HIBT Lab! Burn Rate: Andy Dunn

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 life, 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 here: https://art19.com/shows/831bd173-0992-41b7-b1eb-112db904d947/episodes/3d149444-4cf7-4fc3-a874-e711bdd1cbdc/embed See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,

• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get The US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card.

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  Now you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer.

• 2:58Guy Raz?

  For the first time ever, new Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express Card members can earn two Delta Comfort round trip flights for travel within the 48 contiguous US states, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands. Plus, you can earn 50,000 bonus miles towards your next getaway. And who doesn't appreciate an elevated airport experience? Delta SkyMiles Reserve Card members get access to the Delta Sky Club, your pre-flight oasis to recharge with 15 visits and four one-time guest passes each medallion year when flying Delta together. That's up to $950 in annual value.

• 3:40Guy Raz?

  Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the card that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day.

• 4:23Guy Raz?

  And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port-fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary.

• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobili fuels.com for details. 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 multimillion-dollar menswear company, Bonobos. Andy first came onto the show back in 2019. And if you missed that episode, be sure to look for it in the podcast queue. It's a really, really good one. Anyway, Andy and his co-founder, Brian Spaly, 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.

• 5:50Guy Raz?

  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 untreated.

• 6:22Guy Raz?

  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 a 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.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Guy. Good to be back.

• 6:52Guy Raz?

  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. What have you been up to in the years since? I mean, for starters, you left Walmart, right?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  I did, yeah. I left Walmart right at the beginning of 2020.

• 7:15Guy Raz?

  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 our interview, you had said it was exciting. You liked it. It was interesting. You'd been going back and forth to Arkansas. Did you find that that kind of culture and environment worked for you?

• 7:38Speaker 01

  It's funny, Guy, that you ask 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-backed 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.

• 8:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  And I have to say, it is such a profoundly humbling, meaningful, good...

• 8:28Speaker 01

  And challenging, sometimes maddening experience to realize that all these years you were, you know, 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.

• 8:49Guy Raz?

  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 who need your time and attention to being the person who is seeking the time and attention of the decision-maker.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Totally. And the decision-makers at Walmart were incredible people for me to learn from. The immediate decision-maker in my orbit was Mark Lorrie, who I think is the best entrepreneur on the East Coast.

• 9:18Guy Raz?

  Been on Been on How I Built This, yeah. Founder of diapers.com and jet.com.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. And so when when Walmart acquired Jet, one of the next conversations that he had as he was building out the US 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, his boss, Doug McMillan, the CEO of Walmart, was just learning to listen, to lead by listening, which was not, was not my skill set. And, you know, in a large enterprise, you, 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

• 10:07Speaker 01

  to appreciate them. But I would say I wasn't a very good corporate executive. I wish, 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.

• 10:28Guy Raz?

  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, Don Katz stayed on, still is involved with Audible. I mean, he could have left years ago after it was acquired by Amazon, but he stayed on. You know, Emmett Shear 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 it just wasn't the right... Maybe you went into it knowing you weren't going to stay there that long.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  You know, not bitter or angry at all, like quite the opposite. 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.

• 11:22Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  You know, retail is hard, and being a, let's call it a independent company, mono brand, it's just a very challenging thing. You know, I think Bonobos was lucky to be inside of a $500 billion company, you know, where, in a lot of ways...

• 11:39Guy Raz?

  It's like a warm blanket.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we were fortunate. And so I just wanted to return, you know, the favors, 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.

• 11:52Guy Raz?

  When you were on How I Built This in 2019, you had talked about depression, and you talked about ups and downs. 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, well, a lot about Bonobos, but also about your mental health struggles.

• 12:30Guy Raz?

  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?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  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 Bonobo, as we sold the company for $300 million. Manuela 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 the previous year had been hell on earth. You know, I had been hospitalized for a week with a recurrence 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 1 that I received when I was a senior in college and which I decided to ignore, that

• 13:23Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 14:03Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  And as you might imagine, when you go through an experience like that, you know, the next six months was really 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 going to last? Am I going to lose 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, that is my wife's spine and, and got to rebuild myself.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  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 in Architectural Digest that 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,

• 15:34Speaker 01

  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, I don't, 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 offered that this story is out there.

• 16:08Guy Raz?

  Andy, we're going to take a quick break and come back in just a moment and unpack some of the details from, from this book and your story. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 16:26Guy Raz?

  Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in, so the work is production-ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together. The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste,

• 17:11Guy Raz?

  judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on. NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them,

• 17:56Guy Raz?

  puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called "A Lining for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work." And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape Work across your entire organization and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 18:38Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. Netsuite.com/built.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Confidence. It's listening to your gut. It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska. And in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

• 19:35Guy Raz?

  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 in a straitjacket. And when you were released, you were arrested for assault. Help us understand what happened. What do you remember about what happened before that?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  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, 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. With bipolar disorder, you also have this flip side of the spectrum.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  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, 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

• 21:35Speaker 01

  the way to a manic state. And at that point, you're entirely disconnected from reality. So some of the, 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 messianic 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, that's me when I'm manic, and it's happened probably about three or four times,

• 22:17Speaker 01

  but the most profound were in 2000 and then in 2016. 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, you can be getting happy, and you can ascend into this manic state. And that's what happened for me in 2016.

• 22:41Guy Raz?

  And at the time, I think you were in negotiations or had been approached possibly by Walmart at that point to acquire the company.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  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, you know, in love for the first time as a, let's call it like a, I don't know what a real adult is, but you know, I was in my mid 30s and I felt like I've spent now, and it wasn't impetuous. I'd been with her, you know, at that point for two years.

• 23:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  And so I was at that moment of, you know, I think I'm ready to propose. 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 in 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

• 24:05Speaker 01

  what I needed at that time. And I got taken, you know, as you mentioned, to Bellevue Hospital, kind of famous New York hospital with a profoundly, you know, deep history in dealing with mental illness.

• 24:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  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, 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, you know, I was naked, I was psychotic. I think I thought I was Batman, you know, climate change was going to destroy the world. You know, just picture someone totally who's lost their mind. 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?

• 25:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:12Guy Raz?

  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 were, once you sort of came to, for lack of a better term, you were facing, you know, 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.

• 25:51Guy Raz?

  How did you, I mean, I have to imagine, and that you must have been scared, that both of those things would unravel.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, the acquisition conversation with Walmart wouldn't come till about half a year later. So, we were, we were more in the warm-up phase.

• 26:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  And, that said, you know, the stakes were pretty high at that point in my life. I think, most importantly, I had this relationship that, that I didn't want to lose.

• 26:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  And, you know, imagine how much fortitude and perseverance you need, you know, that Manuela had to stick with me through that. And I'll never forget, sitting down after being out of the hospital, I wasn't allowed to see Manuela for a week, as the court system was kind of figuring out how to treat this. Because Manuela and her mom said so, you know, treating this as a mental health incident, but the state of New York is, is good in this regard, and that they kind of don't believe potential victims of domestic violence. They basically say, "We'll, we'll believe you in six months." So, they do something called an ACD, which is an adjournment in contemplation of a dismissal.

• 27:03Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  So, I had this six-month period of pins and needles. In the first week of it, I couldn't see Manuela, 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."

• 27:20Speaker 01

  And so it was the 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, 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, her mom, I, I sat down with her. And picture this, like, the last time she saw me, I had no clothing on. I had, 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

• 28:03Speaker 01

  in it. 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, then I'm good with you. You know, you can, you can, if Manuela 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, and you just need to take care of yourself. And it was an unbelievable gift.

• 28:43Guy Raz?

  Andy, stick around. We're gonna be right back in just a moment with Andy Dunn, co-founder of Bonobos and author of Burn Rate. You're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Football is back, and PrizePix is bringing out their best offer yet. New users who sign up will get $150 in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. That's right. If you win your first $5 lineup, you'll get $150 in lineups. On PrizePix, you simply pick two to six players, pick more or less on their stat projections, and submit your lineup. Then sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want this football season, all in the same app. And now, PrizePix is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff, because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you on?

• 29:46Speaker 04

  Download the PrizePix app today and use code WONDERY, that's code WONDERY, to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix, run your game. Must be present in certain states. Visit PrizePix.com for restrictions and details. They're running a cover two defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats, order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.

• 30:38Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. 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 were 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 we were misdiagnosed. But in fact, you were, what you write is that when you started Bonobos and the excitement of that

• 31:22Guy Raz?

  experience and the work you put into it, kind of papered over this lingering mental health struggle that you had basically ignored.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think ignored is a charitable word. I would say denied it, and I would say buried it. 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'd 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, when I did spend a moment, you know, researching it or learning about it, one of the things that I learned

• 32:13Speaker 01

  is the suicide, the suicide rate, attempt rate is 60% and the suicide, the actual suicide rate is around 20%.

• 32:23Guy Raz?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  And so like, you're 20 years old and one day you're, you're totally fine and maybe you have some of the invincibility that, 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 had, I was dating someone that I liked 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 the low side, you, you probably have long periods of your life where you're depressed.

• 33:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Maybe you'll cut off your ear like Van Gogh, you know, and it is a one in five chance you'll, you'll kill yourself. It's kind of, it's the kind of thing there without, without the stigma, it's already scary as hell. 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,

• 33:42Speaker 01

  to have some of that joie de vivre 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, 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.

• 34:04Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  And I, and I had, I have a friend who's a, a rising venture capitalist out of Brazil, a guy named Julio Vescconcellos, who's got a fund. And I said, hey, I'm writing this book. He was like, what, 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, and I didn't know how to say it. So I just said, you know, it's about, it's at the intersection of entrepreneurship and mental illness.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  And he made a great joke. He goes, aren't those the same thing? And, 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.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  And, and that I wasn't doing until I got this wake up call in, in 2016.

• 35:17Guy Raz?

  I wonder, Andy, as you began your journey of trying to figure out how to treat your bipolar disorder,

• 35:29Guy Raz?

  I mean, it, it sounds like you were trying to figure out how to manage it. And it can take many years, right? I mean, it can take, it can take a lot of experimenting with different treatments, whether, whether it's certain prescription drugs or behavioral changes or a combination of the two. What did you eventually land on?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  This time I, 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 catatonically depressed. I, I felt so ashamed of what had happened. I felt so broken and...

• 36:46Speaker 01

  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. I had a duty to the people that I loved, to my now wife, who'd 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 gonna not, I'm not gonna do this treatment if you're battling cancer. And I think this was the same mentality.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  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, 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, give me the antidepressants. And then we started seeing each other three times a week 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 been, I've never been so grateful

• 38:11Speaker 01

  to anything as that little blue pill.

• 38:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  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. And so I just, I just had to fight through.

• 38:22Guy Raz?

  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 were you able to kind of function and operate at least on a surface level?

• 38:45Speaker 01

  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, they were not surprised in a way. 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.

• 39:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Then I had a second cohort of people 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.

• 39:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Because you're, 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 a mental health challenge. And that's my mission with this book is to, to normalize disclosure of mental health issues and mental illness in the workplace.

• 40:14Guy Raz?

  You know, I talk about how I built this, not as a business show, but as a show for how, how to solve problems. And I think that's why our audience isn't just an audience of people starting companies or, 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, we don't talk about enough is the, the mental health struggles that many, many entrepreneurs, many of us deal with, when we're, you know, when we're engaged in something with high stakes. What, what should entrepreneurs who, who might be struggling with mental health, what, what do you think

• 40:59Guy Raz?

  they should know or do? Or?

• 41:04Guy Raz?

  Or what are things that you know about your experience that you think would be really important and helpful to them?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think it's this, 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 our one.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Our 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. You know, I think that's our two. And then I think our three is a relationship therapist. If you, 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, maybe, 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.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 42:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  And societally, it's kind of funny, right? We have, we have health insurance that's generally related to physical, medical ailments. We have vision and dental guy, but not, not mental health insurance. You know what I 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, and we need to start dealing with it. And that starts with disclosure.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  It continues with treatment and addressing things proactively. And then hopefully it lands with community where we can all start to talk with each other more about it and recognize that it's a universal part of the human experience.

• 43:38Guy Raz?

  Hmm. It's sort of a strange question, but I wonder from your perspective, is your, is where you are now settled? Or do you think that it will be a lifelong struggle for you to stay ahead of?

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Lifelong struggle for sure. Never, never settled. Here's the, here's the good news, and all psychiatric illnesses are different. I can't speak to other people's experiences, you know, not, not a doctor. Here's the, the silver lining on bipolar disorder. And I think they even made a movie, right? Silver Lining's Playbook.

• 44:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  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, 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, my latest daily mixture of medications. I'll still be seeing a doctor 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

• 44:59Speaker 01

  hours or so to pass without him having a read on how I'm doing. And so there are weeks where I'm like, oh, man, like, I, I just want to work right now. Or I just want to hang out with 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, then I'm willing to do it.

• 45:33Guy Raz?

  Andy Dunn, co-founder of Bonobos, author of the new book Burn Rate. Go check it out. Andy, thanks so much for joining us.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 45:43Guy Raz?

  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 HowIBuiltThis and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at Guy.Raz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is h i b t at i d dot wondery dot com. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Elaine Coats, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Josh Lash, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, and Kerry Thompson. Neva Grant is

• 46:28Guy Raz?

  our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.