are two other things. There was a reporter that asked the question and there were two responses. He asked the questions about the emotional state of Americans. Do you remember that?

Yes. 

The reporter says the questions, “What do you say to Americans that are scared?” That’s called a softball pitch.

It was Peter Alexander of NBC News and he served up the President like you say, a softball. The President could have knocked out of a park and appeared like the father figure than the leader of the country’s needs. 

The expectation you had right there is that there was going to be a perspective of a caring, nurturing and supportive father. The flat earth mindset is when you look at the way Donald Trump communicates with his kids and all the people that he sees are loyal to him. It’s not Karen McDougal nurturing that he brings forward, it’s praise, acknowledgment and recognition. In his worldview, he can’t listen or respond to something that is outside his bandwidth. Some batters can hit the fastball or the curve. Michael Jordan couldn’t hit the curve so he couldn’t make it to the Major Leagues. He’s a great player but can’t hit the curve. The pitcher used to throw a curve at you. You should have that perspective. To him, that question, “What do you say to Americans that are scared?” It’s the curve. The hard part about it is that we keep expecting him to do something that is outside his skillset and then complaining about it. Why are we complaining about it? Get our perspective to shift instead of to expect him to shift his perspective. His perspective is not going to shift.



I’ve seen a lot of talk about that incident on social media and written by reporters. There are two different perspectives being communicated. One is that was an inexcusable thing for the President attacking the reporter, telling him he’s a terrible reporter for asking him a simple question that if he had more empathy and compassion. The President could have answered it in a way that would have helped him raised his opinion in the polls, made people believe a lot of his misinformation more. Instead, he didn’t do that. He attacked the questioner. Some people see that perspective. People that are Donald Trump supporters were cheering him on saying, “That was a got-you question. The media is trying to trip him up then he gave it right back to him.” For a while, I thought it wasn’t a got-you question. It was the reporter trying to get the President to speak to the American people and give them some comfort or message that is like a father and a leader what people need. Because of what you said, I’m realizing that the President always will respond that way. He doesn’t ever respond with empathy and compassion. It may very well have been a got-you question.

He walked into the bear trap of unknowingness of don’t ask this character that kind of question. If you do ask the question, ask it in a way that the President can win. This is where it gets a little wiggly. Ask it in a way that the President wins not because it’s going to help the President score points and get reelected. Give him something that is going to be helpful for the Americans that are following him to follow. He is an embattled twelve-year-old in that moment of that questions. He jumps on to what a 12 or 13-year-old is. He’s an embattled eighth-grader when Donald Trump answers that question. I know I’m putting him in an age group but how a person is experiencing something that he has no modeling for. His brain is not wired that way to do empathy and compassionate sentence.

He doesn’t have the languaging bandwidth. Tom, you do not ask your young daughter to drive a car. You don’t because there’s no skill and her legs can’t reach the pedals. You can’t get her to do it. It’s hard. I am going to say this to all the reporters that are reading this whether it’s Rachel Maddow or anybody else, you can’t throw those questions as well as when you “beat up” on a mistake and inability that he has.

You’ve got to watch it because the people that are following that mindset are getting more and more entrenched like an eighth-grade group of friends that have their limited flat earth mindset. You can’t punch on the mindset because what their brain does is go more to protection. They fight back. Most people did not have the ability to hear what Donald Trump said after he said, “That is a terrible question. You are a terrible reporter.” They did not hear what he said next. Can you remember what he said next? Here’s what he said next, “What I’m trying to do here is to be optimistic in essence. What I’m trying to do here is to put a positive spin on it.” He didn’t say that because he doesn’t have those words. I am trying to get them to buy something.

He thought that Peter Alexander asking that question, he couldn’t sell that answering that question and that’s why he didn’t like the question. 

I can’t sell what you said. I can’t sell loss, morning or this car is broken. The car is used, it’s broken. Please stop pointing at the part of the engine that’s not working. I’m trying to sell this thing.

If the President had some more skill, he certainly could have provided some empathy and compassion and pivoted back to selling.

Pull back on. All of a sudden, it’s like, “The engine cycle. We’re not driving in the wrong direction. I took a wrong turn like nine of them.”

He’s not going to say that.

He doesn’t have the mindset and the languaging ability just as the flat earth who doesn’t have the ability to let go of and pivot on their perspective. Can you imagine trying to convince somebody that there’s a flat earth and believes that the world is a disk? I know it’s defining logic but that’s what perspective does. It defies logic because I’m only taking consideration of what I’ve seen and what I experienced. I am going to validate my perspective. I’m going to take a partial truth and run my life with it.

That right there, Bill, is the essence of why these daily live briefings with the President are so dangerous. It’s because there is a lot of misinformation being communicated by the President himself and people are acting on it. It is going to cost lives. That’s the thing that Rachel Maddow said. For the people reading this blog, the name Rachel Maddow is going to say, “She’s extreme to the left as a reporter has this ideology.” You are correct in that belief, she is. I saw this report first on the Fox News website which is very much the polar opposite of Rachel Maddow. They reported it because what she said was that this misinformation coming from the President daily is dangerous and irresponsible. It was the entire report and the delivery was free from ideological rhetoric. It was very well-spoken and delivered. That’s why Fox reported it. Honestly, they respected what she was saying too. She made a very valid point. She’s saying, “The administration should stop these live briefings because if they can’t control what the President is going to say then it’s causing more harm than good.” They should tape them and edit them like you’re saying, the reality TV star who says something wrong. “Cut, we’ll edit that before we air it.”

Marketing and branding people really don't do well in crisis.

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“Mr. President, let’s try that again. Mr. President, let’s ask that question. Reporter, could you please ask the question again?” The funny part about this is that you can tell all the reporters in the room, “We are not doing this live.” If the Republicans had a moment of consciousness in their brain. Even you and I are talking about perspective. Get perspective of what you are dealing with. You see how enthusiastic I am about this. If you have a player that cannot hit a curveball, do not put him in and do not play him in the game where there’s a pitcher who has a wicked curveball.

That’s what Richard Matta was saying record these things. If the President speaks truth in the message that’s appropriate then air it. If he doesn’t, cut it. You can’t keep putting them on these live broadcasts. That reality TV star is making grave errors that are going to cause people’s lives. That’s the scary part.

I have firsthand knowledge of this. My sister is a show producer in Atlantic City and worked in hire for Donald Trump and did at least one of his birthday bashes. She said to me before he was elected, “He can’t follow direction. He can’t take cues. He comes out on stage and does what he wants.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” “I walked him through all the different things that needed to take place during this performance. Donald Trump, come out here, you’re going to be dressed as a 007, a spy. You have a fake gun in your hand. There’s going to be the Bond girls dancing around you for your birthday party. You’re going to come out. The dancers are going to go around this way and that way. Pull the gun out then the criminal’s going to come out and everybody in the audience is going to see the criminal. You can’t see them because the criminal is over here. Lights are over here. This is the way we’re staging it. Come over, hit this spot over here and then you’re going to throw the guy off the stage where we have people ready there to catch him so that he doesn’t hurt himself.

Before you move off the stage, as you fight him, when you pull your trigger on the gun, the sound effect guy will put bullets to that to match it.” He comes on stage, gun up, pushing the trigger. There’s no sound effect for that. He literally did whatever he wanted. When he was in the fight with the person, the actor had a hold on to Donald Trump to keep from falling off the stage. There was nowhere to catch him because the guy knew that he was going to get hurt off the stage. He had to keep fighting with Donald Trump. He’s trying to punch him off the stage. There’s no one there to catch him. This is not changing. There’s no Presidential moment. This is me doing the world is round. Meanwhile, his world is flat. We want to believe that a person is going to learn from their lessons. This is a great Senator from the main. He’s learned his lesson. He got impeached.

Susan Collins was saying, “After he’s impeached, I think he’s learned his lesson.”

No, the world is still flat in his world. He came out the next day and said, “No, it was a perfect phone call. This is a perfect car. There’s no broken engine here. We weren’t heading in the wrong direction. That idea was the best.”

We’re on top of this virus. It’s under control. 

That flat earth mindset is, “Everything’s all right. This building is going to be fine. I signed a contract for this building. It’s going up. We’ve got the best products going into this building. It is high luxury building.” Meanwhile, the contractors all know where they had to cut corners to make it work. They all know that luxury is not necessarily luxury in that space. The appearance of it being luxurious there but if we looked at the quality inside the building, not so much. It’s better than most but not as much. It’s not high-end but you paid high-end money for it because you were sold a luxury car. You were sold the perspective of a luxury car. You were flat earth into this is the best because it’s Donald Trump but it’s not the best steaks, vodka, university, airline and water. It’s not like he doesn’t try to make it the best too. He tried to put in this luxury toilet in a plane. The engineer said, “Mr. Donald Trump, if you put this toilet, it’s too heavy.” “It’s the best.” “Mr. President, it costs fuel. It’s going to put the plane off a balance.”

It’s not the best in context. There is no context in flat earth mindset. 

I’m glad that you said that because in the flat earth mindset, you’re going to say something and here’s the weird part. A flat earth mindset on the other side receives it and does what you tell them. It’s not fully a cult thing but it is a cult thing. They’re not fully all the way over there but they have elements of being over there. If Donald Trump says, “Here’s this medicine that we have that’s been approved.” Somebody figures out where to get it as what happened. They get and take it and they die. They over medicated themselves because they are too fearful of getting the virus. There’s this terrible thing coming. I better stock up on this. I’m not going to take one, I’ll take three of them. The amount of the active chemical in there and the side effects kill the person. The person didn’t have the virus anyways. It’s very sad. What do we call somebody that accidentally kills somebody?

We would call it manslaughter. 

This is an accidental manslaughter. You didn’t know that the person was going to step in front of you. There’s no way you could have seen him but you said and did some things that were right in the path of that. You need to know that your words were going to make that difference. We do have laws for that. Not that anybody’s going to apply them. The only place law is in the ballot box and there’s no retribution.

They rest with the people. Do enough people want to keep living in this flat earth universe the President is perpetuating or do they want to live in the real world? 

The real world is always to the least common belief or denominator, whatever that thing is that that is the lowest validated belief. Our country, as a 250-ish-year-old that is doing what it’s doing has a great youth to it. It is a bit of an adolescent from a world perspective. Just like you don’t want your teenagers at home, you go away on a vacation and they’re going to bring their friends over to have a party. Do you think they might do some tragic things where somebody tragically might get hurt, drunk, drive home and have sex with another person? I’m thinking of all the things that could go wrong at a teenage party because the perspective is there. The teenager’s perspective is, “I’m going to get a connection with my friends. Why don’t you trust me?” It’s like, “I don’t trust you because you don’t have a good long-term perspective. You don’t have any skill or talent to deal with the complexity of things.”

Can we talk about a real contrast to the leadership per se who came out of the White House? Have you seen any of these press briefings by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo? 

I have. I’ve watched a few of those. That’s a greater perspective. What is he focusing on? He’s focusing on the numbers. It’s like, “I’ve seen the pictures of the earth. Earth is round. Here are some of the things that we can predict because the earth is round.” In that prediction about the earth, it’s going to turn in this direction and the sunrise is going to come up. “I need 3,000 ventilators. I need my numbers. I don’t want to wait for the high price capital assistance to catch up here. I need a low-cost governmental option here.” It’s a profit and money piece on their side. I want certain companies to take advantage of this crisis. We’re in the middle of crisis capitalism. We’re into the place of, “Do I let capitalism catch up to this and make as much profit as it can? Do I add the government low-cost options and say, ‘You’re making these things because it’s dangerous and you’re going to make it at cost and you’re not gouging us?’” He’s not doing that. He’s going to allow the system to be gouged.

From a messaging and leadership perspective, Governor Andrew Cuomo is not doing the flat earth mindset. He’s doing the round earth mindset. He is telling it more like it is. He’s doing more scary honesty but letting people know this is what it’s going to take to defeat this virus and we are going to do it. There’s definitely a piece there. I agree that he is asking for things to be more nationalized than to remain privatized. 

Tom, my perspective went to here’s Andrew Cuomo saying, “I need this inexpensive government stuff.” I didn’t clarify the separation. Donald Trump is going like, “No, let’s wait. It’s not that big.” He’s waiting for the profiteers to come in and provide the things, not provide the government with a low-cost option. That’s what happens. When Donald Trump makes the decision to nationalize it, that means all the profiteering goes out. These companies have to make it at above a minimal cost because there are certain guidelines that you’ve got to follow to make it. Our government has socialistic qualities to it which has price protections because it’s protecting the people. The problem is we’ve got the fox in the henhouse eating the hens. We’re all going to allow the capitalist system to take as much value out of whatever the thing during a crisis. It is not a strong mindset to have because what happens is it waits until the wreckage is complete before it comes in.

I’ll be happy to have a healthy discussion about any Republican or any person in that other mindset to come back and give you pushback. If I’m trying to send the A to Katrina and the city gets destroyed, I choose, as a President, not to activate federal money or support. I get a lot of wreckage. That’s great for the real estate people, landowners and the people that come up and buy up the place. It’s the same thing in Puerto Rico. I have a hurricane down there. I’m not going to bring any federal money in to help those people rebuild or to save lives. Why? The crisis takes place, the economy in that area stumbles, it allows a wealthier person to come in and swoop in and get bargain discount prices because the people are limping. They have no ability to bounce back because there are no resources for them to bounce back with. They have to leave the island or else, there’s nothing there for them. They don’t want to spend the time in an economy that’s not working. It allows the vultures to come and pick over the things.

Regrettably, the image of a vulture picking over a person is very disturbing but it is a perspective after a crisis. It weeds the weak out. It does create opportunities for people that have the resources to come in, swoop in and take advantage of that situation. Andrew Cuomo is a leader whose traits advocate, “We have to get ahead of this. Let’s not let this be a Katrina thing.” He’s going like, “I survived Puerto Rico, impeachment and Mueller Report.” He’s emboldened. Nobody on his side of the fence that is around him is going to stand up and say, “Mr. President, we’re going to have so many deaths in New York City.” He’s going to go like, “So what? At least I can move him out of my hotel. I can buy the hotel. I can fix the hotel up the way I want to.” He’s not interested in that person that’s working there. He doesn’t have the equanimity that, “You chose your life. You were handed this life.” This whole thing we’re talking about is very unsettling.

What you and I are left on this is, what can we do about it? It’s almost sitting at such a sad place because we know there’s some truth around science. We have empirical data and perspective of that. It’s validated. Here’s what to do and not to do. Other people have done this before. We’re third in the world with the number of cases. The death wave is coming on our shores. There are a lot of deaths showing up here. What’s the number going to be? It’s hard to know. Somebody on Facebook would say, “We’re Americans. We’re resilient. We can figure these things out. We’re not like the Chinese and Italians. We don’t have their mindsets. We have a different mindset so it’s not going to hit us as bad.” That’s because in the past, we have had people that from the round world perspective going like, “We could see this coming and we can overplan for this.” We don’t have those people in charge.

We don’t. In fact, the people in charge disbanded the office within the White House that was preparing for a future pandemic. There are lots of ways which we’re behind the eight-ball here. 

The coordinating body. It takes a lot to provide protection. People don’t think of the police. People can take the police for advantage which is the policing system, protect and serve. Those two words. If they stayed closer to those two words, the whole system would work great but it’s not protect, serve and catch, jail and prosecute. You want to keep the protection and the serve bar higher than chase down people that make mistakes, so protect and serve. That was a mistake. Is it worth pulling the person over? Protect and serve. I’m pulling you over because I’m protecting and I’m serving the greater good. That’s the thing that needs to become out of the police’s mouth. “You may have noticed I pulled you over.” “Yes.” “My job is to protect and serve. When you made a turn and you ran that red light, I’ve got to protect the other people around you. You did not meet the need for safety. I’m writing you a ticket for it just to remind you,” not because it’s a quota.

The weak are weeded out during a crisis.

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There are a lot of emotions in between there but most people don’t have the emotional bandwidth to say, “I feel irritated. It doesn’t meet my need for truth.” “I feel doubtful that that’s going to be very supportive.” The people that have that narrative as second nature. The thing that I find most joy in you and I working together on this is we’re trying to adjust the perspective so people can use more of their adult mind and don’t get triggered into, “This person is a bad person,” instead of, “Look at that interesting thing he said. It looks he’s trying to spin something positive where if he used the truth that would serve him a little bit better.” Just like a teenager, the truth would serve them better so they can move past either the mistake or the choice they made.

Remember that cliché honesty is the best policy. I liked that, Bill. I like moving into how we can help ourselves in this situation. 

I think so too.

Thank you so much, until next time.



Thanks.