Spencer Bailey

[Instrumental music] 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's also editor-at-large of the book publisher Phaidon, and his book Explore, the third in a series of books for Monacelli, 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.

[laughs]

Can, can you share what that is?

I have no idea how you found this.

Um, yes.

So I actually don't know the etymology of the word.

I, 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 feinschmecker 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-

Right

...

I then thought, okay, well, that makes sense.