Spencer Bailey is a writer, editor, and cultural journalist whose work explores the intersections of design, architecture, memory, and human experience. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Slowdown, host of Time Sensitive, and former editor-in-chief of Surface. He reflects on surviving a plane crash, growing up without his mother, the role storytelling has played in understanding his own life, and why slowing down may be essential in a culture obsessed with speed.
Spencer Bailey is a writer, editor, and cultural journalist whose work explores the intersections of design, architecture, memory, and human experience. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Slowdown, host of Time Sensitive, and former editor-in-chief of Surface. He reflects on surviving a plane crash, growing up without his mother, the role storytelling has played in understanding his own life, and why slowing down may be essential in a culture obsessed with speed.
Spencer Bailey:
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 gonna want to return to what I would call slow food for media.
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Milman. 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. I want people to feel like they can make space for inefficiency.
Debbie Millman:
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:
Thanks for having me, Debbie. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Debbie Millman:
Spencer, I understand your wife refers to you as a feinschmecker. Can can you share what that is?
Spencer Bailey:
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 feinschmecker suits. It’s kind of a joke, but I appreciate it.
Debbie Millman:
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 wanna start really from your beginning. On July 19, 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, let me 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:
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 a 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:
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?
Spencer Bailey:
Very complicated situation to be five or six and sort of realize that you came to represent this event to so many different people, almost being a body that is symbolic of something that occurs, as opposed to being seen for myself, my like fragile four-year-old self. And then fast forward to 1994, five years after the crash, Sioux City looking to commemorate this event, they built a statue and sort of Riverfront Memorial, it’s the centerpiece of it, right on the banks of the Missouri River. And I’m nine years old. I’m standing next to my dad and my two brothers and Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Nielsen and I’m looking at this bronze sculpted thing that’s meant to depict me but I don’t see myself in it and I’m feeling very confused. And on the one hand, there’s a certain pride that I came to represent, I guess you could call it hope for this community and hope for a sort of strength that could arise out of such a horrific event. And at the same time, I was like, why me? And what about all the others? What about my mother? Only later did I come to realize that that memorial failed to do what the best memorials do, which is kind of have this more what I would call a polyvocal experience as opposed to this sort of monolithic singular story or the sort of biblical hero story in this case of the little boy being carried by the strong man.
Debbie Millman:
Well, we’ll definitely talk about that later in the show as you wrote an entire book about memorials and what they mean. You’ve said there were years when you worried you would spend the rest of your life being the little boy in the photograph. When did you first begin consciously trying to build an identity beyond survival?
Spencer Bailey:
Probably knowingly in high school, my early teen years were tough. Really, really rough. The way a lot of kids are. You’re you’re trying to figure out your sense of self, your identity, where you fit in the world. Add to that, it was my dad attempting to raise three boys. And we lived in a frat house, basically. We even had a urinal in our house, actually.
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Spencer Bailey:
But yeah, I guess around age eleven or twelve, I had convinced my dad to buy me a drum set. And maybe that was like the first real outlet where I felt like I could get away from it all. where I could pursue an art and kind of lose myself in something. And so I would go down to the basement for hours on end and just bang away. The first year I had the kid, I wasn’t even taking lessons. I just mimicked what I saw drummers on television doing or in in films or that sort of thing. So I actually I’m left-handed and I set up a right-handed kit and I taught myself how to play drums left-handed on a right-handed kit, which is called open hand. There’s a few drummers who do this, but it’s rare. And finally by the time I’m like meeting with a drum teacher after a year, he he’s like, you play open hand. That’s cool. And for me, that was this sort of realization of wow, I’m doing something my own way and kind of carving my own creative journey and path. Fast forward to high school, I was still playing drums and that continued to be a part of my journey and still is to a certain extent, but it was actually poetry, writing, literature. I kind of just fell in love with storytelling, period. And that interestingly enough, only full circle later did I realize that it in becoming a storyteller, I was able to take my story back.
Debbie Millman:
Your twin brother, your identical twin brother, was not on the plane with you, but your older brother Brandon was two and a half years older than you. He was. You said that your brother Brandon’s recovery was physically much longer and more difficult than yours, yet he later became a division one athlete. What did watching his resilience teach you about survival?
Spencer Bailey:
I mean, it was everything. He he was my model in a way, kind of like a second parent figure, the way older siblings sometimes can be. But in our sense, I think it was even more extreme because we had a dad who did his damnedest, tried his best, but he lost his wife at age thirty-six. He’s left with three boys to raise. He’s suffering from depression. Trying to figure out his life and pick up the pieces and run a house. And my brother kind of had to in in a lot of ways rise to the occasion to be a sort of model. Part of that included him realizing we had to get out of the house. He had to get out of the house, but also us. So he became very athletic. I think that was partially just ’cause he was passionate about sports, but also he wanted to prove to others that he could do it.
Debbie Millman:
I mean both his legs were gruesomely broken.
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah, I believe his femur bone was sticking out of one of his legs on the runway. He had to learn how to walk again. You know, he was in a wheelchair for a long time, on crutches for a long time. Kids poked fun of him at school, called him a cripple. And then he ended up going to a high school that had the number one lacrosse team in the country. He was the captain. Then he’s getting recruited to the top lacrosse programs in the country for for division one. And I think he also came to realize that sports weren’t everything for him either. He’s constantly been this model to show you don’t always have to be the best by being at the very top. You can be the best by just modeling it. And he did that in sports. He was a very good hockey player too. And obviously being a good hockey player, you need someone to shoot on. So he he put pads on me and I grew up playing hockey goalie. That was a huge part of my identity growing up, I think, like as a kid, this idea of being in the net, stopping pucks. I it it was a place I felt really safe actually and in control and like my team is riding on me. Yeah. In a certain sense I’m still kind of doing that now as an entrepreneur and as an editor. I always I don’t know, I kind of maybe this is overreach, but I feel like I’ve always been drawn to positions that are in the last line of defense. So like the hockey goalie, the drummer, the editor, the business owner, it all kind of falls on you. If you if you get off beat, if you let a puck in, if you take your eye off the ball.
Debbie Millman:
If you forget to edit out a word. You once said that surviving the crash caused you to understand death far earlier than most children do. Do you have a sense that that might also influence your willingness to be the last line of defense?
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah, I think there’s an irrational thing that occurs when you go through an event like I went through. Like I said, I was reborn. I feel like I while I have no memory of it, I can only base it on sort of what Brandon’s told me. I feel like I came face to face with death.
Debbie Millman:
You were found in the fuselage.
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah. Yeah, a woman found my body. Even though it’s a man carrying me, that’s the one who’s sort of the hero. Yeah. I was a big boy. I was
Debbie Millman:
I’ve seen the picture. You weren’t that big. You’re a little boy. You were four years old. Almost four years old.
Spencer Bailey:
Still probably a lot to carry. I don’t know but yeah, this woman Lynn Hartter found my body in the wreckage. And I don’t know, like if she hadn’t found me when she found me, I mean, there’s so many reasons that I’m sitting here in this chair. Like Captain Al Haynes, who was able to land the plane in the first place, even though it crashed and created a fireball and many people died, like many people survived because of him too. And I feel like I’m here because of him. I’m here because of Lynn. I’m here because of Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Nielsen. I’m here because of the nurses at St. Luke’s in Sioux City. I am here because all these people cared and showed up and very luckily we had an incredibly trained cockpit on that plane.
Debbie Millman:
In terms of your identical twin brother, you’ve described wanting desperately to be seen both as twins and as separate individuals. And I’m wondering how twinship shaped your understanding of identity, especially since you went through this profound experience and he didn’t it to a degree. You know, the actual crash itself.
Spencer Bailey:
Of course, the the big the big hole in the center is losing our mom. And I think it was probably extremely traumatic for him to see his brothers come back in the condition that we did. There’s a story actually that’s relevant here, which is when I left the hospital and I went to my maternal grandmother’s house in the Adirondacks in Lake Placid. I showed up and Trent saw me and I had you know this scar really bad and pointing to my elbow and then I had huge scar on my head that you can’t see because the hair grows over it, but it’s it’s there. The whole left side of my head is a scar, almost lost my left ear.
Debbie Millman:
I heard it was almost sliced off. You were in a coma I think five days
Spencer Bailey:
Five days, yeah. And my head was so swollen that my dad said it looked like a basketball and my eyes were swollen shut. But when I got to Lake Placid, Trent was like, where’d you get all the boo-boos or owies from? And I just said the hospital. Like it was as if like, you know, the event hadn’t occurred. I just related it to this time in the hospital, which is also where my first real memory comes from, which was holding a red fire truck in the playroom in the hospital. Maybe my second memory would be that fourth birthday party we had in Lake Placid that our grandmother threw for us. But to answer your question, I think it’s a sort of yin-yang thing with Trent. We have a very special twinship to this day. Growing up, he played bass, I played drums, I wrote, he took pictures. It was a constant exploration of art, creativity, and life together. He was a lacrosse goalie actually. So Brandon and I used to shoot lacrosse balls at him. And then he and Brandon would shoot hockey pucks at me. So, you know, it was there was just this constant kind of exploration together. But we also at a certain point I think realized it’s hard being Spencer hyphen and hyphen Trent. You have to remove the hyphens at some point and as we got older, I think we figured out a really healthy way of, I guess you could say, carving our own identities while still staying really true to each other as twins. And I still feel that way. In the summer of 2008, we took a trip around the world together and we had been apart for most of high school, college, didn’t get in a single fight on this trip. I mean, it was just like pure kinship, twinship, whatever you want to call it. Put ourselves in some uncomfortable positions all over the world and and everything was sort of just like we were totally in sync.
Debbie Millman:
Because of the injuries from the crash, you struggled early on with reading comprehension for many years and had to effectively relearn how to process text across a page. What did it feel like to discover language slowly and almost physically?
Spencer Bailey:
I’ve never thought about it that way. I mean, I will say I definitely feel like I was usually fairly on par with the class or trying to be. I was always very good at spelling. Like I remember, you know, fifth grade spelling, but I was like the runner up. But like reading definitely came a little bit slower for some reason. And I’m not quite sure why that was, other than that probably my brain injury. I mean, Trent took to reading faster than me. I love how you described it as physical, because there’s something about the physicality of holding a book in your hands, sort of moving slowly across the page, approaching words and looking at words almost as physical objects, as a as something aesthetic. Back to the feinschmecker thing.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Spencer Bailey:
But yeah, like I definitely feel like my love of reading, my love of words, my love of literature kind of came from that slow reading experience and perhaps I guess to tie it to today, I’m still slow reading. I feel like what I do with the podcast, what I do with the slowdown is a form of slow reading. Especially in a world that feels just like incredibly fast all the time.
Debbie Millman:
Is it true that reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s book Interpreter of Maladies at seventeen made you want to become a writer?
Spencer Bailey:
Yes, yes, that is very true. And I’m trying to think of why th those stories in particular. I mean, I think it was because that class, if if I remember correctly, we were also reading the other classics you would expect, perhaps in a high school English class, Great Gadsby, Catcher in the Rye, Catch Twenty Two. And then all of a sudden I’m reading about like the Indian diasporic community through Jhumpa’s beautifully wrought stories, entering realms and worlds that I never knew I could have access to. And I don’t know, like Holden Caulfield didn’t appeal in the same way that Jhumpa’s characters did for some reason. Like I felt like, I don’t know. And then the deeper I’ve thought about it, Jhumpa also kind of existed in this in-between space and so does her characters. I mean she was born in London, raised in Rhode Island, speaking Bengali at home with her parents, speaking English out in, you know, when she was in school, kind of always feeling in between. And while I certainly will be the first to acknowledge I’m a white male American, very privileged growing up in the motherless condition, you’re also put in an in-between where you see all the other kids and their moms picking them up from school, and you’re like, it’s gutting. It’s not I’m not really trying to equate those experiences, but I think this in-betweenness definitely creates a level of remove and wonderment at the world where you’re sort of like my situation’s different, but it’s not that different. And you’re trying to find ways of connecting. And I guess that’s what I felt in those stories was that she was weaving these lives together in ways that while they didn’t feel relevant totally to my world, I could relate to these characters so deeply. And the way she used language and words and the sort of I don’t know, there’s this sort of melancholy layer to those especially in Interpreter of Maladies, melancholy layer to those stories that I found relatable somehow.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You and your brother, your twin brother convinced your dad to let you go to boarding school. You went to separate boarding schools. You went to Pomfret.
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah, we had to get rid of the you know, the hyphens. Right.
Debbie Millman:
There, when you went to boarding school, you told very few people about the crash. You wanted to keep it very private. And then during your senior year, you gave a speech publicly telling the story for the very first time. You said that the room went completely silent. What changed internally for you after that moment?
Spencer Bailey:
If the room went silent, I guess my my my internal self went loud. Like I or or full color or something. It was sort of this like going from this sort of black and white, like something’s deeply buried, to to like I can put this out in the world and it matters because it while it’s just my story to tell, we all have our own different versions, maybe slightly less visceral than a plane crash and losing your mother, but like it felt like this thing that I could put out there. And yeah, I continue to feel that way when I share the story because it’s a all a form of processing. And I feel like every day imbues it with new meaning. It’s not like I just told that story senior year of high school and that was it. It’s like I’m still processing it now. I’ll be processing it when I’m 50, when I’m 60, when I’m 70. Hopefully when I’m 80.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve described the speech as liberating. was that the first time that sharing this experience stopped feeling like exposure and more like authorship?
Spencer Bailey:
For sure. And I think it it was such a you know, it reads like a high school kid wrote it. I so it was the best version of that story that I could tell at that time. And then after that, actually, I didn’t really share it that widely. I I felt more free telling friends in college that, you know, hey, this happened to me. But it was only kind of when I became a journalist more formally and writer that I’m like, this is my territory and terrain. Like I can I can explore this a little bit. Like I can I can use it as material to understand myself more deeply, but also the things I’m interested in more deeply, architecture, memory, art, culture.
Debbie Millman:
You went on to Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. You had a short lived college newspaper column. You also worked for the college magazine. Is it true that you wrote a thesis on Philip Larkin and Jazz? What what drew you to that particular intersection?
Spencer Bailey:
True story. Very niche. I had a professor, Carol Ann Johnston, who introduced me to the work of Philip Larkin. And then when I went to study in London for a summer, I had a professor there as well who was teaching Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes and Paul Muldoon and some other British and Irish poets. And I was just like, this Larkin guy’s a great poet. Like I just, again, kind of I don’t think Jhumpa Lahiri and Philip Larkin have very much in common, but there’s a there is a melancholy, I guess, a certain loneliness perhaps as well. But I felt connected somehow to Larkin and to his poetry. And then I discovered that he had been a jazz critic and I thought, huh, that’s interesting. Like I also love jazz poetry. And I’d never thought about Larkin as a jazz poet. So I was just basically merging these two things that I found fascinating and combusted them into this thesis.
Debbie Millman:
You said that Dickinson was where you realized you were not the writer you wanted to become. I know that Sherry Kimmel at the magazine taught you a bit about the mechanics of editing and storytelling. How did she influence the writer that you wanted to be?
Spencer Bailey:
More or less by making me understand pretty early on that every word counts, every word matters, how to micro choose, I guess you could say, like be your own best editor. She was very encouraging on that front. And I guess also I would say understanding how to tell a story by starting with the W’s, the classic W’s of the who and the why and the what. But really, I think getting to the heart of the why. The one story that always comes to mind for me from that time was she assigned me to profile the college’s stonemasons. And Dickinson was founded in the late 1700s. It’s got a limestone campus. Almost all the buildings are the same limestone. It’s very kind of Hogwarts vibes or something. But it’s beautiful and they still maintain this limestone tradition to this day. And what I found really interesting was like, wow, there’s two guys who show up every day, day in and day out, to like make sure the stones across the campus look good and are maintained. And so I got to go to the old limestone quarry with them. And for me it was like understanding another layer of this, you know, you walk these past these walls every day. You don’t think about the maintenance required for taking care of them or the intent that was behind what built the campus in the first place. I guess you could say that was my first piece of design journalism.
Debbie Millman:
After graduating, you arrived in New York City in September 2008 and the day after signing your first lease on an apartment, Lehman Brothers collapsed. you described entering the city with ambition, but no roadmap. At that point, what were you hoping to do?
Spencer Bailey:
I wanted to work in publishing media magazines, whatever that looked like back then. It was all you know, sort of the tail end of the big Condé, Hearst, Time Inc. years. And at that point I had interned at Harper Collins and kind of learned through that experience I didn’t really want to go become a book editor. I loved the pace of magazines and something faster. But of course when the Lehman thing happened, it was just all my friends who graduated with me in 2008, we were all kind of like, well, now what? I finagled my way into a paid internship at Esquire magazine.
Debbie Millman:
How you finagle? I’ve read you use that word in in I saw it in my research. You just like finagling.
Spencer Bailey:
Okay. The backstory the backstory here is that my my college hosted a career trip to New York for juniors, seniors looking to enter the communications field, whatever that means. And I joined the trip and we visited the offices of Cosmopolitan Magazine. I was one of two men on this trip and it was like twenty women and two men. So I stood out. And we’re on the floor of Cosmo, and I’m like this six foot three guy in a sea of women. And the editor-in-chief of Cosmo, Kate White, was hosting us. She comes in and I knew but didn’t fully realize was that her son, who was a student at the school, I knew and had said nice things about me to his mom. So she knew who I was or was aware. Following that, I followed up with an email, as you do. And I guess the rest is history. She and I became friends and she became a mentor and she did what she could to help me get my foot in the door. I was a kid from Denver. I didn’t know anyone in New York. I was just trying to figure it out. And I knew New York was where I wanted to be if I was going to build the media career I’ve since gone on to do. So I guess my early instincts there were right and it goes to show that it’s just like even just one email can completely transform your life.
Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to go on to Columbia Journalism School for a graduate degree?
Spencer Bailey:
Couple reasons. One was I was an English major undergrad. I didn’t really have the journalism shops except for everything Sherry Kimmel had taught me at the Alumni magazine. And I felt like I could use some shoe leather reporting.
Debbie Millman:
I was also an English major, by the way. I also applied to the Columbia School of Journalism, but I didn’t get in.
Spencer Bailey:
I didn’t think I was gonna get it. It was like a it was a big shock to my system. Especially given like where I came from in, you know, middle school. You could barely pay me to pick up a book, you know, and then to be at the best journalism school in the country. It was a journey, a portal, a dream, whatever you wanna call it. Quite an evolution. But I felt really lucky to have gotten in and the timing was right because the economy was still really in rough shape in 2009. And I felt like, okay, this is a 10 month master’s. I’ll go, I’ll learn the shoe leather reporting on the street and hopefully have a better idea and vision for where I go next. And hopefully the economy will be in better shape. All those things turned out to be true.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk to you about this shoe leather in a moment, but the summer before you started at Columbia, you took Gordon Lish’s infamous fiction workshop, which you’ve described as twelve weeks of sentence by sentence dismantling. First the word, then the sentence, then the structure. And you said you were both inspired and terrified by him. What was most inspiring and what was most terrifying?
Spencer Bailey:
Well, he had this very like Svengali sort of presence in the room, everyone just sort of ooing and awing over his every word in a way. I think I was intimidated because this is the man who edited Raymond Carver’s stories. I mean, those incredible stories. And then not to mention the reputation this workshop had by that point accrued, I would say. You know, you had writers like Amy Hempel coming through that workshop. He was teaching at the Center for Fiction and at the time they were in midtown. And I was the youngest student in the class. I was twenty-four at the time. Most of the students were out of like Columbia MFA program. There was a neuroscientist in the class, I remember. There there was a guy who was in his fifties who would fly from California every week to be in that room. A lot of brilliant minds, including Mitchell S. Jackson, who has since gone on to win a Pulitzer Prize. So yeah. A really amazing room of people. So I was intimidated by him and by the people in the room. But I think where he instilled fear was his teaching method, which was so you had to read a sentence aloud in front of the class. If you liked the sentence, then you could go to a paragraph. If you liked the paragraph, then you could attempt to write a story, basically. That’s a very simple way of putting it. But that intensity and it it would start at 5 p.m. And it was supposed to end at 10, but a lot of the times it would go till two in the morning. And so I’m like, you know, walking in midtown Manhattan, bleary eyed at two in the morning after like a seven hour workshop. It was intense. But he taught with this zeal. It was almost like for him, nothing mattered except for the words you’re putting on the page, that that’s what it means to be alive. And I love that sort of energy and that attitude, even if it’s, you know, needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Like I think you could drive yourself pretty crazy approaching life that way or your work that way. But I think just to wake up in the morning and be like, the words I’m gonna put on the page are important. They do matter. They can change somebody’s life. They can move somebody. They can awe somebody. They can wow somebody. And I think that was his point that the energy you can compact into a single sentence has the power to shift the world.
Debbie Millman:
How did that training shape the way you later edited magazines and interviewed people?
Spencer Bailey:
It’s everything. I mean, I feel like that Lish course is so central to the work I do today as an editor and a writer and a podcast host, interviewer. I’m constantly in real time thinking that way. I’m trying to do my best actually right now with the answers to just totally let go because I feel like when you’re on the other side of the mic, it’s really important to just be you and yourself. And I think it’s important as an interviewer to be yourself, but you have to prepare. It’s like almost like learn as much as you possibly can, build up all that energy, try to let some of it go, get into the flow of the conversation, but also embed that conversation with the kind of rigor that comes with good sentence making.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. I agree. One hundred percent. At Columbia Journalism School you were assigned the beat of city gentrification and your early reporting connected cupcake shops, urban development and neighborhood transformation. You said that initially it might have sounded trivial until you realized it was about class, race and spatial politics. Would you say that design initially revealed itself to you through sociology rather than aesthetics?
Spencer Bailey:
Completely back to those stonemasons. Yeah. Through to that RW1, as they called it, the intro to reporting and writing class. I feel like that class in particular, or that beat anyway, which kind of led me to all over the city into these neighborhoods that were rapidly developing. I reported on the first residential development in Bushwick with an indoor pool. And that that building was on on the same block where just two weeks before I went there to report there’d been a double homicide. I mean, these were the sort of clashes that were occurring in these neighborhoods between like poverty, violence. In certain cases, it was like people getting pushed out because these new buildings coming in, a developer buying an old lot for dirt cheap, putting a pool in, and all of a sudden you have a lot of cool like hipster kids wanna move in. So I was trying to get at those racial tensions, understand the sociology of it. And it was extremely interesting for me to navigate my own personal identity through that as this I’ll just be blunt, like six three waspy white dude from Denver. Like, you know, like I felt that it was important to put myself in uncomfortable positions as a means of understanding my place as the author within that conversation. I couldn’t take myself out of that conversation. It would do a disservice to the I wasn’t writing in first person, but I was approaching the reporting and the situations fully understanding my own identity as not separate from the situations I was reporting on.
Debbie Millman:
During graduate school you also interned at Vanity Fair under Graydon Carter. What did that environment teach you about editorial ambition?
Spencer Bailey:
You gotta start small.
Debbie Millman:
Let’s elaborate.
Spencer Bailey:
I got Graydon Carter his coffee on at least one occasion. Tony Ratano, who’s now at the New York Times, he was Graydon’s assistant at the time and he sent me out to go get a iced coffee from Starbucks. This was when Vanity Fair and Conde were in Times Square. There was a Starbucks right across the street. He said to get a tall iced coffee. I didn’t know my Starbucks sizes. I came back with a venti, which is like, you know, the giant one. And I’m like walking toward his desk and he sees me and he has this like mortified look on his face, and he’s just waving his hands, tall, tall, go back, go back, tall. And I’m like, I guess I got the wrong size. So I go back down to Starbucks and I tell the barista, can you put this in a tall? And she’s looking like, at me like I’m crazy because I’m we’re pouring a venti into a tall cup. Anyway, this is what I learned. Start small slash also attention to detail. That was a rather humiliating experience that I didn’t totally screw up because I was able to get the right size in the end, but left a very confused barista.
Debbie Millman:
What was what was the biggest thing you learned while interning at Vanity Fair for Graydon Carter?
Spencer Bailey:
Well, I would say I really interned for John Kelly, who’s now the founder of Puck. John was really my shepherd through Vanity Fair and that experience. And to a certain extent, Claire Howorth, who’s now back at Vanity Fair. And both of them gave me a lot of different assignments to get my hands dirty and just do deep research and I did get one thing in the print magazine as an intern, which was huge. I didn’t they didn’t give me a byline in the end, because I guess you you know, you’re the intern, but I did a sidebar for a big piece about Rupert Murdoch and his takeovers and across, you know, his career in the media industry. And they asked me to do a sidebar about all the editors in chief that he has fired or let go over the years. So I did some deep research and I came back with a list of twenty plus editors. And they were like, wow, this is good. And then he’s like, yeah, just kind of shape it up and put a headline on it. And I came back to him and my headline was edit editors in brief. And it made it in the print. So did the like all all my copy, but alas, no byline.
Debbie Millman:
I think you can still claim it. You joined Tina Brown’s Daily Beast just as it launched, but within months you were burnt out by the pace and the intensity of New York media. What specifically exhausted you?
Spencer Bailey:
Well, I think it was the level I was at there. I was like a editorial assistant. They had this thing called the cheat sheet. You would write 200-word news blurbs for breaking news that would then go like almost immediately like live on the site. The pace of that was just exhausting. And then they had us on this sort of rotation where some days I would work like an early morning shift to midday. Other days I would work late afternoon till midnight. It it kind of had more like the hours of like a nurse or something than an editor. Yeah, and it was run with a early 2010s intensity of, you know, this was the moment of like the Daily Beast was rising with BuzzFeed and Huffington Post. Gawker was still kind of very much in the conversation. That was kind of the vibe in the culture. And I was like, I still love print. I still love making and packaging physical things. I don’t know if that’s a big long future. At the time, I just thought, well, I want to go try that for a little bit and see what happens. but here we are in 2026. I’m still doing it.
Debbie Millman:
And then around twenty five years old or so, Surface Magazine enters your life almost unexpectedly. How did you first discover the magazine and how would you describe it at that time?
Spencer Bailey:
Do you remember the website Mediabistro?
Debbie Millman:
Of course I do. Of course I do.
Spencer Bailey:
For those listening who don’t know Mediabistro, it was like where everyone who wanted to work in media would go look at their potential jobs. This was before like, you know, the Indeeds of the world. Yeah. I mean now everyone just goes on LinkedIn. they had posted a job for an assistant editor and I was like, What is this magazine? Surface. You know, I’m a word nerd, right? So all of a sudden I’m like surface. That’s a great name for a magazine. Super interesting. I wonder what it’s about. I went to the local Barnes and Noble and picked it up and it kind of, you know, it was avant-garde. It looked like an intern designed it that wasn’t far from the truth. it needed some work, but they were definitely evolving it at that time. And I picked it up and thought it’s a lens. It’s a lens for looking at the world. But at the time it felt like a very, very specific, almost like too cool for school. Like I don’t know if I’m cool enough to hold this magazine kind of vibe. But I got the job. I got hired and I s I worked under Dan Rubinstein there for two and a half years, learned a ton about design from him and from just working day to day on the job. I’ll never forget my first week because Dan asked me to go to a Duravit event. As in yes, Duravit, the toilets. And so I go to this event and I’m drinking champagne looking at toilets.
Debbie Millman:
This one nice toilets though.
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah. But I was like, is this my future?
Debbie Millman:
Yes, yes it is.
Spencer Bailey:
Anyway, it became a lot more interesting from there.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you joined in 2010. You were a relatively inexperienced young journalist with little formal design background, certainly none in toilet.
Spencer Bailey:
Yes. I mean, during my interview, I remember saying I don’t know a ton about design, but I love art and I love business. And design is the combination of the two, which I think was fairly astute.
Debbie Millman:
Didn’t they ask you about your favorite architects and you could only name two?
Spencer Bailey:
Like like Frank Gary and Frank Lloyd Wright. Maybe Zaha Hadid. Like you know.
Debbie Millman:
Woohoo, you really knocked that out of the park. But you got the job and suddenly by the time you’re twenty seven, so just like two years later, you become editor in chief after a major ownership transition. How did that happen?
Spencer Bailey:
I was so freaked out in that moment. I didn’t really know what to do.
Debbie Millman:
Actually described it as a holy shit moment.
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah, yeah. It was I called Kate White. I called John Kelly, called the mentors, and I was like, what should I do? And both of them said the same thing. Stay put. Don’t do anything. Don’t speak up. Just stay put. See what happens. And I did. And two days later I got called to lunch with the CEO and then publisher. And they both said we think you should be the editor. And yeah, that was my holy shit moment of like, this is an amazing opportunity. But I also didn’t have the hubris to think I was at all ready for that job. You know, I was still kind of learning the ropes, but I had spent a lot of time thinking about storytelling, magazine making. I mean, it wasn’t coming out of nowhere. And I had an eye. Like I feel like. And maybe this is something interesting to get into on on the podcast today is that my mom was an artist and my dad decidedly was not. He was more of an engineer mind. He studied civil engineering and we didn’t grow up in a house that was like the most aesthetic thing. There was an Alessie tea kettle. My dad had a Mont Blanc pen that stood out to me as something that was nicer than most of the other things in the house, but my mom was an artist and had us painting. There’s photos of her with us at an easel, Trent’s on one side, I’m on the other, we’re painting. But I feel like taste is something that you accrue over a lifetime. And I realized that somehow I had accrued this visual sensibility that wasn’t something I learned in the English classroom, certainly not. Or or probably even at Dickinson, but was something that was more deep rooted. And I think when you’re even at a very young age, given a paintbrush or given that tool to make art, it teaches you how to look. And I know that probably sounds ridiculous because it’s like, yeah, kids paint all the time, you know, whatever, finger painting, all. But I really think that it instilled in me this internal love of making, you know, who doesn’t love beauty, but you know, I think thinking about things aesthetic. And so I was figuring out how to make a magazine as an editor, but also as somebody who is deeply interested in visual culture. And I think a lot of editors don’t think so much in visual culture. So I was combining these two threads that kind of in a way up till then I hadn’t had the platform or ability to merge.
Debbie Millman:
One of your first major editorial moves was reframing surface from a magazine about the design world into a magazine that looked at the world through the lens of design. Why was that distinction important to you?
Spencer Bailey:
I feel like the design world so often puts itself in this corner where it’s just like coffee tables, handbags, and chairs, right? Like just wallpaper. I mean, not the magazine, although I realize that could have sounded like me dissing wallpaper the magazine. I I think that there’s this tendency to talking about design as this commercial thing. When yes, certain elements of design are certainly commercial. I think the world, when you walk out your door, every single thing is designed. I’ve talked to Michael Beirut about this. He and I both really like it’s sort of like the Jasper Morrison thing too. I mentioned Jasper because I love the way that he looks at the world. Like he’ll see the funniest, strangest shaped bike rack or you know just random thing on the street and think it’s like the best design, the most essential design. And to me, that’s as much design as any like uber marketed coffee table or I don’t know. I would say if I had a design perspective, it’s very much in line with Isamu Noguchi. And he famously said, I am not a designer, which is the name of a show at the High Museum right now, about his work. He didn’t want to be defined as a designer. And maybe in that sense, I am not a design editor, but I love design. I understand the inherent value in it to make the world a better place. Like design and art are these tools that if we didn’t have them, what would be worth living for in a way? I mean, I feel like so much ingenuity, so much invention, so much creativity is rooted in those two worlds. So that’s what I wanted to showcase in the magazine, really. I think. I mean, I put a lot more art in the magazine. I focused a lot more on architecture because I felt like architecture is often one of the more underserved things in the media in terms of people truly understanding how much it shapes our lives.
Debbie Millman:
Your conceptual shift became central to your tenure under your leadership Surface broadened dramatically to architecture, fashion, music, hospitality, technology, urbanism, and contemporary culture. And you chose Ian Schrager as an early cover. First was he embodied architecture, hospitality, nightlife, fashion, business and culture simultaneously. He is amazing. He’s actually the dad of a very dear friend of mine, so I’ve met him a few times and he is just extraordinary. Visually and editorially, you also oversaw a major redesign and repositioning of the magazine, it moved towards a sleeker visual identity, more culturally expansive editorial coverage, you grew a broader audience, you put Kanye West on the cover, so Solange Knowles on the cover, Peter Zumthor on the cover. What was your goal at the time?
Spencer Bailey:
I wanted to position design as more central to the conversation rather than relegated to this like sideline thing. I mean, why would Kanye West at the peak of Kanye in the fall of 2016 want to be on this design magazine’s cover?
Debbie Millman:
Answer the question for us.
Spencer Bailey:
I think it’s because his heroes had been on the cover and or were people in that
realm and in that world. They were the Peter Zumtors of the world, right? The Ondos. And I think he very much sees himself in a similar position to them, or certainly did at the time. I mean, I don’t want to speak for him, but that’s probably my guess as to why he would want to do that. And I think we largely succeeded in that mission in a lot of different ways. Even though I was there for eight years, editor in chief for five of those years, I feel like I did what I wanted to do there. I mean, the only cover that got away that I tried and we were close was Michelle Obama. I thought that would have been just so interesting having Michelle on the cover of this design magazine.
Debbie Millman:
Why didn’t that happen?
Spencer Bailey:
They were leaving the White House. They replied and they were they were there was interest initially. But short of getting her on the cover is like kinda did everything I wanted to there.
Debbie Millman:
You spent eight years at Surface, but began feeling exhausted by constantly running after the next thing. What had become unsustainable for you?
Spencer Bailey:
I mean, the pace of that life was, you know, when when I started, it was a low seven figure company, maybe a staff of five. When I left, you know, we had grown the revenue almost six or sevenfold. We had quadrupled the size of the staff. I mean, we had almost forty people on staff. we had a whole events business, we had a little agency model doing brand work within that. It had grown so exponentially. And all of that was super exciting. I just felt like I wanted to explore something more connected to slowness. As much as I had shifted the magazine to looking at the world through design rather than the design world, I felt like I had kind of reached this moment where I’m ready to like leap out and do some other things beyond just the realm of design. And didn’t know what that was gonna look like. I also felt like going back to what we were talking about earlier, taking my story back. I had become known by that point as the editor of this magazine. I had become a known entity other than the little boy being carried in the photo. That also kind of made me realize, okay, what’s my next story? I’m no longer the boy in the photo. I’m now this magazine editor. I don’t know that I want to run a magazine forever. I love storytelling. Where do we go next? And we had started an event series at Surface called Design Dialogues, where I would interview all these different really interesting people on stage in dialogue. So it was like Stefan Sagmeister in conversation with Jeffrey Deitch or Craig Dykers in conversation with José Parla. And the conversations were really beautiful that happened on stage. And I realized I have a knack for this like live conversation thing. And then it was 2017, 2018. I’m like, maybe my next thing’s a podcast.
Debbie Millman:
Your departure from Surface feels less like a burnout situation and more like a philosophical shift about attention itself. Did you begin questioning not just what media was covering, but the speed at which media was asking us to live?
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah, the whole thing. Yeah. I actually think there’s a real analogy here. The way we think about media is how we should think about our food. I’ve been saying this for almost a decade now. Like we’re just guzzling from a fire hose when we turn on our the apps on our phone, especially Instagram, which I’m guilty of. We’re now all on like a McDonald’s fast food diet when it comes to our media consumption. And what I’m curious about and potentially excited about, honestly, is that I see a future where people are gonna want to return to their mode of what I would call slow food for media, like this more intention-based way of thinking about what we read, what we look at, what emails we subscribe to. What content we watch. I mean, it feels like things have become more and more fragmented and that our attention spans are even more just like all over the place. Something’s gotta give at some point. And so I guess in a certain sense, that was the early thesis of the Slowdown, this media company I’ve got now, which was how do we think about the values that were put into the slow food movement and apply that to media, not in a total didactic way, but in a way that’s maybe more metaphorical, philosophical, rooted in time and temporality, rooted in making space. You’ll notice I’m not talking super quickly on this podcast. I’m trying to get my ideas across thoughtfully in a considered manner, in a manner with pacing and not trying to blurt it all out and get it out there and hope that it sticks.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve spoken really beautifully about chi, the idea that energy becomes embedded in the things we consume. I also feel that way. I feel like there’s energy in things that we…
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah, animism, right?
Debbie Millman:
And I tend to anthropomorphize almost everything but how do you think that applies? How do you think the chi applies to our media consumption?
Spencer Bailey:
I mean, I don’t think it applies right now. I think it should. That’s sort of my goal with Time Sensitive is can you create a capacious space for people to go on a journey? Like I approach the podcast like a walk. I want people to feel like, hey, I’m your guide. I’m gonna take you on this little walk. I don’t know where we’re gonna go, but we’re gonna get somewhere, and then we’ll get back to the trailhead at the end.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s how Isaac Fitzgerald is his he literally takes a walk with people.
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I feel like that journey making, that openness is so important. We live in such a structured society. Everything’s so efficient. Everything needs to be like done yesterday. I want people to feel like they can make space for inefficiency, that they can make space for friction in their lives, that they can enjoy something that is winding and not random. But media that’s highly crafted, made with intent, made with care. It’s not just this willy-nilly, like, hey, come on a it’s not Burning Man with respect to Burning Man, but it’s not like you know, like willy-nilly journey, whatever. It’s like, no, we’re gonna have a very considered conversation, but we’re gonna do it in a way that feels like deeper, more human, less rooted in trying to find some quick answer or outcome or thing that sounds great on TikTok, right? It’s an uphill battle right now because I think we’re in this moment where everything needs to sound good in a soundbite. But the reality is, is there’s not that much that’s being said that has substance that’s said in a soundbite. I can’t really name that many examples. I like what Kareem’s doing on Subway Takes. I feel like that’s a that’s one example of like a short form content that has some deeper meaning in it. But even then I feel like it’s like that’s the age we live in now where people just want that.
Debbie Millman:
Well I feel like media took a real hit when we started to need to see how long it was gonna take for us to read something before we started reading it. Yeah. That really bothers me.
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah, the scroll when it’s like
Debbie Millman:
T L D R
Spencer Bailey:
Bullet points. Yeah. Clip notes.
Debbie Millman:
You launched your firm The Slowdown on May 1, 1029. less than a year later, the entire world entered a literal global slowdown during the pandemic. Did that coincidence influence your understanding of what you were building?
Spencer Bailey:
In hindsight, yes. At the time, no. I mean, who predicted that other than maybe historians focused on the 1918 Spanish flu, which most of us had forgotten. It was so surreal to have a company called The Slowdown in a global slowdown. Also the fact that like I like to say The Slowdown did not slow down in the slowdown. So like our company thrived in this moment of global confusion. To answer your question, my thesis was that the world was gonna slow down somehow or need to. Whether it was environmental, political, social, all of the things combined, I guess we would put this in a category of chemical, medical, you know physical, but it was not a slowdown any of us could have predicted. But when it came and it came fast, it made me realize that there was a place for this company that was beyond what I had even initially anticipated.
Debbie Millman:
The company now includes your podcast, Time Sensitive. You’ve done over well over a hundred episodes.
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah, hundred and fifty just a few weeks ago.
Debbie Millman:
You have a relationship with Phaidon Press. You are the editor at large. you also do a lot of consulting, branded experiences. Congratulations, you really created something exactly the way you intended.
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah, or at least evolved it into something that feels very close to the original intent and have not deviated from that intent. And I think that’s really thanks to building a great team, having the right partners. Like again, it’s sort of back to what I was saying at the very beginning of I’ve always been a fewer better person, and that includes how I run the company, hire the team. I realize I’m in a very privileged position to be able to basically say yes to only so many clients, but it feels like the kind of way that I want to do it rather than scaling this up to some $30 million media business that just feels like again, this like bloated thing that’s not really what I want to be running. Instead, I’ve built a very healthy seven-figure media business that I get to run on my own terms.
Debbie Millman:
One of your first major projects for Phaidon was your book, In Memory Of: Designing Contemporary Memorials. And you spent three years researching and writing it, approaching memorials not simply as architectural objects, but as emotional and philosophical environments. And in many ways, the book feels inseparable from your own biography, even though it rarely centers on your identity or you directly. At what point did you realize the project was also a way of interrogating your own relationship to memorialization?
Spencer Bailey:
I think it was the original intent. So when I left Surface, Keith Fox and Amelia Tarrani at Phaidon, Keith was the CEO at the time, they called me into a meeting and they’re like, we want to work with you. What ideas do you have? Come be our editor at large, basically. She was like, this is exciting. I want to make books. And the very first book I pitched to them was this one on memorials, which felt both very personal and very universal. It was like, I’m probably one of the only people who can really write this book from my perspective. Like I don’t know anyone else who’s been memorialized, who’s not like a
Debbie Millman:
General in the Army.
Spencer Bailey:
Right. Keith Fox actually is worth bringing up because he was very involved with the AIDS Memorial in the West Village. I believe he’s still on the board there, and he was instrumental in realizing that project. So he also felt very passionate about this subject. And I think he also saw that I was somebody who could write about it from a perspective unlike anyone else. And so I basically got to work. I started researching global memorial culture and went super deep. Picked, I think it’s roughly sixty to sixty-five memorials around the world to sort of include in this book. And as I was writing it, I realized that I absolutely had to put my personal story in it, but how? And ultimately decided that I would just write about it in the introduction, sort of make a first person, like, hey, you know, again, I’m gonna take you on this journey into global memorial culture. This is my story, this is who I am, and this is how it fits into everything from like 1982 Maya Lin Vietnam Veterans Memorial to 2019 MASS Design Group Gun Violence Memorial. So it sort of takes readers on that journey. And it was such I mean, talk about my that senior speech I did in high school, like this was that tenfold. This was so cathartic, so deeply, profoundly life-altering to write this book. And the strangest thing of all actually was the timing because I turned it in in March 2020, the manuscript to the publisher. And it came out in October 2020. So I had spent two and a half, three years more or less thinking about death, loss, atrocity, everything more or less that we were facing around the world when COVID came. And then George Floyd and post-George Floyd and watching these monuments get torn down. And here’s where I should say the book makes a case and an argument for abstraction in a way it argues against the hero figure or form, you know, arguing that. That that’s more like a sort of monumentality, whereas memorialization at its best is something slightly can be monumental, but it’s not a monument. It’s different. There’s a there’s a different use of of space. And actually got to very luckily got to work with our friend Michael Beirut on that project. And he designed such a beautiful cover and book and didn’t have to change a thing. It was extraordinary and a dream and even getting to put that book out when it did. It was a dark moment. I mean, it was October, like second wave of COVID. I had to do the book launch over Zoom. I had to lose a lot of those experiences that an author gets to enjoy when their book comes out. But I did get to at the very least understand that this book was entering a place in time that was extremely relevant. Like all of a sudden, I’m talking on BBC about memorials and sharing why I think we need better memorial making and what that might look like.
Debbie Millman:
The book studies memorials related to genocide, slavery, war, terrorism, dictatorship, mass violence, and collective mourning around the world. And you said that memorials combine the powers of art, architecture, and collective memory, unlike any other space. How do spaces shape mourning?
Spencer Bailey:
I feel like it’s hard to talk about this in the abstract. So I’ll use a specific example. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which is designed by MASS Design Group and done in collaboration with the Equal Justice Initiative, Brian Stevenson. I won’t do justice to it trying to describe it in a couple minutes. But I’ll do my best.
Debbie Millman:
Okay.
Spencer Bailey:
It’s a space that’s rooted in metaphor and is imbued with so much feeling that it’s not just about loss. I mean, when I was organizing the book actually, I did five different essays that are interspersed as a means of saying that you can read this book in a multitude of ways. And each essay has an emotional theme, and it’s fear, strength, grief, loss, and hope.
And I did that because I think these sorts of spaces, when they’re at their best, allow you to feel all of those things. And to bring it back to Montgomery, you’d certainly feel that when you’re entering this pavilion, there are these steel columns, each is about six foot long, like a human body or a casket. And each one represents a county where different lynchings took place. And on that pillar are the names that they have documented of the people who were hanged and the name of the county. It’s a circular pavilion that has a sort of tourell-like interior that opens up to the sky. And when you walk into it, the slope begins going downward. So at first the pillars are eye-level, but then you find yourself underneath them looking up. And it creates this sort of uncanny feeling of realizing that you’re like you’re you become the observer and you’re effectively watching the history of the hanged. There’s also a very selective group of, I don’t know, several dozen wall texts as you get deeper into the pavilion that explain who was hanged and why. And when you realize the absurdity of the reasons why, it just makes it all the more infuriating and sad and just like gutting.
Debbie Millman:
Rageful.
Spencer Bailey:
Rageful. And yet, and yet, and I say and yet because the deeper you get in, the more you see how much hope and strength is embedded despite the fear and the grief and the loss and and the anger and the rage. I’ll stop there because I could keep going, but there’s so many readings to that memorial. One last detail that’s very interesting about it is on the when you get to the other side, there are copies of each pillar laid out like a cemetery. And the Equal Justice Initiative is telling all the counties, hey, through a process of truth and reconciliation, come, we’ll work with you, you can create a space to house these in your community. So it’s not just a static memorial. It will become a living memorial. But I was just there a few weeks ago and sadly not one of those pillars has been taken yet. Although I hear that Houston is probably gonna be the first city that that takes one and builds a park around it.
Debbie Millman:
Your ongoing five-volume book collaboration with the leading hotels of the world through Phaidon moves through themes like design, culture, and the upcoming Explorer, which will be released in just a few weeks. One of the things that runs through design is the idea that hospitality design shapes behavior, how people move, gather, rest, and even dream. Very philosophical, which is why I like it. The second volume, Culture, broadens the conversation beyond aesthetics into ritual, craft, locality, and heritage. The upcoming volume, Explore, shifts towards movement, adventure, wellness, and discovery. Talk a little bit about how you are positioning these books. They’re very unusual. They’re not hotel monographs. They really are a series that I think in many ways talks about the era we’re living through. Would would you agree?
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah, sort of. I mean, what what I’ll say is that from the get-go, I have framed them as culture books, not brand books. There’s definitely a distinction there. Like, while that might sound like a a way of spinning it or remarketing it, I actually like genuinely feel passionate that we’re creating culture through these books.
Debbie Millman:
For me they’re more idea driven than they are place specific.
Spencer Bailey:
Yeah, exactly. And you know, they’re organized geographically. And for those that don’t know, the leading hotels of the world is a nearly century-old sort of I guess I’d call it umbrella for all these independent hotels around the world that become members and they’re upper echelon. I mean, these are I don’t use five star because they don’t use five star because five star doesn’t really mean anything, but let let’s just say highly crafted, very often family-run, independent, really, really just exquisite and exquisite hospitality experiences. There’s 400 and almost 400 or around 450 of them around the world now. And what’s interesting is like in the in a world of Hilton’s and Marriott’s and on and on, they exist in this other space. That’s rooted in tradition. It’s rooted in family. It’s rooted in local culture. And these hotels are really tapping into that slow idea I was talking about earlier. They’re really tapping into that friction that can happen. Like you, if you hear the word friction, you’re like, I don’t want friction with my hospitality. No, you do, because it’s actually really amazing when you go to a place and it’s like, they’re not doing it here the way they would do it at a Marriott or, you know, some sort of more cookie-cutter approach to hospitality. They’re doing it the way that this family’s been doing it for 150 years. And that’s beautiful and amazing. And it almost feels like you’re in someone’s home. And I think that that like personal touch, I wanted to imbue the books with that. I wanted the books to feel like some sort of, the same way that when you open the memorials book, it really does have this overpowering, like it almost feels like you’re immersed. Like I wanted the same thing, but like it to be like this like plush, luxurious pillow that you’re like, man, I’m gonna lose myself in this world. I realize it’s quite a jump from memorials to high end hotels, but another through line is Michael Beirut is also working with me on that project. And it’s just been such a joy to kind of make that leap with him as well, like going from memorials to hotels, quite a shift.
Debbie Millman:
Well, in some ways the series also mirrors, it seems to me, to mirror your own trajectory from Surface through The Slowdown and Time Sensitive, where design becomes sort of a doorway into much larger questions about culture and meaning.
Spencer Bailey:
Connecting the dots. Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
I only have two more questions for you. You’ve said that the older you get, the more time sensitive you’re becoming, less willing to spend time on things or people that don’t matter deeply to you. Do you have any inner conflict on saying no to the things that you don’t want to do?
Spencer Bailey:
Don’t we all? Yeah, I do sometimes. But less so. I think life has become more urgent probably the older I’ve gotten. I feel like your body tells you something. And I grew up in a way in which I had a very high tolerance or threshold for pain. I was very much willing to just push through. And I think one thing I’ve been really much more conscious of, thanks to my therapist. And yeah, I’ve been in therapy now for more than 10 years and or almost 10 years. And you know, for a while there I was going twice a week, and it was like very, very intense and necessary and life-changing and life-affirming. And I think one thing that she’s really helped me with is get way more in touch with my body. And way more in touch with like the sort of Bessel van der Kolk body keeps the score thing. And COVID did that too. But I didn’t know how much I was holding in. And COVID brought out a lot of things that I had been holding in. I had a bout of shingles that was horrific, like extremely painful. Right when In Memory of came out, I was dealing with shingles. And it was this strange dual thing where I’ve like got this book coming out and it’s exciting. And then I’m like at home in pain, and my shoulder and my chest are like being like, dude, you gotta take care, right? And so I feel like if anything, the sort of time sensitivity element of getting older of you know, I’m forty now, still feels pretty young. But I feel like you enter your late thirties, or at least this was the case for me, like probably thirty eight, thirty nine, forty, you know, I start waking up a little achier. I start and it just makes me realize like, okay, take a beat, slow down, be present. You don’t have to do 20 things. Do two things. Say yes to that person and that person. You’re one person with two arms and two legs and a head and a heart. You know, be present.
Debbie Millman:
This is my last question for you today. There’s a remarkable coherence, this thread to your life’s work, survival, memory, empathy, slowness, journalism, memorials, and time. When you step back and look at the larger arc, what do you think the through line is in what your life means now?
Spencer Bailey:
That is really hard to answer. I think I’m gonna cheat. I don’t know if it’s cheating. I’m reading a book right now called Transversal by Maria Popova.
Debbie Millman:
Who I’m interviewing next week.
Spencer Bailey:
It’s a book about love. Love was something growing up in I’ll just call it a toxic male household. We are a tough love household. Toxic male households, maybe not quite right, but tough love. And it’s a lot of male energy. My dad definitely tried to instill in us that love was this important thing. And yet we had all suffered so much. And I think we had a very hard time with saying I love you. Just wasn’t something we did naturally. Now every time I talk to my dad or my brothers on the phone, I say I love you. And I feel like it’s very easy through a series of like circumstances to feel that love beaten out of you. This might be a very cheesy way of answering your question, but I feel like it’s an honest one, which is that I have followed a course of things that I love, that I feel extremely passionate about, excited about, where I wake up in the morning and sense that if I feel this way, there’s probably many others who will too. And maybe I can be a translator of sorts to express that across the transom, whether it’s a podcast or a book. I think the things that I create, you feel love embedded in them. It’s it’s my like love letter to the world. Like, here’s my book, here’s a podcast, here’s an episode.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I don’t think that’s cheesy or cheating. I think that’s the best possible answer. I could have hoped for.
Spencer Bailey:
Thank you, Maria Popova.
Debbie Millman:
Spencer Bailey, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. To learn more about Spencer Bailey, you can go to his website, spencerbailey.com and slowdown.media. Spencer’s brand new book is titled Explore.
Spencer Bailey:
Thank you, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
This is the twenty-first year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.