Spencer Bailey

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.

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.

112 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?

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

almost a sort of like Frankenstein feeling of, on the one hand, the physical presence of my mother.