Spencer Bailey

**Spencer Bailey** (0:01)
We're now all on like a McDonald's fast food diet when it comes to our media consumption. I see a future where people are going to want to return to what I would call slow food for media.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:20)
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.
On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with Spencer Bailey about why and how to slow down in the age of social media and personal optimization.

**Spencer Bailey** (0:46)
I want people to feel like they can make space for inefficiency.

**Debbie Millman** (0:54)
Spencer Bailey is a writer, editor, and cultural journalist whose work lives at the intersection of design, memory, architecture, and human experience. As the founder and editor-in-chief of The Slowdown and host of the podcast Time Sensitive, he has become known for conversations and storytelling that explore not just creativity, but the deeper questions beneath it, time, meaning, loss, attention, and how we live.
Before founding The Slowdown, Bailey served as editor-in-chief of Surface Magazine, where he helped transform the publication into one of the most influential voices in contemporary design and culture. He is also editor-at-large of the book publisher Faden, and his book, Explore, the third in a series of books for Monticelli, will be published this month. Spencer Bailey, welcome to Design Matters.

**Spencer Bailey** (1:49)
Thanks for having me, Debbie. It's a pleasure to be here.

**Debbie Millman** (1:52)
Spencer, I understand your wife refers to you as a findschmecker. Can you share what that is?

**Spencer Bailey** (2:00)
I have no idea how you found this.
Yes. So I actually don't know the etymology of the word. I believe it's German. Maybe there's some Yiddish in there as well. But it basically refers to somebody who has an appreciation for the finer things, starting with food.
So it's rooted in food, but then it applies to taste kind of writ large. I do like nice things. I have a sort of fewer better things mantra when it comes to how I approach my life. So fine schmecker suits. It's kind of a joke, but I appreciate it.

**Debbie Millman** (2:35)
I was then somewhat surprised that when I read that ice cream is your kryptonite. But then when I further found that your favorite flavor is actually pistachio cardamom, I then thought, okay, well, that makes sense. From a particular creamery as well.
Spencer, getting a little bit more seriously rather quickly, I want to start really from your beginning. On July 19th, 1989, you were flying on United Airlines flight 232 along with your mother and your older brother. When the airplane suffered a catastrophic engine explosion that severed all the hydraulic controls, left the pilots with almost no ability to steer the aircraft, and after an extraordinary emergency effort by the crew, the plane crash landed in Sioux City. One hundred and twelve people died, including your mother. You were one month away from turning four years old, and because of the severity of your brain trauma, you have no memories from before the crash. You've said that in some ways your conscious life began after the tragedy. So my question is, before I even ask my question, let me tell you how sorry I am to have lived and understood your trauma for the time that I've been researching. While I've known you for a very long time, I had no idea and I'm so sorry.
What does it mean to build an identity when your earliest memories are inherited rather than remembered?

**Spencer Bailey** (4:23)
Wow. Big question.
Yeah. When you are effectively reborn the way I was, I mean, I had my physical birth out of my mother, and then I had this sort of rebirth that occurred on the runway in Iowa in 1989 In a certain sense, I carry these two feelings, almost a sort of like Frankenstein feeling of, on the one hand, the physical presence of my mother. I feel like I carry her in me every day. But then I carry this other reality, which has been, let's call it my conscious reality, post Flight 232 reality, which is that effectively my entire life, I've lived this day-to-day motherless existence. So it's this combination of both being very physically aware that I carry this person I never knew in me, and at the same time very mentally aware that I'll never know truly who she was.

**Debbie Millman** (5:42)
For much of your life, one of the most famous images associated with you was not a portrait you chose, but a photograph of Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Nielsen carrying your little three-year-old unconscious body from the wreckage of the flight. And long before you understood the event itself, the image had already entered public memory. How did growing up attached to that image shape your understanding of yourself?