How I Built This with Guy Raz - HIBT Lab! Burn Rate: Andy Dunn

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

From the outside, it seemed like Andy Dunn was living the dream. His menswear company, Bonobos, was acquired by Walmart for $310 million in 2017 — the same year he married the love of his l...ife, Manuela. Of course, Andy’s entrepreneurial journey wasn’t without its challenges. Under the surface were much darker struggles that he largely kept hidden…This week on How I Built This Lab, Andy returns to the show to talk to Guy about his new book, Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind. In this radically honest memoir, Andy finally opens up about the struggle with bipolar disorder that nearly cost him everything. Check out Andy’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/Burn-Rate-Launching-Startup-Losing/dp/0593238265 Listen to Andy’s How I Built This interview from 2019: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/18/686640146/bonobos-andy-dunn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Starting point is 00:00:53 through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb.
Starting point is 00:01:31 It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Today we've got a return guest, Andy Dunn, the co-founder of the multi-million dollar menswear company, Bonobos. Andy first came out of the show back in 2019, and if you missed that episode, be sure to look for it in the podcast queue.
Starting point is 00:02:27 It's a really, really good one. Anyway, Andy and his co-founder, Brian Spaley, launched Bonobos back in 2007 when they were both still students at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. In 2017, Bonobos was acquired by Walmart for around $300 million. But the journey getting there was, to say the least, tumultuous. Andy and Brian had a falling out in 2009 that led Brian to leave and eventually build his own successful startup trunk club. And Andy went through several crises running bonobos, including three separate occasions when the company almost ran out of money. But underneath all the public turmoil for Andy was a much more challenging struggle, a struggle that he largely kept hidden. Andy had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder that went largely.
Starting point is 00:03:19 largely untreated. And despite living what appeared to be a successful and happy life from the outside, Andy experienced mania, paranoia, depression, and even suicidal thoughts during his tenure as CEO of Bonobos. He's now decided to come out publicly with his story about his condition and what he experienced and how he's learned to manage it in a new book called Burn Rate. And Andy's with me from Chicago. Andy Dunn, welcome back to how I built this. Thanks for having me, Guy. Good to be back. We last left off, you had sold bonobos to Walmart. You were working for Walmart as an executive, and that episode aired in early 2019.
Starting point is 00:04:03 What have you been up to in the years since? I mean, for starters, you left Walmart, right? I did. Yeah, I left Walmart right at the beginning of 2020. And tell me a little bit about your time with Walmart. I mean, you went from running your own business in your own startup to working for a big company. And I remember in the, in our interview, you had said it was exciting. You liked it. It was interesting.
Starting point is 00:04:29 You'd been going back and forth to Arkansas. Did you find that that kind of culture and environment worked for you? It's funny guy that you asked this because I've been reflecting a lot on it. And I realized, you know what's something that no founder has ever said. No founder has ever said this. you know, I've been building my own company. I've been running it as the CEO. What I really need to do next is be an employee again. I really need to work for someone else and not actually be the CEO anymore. No one's ever said that. And so the only way that that happens is if you don't, let's say you're building a venture back company as we were at Bonobos and you don't end up taking it public, you sell it. You're going to in 99% of scenarios, become an employee. And I have to say it is such a profoundly humbling, meaningful, good, and challenging, sometimes maddening experience to realize that all these years you were, you know,
Starting point is 00:05:35 woe is me. Being a CEO is so hard. And it actually turns out that being an employee in a lot of ways is harder because you care, you know, just as much. And you don't actually have the ultimate decision-making ability. Yeah. It's, and all of a sudden you go from the executive where you're making the calls, you're surrounded by people who need your time and attention to being the person who is seeking the time and attention of the decision-maker. Totally.
Starting point is 00:06:02 And the decision-makers at Walmart were incredible people for me to learn from. The immediate decision-maker in my orbit was Mark Lurie, who I think is the best entrepreneur on the East Coast. Been on how I built this, yeah. Founder of diapers.com and Jet.com. Exactly. Yeah, and so when Walmart acquired Jet, one of the next conversations that he had
Starting point is 00:06:28 as he was building out the U.S. e-commerce business there and really transforming Walmart digitally was bringing in Bonobos as a part of this digital brand strategy that I got to run. So I got to learn from Mark, who was my direct boss. And what I learned from Mark, and then his boss, Doug McMillan, the CEO of Walmart, was just learning to listen, to lead by listening, which was not my
Starting point is 00:06:52 skill set. And, you know, in a large enterprise, you have to build allies and coalitions, and you've got to be less outspoken. And I think these were things that I didn't appreciate. I came to appreciate them. But I would say I wasn't a very good corporate executive. I wish I could go back and give myself a pep talk and say, this isn't about you anymore and how do you serve the enterprise? I figured it out, but I think I figured it out, you know, two years in, and I wish I'd known it at the beginning. Yeah, I mean, oftentimes there's a commitment that a founder has to make or does make when the company's acquired. It's usually two or three years. Sometimes they stay on. I mean, you know,
Starting point is 00:07:37 we, you know, Don Katz stayed on still, still is involved with Audible. I mean, he could have left years ago after it was acquired, you know, by Amazon. but he stayed on, you know, and mature with Twitch. So it is the case when founders stay on and continue to work for the mothership. But oftentimes after two years, they move on. It doesn't sound like you were sort of bitter or angry when you left Walmart that maybe just wasn't the right. Maybe you went into it knowing you weren't going to stay there that long. You know, not bitter or angry at all, like quite the opposite.
Starting point is 00:08:11 it. I wanted to figure out how could I reciprocate. It's such a big tent and it's such a safe place to be in retail by comparison to being outside. You know, retail is hard and being a, let's call it, a independent company mono brand. It's just a very challenging thing. I think Bonobos was lucky to be inside of a $500 billion company, you know, where in a lot of ways. It's like a warm blanket. Yeah, I think we were fortunate. And so I just wanted to return, you know, the favor is the wrong way to put it because I think it was a win-win. And I think Bonobos has been accretive to what Walmart is doing in fashion and what Walmart is doing online. When you were on how I built this in 2019, you had talked about depression and you talked about ups and downs.
Starting point is 00:09:00 And it was very clear. It was a really emotional conversation. I remember it very clearly. It's a great episode. And if you haven't heard it, anyone listening, go check it out. But there were obviously details in there that you weren't ready to talk about. And I guess you spent much of 2020 really putting this book together, Burn Rate, which is about a lot about Bonobos, but also about your mental health struggles. Tell me about, before we get into it, tell me about what got you to the point where you decided that you wanted to put this out there into the world.
Starting point is 00:09:37 You know what it was, Guy, was I think 2017 for me was such a magical year in life. You know, I got married. I converted to Judaism. I had the 10-year anniversary of Bonobos. We sold the company for $300 million. Manuel and I had this huge, beautiful wedding. And I had a friend text me and was just like, he was just like, you are living the dream right now, you know? And in the previous year had been hell on earth.
Starting point is 00:10:04 You know, I had been hospitalized for a week with the recruits. of psychiatric issue that I'd been in denial of for at that point for 16 years, which was a diagnosis of bipolar disorder type one that I received when I was a senior in college in which I decided to ignore that I was in denial of really for a decade. And finally, after a week in the hospital, I walked out, clear-eyed that I had just, you know, had this second psychotic break that it meant this diagnosis was real. And my whole family rallied around it. Everyone was in New York.
Starting point is 00:10:40 My girlfriend was by my side and finally came out and ready to deal with this. And I walked straight into handcuffs. And I was arrested for felony and misdemeanor assault of my now wife and mother-in-law who were trying to keep me from running into the street naked out of my apartment on 9th Street. Wow. And as you might imagine, when you go through an experience like that, you know, the next six months was really a floating a floating hell of you know am i going to get healthy is the first good relationship that i've been in in my adult life um going to last am i going to lose
Starting point is 00:11:19 my job is there going to be publicity around this how do i feel about what happened and you know the trauma of the original diagnosis having been buried which i internalized as an unspeakable shame you know for so long and so i'd gone through all this stuff really hard stuff we had, you know, really rebuilt myself on the, on top of the steel backbone that is my wife's spine and got to rebuild myself. And we, we kind of figured out our way through the relationship and she stuck with me and therapy and all this intensive work. And almost no one knew about it. Like no one knew that that had happened. What people saw was this, you know, airbrushed, you know, living the dream BS of, here's the house and architectural digest that
Starting point is 00:12:14 Andy and Manuela live in. And here's this $300 million deal. And it looked like what was happening was so good. And undergirding that goodness had been a year of real struggle and real human strife. And I felt coming out of Walmart that the best thing I could do for, the world and the best thing I could do for me as a person would be to excavate this story and share it. And I think the selfish part of it was to kind of experience a reintegration on my side because I'd had to hide this from everyone. And it was kind of like, no, screw that. Like, it wasn't my fault. Like, I don't need to hide it. Number one. And number two, I know other people deal with this. And so by sharing it, hopefully there's some measure of support
Starting point is 00:13:04 offer that this story is out there. Andy, we're going to take a quick break and come back in just a moment and unpack some of the details from this book and your story. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. I'm with Andy Don, co-founder of Bonobos. He's written a new book called Burn Right. It's about his struggles with mental health. Andy, let's talk about what happened in 2016, and then we'll wind back to how it got to that point. You briefly described an episode where you wound up in a mental hospital and in a in a straight jacket. And when you were released, you were arrested for assault.
Starting point is 00:14:07 Help us understand what happened. What do you remember about what happened before that? Yeah. So bipolar disorder, for those of you that aren't familiar with it is a mood disorder. and it's different than what people call unipolar depression or, you know, quote-unquote, regular depression, in that in addition to these catatonic lows where you don't feel like you want to go on, where maybe you can't function as a human, perhaps you're dealing with suicidal ideation, things that I went through on the low side.
Starting point is 00:14:43 With bipolar disorder, you also have this flip side of the spectrum. called, in many cases, hypomania, which is sort of a elevated mood state where the synapses are firing. Everything happens for a reason. You're in a state of flow. You have less of a filter in terms of what you might say. You have a rising irritability. And I think that hypomanic state is almost indistinguishable from an entrepreneur who is quote unquote on, right? And with bipolar disorder type one, which is the illness that I was diagnosed with when I was 20 after a psychic break when I was in college, what can happen is you go all the way to a manic state. And at that point, you're entirely disconnected from reality.
Starting point is 00:15:39 So some of the attributes of mania are elevated speech, stopping core things that you need to do, you know, as a human, like eat sleep and drink. Delusions of grandeur, frequently messionic delusions. So you kind of think about that person that you might pass on the street in one of America's cities who just, you know, seems like they're quote unquote out of their mind or going crazy or they're ranting and raving. That's me when I'm manic and it's happened probably about three or four times, but the most profound were in 2000 and then in 2000. And one of the things that causes, that can cause mania is a positive life event. This is one of the things that's so horrific about it is you can be happy.
Starting point is 00:16:31 You can be getting happy and you can ascend into this manic state. And that's what happened for me in 2016. And at the time, I think you were in negotiations or had been approached possibly by Walmart at that point to acquire the company. We were in the early stages of thinking about selling the company, exploring what that would look like. And the real precipitant here for me was that I got excited about the decision to propose to my wife. And so I was in love for the first time as a, let's call it like a, I don't know what a real adult is, but I was in my mid-30s and I felt like I've spent now. And it wasn't impetuous. I'd been with her at that point for two years. And so I was at that moment of, you know, I think I'm ready to propose.
Starting point is 00:17:24 And she was out of town for a week and I was getting excited about it. And I disconnected. I started, I was going out. I was drinking a lot. I wasn't sleeping that much. And my mood state, which had been in the hypomanic zone that people so frequently experienced me and as an entrepreneur started to ascend. upwards. And by the time, by the time she got back, I was losing it and only thanks to her mom's grace and her grace and really their initiative, calling the police, letting them know that I was out of sorts. That was what I needed at that time. And I got taken, you know, as he mentioned, to Bellevue Hospital, kind of famous New York Hospital with a profoundly, with a profoundly deep history in dealing with mental illness.
Starting point is 00:18:18 I got taken to the psychiatric emergency room. I spent a few days there and then I ended up in one of the psychiatric wards upstairs. And literally that saved my life. I mean, I don't think I would have made it that night. If I'd gone out in the street in the state that I was in, I was naked, I was psychotic. I think I thought it was Batman.
Starting point is 00:18:41 Climate change was going to destroy the world. you know, just, just picture someone totally who's lost their mind that that was me. And, you know, I shudder to think, you know, if I'd been a, if I'd been a black man in the Bronx with a knife, you know, would I even be alive, you know, and was so fortunate that I made it to the hospital to get better and could start to figure out how to rebuild my life coming out of that. Andy, I know when you were released, you were briefly detained by the police because you had in your manic state attacked your wife and your mother-in-law. I'm trying to understand once you sort of came to, for lack of a better term, you were facing your soon-to-be wife and mother-in-law who you and your state, your manic state, had attacked physically and also you were in the middle of an acquisition conversation with Walmart.
Starting point is 00:19:49 How did you, I mean, I have to imagine that you must have been scared that both of those things would unravel. Yeah, the acquisition conversation with Walmart wouldn't come until about half a year later. So we were more in the warm up phase. And that said, the stakes were pretty high at that point in my life. I think most importantly, I had this relationship that I didn't want to lose. And imagine how much fortitude and perseverance you need that Manuela had to stick with me through that. And Guy, I'll never forget sitting down after being out of the hospital. I wasn't allowed to see Manuel for a week as the court system was kind of figuring out how to treat this.
Starting point is 00:20:41 Because Manuel and her mom said so, you know, treating this as a mental health incident, but the state of New York is good in this regard and that they kind of don't believe potential victims of domestic violence. They basically say, we'll believe you in six months. So they do something called an ACD, which is an adjournment in contemplation of a dismissal. Right. So I had this six-month period of pins and needles, and the first week of it I couldn't see Manuel, and I got a card from her. Finally, the day I was going into court, and the card said, I love you as much as, almost as much as Kanye loves himself.
Starting point is 00:21:18 And so it was kind of, I mean, first of all, what a funny person to reference in this context. And also, it showed that she was with me and had a sense of humor. And that was a really healing moment. And it was kind of the first sign that I had that we were going to still have. a shot that I was going to have a shot to be with her. And then her mom, I sat down with her. And picture of this, like the last time she saw me, I had no clothing on, I had struck her daughter, I had pushed her and kicked her to the ground, which is where the felony charge came from, assaulting a senior citizen. And she put her hand on my hand and she said, you know, Andy, this is just like diabetes. It's no different. It's a, it's an illness. There's no shame in
Starting point is 00:22:01 you just have to take care of yourself. And as long as you take your medication every day and you see your doctor, as frequently as you're supposed to see, see your doctor, which in my case, I see my doctor now twice a week and I have for six years,
Starting point is 00:22:15 then I'm good with you. You know, you can, you can, if Manuel wants to be with you, you know, then I'm good with it. And just the tears down my face to be at that moment of my life to have someone tell me, This happened and it's okay and it's not your fault.
Starting point is 00:22:34 You just need to take care of yourself. And it was an unbelievable gift. Andy, stick around. We're going to be right back in just a moment with Andy Dunn, co-founder of Bonobos and author of BurnRate. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz.
Starting point is 00:23:08 I'm with Andy Dunn, co-founder of Bonobos and author of the new book Burn Rate about Andy's struggles with mental health Andy, I want to talk about your original diagnosis. You were originally diagnosed with bipolar disorder when you're in college, I think, in around 2000. You sort of, I don't know if this is the right word, but you kind of ignored it for many years. And you hadn't had another serious episode for many years. So you kind of figured, you write about this in the book, you kind of figured that it just kind of maybe you were misdiagnosed.
Starting point is 00:23:43 But in fact, you were, what you write is that when you started. bonobos and the excitement of that experience and the work you put into it kind of papered over this lingering mental health struggle that you you had basically ignored yeah i think ignored is a is a charitable word i would say denied it and i would say buried it and and the reason i would say buried is that it's going to come back you know bipolar disorder is the kind of thing where it can be 20 years between episodes, but it be unusual if it's untreated and unmedicated that you don't experience it again. And I think the thing for me when I was 20 that was hard to hear is when I did spend a moment researching it or learning about it, one of the
Starting point is 00:24:40 things that I learned is the suicide, the suicide rate, attempt rate is 60% and the suicide the actual suicide rate is around 20%. And so, like, you're 20 years old, and one day you're totally fine, and maybe you have some of the invincibility that you do at that age. You know, I was a senior in college. I had just gotten a great job. I was having fun with my friends. You know, I was dating someone that I liked,
Starting point is 00:25:08 and it just then a week later, you've just come out of a hospital, and you're told, you know, you've got this issue. It's going to be forever. you could lose it like this again, you could end up hospitalized again, probably will, maybe institutionalized. That's on the high side. And then on the low side,
Starting point is 00:25:24 you probably have long periods of your life where you're depressed. Maybe you'll cut off your ear like Van Gogh, and it is a one in five chance you'll kill yourself. It's the kind of thing there, without the stigma, it's already scary as hell.
Starting point is 00:25:43 it feels like it feels like maybe like being diagnosed with something awful from the physical side except it's it's like oh you have this bomb in your brain that could go off you don't know when it will it's a very easy thing to not want to believe and it's also a hard thing to treat you know to find the right cocktail of medications that enable you to feel like you're you still to have some of that Joadiv that defines you versus being totally muted. And I'm very lucky that in the two decades since I was originally diagnosed, we've gotten a lot better at that. And then with entrepreneurship, you know, the subject of your show, we equate the experience of being a founder and a builder with the highs and lows. We talk about that. Right. And I have a friend who's a rising venture
Starting point is 00:26:36 capitalist out of Brazil, a guy named Julia Vaskoncellos, who's got a fund. And, and I have a friend, And I said, hey, I'm writing this book. He was like, what's it about? And it was typical of someone who, a lot of people who know me well didn't know about this. And I didn't know how to say it. So I just said, you know, it's at the intersection of entrepreneurship and mental illness. And he made a great joke. He goes, aren't those the same thing?
Starting point is 00:27:00 And I laughed. And I said, you know, it's true they are. And then it's also true that they aren't, right? Which is to say that the highs and lows you're experiencing as an entrepreneur. are not necessarily as high and as low as you can go if you also have an untreated mood disorder underlying. And so what I mean by that is it's easy to explain away the mood swings you might experience as a person with bipolar disorder if you're also an entrepreneur as being due to the fact that you're an entrepreneur when there's something else that you need to be dealing with as well that is contributing or amplifying those highs and lows. And that I wasn't doing until I got this wake-up call in 2016. I wonder, Andy, as you began your journey of trying to figure out how to treat your bipolar disorder, I mean, it sounds like you were trying to figure out how to manage it.
Starting point is 00:28:02 And it can take many years, right? I mean, it can take a lot of experimenting with different treatments, whether it's certain prescription drugs or behavioral changes or a combination of the two. What did you eventually land on? Well, so what happened was once I came out of Bellevue and I, you know, the difference was whereas the previous time I went and saw a doctor in a pretty perfunctory way and basically was like, I'm not going back. And whereas the previous time I went on some medication and I felt, oh, I don't feel like myself and I went off of it and threw in the towel on it.
Starting point is 00:28:46 This time I had a different narrative in my mind, which is I don't have the luxury of giving up, of going off medication for any reason. I had to fight through it. And so I had six horrible months where I felt catatonicly depressed. I felt so ashamed of what had happened. I felt so broken. And I wasn't able to get out of the depression in spite of the best efforts of my doctor to find the right medication. But I didn't give up because I didn't feel like I had the luxury of giving up.
Starting point is 00:29:27 I had a duty to the people that I loved to my now wife, gone through hell with me and to myself to fight through that treatment, the same way that a cancer patient might fight through their treatment. You know what I mean? Like you don't get to say, you know what, I'm just going to not, I'm not going to do this treatment if you're battling cancer. And I think this was the same mentality. And so we got to the end of the six months. And my doctor said, look, we have two choices. Either you can get electroconvulsive therapy, which is, you know, getting clamped down and shocked effectively, like you see in the movies,
Starting point is 00:30:07 which he said happens to work well, but people have a hard time wrapping their brain around it. Or I can give you an antidepressant, and we'll just have to watch you like a hawk and dial up the mood stabilizers, and we'll have to be very careful. And I said, give me the antidepressants. And then we started seeing each other three times a week,
Starting point is 00:30:29 and we were really vigilant to make sure it didn't kind of shoot me upwards and eventually it got me out of the depression and I've never been so grateful to anything as that little blue pill that in combination with the other stuff I was taking to make sure I didn't swing upwards got me got me out of it
Starting point is 00:30:49 and so I just had to fight through. I mean meantime, you are still ostensibly running bonobos dealing with the conversations around acquisition. I mean, did you, keep all of these details from your team? I mean, how are you able to kind of function and operate at least on a surface level? What I did, Guy, was I told a small cohort of people who just had to know. I told our general counsel. I told our head of HR. I told our CFO. I told my assistant, they were not surprised in a way.
Starting point is 00:31:31 I mean, they were shocked at what had happened, but these are people, you know, typically no one's like, oh my God, you have a mood disorder. You know, it's sort of, you know, to some level, it's not a shock. The events, of course, were a shock. Yeah. Then I had a second cohort of people
Starting point is 00:31:46 where I didn't share all the details, but let's say the extended management team, I said, hey, I had this issue. I'm working on it. And then 90% of people had no idea. And so I'd say I became like an actor. But the truth is that you kind of are an actor anyway frequently as an entrepreneur. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:32:06 Because you're trying to project the right level of confidence when you yourself are so frequently consumed with doubt. So that was kind of the way that I approached it. And I think what I'm encouraging leaders to think about now is proactively disclosing issues before there's a crisis to create a norm that it's safe to share what you're dealing with because even if you don't have a diagnosis, life is hard and you're dealing at some point with the mental health challenge. And that's my mission with this book is to normalize disclosure of mental health issues and mental illness in the workplace. You know, I talk about how I built this, not as a business show, but as a show for how to solve problems. And I think that's why our audience isn't just an audience of people
Starting point is 00:32:53 starting companies or wanting to start companies. Of course, many of them are, but the idea behind the show is for people to, you know, kind of draw universal lessons. And I think in this case, one of the things we don't talk about enough is the mental health struggles that many, many entrepreneurs, many of us deal with when we're engaged in something with high stakes. What should entrepreneurs who might be struggling with mental health? What do you think they should know or do? Or what are things that you know about your experience that you think would be really important and helpful to them? Yeah, I think it's this.
Starting point is 00:33:42 As busy as you are and as much as you have on your plate, I think everyone needs to make time, call it two to three hours a week for good mental hygiene. and I think good mental hygiene is it's up to the person to figure that out. But for me, in the intensive periods of my life, it's having a therapist, which is now table stakes in my life, who is a mental health professional who's there to keep you mentally healthy. So having a mental health professional therapist, let's call that hour one.
Starting point is 00:34:21 hour two is a coach and a coach is different. A coach is there for the business to succeed. A coach frequently is in contact with other people on the leadership team. I think that's hour two. And then I think hour three is a relationship therapist. If you have a relationship that you're navigating, maybe it's some other healing practice that you're in. maybe it's something else, you know, medicinal that you're doing.
Starting point is 00:34:54 Maybe it's distributed, you know, 20 minutes of meditation a day. And this is above and beyond what you might be or might not be making time for in terms of your physical health. But the case that I'd like to make is if you're trying to work out a few times a week, if you're hopefully, you know, brushing and flossing twice a day, you're showering, maybe you're putting on makeup, whatever you're doing, it's, worth at least two to three hours a week to be doing that for your brain. Yeah. And societyally, it's kind of funny, right? We have health insurance that's generally related to physical, medical ailments. We have vision and dental guy, but not mental health insurance. You know what I
Starting point is 00:35:36 mean? Like, make sure your teeth and your eyes are doing well, but what about your brain? And so I think we have to stop complaining about the issues that we're dealing with. We need to start dealing with it. And that starts with disclosure. It continues with treatment and addressing things proactively. And then hopefully it lands with the community where we can all start to talk with each other more about it
Starting point is 00:35:59 and recognize that it's a universal part of the human experience. Hmm. It's sort of a strange question, but I wonder from your perspective, is where you are now settled? or do you think that it will be a lifelong struggle for you to stay ahead of? Lifelong struggle for sure. Never, never settled. Here's the good news and all psychiatric illnesses are different. I can't speak to other people's experiences, you know, not a doctor.
Starting point is 00:36:35 Here's the silver lining on bipolar disorder. I think they even made a movie, right, Silver Linings playbook. Yeah. is it's we're at a stage in the history of the history of society and medicine where it's treatable, but it's not curable. So unlike a medical ailment where you might move in and out of it or be cured, it's more like, you know, I don't want to make the wrong analogy here, but it's the kind of thing that you're going to have forever and you just need to contain it. And so I hope, Guy, that, you know, we're sitting down to have a conversation in 20 years, I'll still be able to tell you about my latest daily mixture of medications. I'll still be seeing a doctor
Starting point is 00:37:19 twice a week. And twice a week is a lot, right? Seeing a doctor twice a week is a lot, but I do it because I don't want more than 72 hours or so to pass without him having a read on how I'm doing. And so there are weeks from like, oh man, like I just want to work right now. Or I just want to hang out up my son. Like, I don't want to do this doctor's appointment right now. But it's just part of what I do to contain this illness and to try to ward off the devastating highs and lows. And since I know how costly those are, since I know what the price is, then that I'm willing to do it. Andy Dunn, co-founder of Bonobos, author of the new book, Burn Rate. Go check it out.
Starting point is 00:38:06 Andy, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at how I built this and mine is at guyraz, and on Instagram I'm at guy.razz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is hibt at id.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with editing by John Isabella.
Starting point is 00:38:38 Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablui. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthor. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, Jacey Howard, Liz Metzger, Josh Lash, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, and Kerry Thompson. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

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