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Chapter 1: How does Spencer Bailey define 'slow food for media'?
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.
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.
I want people to feel like they can make space for inefficiency.
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Chapter 2: What traumatic event shaped Spencer Bailey's identity?
Thank you.
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. Thanks for having me, Debbie. It's a pleasure to be here. Spencer, I understand your wife refers to you as a feinschmecker. Can you share what that is? 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.
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Chapter 3: How does storytelling help in understanding personal trauma?
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.
Yeah.
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. I feel like I carry her in me every day.
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Chapter 4: What role does memory play in Spencer's life and work?
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.
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? It's a 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 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 myself. 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?
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Chapter 5: How did Spencer Bailey's brother influence his understanding of resilience?
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.
Well, we'll definitely talk about that later in the show as you wrote the entire book about memorials and what they mean.
Yeah.
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? Probably knowingly in high school. My early teen years were tough, really, really rough, the way a lot of kids are.
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. We lived in a frat house, basically. We even had a urinal in our house, actually. Wow. But... Yeah, I guess around age 11 or 12, 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 kit, 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.
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Chapter 6: What was the significance of the memorials book in Spencer's career?
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's like, Oh, you play open hand. That's cool. And, and yeah,
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 in becoming a storyteller, I was able to take my story back. Yeah. 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 I athlete. What did watching his resilience teach you about survival? I mean, it was everything. 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 36.
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Chapter 7: How does Spencer view the relationship between design and culture?
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 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 because he was passionate about sports, but also he wanted to prove to others that he could do it. Both his legs were gruesomely broken in the crash. His femur bone was sticking out of one of his legs on the runway. He had to learn how to walk again. 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 Division I. 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.
Chapter 8: What insights does Spencer Bailey share about slowing down in media consumption?
And obviously, being a good hockey player, you need someone to shoot on. So 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. It was a place I felt really safe, actually, and in control. And like, my team is riding on me.
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 get off beat, if you let a puck in, if you take your eye off the ball. You forget to edit out a word.
Yeah.
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? 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. You were found in the fuselage. 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. I was a big boy. I've seen the picture. You weren't that big. You were a little boy.
You were four years old, almost four years old. Still probably a lot to carry. I don't know. But yeah, this woman, Lynn Harder, 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 and 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. 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 is.
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