Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't: A Conversation With Ryan Diess

0:00So you got companies losing money. So a couple of years ago, if you don't do something, everybody's going to hate you. Your employees are going to walk out. Your customers are going to walk out. Now you do something, everybody's going to hate you. Your customers are going to walk out. Seems to me like if you're a business owner, you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't. How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who shared their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success? Grab your seat at the table, because this is Business Lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice.

0:33Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Business Lunch with your hosts, Ryan Dice, which is not me, and me, and I'm Roland Frazier. We are here today to talk about fun and exciting stuff so that you basically get to join in the conversation that we would have if we were having lunch together. So, Ryan, how are you doing today? I'm doing exceptionally well, and if we're talking about what I think we're going to talk about. I think we can officially title this the Roland and Ryan get canceled episode. Yes. The Roland and Ryan risk cancellation show for sure. Um, however, I'm feeling very survivally because I just survived a hurricane in, uh, in California in San Diego, where we had the first tropical storm watch we've ever had.

1:16It turned out basically to be light rain and my glass, my windows steamed up from the humidity. But other than that, uh, There was, I guess some people actually got hit with it, but it was really interesting how, how scary they were trying to make it and then how non-scary it actually turned out to be. Yeah. And, and I mean, you know, I mean, I was, you obviously were not panicked. I was panicked on your behalf, as you all know. Well, you, you went through like, Hey, it's all going to be okay. And then you had no water. So I get that. I mean, growing up in Texas and having, having a place on the Texas coast, you know, I've been impacted by hurricanes a number of times and they absolutely do suck.

1:56And they will definitely come and just take everything away. You had a house, but now you just don't. I don't think it's quite as cruel as a wildfire. You think about what some of the other folks going through in different parts of the world. I think that I think wildfires are the only thing more cruel than a hurricane, but they both just absolutely suck. And so, yeah, when I saw there's a hurricane going up the Baja Peninsula, I'm worried because I'm like, man, all these Southern Californians, they don't really know how to do hurricane. And I know you, you know, you, you play a wealthy Californian on TV, but you grew up in, you know, Virginia, Virginia's got hurricanes.

2:30We, uh, we had tornadoes where we would go down into the shelter. Like there was like group shelters we had to go to down. And I remember sitting there thinking, you know, why do people live in this area? But anyway, uh, but yes. So, but, but most people have not. And Dawn, my wife who grew up here, she, uh, she was like, I don't, I just have no idea what to expect. So we tied everything down, got already, you know, turned our umbrellas and our stuff down and, uh, and all the things that would fly about the yard with a heavy wind gust. And, you know, we got light rain. So it was kind of interesting.

3:06I think part of my concern was Emily, my wife is, um, is talking to me. She's like, you need to talk to Roland because I'm texting with Dawn and she doesn't seem to like know what a hurricane, like how to prepare for a hurricane. She's never been in it. And so basically Emily felt like my wife felt like your wife wasn't adequately panicking enough about the situation. And so it was vital that I panic enough to make up for her panic and the lack of your wife's panic. And at the end of the day, a delightful summer shower is what you got. yes yes but the good news is we were prepared so had had had we not had water we had you know we but we always have hundreds of liters of water sitting around anyway because i'm i'm like i've been through some stuff and uh i'm always ready for for that but we generally just leave as you know like they're like there's a fire coming your way i'm like we're leaving the power is going to be out we're leaving you know this one i kept looking at and i was just like i just don't see that it's going to be enough of something even if it had been everything that they thought it might have been that it would cause, because it was also only for a day, right?

4:13It's like, it's for a day, you know? So it, it, it seemed like it was not going to be a big deal, but anyway, let's see if we can give some actual value to the people who are. Well, I mean, I will say at business lunch, it's, it's like if they were sitting with us at, you know, over lunch and we were having a conversation, we'd be talking about the weather, but now we're through that. What I would want to talk about next, if we were sitting at lunch and I kind of meant what I said, I think that this episode has a chance of maybe getting us into trouble, depending on how it goes. But it is a conversation that entrepreneurs I know everywhere are having, but almost nobody's having it in public and out loud because everybody's afraid of the same thing, which is getting canceled.

4:54So I'm going to set this up. Right. I'll give you the setup. And then I want to hear your take on it. I want you to go first so that when you ultimately say the things that gets you canceled, I can just go. I disagree with all that and then leave. I can't believe that he said that. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I have your voice clone. I refer you back to our AI automation. That's true. All right. Then we'll try to keep it classy. All right. So I, I met just through happenstance. I got connected up with another entrepreneur here in Austin where I live. And we were chatting and at a school function, our kids go to the same school and just talking about business.

5:32And it turns out like he owns this donut coffee shop that I've actually gone to a number of times. I think it's a great place. It was like, oh, cool. I love, you know, love your place. How's business? Kind of what any entrepreneur would ask anyone. And the nice thing about entrepreneurs is generally you meet another entrepreneur and somebody asks how's business. You kind of look around. It's like, do you want the real answer? You know, and it's like, yes, we had a real conversation. And this guy was really struggling. And he's going to be fine. Like things are on the upswing. So this isn't a sob story.

6:00but he's like, man, he's like, everything was great. And then COVID happened. And I was like, yeah, COVID sucked. He's like, no, you don't understand. It wasn't COVID. We were doing okay. We were making it work, but I had like a complete staff revolt. Like, what do you mean? He's like, well, I was trying to keep business afloat. I wanted to keep everybody employed. I didn't want to just furlough everybody. So we had it set up, you know, we're trying to be ultra safe. One person in the kitchen at a time, everybody's masked up making donuts. We were still selling. We were selling outdoors. We were selling in parks.

6:29Like I'm trying to do everything that I can, but the people that work for me are saying that I'm not doing enough, that I'm not taking it seriously. And then I just need to shut down the whole business and pay them anyway. Right. So they're already mad at me. And then you have the George Floyd protests go down. And now they want me to make this big statement about kind of as a company, our stance on that and, and, and Black Black Lives Matter and all this. And, you know, my response was like, yo, we're just like, I care about this. And by the way, this is not some, you know, Trump flag flying right wing person.

7:03I mean, this guy is definitely on the left early side of things. And he's like, let's let's just make donuts. Let's go try to make people happy. You know, we make the greatest thing in the world. Donuts are caught. Like, what if we just make donuts? And they were so upset with this entrepreneur that a couple of his employees actually attempted to stage a walkout, did succeed in staging this whole walkout. But they had this plan of taking every donut they made that day and throwing it on the curb, you know, out of protest. And he obviously had to let a bunch of people go because you can't just do that.

7:36And it basically messed up his entire business. So it reminded me of that time because I remember it. I remember like the pressure, you know, of you need to make a statement. But then fast forward to today. And I was reading an article. And again, I know this is an incredibly long setup. We're going to get to the discussion. Bear with us, listeners. But, you know, news article I saw in Bloomberg, a bunch of other ones, Anheuser-Busch, Target, Kohl's lost a collective$28.7 billion in market valuation beginning in April amid a backlash of basically taking, you know, political and cultural stances on, you know, everything under the sun.

8:18Right. So you've got companies losing money. So a couple of years ago, if you don't do something, everybody's going to hate you. Your employees are going to walk out. Your customers are going to walk out. Now you do something, everybody's going to hate you. Your customers are going to walk out. Seems to me like if you're a business owner, you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't. And it just, you know, as somebody who feels primarily, you know, for entrepreneurs, I just want to know, like, let's look at this. Let's try it as best that we can to remove the politics, to remove the cultural issues, to remove religion, to remove hate.

8:52Let's do the best that we can, and I know you can't. I probably already got canceled by that mere assumption. But trying our best to do this, thinking about the entrepreneurs. Roland, first principles, what do you do? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. There is no winning. How do you win? well i guess it to me a general comment is that i see i think it's we are an interesting species because of the things that we do to control one another and this need that we seem to have to have other people have to share our views or they are bad or wrong and i think it's sad because that's not really what we built the whole country on the ability to have freedom of speech so So I think that first principles, I start with everyone has the right to freely express themselves and their opinions.

9:49And then it comes down to, do you want to support those opinions and beliefs or do you not? It is sad to me that we have so much bullying by people who have views trying to force other people to either suppress their views or to adopt the views that they do not currently have. And so I guess like that's that's where I start is is I believe in the Constitution that we have here in the United States that says that we all have the right to free speech and we should be able to express ourselves. I think that that is coming ever increasingly under fire when you say things that people don't like. But at the same time, people get to vote with their feet.

10:37And so if you don't like what the donut person does or you don't like Target supporting what Target's supporting or Bush supporting what Bush is supporting, then you have the right, as you should, to vote with your wallet, right? to vote with your feet and leave, to vote with your wallet and not patronize that business. So I guess in terms of like, how do we, how do we remedy the situation? I'm not sure that you can fix human nature. But I do believe that, I mean, certainly not with that attitude. Yeah, exactly. I didn't even try. Whether you believe you can't, you're right. But I really do think that that if you, you know, I guess it would just be maybe a campaign of tolerance that we say, you know, hey, guys, this is we're all out here.

11:32We all have different beliefs and thoughts and we all have the right to express them. And isn't it wonderful that we do have the right to express them? Because if we didn't, we would live in a totalitarian state where they come in the black masks and cart you off and throw you in jail for, you know, definitely questionable claims against you or crimes. So that's such a gift that we have where we live. Could we perhaps embrace tolerance more? Because all of the people that are bullying one another, the employees that were bullying to me, the guy by saying, we're going to hurt your business. We don't want to just express what we think and share that thought with you.

12:14We want to hurt you. and um you know that you would say that throwing a bunch of donuts on the curb does not qualify as legitimate free speech no no it does it absolutely does right that but at the same time it's like you can i can say ryan you look like crap i think you're a horrible person but why would i do that because that's like what's to what end am i doing that you know so should the person who threw out the donuts or wanted to like conspired to do that should they not have been fired? Should they not have been fired? I believe that you have the, you should have the ability to have the people work with you that you want to work with you.

12:49And so if somebody is working against your business, I don't think you should be required to continue to employ them. But in terms of like, cause I remember when you and I were talking about it during several of these things and we were talking about, you know, should the company take a stand? And honestly, I, I don't like it when companies take stands. I, I, I feel pressured by them to do something when I'm sitting on the airplane, even, you know, this is, this is a more innocuous one, but it's annoying as heck to me when I'm sitting on the airplane and they're trying to sell me a credit card and they're broadcasting it over all of the televisions and audio that I can't turn off.

13:24And they stop everything else that they're doing and make me listen to their message. That annoys me. I feel that I'm being bullied into supporting the cause that they've got when I'm at the register and they say, you know, will you give a dollar to this or a dollar to that? And I think to myself, you know, is that okay for them to ask? I'm annoyed because now I feel like a bad person, but I also maybe don't want to support that cause or, you know, I have my other things that I already support. And so am I now obligated to support all of that? So it's, it's a difficult question. I think if we just get to the point where we do tolerate and say, hey, look, donut shop example.

14:08Hey, look, donut guy. We don't feel that this is fair. And so we are concerned about our health and would like to have the ability to not work. I think that donut shop guy probably ought to respect that from those people. If they approach it respectfully requesting. But if it's just mass mutiny and I'm donut shop guy, I'm kind of mad. I'm kind of like, you're trying to hurt my business and my family's living. And so that's really not cool. You, you went about this in an unprofessional, unkind way. Um, so, you know, you want to take my things that I create to try to bring joy to people and smash them on the street.

14:50I feel like that's disrespectful and I don't want you to work for me. Although you do have the right to go out and do that. Um, I disagree with that as the way that you're going about it. And I just feel like that's kind of it. Is this if we understand that we all have these rights, they're necessarily going to conflict with the things that people use in expressing themselves, like burning a flag. I'm not a flag burner, but should somebody have the right to burn the flag? According to the constitution, freedom of expression, they should. But then there's a whole bunch of people that are like, you can't burn the flag.

15:23We believe in that. and everybody gets into a fight about it. But I guess just, man, going back to thinking about what is the foundation of the Constitution and our system of government that says that everybody should have the right to express themselves, all of these people should have the right to express themselves. And if the public says we disagree with that and don't want to support you and that costs you$28 billion in market cap, then so be it. You get to decide how strongly do I feel I need to express myself and am I willing to take that risk? And if you are, then you should. And if you're not, then you might want to ask yourself about your convictions, about the things that you believe in.

16:09But I guess that's kind of where I don't know that there's anything actionable on that other than could you be kind, could you not bully people and respect the amazing right that we have to express ourselves. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I think as business owners, the solution really has to come down to what are your values? And because you said like no business should feel coerced to do something they don't want to do. What you're basically saying is you shouldn't force me to say something is valuable when I don't necessarily think that it's valuable or I don't necessarily think it's valuable in this business context.

16:47So for me, and you know this, I'm a religious guy. Like I'm a Christian, right? I'm a God-fearing man, go to church on Sunday kind of person. Like that is who I am. I don't feel like somebody absolutely has to believe the same thing I believe to work for me or to be a customer or a client. Now, there are other people who do. You take Dave Ramsey, for example. Dave Ramsey doesn't necessarily require that everybody, you know, a Christian, but to work for him or to be a customer. But he's going to be very overt about those beliefs. And in saying, if you're aligned with these values, then we're the place for you.

17:24If you're not aligned with these values, then we're probably not. Now, I don't think that that makes me any less of a Christian or Dave more of one. I think it just means like this company, this is a vehicle. Like, what do we want to do? What do we want to paint? What color do we want to paint the vehicle? Who do we want to invite to join us on the ride? That's the values of the business. And so I think as long as you if you want to say, no, we are absolutely a company that prioritizes and we are going to espouse certain values. And when there is an opportunity to do that, you absolutely should.

18:02But if you haven't, and if you don't, then to pretend like you do, because it might be politically advantageous, culturally advantageous, to me is a bigger fraud than saying nothing at all. At least if you say nothing at all, you're like, I don't have an opinion on this yet. You could argue that I should. I don't. I'm sorry. I just freaking don't. But I think it's good for companies. And I believe that we've been given a playbook. um are do you remember uh you're familiar with like brian armstrong ceo of coinbase no so brian armstrong who's the ceo of coinbase uh you know you probably know what coinbase is it's a it's generally irrelevant yeah no i just don't know anything about him so what he did i thought this and he did this at a time it was september 27th 2020 okay september 27th 2020 So, I mean, you're talking about being in the thick of all of it.

19:01He came out and basically said, look, at Coinbase, we're going to be a mission-focused company. And so his thing is provided a couple of principles that I think now really is the playbook. Because they're a couple of years into this, and it seems to have worked. He caught a lot of heat and a lot of flack early on, but they were able to weather the storm. A lot of people left. A lot of new people joined. but I think it came down to values. And he said, you know, we've decided we're going to do a couple of things. Number one, we're going to be company. We're going to be company first. You know, we're going to, we're going to put the company's goals ahead of any particular team or individual goals.

19:42Just that I think is so important. Just saying we are a company. This company is in business to make money. Yeah. Now we're going to do that by serving our customers. But like, I love just the acknowledgement of like, We're going to make decisions as a company based on what's best for the company. Not any single individual, not any single team, and definitely not any third-party constituency. Number two, we're going to act in service of the greater mission. But this is critical. You have to define a greater mission. They said they've united as a team to try and accomplish something that's different that is in the crypto space.

20:14Now, you can completely disagree with that mission. I think it's completely stupid. And that's fine. That's simply saying that probably not a good fit for you. if you're bought into it, but they're saying we're going to align around this mission, not that mission over here. And it doesn't mean that other mission doesn't matter. It's just, that's not our fight is basically what he said. We're going to default to trust. So we're going to assume positive intent. That goes to what you were saying. Let's assume that somebody didn't mean to make me feel mad. Let's focus on what unites us, what unites us, not what divides us.

20:45And let's sustain high performance. Basically kind of let's, let's act as a team. So he essentially came out and said, we're not going to take a stance on this. Our stance is we ain't taking a stance. We will only take a stance on what is our mission. I think this is a pretty tremendous gift that he gave to entrepreneurs by going first that I've seen more companies adopt. So that when somebody comes along and says, hey, what's our stance on this political thing or this religious thing or this cultural thing? You could say as a company, we have none. As an individual, If you want to do that, we support, you know, you've been doing that.

21:22I might support it as an individual, but as a company, we're not. And I think just to the entrepreneurs out there, I would, I would say, don't, it's your business. Don't feel pressured to make your business say something that you wouldn't have said on your own. It's okay. Of course, is then are you abnegating your social responsibility, which assumes that you have one. Are you abnegating your social responsibility to use the position of the company and the reach that it has that the individuals behind the company may not have to actually give back and do some social good in addition to doing the mission of the company?

22:02And that's the challenge, right? Some people think that it should. Some people think that it shouldn't. Some people agree. Some people don't. In this case, the interesting thing is that a few people that make the decisions at Anheuser-Busch and Target are making decisions about their personal convictions that have a tremendous adverse impact on the shareholders of the business who didn't get any real say in that at all. So then it's like, well, so you're going to take your views in this department that is responsible for handling this. And then what's the process for determining what is the company's view?

22:39And since the company isn't actually a person, can it have a view? And, you know, if it does, do we need to reconcile that view with the mission, which is what he was saying? but then also what about our duty to the shareholders who are the people that were ultimately supposed to be serving? Does it serve the shareholders of the company to have the company take potentially controversial positions? And, uh, and that's a tough thing to answer. You know, I don't, I don't know that there is a right or right answer, but I definitely know that there's some pension funds and some people who were counting on the value of that stock to support them.

23:19that now don't get to count on that. And they may or may not share the views that the company shared. And they're nonetheless responsible or ultimately suffering the consequences of what the market views, the decisions that the company, that those owners have made, which to me makes it very complicated and argues towards, well, maybe the companies should do it the way that the Coinbase guys said right maybe they should be agnostic socially agnostic um and the people at the companies can do what they want and the company could make maybe the ability could make opportunity could create opportunities for the people at the companies to connect with one another to advocate their causes on their own time doing their own thing but um but i do you know i do lean towards divorcing those two things because I, you know, my personal experiences is just don't pressure me.

24:17I want to buy a cup of coffee. Don't make me take a stand on something because I want to have a cup of coffee. I can't go there because that coffee shop believes in this and I can't, you know, but I'm going to go here because this coffee shop believes in that. It's like, why do I have to make those decisions? I don't want to, I want to get to decide on my own, you know, and I guess then the other side of that is, but you are deciding on your own Ryan and Roland because that coffee shop is a vote for that thing. And that coffee shop is a vote for that thing. You know, so it's a very complicated, I don't know that there is a good right or wrong answer.

24:52I'm going to suggest an end again, this is probably going to get, get me canceled. I'm going to suggest, cause you said like, how do we use, you know, should we use this power that we have as a business, as a company, this platform you know, aren't we obligated? Don't we have a responsibility to use it for the forces of good. To me, this is like Spider-Man morality, right? With great strength or with great gifts come great responsibility. Sure, but who decides what you're responsible to? I think ultimately it's the owners of the business. If it's a solo enterprise, it is the business owner. It's the shareholders.

25:33They should approve the vision and mission and values of that company. And if it aligns with that, then by all means, full speed ahead. But if it doesn't, that doesn't mean it's bad. And it's this bind. It's this simplistic binary thinking that if you're not like 100 percent for us and on our camp, and if you're not doing this, then you're against us that I just reject. And I'm going to suggest to other entrepreneurs out there that it's okay for you to reject it as well. I don't think that because I don't force our collective companies, you know, Roland, to have overtly Christian themes in everything that we do, that that makes me a bad Christian.

26:12It means the job of the company is to do something different. Yeah. And so and if another Christian were to say that to me, I'd be like, no, shut up. You can't have that. I don't give that to you. But we do it with other things that we feel like have greater political influence and power over us. Right. We'll let them have it, not because they're right, but because we're afraid of them. It's what you said. It's being bullied. So I just think as a business owner, if you want to guard against this, protect against this, be really crystal clear on who it is that you're fighting for. And I'm going to encourage that you make it your customer, your client, right?