Spencer Bailey

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 leap out and do some other things beyond just the realm of design.

And...

Didn't know what that was going to look like.

I also felt like going back to what we were talking about earlier of 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 Jose Parla.

And the conversations were really beautiful that happened on stage, and I realized I have a knack for this live conversation thing.

And then it was 2017, 2018, I'm like, maybe my next thing's a podcast.

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?

Yeah, the whole thing.