Spencer Bailey

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 it's not burning man with respect to burning man but it's 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 one example of 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.

Well, I feel like media took a real hit when we started to need to see how long it was going to take for us to read something before we started reading it.

Yeah.

That really bothers me.

Yeah, the scroll when it's like... TLDR.

Yeah.

Bullet points.

Cliff notes.

You launched your firm, The Slowdown, on May 1st, 2019.

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?

In hindsight, yes.

At the time, no.

I mean, who could have 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.