Mental Health High Up with Andy Dunn

0:00And I said, Oh no. And I've learned this thing as a husband, which is, I know my wife is going to be right later. Later she's right. Yeah, right. But in the present, I want to fight and be defensive and be defensive and be defensive and defensive. day I had enough time.

0:27What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change? I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

1:03We are so excited to bring you this great conversation today, but we also want to give you a heads up that in this episode, we discuss hard topics surrounding mental health and mentions of suicidal ideation. Please do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself. Today, we are joined by the wonderful Andy Dunn. So excited to have you here today, Andy. Andy is the founder and CEO of Bonobos, a men's retail giant that was acquired by Walmart. And he's also the author of the book Burn Rate, which came out a few months ago. And Andy, we met, I don't know if you remember, I think you do. I tried to recruit you and you said no.

1:47And you took me to some weird Mexican restaurant somewhere in this Bay Area. I don't know where. Mountain View. Yeah, Mountain View. Mountain View. And we repeated that cycle every two years and you kept saying no. One day we're going to get to work together. I hope so too. So Andy, is there anything that I missed in your intro? I mean, you've accomplished so much. There's one modification, which is you said co-founder and CEO of Bonobos. And I'm so excited to say just co-founder of Bonobos. I got to retire from that post. You were CEO for a long time. For 10 years, yes. I was the founding CEO.

2:25Maybe that was what you meant. But what's cool now is I'm back as an advisor, which is sort of a newish thing. In fact, I was just at Nordstrom two days ago rebooting the Bonobos relationship with Nordstrom, with the new owner, and with the CEO. And I thought a couple of things. First, I thought it's so cool to be doing this again. And the second thing I thought was, it's so great to be doing this again, not as someone doing it full time, but having it be just, you know. Yeah. I mean, you were so raw and honest about your experience as a CEO. It's like, whew, I don't know how many people would be able to do that.

3:08Just really say, I fucked up. I was wrong. I should have rethought it. because it's such a scary, thrilling journey. I mean, that's what I got from reading, listening to you. It was like, and then you're high and then you're low and then you're high and then you're low. And then to have that happen, I love the juxtaposition between entrepreneur bipolar. Is it the same? Is it different? What are those incredible threads that weave in and out? And I know Jessica and I have talked about all the CEOs we've worked with over our time. And there's no two people are alike. No two situations are the same.

3:56But that fluctuation between really high and really low is really common. Yeah, it is. Well, before we get into that, Andy, I want to back up a little bit and just tell the listeners a little bit about your journey. You wrote this amazing book called Burn Rate, where, as Patty describes, you get incredibly raw and vulnerable and talk about your experiences, not only being an entrepreneur and a CEO, but in having bipolar one. I want to maybe take a step back and talk about the process you went through to decide to tell this story. How scared were you? I was not that scared. a little scared maybe the right emotion would be i was anxious just at like how at how it would be received but the privilege of putting the story out without fear of career retribution because i had sold my company i had money so it was sort of okay i can now tell this and if everything goes poorly in my career from here, I'm okay, which I didn't feel coming up.

5:19I didn't feel I could raise venture capital if I was on the record as having bipolar. I didn't feel like people would want to work for me if I was on the record. Turns out that when they found out, there were a lot of conversations like, oh, you have a mood disorder? Oh, of course, everyone knew. There are forms of diversity that are hidden and forms that are not. And neurodiversity tends to not be hidden because we experience it when we interact. So the decision to write the book was driven by the courage of my wife who said, yeah, of course, let's put this out there. My intrinsic motivations were twofold.

5:58One was selfish and one was altruistic. As sometimes the human species, we have those two possibilities. The selfish part was I was just tired of being ashamed. And I was angry that I had imputed some type of human stain from having bipolar. Even this idea that someone is bipolar versus has it. Yeah, you have it. It's like, no, no one is bipolar, just like no one is cancer. We shall not conflate the identity in the illness. It's hard enough to have the illness, let alone to be it, which sounds nonsensical when you compare it to a physical ailment. And so I was tired of being ashamed and I wanted to get the shame out of my body.

6:47I wanted it out. And what is shame? And I did some work on this. Shame is what is unspeakable. Right. And so to speak it is to say it's not shameful. If I can talk about it, then there's nothing that I'm ashamed of. Otherwise I would have to hide it or we would have to bury it. And I think it's such a powerful emotion. I mean, I really, really do. I've been thinking about it a lot since I wrote my book. So I talk a lot about moving on and being fired, right? And I say, look, there's no weapons involved. There's nobody dying. but you give the, you, you, you create this emotion shame, which for all of us, I think, as humans is like the worst, right?

7:36Because you experienced first with your parents and then, and on the career shame part, you remember every one of those incidents as if that happened yesterday. Oh, it, the, the scars don't go away. They're, they're there forever, which is kind of unbelievable. So what you did that was so incredible was you brought that into the open and said, it may not be a curse. Yeah. And it has two sides. It's the strings have shadows thing. Yeah. I was going to bring that up. Can you elaborate on that for the listeners? Yeah. It's interesting. I was at a dinner recently with a bunch of folks talking about the intersection of mental health and leadership.

8:27And there is a thing which is the hardest thing that we face in our lives. Let's call it in this case, like the shadow has strengths too. And I was using this phrase, strengths have shadows. and there were two women at the dinner and one said, oh, the gift is in the wound. And I thought, whoa, I might even like that better. And then another one said, the beauty is in the brokenness. And so I can remember going to a fortune teller on Broadway in New York one day. I don't know why. Wandered up. It wasn't a common thing. You're just like walking down the street? I just walked down the street and I saw it and I said, you know what?

9:13I want to go in. okay and she looked at me and she said and maybe this is just her standard line she goes you know that you're broken right oh wow you know you know that you're split in two and it just it sort of it it resonated in a way because i had this formative life-changing experience of going through a psychotic episode delusions of grandeur all the things that come with a manic break. And I received this diagnosis coming out of it that was pretty directionally clear. And then I developed this really, really difficult depressive episodes that I explained away as job stress. And so colloquially bipolar one is known as manic depressive illness.

10:06And it was so clear. It was clear that this diagnosis that I'd received when I was 20 was accurate and yet it was hidden. It was even hidden from me because I buried it deep such that only once in a while would I even remember that it happened, which sounds ridiculous that I've now learned is the nature of a traumatic memory. One may not have access to a traumatic memory in the frontal cortex all the time. It can rise and fall and that creates a brokenness, right? It creates problems. And so to integrate and say, I can embrace my life, including that this happened, including that I have this. I don't want to say it necessitates seeing it as something with two sides.

11:05but wow does it really help when we change the narrative and say this thing that i processed as horrible at the time maybe there is beauty in that maybe there is a gift in that maybe there are strengths in that and then by the way you go to the data which i know patty will appreciate the balance of art and science you go to the data and what does the data say the data says that bipolar is 2 % of the American adult population experiences bipolar, 11 % of the entrepreneurial population. So it's five to one, ADHD, three to one, OCD, three to one, unipolar depression, two to one, substance use, X to one, suicide, Y to one.

11:49All of these stripes of neurodiversity for better and for worse over index and high performing creative people. And so now when an entrepreneur comes to me and says, hey, I have bipolar, should I even do this? Should I raise money? I say, of course you should. You're five times more likely to be successful at this. And so let's stop denying that it's here. Let's actually recognize that maybe there are some superpowers in it. But let's not let those superpowers be an excuse to have the shadows and the brokenness. And the ghosts. and the wound run them up unchecked, which by the way, is part of our modern ethos on great entrepreneurs is they're allowed to just be as, just let, just let a rip.

12:39And that's also not okay because it does harm. We can harm other people. I'm thinking that you're a fortune teller. Even if that was their shtick, according to the data, she's right most of the time. She's right most of the time. That's true. Andy, so you're 20 when sort of your first episode happens, right? And then, you know, you go to business school, graduate, you start, you know, tinkering around and being an entrepreneur with ideas and things. And then, you know, as your company gets going and you're hiring employees and you have your co-founder and there's a story behind that, like you knew that this happened.

13:23and, but you pushed it deep down, right? And to your point, maybe couldn't even access the trauma. When you were feeling in those states depressed or sort of like, as you were saying, it was an excuse from maybe stress of work. Did you feel like, hey, maybe I should think back to what happened when I was 20? Did that feeling come up? Yeah. I had some moments. I had some moments where I felt so low, so lonely, so sad, so confused, you know, to be someone who has a hypomanic side where I felt there were times where I had so much energy, so much magnetism. people were coming to work for me raised over 100 million times where i felt so high on life and having so much fun it's hard to recognize i found it was hard to recognize myself when i couldn't get out of bed because it was sort of well who is this person and i internalize that as i have to hide this I have to hide this because this is not the mask I wear for the world.

14:50And at some point, obviously, that's not a terribly healthy way to approach things. And of course, you can't get better. You know, if you're I couldn't get better if I wasn't dealing with the depression. And so at some point I thought, I don't want to be here anymore, which is a first step on the suicidal ideation journey. It's kind of the top of the funnel for that. and that was a foreign feeling. And so I did get, I was afraid and I went to see a therapist and unfortunately what happened, she was a great therapist on interpersonal dynamics. She helped coach me through my co-founder divorce. I remember her asking me, Andy, are you in touch with anger?

15:30And I was like, anger, what's that? I was like, I've seen people get angry. I've seen my mother angry. And she's like, no, but what about you? Are you in touch with anger? And I said, I don't get angry, which is what a very unaware person says in therapy. And she said, I actually think you do get angry. I think you're furious with your co-founder. The reason why I think you get angry is that every human who's ever lived has been angry. And I think that sublimated anger can lead to depression. And that was both a brilliant insight and it helped me and it enabled me to express that anger in unhealthy ways towards my co-founder and to ultimately take action that led to the co-founder divorce.

16:09but it also provided a life raft for me to paddle away from the bipolar diagnosis that I knew was lurking because there was now an explanation for my depression. It was not this lingering bipolar. It was that I was angry at my co-founder. And then one day I pulled a doctor and my family aside, one of my aunts, and I said, I haven't been able to get out of bed all weekend, which I had told no one that. No one in my life knew that I spent the weekends in bed for months at a time. And she said, Andy, you have a really hard job. You're probably just exhausted on the weekends, which is such an Indian doctor thing to say to their Indian nephew.

16:46It's like such an immigrant thing. And so it was a, it was a two sided thing where I knew on some level that this thing had happened. And somehow when I did make a cry for help or I did extend a bid, it just so happened that folks thought, no, this isn't you. This is your job. This is the role. And it turns out that both can be true. It turns out that one can have a job that is a roller coaster and that one can also have a mood disorder that amplifies those highs and lows. Those things can both be true. And gosh, is it so much more helpful when we're in touch with both of those and trying to deal with it rather than in denial or using one to explain away the other.

17:41Absolutely. So now you've launched the book, you've done a TED talk and tell us how you feel now. I feel amazing. Is the shame gone? There are moments, you know, there are weird moments where like I'll meet someone, I'll learn that they have bipolar and I'll think, well this dude's crazy like i'll have the story that society told me will happen in my own brain right and then i'll feel shamed of that and so there are moments but i i will say i'm a changed human because to have a secret and then to kind of to invert it where it's not just a secret but it's something you shout on a megaphone it's not like i just got in touch with family and friends and dealt with this.

18:31It was, hey, hello world. Here's the truth about my story. And to be so accepted and even celebrated, it's so wild. This was the thing I thought I most had to hide from the world. And it turns out it was the thing I most needed to share to be fully known. Do you think that's what drives your empathy for investing in people who also have secrets? I think it's part of it. And I also know that the lows are bad no matter what. I think it's important. Let's never underestimate when we're talking about bipolar, the degree to which everyone has an undiagnosed mood disorder. I don't mean that seriously.

19:23there is a difference but the lows are bad for every human there are just bad lows life does not the buddha was on to something when he said that life is suffering and it may not be ongoing but we all have moments of crisis the loss of a loved one the loss of our parents breakups, financial stress, substance issues, the mental health issue of a family member becomes a mental health crisis for the family. There's no way to make it to 40 without having been absolutely thrown on your ass by something, getting fired from a job. There's so many of these things. And so I do like to say to entrepreneurs when I get to back them, I'm not going to be that useful to you over time because I have too much stuff going on.

20:19But I do want you to call me on your darkest days when you want to quit, when you need to sell your company, when you're ready to give up, when you are having that co-founder divorce. I want to be the person that you feel like you can't talk to anyone, certainly not in your shareholder group. Yeah, I love that. I'm your darkest day. You know, I want to be the best. I have a group of women CEOs that I'm friends with forever. We call it Patty's posse. And somebody is like, we should get T-shirts to say Patty's posse. I'm like, you know, I'm not really sure. But I am that same person in your darkest day.

21:01Right. Just call me up and go. Yeah. I can't believe they're treating me like this. I'm ashamed. I'm afraid. What do I do? How do I deal with this? And so the reason I asked that was the people that, for whom empathy is as much of the equation as the data and the return on investment. Yeah, you know, my wife and my sister are both entrepreneurs and they both are more accomplished at the stage of their businesses than most male founders that I know that get funded. And they have to work so hard to raise money. Yeah. And then the data shows, right, 3 % of venture capital goes to founding female CEOs.

21:51we skew the data up by speaking about female co-founders but female ceos and you know i was with my wife last night and she's grinding through it and it's just hard this stuff is hard she's like mad that she has to be better to get the same thing it's every conversation i have with my posse is this exact same conversation. Yeah, I had this amazing experience with my wife vis-a-vis this issue of how to talk about gender in the workplace. I got invited to do something really special, which is to give a talk at International Women's Day at Walmart to 5 ,000 people. And I thought, great, I'm going to be a man talking on International Women's Day.

22:37I'm so effed. Just the setup is not going to go well. And so I really worked on it. rush the stage. Yeah, right. Yeah, really. I really worked on it. And I wrote a speech about my grandmother. My grandmother on my mom's side was a child bride. And she was promised to be married at 11, married at 13, two miscarriages at 15 and 17, then seven kids, the middle of whom was my mom who was born on the refugee trail. And it was this whole thing about her life story. and I shared it with my, and how far we've come and how, you know, I shared it. My mom was like, this is great. My sister, my mother-in-law, who's one of the leading feminist anthropologists, reproductive rights advocate from back in the sixties.

23:24And I finally got to Manuela at 11 PM, my wife. And she's like, I think this is terrible. and I said oh no and I've learned this thing as a husband which is I know my wife is going to be right later later she's right yeah right right but in the present I want to fight and be defensive and all that so the question becomes how do I try to process later now right and that day I didn't have time because the speech was at 8 a.m. and I was in a hotel in Bentonville at 11 p.m. And I said, well, what's the problem with it? And she said, your mom, your grandmother's story is beautiful, but I don't care.

24:08I don't care how far we've come from child brides to 2020. I want what you have. I want male privilege. I want to be able to suck at what I do and still get promoted. So let's talk about the gap between where we are now and where men are, not the progress because I don't care. And it just blew my mind. So I said, what do I do? And she said, well, why don't you just talk about all the times you've gotten it wrong in our relationship? And so I went back and wrote a top five. That's only like one or two things. No, it ended up at 17 things. It ended up at 17 things and it was four in the morning and I didn't have time to clear it with Walmart PR and comms because there was some vulnerable stuff in there.

24:55So I just sent it straight to the CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillan. And I said, can I share this at the speech tomorrow? And five minutes later, he was like, go for it. Oh, great. Go for it. And so that's, Patty, that's what motivates me is trying to close that gap. Yeah. Reed Hastings. Yeah. The CEO of Netflix said to me one time, you know I mean I get it but you were never really discriminated against I mean like really you know give me give me an actual example in your life and I said they always got the promotion and I was clearly better everyone knew yeah they knew right they would apologize we're sorry but you know you don't have what it takes like the third rail i would call it it's like yeah you could have said you could have said read right now right now that's what i was thinking right now you're doing what my reality is rather than me oh no we we totally got there i mean we had lots and lots of conversations about that but the fact that yeah you know and this is probably 20 years ago, 25 years ago, that he would even honestly, innocently say, yeah, but you're you.

26:13And so that didn't happen to you. Do you two feel like that gap was closed at Netflix? Can you be incompetent in Netflix and get promoted the way that as a woman, the way that men sometimes do? I mean, I know it's a great talent entity. Listen, I think Netflix is not immune. I mean, you know, like the world is not immune to these things. Do I think we did a better job at trying to recognize that, own that, you know, peel the layers back to keep ourselves honest in decision making? I think we did. I think we tried. But, you know, I mean, bias and the way that we were taught to do things is just, it's so inherent.

27:02So Jessica and I were just talking about this the other day about, I said one of the things that I was ashamed of in my, looking back in my career was that I coached women for years to say, nut up, be aggressive, take your stand, you know, that's how you're going to get ahead. And Jessica goes, I think I was one of those people. I was. and look and i i i don't you know regret you telling me those things because they were kind of worked right in the moment in the time and i and it worked and i did so what's the shame what's the shame about patty that i didn't try and work on the men that i worked with to say hey you know jessica has a different way of influencing people and it's as effective as nutting up, right?

27:58So if you advise now with your wisdom, what would you tell people, Andy? Well, I am inspired by your reframing of it's an issue for men more so than for women, right? The whole point of here's how you have to do better puts the onus back on the woman. to be the one that has to show up in a different way in the conversation. And so I think that resonates for me. And I also find it challenging because I think it's not, there's not a mindset of male allyship naturally from what I can tell in the circles that I've traveled in. it's more the exception not the rule and let's focus on the exception i recently met one of the best people in the technology ecosystem here in chicago where i now live which by the way is a short list this ecosystem is challenged it reminds me of when we got to new york in 07 and it was it was not impressive yeah new york came along yeah i remember that I think we can make a lot of progress in Chicago.

29:15I do. But what I really loved about him is he said, basically, if you have an above-threshold idea, he will write a check sight unseen for between$100 ,000 and$250 ,000 to a woman or a person of color that's building a business because those checks are so hard to come by. and when people know that his name is on the cap table, he knows without saying it this way, he knows that everything is going to be easier from there because he's on the cap table and he knew he had that power and he's worth probably a hundred or$200 million. And so 10 quarter of a million dollar checks a year is a rounding error for him and this, and this, he's going to make a lot of money on one or two of those deals.

30:08Of course. Right. Right. Right. Because the distance traveled is longer, right? To get to the same place, you have to be better, which means that if you do get the opportunity, he's going to do great. It's like, don't do it because it's the right thing to do. Do it because you're greedy. Yeah. And maybe we need a whole new vocabulary around, you know, just do it because you're greedy. Yeah. I want to bring us back to, and speaking of influencing, I want to bring us back to mental illness for a second because we could talk about women issues. For a long time. I'm sorry, Jess. I don't know. For like our entire lives eternity of the show, we could talk about women issues.

30:51However, I want to talk a little bit about, Andy, like the impact that you, well, I know you've had, but I want to talk about the impact that you think you've had on mental illness at work? And what do you see in terms of companies changing their processes, policies to support folks in a different way? I think that movement had started to happen in some parts of the world for work. But do you think you've Given that a kind of shot up in terms of momentum? Look, I think it's one of the great things in the zeitgeist when you can feel it changing right in front of you. I remember when I got to New York, I hadn't really been immersed in LGBTQ communities before until I worked in fashion.

31:55And only when I became very close to people who I worked with that it strike me as, wow, these folks on my team can't get married. That law didn't change until 2015, I think, in New York State. And I remember being at a gay show tunes piano bar called Marie's Crisis in the West Village the day that the law passed. And just the sound of human liberation. You know, it might have been like being there for women's suffrage or when the Civil Rights Act of 1965 got passed. It was like being there a block from Stonewall. And so we saw that change. And there are really cool charts that show the rate at which the states adopted freedom of marriage.

32:37You can see similar charts for other civil rights movements, like how from when they started, when the movement started to when it became the law of the land. Interesting. And through our country, as we know, that moves through states. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And sometimes, by the way, it goes backwards, right, as it has with reproductive rights. I feel like we're living through that right now with mental health and mental illness in the workplace, that it's changing right in front of us. And part of the reason for that is it's a bipartisan issue. There's not a debate really about mental health between the parties.