Mental Health & Entrepreneurship
“The only way to expunge shame is to say, there's actually no big deal to talk about this. This isn't embarrassing. This isn't shameful. This isn't or wasn't my fault. And so the act of writing the book, as much as it may be helpful to others, was for me to expunge that from my body because it was such a toxic emotion to bear for 16 years.” - Andy Dunn
May Mental Health Awareness Month. Did you know that entrepreneurs are 50% more likely to report having a mental health condition
Founders are:
2X more likely to suffer from depression
2X more likely to have suicidal thoughts
3X more likely to suffer from substance abuse
6X more likely to have ADHD
10X more likely to suffer from bi-polar disorder
In this episode, we talk to Andy Dunn, an entrepreneur, author, investor, and father. Andy co-founded the menswear brand Bonobos, which sold for $310 million.
Last year, he published a memoir called Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind, which detailed his up-until-then private journey with bipolar disorder. We discuss entrepreneurship, mental health, and the benefits of being open and vulnerable about your diagnosis.
Topics covered:
Are founders wired differently?
Living with bipolar I disorder
The promise of virtual care for mental health
The vernacular of saying I am bipolar vs. I have bipolar
How we can normalize mental health disorders, and practice more self-care in startups
Listen
Transcript
Halle: This is The Heart of Healthcare Podcast, and I'm your host, Halle Tecco. Thanks for tuning in. As you probably know by now, may is Mental Health Awareness Month. But what you might not know is that entrepreneurs are 50% more likely to report having a mental health condition. In fact, founders are twice as likely to suffer from depression twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts, three times more likely to suffer from substance abuse, six times more likely to have adhd, and 10 times more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder.
Today's guest is a very successful founder who has bipolar disorder. Andy Dunn was the founder and CEO of Bonobos, which raised over a hundred million and sold to Walmart in 2017. He has invested in other brands like Warby Parker and Oscar. And for a long time, kept his diagnosis private. But last year he published a memoir burn rate, launching a startup and losing my mind, sharing the intimate details of this time period, including a catastrophic manic episode in 2016.
Andy, thank you for being here today.
Andy: It's amazing to be here, Halle. Thanks for having me.
Halle: Some say that choosing to be an entrepreneur is an exercise in bad judgment. It's an incredibly high stress career and most startups fail. What do you think is different about how founders are wired that makes them wanna do this job?
Andy: It's funny. Two weeks ago, one of our key key executives left my current company. I don't know why I'm a glutton for punishment. I did it again, started a new company and a bunch of people in my life who are like intimately aware of the dynamics that my new startup were aware, you know, were understanding of how big of a deal this was.
And many of them would say, you know, oh, sorry, I'm sorry to hear that. And I would say, sorry, what are you talking about? This is the job. This is what I signed up for. This is in a weird way, what makes it fun in a, in a perverse way is that it's hard. And usually those weeks are my most fun weeks because I don't have time to.
To think you just have to act. I had to figure out how to retain the engineering team and was my other key executive gonna leave and fly out to New York twice within 10 days, which is not ideal for a dad with a two and a half year old and a wife who's also an entrepreneur. So I guess I love the pain because the pain leads to growth.
Halle: And do you think that entrepreneurs are just like born with this ability to endure this pain and plow through like, like bulldozers, like firefighters? Or do you think it's something that you learn how to do as you go?
Andy: on. You know, I think that we lionize entrepreneurs too much in our culture.
Culture, okay? They're sort of the new stars, and I would say humans are born to endure pain, right? Mm-hmm. There's not a person who makes it to old age without having endured grief and loss and all these. Challenges of life. Even simple things like moving, getting your heart broken, eventually physical health issues that we all face.
And even with mental health, you don't need an enduring chronic diagnosis to deal with an acute issue at some point in your life. So I think, I think we're wired to do this. For our survival. We're wired culturally to try to endure by definition, because our parents have endured and we're also, our genes are wired to endure.
So I think entrepreneurs, a way to frame it would be, these are. We are humans who are endowed with this potential, and we are the ones who are lucky to channel it towards creating things rather than working for someone else. Yeah. And so I think about it as, uh, I don't know who said this, maybe it was Serena Williams, pressure is a privilege.
Mm-hmm. Or she passed that on and that's how I feel about it. Yeah.
Halle: Not many successful business leaders talk about mental health struggles or really any health struggles. So first of all, thank you for being so open and doing so. What gave you that courage to come out and share intimate details of your life?
Andy: Well, my personal. Ax to grind. Maybe it's not an ax to grind, I'd say cross to bear, but that's not a great analogy for someone who's dealt with messianic delusions, which is part and parcel with what I've dealt with, which is bipolar disorder type one. And I felt so much shame from that diagnosis when I was 20 years old.
It was just something that we didn't talk about. My friends never spoke about it. My family never spoke about it. It was like fight club. You don't talk about fight club. Have you've seen the movie? Yeah. And so what is shame? Shame is what is unspeakable, and it was something that we didn't speak about.
And so by the time I came to accept it 16 years later when I had this awful second psychotic break, and it was just clear what I was dealing with. I was 36 years old. We had 400 employees. I had a woman who I wanted to marry. The stakes were so much higher, and as I started to metabolize what had happened in the previous two decades, I felt so angry that I had been made to feel ashamed, societally by something that wasn't my fault.
And so the only way to expunge shame is to say, there's actually no big deal to talking about this. This is something that isn't embarrassing. This is something that isn't shameful. This is something that isn't or wasn't my fault. And so the act of writing the book. As much as it may be helpful to others was for me to expunge that from my body because it was such a toxic emotion to bear for 16 years.
Yeah.
Halle: And you say you have bipolar disorder, type one. Can you explain the difference between type one and type two and if there are any other categorizations?
Andy: So bipolar disorder is a disorder of mood, bipolar illness, the classic. Role model, I'll call him is Vincent Vangogh gets credit with having had this issue, and we all know that he suffered terrible depression and on the flip side, psychosis cut off his own ear, allegedly.
And so it's an illness of ups and downs and. On the difference between bipolar one and bipolar two, the ups of bipolar two are referred to as hypomania, which is a mood state that is elevated. It's characterized by the flight of ideas racing, speech grandiosity, relentless optimism, delusions, and yet it's within bounds of potentially understandable human thought.
Whereas bipolar one, you have this super-sized version of a hypomania where you, where you move into psychosis. And so I would say hypomania might be, oh, I just saw a truck pass by with a logo. That was really meant for me. Everything happens for a reason. That was a sign bipolar one would be that truck passed by with.
The initials of my grandfather on it. That was actually my grandfather's spirit. You know, speaking to me. I now need to follow that truck because I'm meant to go, go wherever, right? So Bipolar one has more extreme highs than bipolar two. They both have awful lows. Uh mm-hmm. Awful depressive lows.
Halle: So now that this is out there and you continue to manage living with bipolar, but having it out there, is it freeing in a way?
Andy: Oh my God, it's amazing having this out there because what I realized is no one cares in the best possible way. No one is out there thinking about individual people who aren't their loved one. For that long of a moment, you know? So if someone's gonna spend a moment thinking about me, if they're reading the book, or if I have a chance to be in front of a group, then why not be in front of them with the most vulnerable thing that I could And the most connecting thing.
And the most useful thing. Yeah. And. What I've, what I say to people is it's in your self-interest to disclose things that you might think you shouldn't, because those are the most connecting things.
Halle: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Making yourself vulnerable, for sure. Let's talk about the vernacular because you say, I have bipolar disorder.
You don't say I am bipolar. That has kind of changed over the years. I imagine you have thoughts about how that matters.
Andy: Yeah. I think it's. I think it's fascinating in that it is common to say someone is bipolar rather than has bipolar. And then the example when you give it of you would never say someone is cancer, you would say they have it.
Yeah. Makes it so clear just how messed up that is. Yeah. And yet even now when I'm in front of an audience talking about this afterwards, whether it's a book signing or talking to people, which by the way is such a privilege to hear. It, it immediately flips to those individuals and their mental health struggles or their families.
Mm-hmm. And that way that my story is just a, a lightning rod for that discussion. In those moments, almost without fail, when someone refers to their family member, they'll say, oh, my sister is bipolar. Even after we've just talked about it. Yeah. And I've made that same point, which just shows you and those folks know mean no harm.
And I hold no judgment over it because that was me. That was the way I describe myself in my own head. Once I'd come to grips with this diagnosis and the human stain that I felt from that. As someone literally broken, I literally am a disorder now. I don't just have this illness. I am the illness. I'm one and the same with it.
Yeah. We don't use that language that much. In our culture. We say that of a, someone didn't commit murder, they are a murderer. Mm-hmm. Someone didn't commit rape. They are a rapist. We say these things when the thing defines. The identity, and so we've gotta change that. Yeah. Because it's so much easier to have bipolar than it is to be bipolar.
And by the way, it's, it's hard enough to have it, it's challenging enough to have it, let alone, to conflate it with one's identity and take all that on. Yeah.
Halle: The weight of then the shame and stigma that you, that you carry just deepens when you feel like it's Yeah, like it's something. You are for something.
You have so interesting how language matters. You've said that bipolar disorder is both overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Andy: That's just what my doctor said, and he's an amazing psychiatrist, so I now pared it, but, but the example that he gave is people come into his office and they self-diagnose.
They're having, I don't know, some ups and downs and they say, yeah, I think I'm bipolar. Dr. Z. Yeah. And he basically knows them and knows their symptoms and says, There's a difference between experiencing the normal, let's call it the normal range or the typical range of a human being and having these periods of time where you're really outside the range and mm-hmm.
Depression is a really good example of this where there's dysthymia, which is mild depression, it's a low mood state. You're not a happy camper, but you can go along with the day-to-day of your life. It doesn't. Preempt you from functioning. And then there's clinical depression where you know it's a different form of low, can't get outta bed or can't sleep, don't wanna live.
Catatonic depression, which is the type I experience where I'm just gone. Can't do anything m most make like a vegetable or a walking zombie or something. And then of course, a level of depression where you get to suicidal ideation. And then dying by suicide, which is often the most extreme form of depression that leads to that.
Not just a desire not to live, but a misguided courage to take one's own life. And with bipolar one, that attempt rate for suicide is set to be 60%. And the suicide rate is 19%. So we're talking with manic depressive illness or bipolar one, about a condition that can be so severe that on the depressive side, three out of five people will attempt to take their own life and one out of five will.
And you know, it's so frequently diagnosed when one is between 18 and 25, what 20 year old wants to take that possibility on. Yeah, I know. I certainly didn't.
Halle: Are we finding that it's taking a long time to, for people to get an accurate diagnoses?
Andy: I don't know. I don't have the data on that. Yeah, and I'm loathed to speak without the data, but I could just speak from personal experience, which is I had used psilocybin for the first time in my life a few weeks earlier, and I was told upon diagnosis that it was a differential diagnosis, which is to say, It wouldn't be definitive until we saw what happened going forward.
And my diagnosing psychiatrist at the hospital, good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove where I, I was diagnosed and happened to be where my mom worked, which created its own dynamic. Yeah. Of everyone knew I was there, but it wasn't necessarily spoken about within her community. It wasn't so clear what had.
Transpired, was it related to the drug use? Was it actually a, the bipolar diagnosis or possibility was accurate? We didn't know. And that led to this fantasy that in fact, perhaps it wasn't bipolar. Mm-hmm. And yet the manie that I experienced is literally like bullet for bullet, the DSM criteria of a manic episode, which is.
What one perceives a diagnosis of bipolar one from, so yes, it, it is nuanced that this stuff is nuanced from what I understand. My current psychiatrist said it was, it was wildly irresponsible of the diagnosing psychiatrist to say if Andy doesn't have another issue for the next five years. That means that this isn't bipolar because the truth about bipolar is a manic, manic episodes might be 20 years apart.
And in fact, the problem was I then didn't have any issue for five years, even though like many people and maybe more so young people, I went off my medication. I didn't have an issue for five years. So that was like my proof. Mm-hmm. I don't have bipolar or Yeah. At the time I am not bipolar because nothing had happened for five years.
Yeah. And yet this's, what I told you is an illness that can be when unmedicated and untreated and unacknowledged like can be a, like a B, an earthquake, it can be 16 years between earthquakes.
Halle: And are the earthquakes triggered generally triggered by something?
Andy: I mean, again, I defer to the experts. Yeah, certainly.
Yes. Sometimes, or oftentimes. And the thing about mania that can be so pernicious is it can be triggered by life's most positive events. Mm-hmm. And so once I went through the psychosis that I went through in 2016, I had a religious Olympic regimen of treatment coming out of that. Seeing my psychiatrist two or three times a week.
Medication every day, five different medications in the hopper. One, that's my daily ride or die. I had these peak experiences that that came and I've so blessed I the next year I got married, my son was born three years later. These were events where I actually was terrified that mania could be driven by the upside of the event.
Hmm. The peak experience, and so I had to be particularly vi vigilant as those kinds of events. Yeah. Came.
Halle: Are you bullish about virtual mental healthcare? What are your thoughts there?
Andy: Look, I think we talked about access. Yeah. And so there is an element of virtual care. That's going to be really big because I'll give you an example, and these are biased examples, but I'm an investor in a company in California called Mood.
And Mood was started by uh, a guy named Mike Claire, who experienced a lot of depression when he was younger and he could never get to antidepressants cuz it was too expensive and too difficult to get in front of a psychiatrist. And he found a loophole, which is that in the state of California, a nurse practitioner can prescribe antidepressants.
And so that's what he's working on with mood is how do we unlock that digitally so people don't have to work as hard or pay as much money for a prescription that is barely more complicated than giving Tylenol to someone with a headache. Right. So, and I'm probably, it's probably, it's more complicated, right?
But nurse practitioners, the average nurse practitioner I've met is smarter and more empathetic than an average. Oh, they're great. Average, average doctor, yes, they're fantastic. So let's, let's empower them. And I think that's a really cool company. For another example in New York City, a company called Real has figured out that.
It is still $200 a session in New York City with a therapist. And so how do we offer someone a more like, let's call it like a Netflix level, price point. I know that Netflix keeps raising prices. I was about to say $7 a month, but maybe it's now 14, but still a long way from, you know, 800 a month for four sessions with minimal reimbursement and let's get someone on a specific pathway.
Let's have that. They call 'em paths. If your focus is on infertility issues, if your focus is on weight and body image, if your focus is on bipolar and working through that, there's a lot of work you can do to self-educate group therapy. Digital async conversations that are more scalable than therapy.
Yeah. And so I don't see it as a substitute. I see it as potentially something that amplifies what already exists. And let's take the example of just a great marketplace for therapists to find the right person. And I just saw it pitch deck last week of a new company working on that, powered by ai. Of course, everything, anyone raising money now just says ai.
Yeah. But I think we're gonna amplify existing care. Or look at that company mood. They're just simplifying an existing potential with nurse practitioners. And I think we're gonna get substitutes that are down market on price point from things that we know are too expensive. And we know that reimbursement is not gonna go to, you know, a hundred percent overnight.
And so we're expanding access, we're amplifying what's already out there. And so selectively, I'm bullish now. Are there a lot of companies out there that aren't gonna make it? For sure. Yeah. But that's startups.
Halle: Yeah. I'm,very bullish bringing some of these support group concepts digitally. if you think about like Alcoholics Anonymous and the impact that's had for people with substance use disorder. Thinking about kind of just building from there. We know these models work. We know having. One, one to-one isn't as scalable as one to many. Uh, so I'm also very bullish. There's a lot of cool companies in this space.
Given you know, your experience with the medical system and what you've seen from others that have talked to you, what do you think are some of the key ways that are. Medical system needs to improve.
Andy: I think first of all, we've gotta offer much better reimbursement. Yeah, mental health issues, mental health treatment, it's reimbursed at such a low rate.
You know, my psychiatrist costs a thousand dollars for 45 minutes, and I'm reimbursed at a rate of 10%. So that's $900 a session twice a week. Yeah, it's a hundred thousand dollars a year. Who can afford that, probably 2% of the population and who's willing to do it, you know? Yeah. Another 2% of that group, so, wow.
It's just wildly unacceptable that you have to have so much disposable income. And we already know 40% of Americans anyway, live paycheck to paycheck. And so for our most vulnerable populations, mental healthcare is off the table more or less. Yeah. So we're, we're dead in the water right there and then.
Stacking on top of that is accessibility and the ability to figure out what kind of treatment that you need. And so for example, I'll often meet someone who has bipolar, who doesn't have a psychiatrist, but they have a therapist. And then the issue right there is, well, then you really are only able to address this illness with cognitive behavioral therapy or talk therapy.
Not medication. And the truth of so many of these mental health issues is we might need both. Right? We might need to talk our way out of depression. Right. But we probably shouldn't take just talking our way out of depression as the strategy. That's the old school. Well just. You know, whatever. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps or whatever the saying is.
Well, no, you're depressed. Take some medication as well as getting therapy because the medication is a booster that will help you. It will. It's a virtuous cycle, right? And so, Now you need to see a psychiatrist in addition to your therapist. You have to tell that person your whole story. You have to figure out how they communicate.
It's dizzyingly complicated, and it's definitively not something that we're gonna be able to do when we're in crisis. So now you need a loved one. Who's doing that research for you? So it's just too much. And we've gotta figure out how to get both of those things right, both the affordability and the accessibility.
Yeah. And then I think we need to do what's bedrock to all of this, which is just normalizing the conversation because until we do that, it's hard to have the conversation about how woefully inadequate access and uh, reimbursement is.
Halle: Yeah, it does feel generationally, like if you look at our parents' generation, they would never talk about going to therapy.
They would like, it'd be very hush hush even if someone was just on Prozac. But then you look at the 20 year olds today and it's like, you know, they're putting therapy on their work calendar cause it's just. They don't care. They don't have this sort of stigma. I, I'm personally hopeful that this is changing The way that we view mental health is, is absolutely changing generationally.
Do you agree with that?
Andy: A thousand percent? Yeah. Yeah. When I told my current team at my new company, PI Labs, about my bipolar and my journey with it. I was terrified actually. Even though the book was coming out, I still felt, because it was my current team, this was the deep-seated fear that I had, that if I were on the record with bipolar, I would neither be able to lead a team cuz who would want to follow an entrepreneur with bipolar or a person.
And I felt I would also. Be at a disadvantage to raise money cuz who would give, who would give money to someone who can be psychotic or who can have bad judgment when they're hypomanic and yet we already do. Right? Uh, we know from University of California, San Francisco, that bipolar might be one to 3% of the general adult population.
And yet 11% of entrepreneurs. So it's three to 10 times as prevalent. So that's sort of my pitch is we're already giving money to entrepreneurs. Yeah. We already have more entrepreneurs who have adhd, depression, substance use, suicide. And so if that's true, then such a system should be less concerned. And entrepreneurs with mental health issues should be less concerned.
In fact, they should theoretically say, oh, amazing. I have bipolar, there's a three to 10 times greater likelihood I'm gonna start my own company at some point. Yeah. So, um, I, and
Halle: you're being open about it, so you're, you're saying, I'm taking care of it. I'm doing what I need to do to manage my
Andy: illness a hundred percent.
And yet, when I told this team, I felt like they might all quit. My heart was going 200 beats a minute, and I dmd our CTO on Slack afterwards, and I said that was a disaster. People almost looked bored. I, I just read into it that it wasn't going well, and she said, no, no, no vulnerability. It's always good. No one cared.
Halle:It was just not, that's, that's why they look bored. They're just like,
Andy: okay. Yeah. They're like, oh, yeah, okay. Totally. Yeah. That, and it was, it was just so different than, yeah. Well, not just my generation, but when I look back to my parents' generation, it's, we've been on a journey.
Halle: We'll be right back after the break.
I have a diagnosis of infertility and I've found that it is really rewarding to share some of my story because I get such heartwarming feedback and thank yous from people who are suffering silently, and I hope I give them kind of courage to feel okay with their diagnosis. But sometimes it's hard because it's just like this one small part of me and a very frustrating part of my life, and I don't want it to be my full identity.
You wrote a book on this, on your diagnosis, like, so two questions here. So one, I'm curious to hear kind of what's the response been to your book, but also do you feel. Do you ever feel kind of that same sort of weight of like, I'm done talking about this, like this is just a small part of my life, not my whole life and I don't wanna disproportionately like lean into it?
Andy: It's such a fun question cuz it is something that I thought about and I recently was with someone whose son is quite famous and has bipolar and his son felt that he didn't want to be defined by it. And so he. Well, hasn't come forward on it. And I guess I had a little bit of an unfair advantage in that I had a community of people who knew about it.
That was small. My board, my executive team. My close friends and then an extended circle of both close people and more distant people, where I was experimenting over time with disclosure to certain new people that I was working with who hadn't been there when the mania went down. Funnily enough, I raised money from the VCs that backed me the first time, who went through the crisis, uh, when I was psychotic, which was, no, it was no simple matter.
You know, there were assault charges brought against me from assaulting my now wife and mother-in-law. During the mania. They were trying to prevent me from running naked into the streets of Greenwich Village. I mean, this was some real shit that we went through. Yeah, this was some real stuff. And they did too.
And those people said, oh, you're starting a new company. Can we back you? And that was amazing. So I had this internal barometer that this would not define me, that particularly if people know, funnily enough, if it's a known thing and you're naming it, it's like those m and m rap battles from eight mile.
If you say it about yourself, it loses all power for someone else to say it about you, and perhaps it seems, whoa, that's a person that, that guy's a badass. He doesn't care. He's walking around saying something. And by the way, by definition, I know people who have this, or maybe I am one. And so I know it's doable to be successful at X.
Yeah. And so then I thought, This is just going to be a season of my life. It's gonna be a season, and I would say I'm still in that season, right? The, I launched the memoir last May, mental Health Awareness Month, may of 2023. Paperback book is coming out. My TED talk is coming out and then we're in talks for a TV show, not burn rate, but inspired by it.
That'll be its own thing. It'll, if it works, it'll take some time to develop it. So I'd say I'm in like in a five year season, but the way I thought about that is I don't want to be limited later by this. And so the fact that I'm going through this season where it's on the record is important. I have some aspiration to be a public servant down the road.
Will there be a chance maybe for me to run a public company where I've always, I've always worried about being a shepherd of public capital and the perception, mm-hmm. To, to be able to feel good with myself. That I wouldn't be limited later. I felt like I want to control the narrative now. I don't want some, someone to track down some New York post.
Police blotter, by the way. No one cares. You know, when I, when my arresting officer, when he was taking my mugshots, I said, is this gonna be on the internet? And he turned around and he said, dude, I looked you up. You're not the founder of Google. You just sell pants. And it was just beautifully true, right?
No one's, the court reporters didn't even know who I was, right? I walked right in and walked right out, and they were like, all right, whatever. Andrew done. You. Who's Andrew? Done? No one cares who he is. Yeah. I'm a, I'm like a nerd celebrity, right? I'm known in a very small corner of the world. Reasonably well, and that corner is tiny.
Yeah. So here's the thing, no one cares. If anything it's connecting and the more you name it and own it, the more power you take from it. Yeah. And because then people can see, oh, he has bipolar and he seems like super on it. And that is the one thing my mom said. She said, once you come public, you now have a more of an obligation.
I. To stay healthy because you're now gonna be, in theory, a role model for dealing with this stuff proactively. Absolutely. And I said I love the pressure because I already feel Yeah, more, more dutiful. To my wife and my son, and my parents and my sister, to never be a liability to them again. In this way. I never want to put them through that.
And so if I get the extra bonus of being the person that says I'm running a marathon to create social accountability. Right. That's why everyone tells you. Yeah. Right. There's a joke. Yeah. How do you know someone does CrossFit? They tell you. They tell you. They tell you. Yeah. And so I feel, I feel even more motivated.
And in that way I think we need to view disclosure of everything and certainly mental health challenges. And if so, a diagnosis as a source of power. And a way to get negative stuff out of your body rather than holding it in, because that actually damages just us and it robs other people of the opportunity to empathize.
Yeah.
Halle: Any other advice that you have for anyone struggling with a mental health diagnosis?
Andy: I mean, one thing I would say is, Don't put pressure on yourself to go through the journey of disclosure while you're dealing with it. You know what I mean? Like some people say, well, I should, should I talk about this now?
And I say, if you're in crisis now or if you're dealing with it, if you don't feel like you have this, your, your arms around this don't add the psychological stress of the interpersonal disclosure stuff. To that unless you want to, right? Unless it makes your life easier. For example, let's say you're in a depressive episode and you can't go to work.
Well then better than your boss thinking that you are not committed is to say, here's what I'm dealing with and can we talk about this? Can I take a leave of absence? Or what resources do you or the company recommend and that actually will be good for the organization that you work for? Cuz they'll have to confront, what do we do when someone isn't missing an action?
For reasons we don't appreciate, but they actually have this. This thing, and I know I've faced that issue at work. Before I was out, we had a woman who had depression and she was gone for seven months. That's complicated, right? Yeah. Because what do you do as an enterprise? Could you just pay two salaries and perpetuity?
These are questions that we have to wrestle down in the corporate world and and I would encourage folks whose mental health condition is affecting their job performance to disclose for everyone else. That's at, at the time of your choosing. And I was told when I put this story out, Hey Andy, there's some backlash coming here.
Be ready for it. And I just remember this like sinking feeling in my stomach of like, well, what does that mean? What's that gonna be about? And then it's been nothing. It's literally I have one, one star review on Amazon. And I read it cuz it's kind of like that you're not supposed to. I wanted to and it was hilarious.
It was like, this dude isn't bipolar. And it just was like, all right. That's funny. I don't think you read the book, like Yeah, but it's been so little and yet the only one that affected me because there have been a few comments or whatever it is, social media after all right. Was a woman who said, and she appeared to be a Latina woman.
From what I could define from her, from her name and. She said, what a privilege it is for you, rich, white dude, to be able to say all this. And I thought, she's absolutely right. She's right. Because first, when you're in it, it's not clear that you can say it like, I, I don't think I could have said this without it being limiting in some way at the time that it happened, especially the violence and the arrest charge and all that.
Because people would just would've assumed that I was a domestic abuser. Some people would've assumed that, and I also didn't feel confident to say it. Even in the environment that is changing around us without having independent resources from selling a lot of pants, and I don't think we're there yet.
I don't think we're in a place where people can just say whatever they want, whenever they want. That's the goal. This book will sell zero copies when that's true. Because it'll be like, duh. Yeah. And I'd love to say we're there, but I think as you know, and as everyone knows, we're, we're on a journey where the zeitgeist is moving, but we're definitely not there yet.
Halle: Yeah. So you've started this new company. What are you doing to protect your mental health this time around and to just create the sort of environment that employees deserve?
Andy: Yeah, I think there's. There's two good questions in there. The first is, what am I doing? I had such a fun conversation some years ago with a woman and she's, she was on her third company and she said, you know, I've started three companies, one where I had young children and one where I had no children, and one where I had grown children.
Which do you think was the hardest? And I was like, oh, well, young children. And she said, no, that was the easiest. And I said, what are you talking about that's so counterintuitive? And she said, with young children, they need your attention and care. They won't survive. There's no question that you have to spend energy with young children because they're at a stage of their lives where they need.
It obviously goes without saying babies and toddlers and such. So, I had, she said, a clear boundary between my professional life and my personal life. I had another source of meaning and something that I had to do with my time that created balance. And that so resonates. You know, I was, yeah, with my son on Sunday and taking him first swim lesson and it's just, it's so clear to me that that's more important.
And so how do I figure out how to make sure I show up enough? And by the way, that's not easy. It's certainly, I'm certainly not spending as much time as I could and I do fantasize what does life look like on this other side of this company, because I started it. Before he got here and I always assumed bigger and better, and I need to do the next one and the bigger one, and now I feel differently.
I feel like, you know what, after this one, I don't want a job. I want a bunch of hobbies and you know, some of those I'll probably need to be revenue generating. And my wife's filming a company and I know she's, she's feeling that and she's feeling the parental guilt and so busy and doing more than me.
And that creates its own marital discussions, obviously around equitable contributions in the household, both childcare and otherwise. So all of that said, what that entrepreneur told me was such a gift because it's true. I have found I have more balance now because of my personal life being more demanding.
Whereas at Bonobo's, when I was not just without children, but single, it was all the time. Yeah. It was nonstop. Yeah. Even my social life was almost always related to an interview or someone I was meeting or a PR event or talking about it. It was a whole. Life and now I've got a bit of that separation.
Yeah. And then probably even more important is a medication and therapy and doctor and sleep. So as were before, I would literally, the proverbial burn the candle at both ends. Now I can't, I have to sleep between seven and eight and a half hours a night and that's a part of my regimen. And if the sleep goes low, it's a different medication and I work my way back.
I just had this last week, I had a five hour night, a three hour night and a five hour night, and it was like red alert. Yeah. I had taken antipsychotic. I was in touch with my wife about it, my doctor. It was, it was almost, um, it was, it was an acute situation where this Friday night, literally last week, I had to sleep seven minimum or.
You know, I was probably gonna have to like shut down operations and just stay home from everything until that happened. And then I slept eight and I sent a text of my Fitbit screenshot to the sleep group on WhatsApp with a little trophy on it. Amazing. Like I did it. Right. And so my self-care has increased.
My boundaries between personal and professional have been sharpened, or let's say are actually existent. And in those regards, this company feels so much better. I feel so much more, I feel less emotional during the workday, and therefore better able to show up I hope, as a leader. So that's me. As for my team, we're working on something important.
And to be candid, I haven't landed it yet, but we're working on something important, which is to provide everyone with at least $2,000 a year of additional compensation for mental health reimbursement. Because the acknowledgement is amazing that insurance isn't enough. Yeah. And so we need to find, we need to find a way to add this on.
And of course it's a pure, yeah, a pure cost center would be the traditional thinking. But what I'm trying to convince, first I've convinced myself of it cuz I'm doing it, but when I'm also trying to convince other companies is that don't do this out of altruism, do it out of self-interest and greed.
Which is to say a more mentally healthy, mentally fit team is a more productive team. And so let's, let's do this because it's good for shareholders, not just good for our, for our teams. Absolutely. And how are you feeling Halle, mental health wise now? You made an important disclosure earlier, how you doing?
Yeah.
Halle: Thank you for asking. So I really resonate with what you said earlier about having the boundaries with a child. So my, my child's now five and a half and I've started a company. Before him enduring his life. And the analogy that I use is like no matter what size purse I choose to bring with me, I will fill it to the top.
And that's kind of how my life is with work. Like I used to be a workaholic and at every, every minute I had, I would devote to work. And when you're a founder, there's not like a checklist and then you go home. Like, you will always find something else to do. And so, you know, I, I wasn't taking great care of myself.
I, you know, didn't have the, I didn't have a good workout routine. I wasn't eating healthy. I didn't have the strong relationships that I should have. And so really kind of resetting my life and my priorities was, was really helpful for my mental health. I've been seeing the same therapist for since the beginning of my infertility journey.
Seven years ago, seven or eight years ago. And so he's followed me through, you know, my whole journey.
Andy: And also, I'm so glad you bring up the, the workaholism as the escape. I was with a group of 20 founders or so last week. At a dinner put on by an incredible not-for-profit social entrepreneur named Phil Schirmer. He's got a group building, something called Project Healthy Minds, where he's trying to create the Google for mental health, the search bar where you go, no matter what you're looking for.
And that would be amazing. And who knows? There are probably other people working on that problem, but whoever solves it. Great. And one of the interesting things about the discussion for me, and maybe this is obvious, was not burnout, but work addiction. Yeah. How many people around the table had a substance problem and that substance was their work?
And I don't know if there's a diagnosis for that, but it's its own form of addiction, right? It's got a high. It's got Lowe's, and if you're, if you have an unhealthy relationship with it, as I definitely have, and you're alluding to, it's like a mental health problem too. So thanks for Yeah. Sharing all that on your side, it's, yeah.
It's so important to me whenever I have these conversations to hear from the other individual or folks because. It's not, I'm not like a special guest, you know what I mean? No. With this, and sometimes I'm, I think that's the perception. And like I did this event last week. There were hundreds of people there.
There was a huge line afterwards. And do you know what it was for? It wasn't for my stinking signature because who cares? It was because they wanted to share. Yeah. And that's, that's the magic as well of disclosure as it invites reciprocal disclosure and that's the good stuff.
Halle: So Andy, thank you for being here today.
Andy: Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.