Ten years ago, the Austrian-born, New York–based graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister—famous for his attention-grabbing exhibitions, posters, and books, as well as for his impeccable album covers for bands like The Rolling Stones, OK Go, and Aerosmith—walked onto the stage at the TED Global conference in Oxford, England. There to present his findings about the power of time off, he spoke specifically about the virtues and values, personal and professional, of taking a sabbatical every seven years, something he started to do in 2000 and has continued to practice since. Coming in the midst of the Great Recession, the talk resonated widely: its resulting video has been watched more than three million times. Clearly, Sagmeister was, and is, onto something. Even if it’s something most people can only dream about. Since then, Sagmeister has gone on yet another sabbatical—his third, in 2016—this time stopping in Mexico City, Tokyo, and the town of Schwarzenberg, Austria, over the course of a year. (For his first sabbatical, he was in New York City; for his second, Bali.) On this episode of Time Sensitive, the 56-year-old looks back, with a fuller-picture view, at his three periods of time off. Digging in to how the sabbaticals created opportunities for incubating ideas that became two massive multi-year undertakings—one a project on happiness, the other on beauty—Sagmeister shares with Spencer Bailey how certain things have changed for his practice since that TED Talk a decade ago. In 2012, he joined forces with Jessica Walsh; their firm, Sagmeister & Walsh, now operates in a different, slightly larger office than the one he was in, and having another partner at the firm has shifted how things run overall. Still, Sagmeister’s signature approach to design remains as exuberant as ever. For clients including the duffel-bag brand Baboon, the Jewish Museum, and the Miami advertising agency Gut, the firm continues to produce inventive and playful work.

Uzodinma Iweala’s journey to becoming the CEO of the Africa Center, a culture and policy institution located on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan at the northeast corner of Central Park, defies expectations. Prior to the role, which he began in early 2018, he had zero non-profit experience. And though the Washington, D.C., native had co-founded a small media start-up in Lagos, Nigeria, he had never lead an organization of this scale or ambition. What Iweala did understand, though, is the power of storytelling—specifically, storytelling of and about the African diaspora. Today, at 36, Iweala is confident that by harnessing storytelling he can, and will, reorient the organization, which was founded in 1984 as the Museum for African Art and saw its share of setbacks prior to his arrival. If Iweala’s diverse background and track record is any indication, the Africa Center is poised to grow into a high-impact hub for pushing conversations and greater understandings about the continent forward. Iweala’s journey has been circuitous to say the least: He wrote the novel Beasts of No Nation, which was adopted into a 2015 Netflix film directed by Cary Fukunaga and starring Idris Elba. He completed a multi-year study of HIV/AIDS in Africa, the result of which became his second book, Our Kind of People. He received an M.D. from Columbia University in 2011, co-founded and launched Ventures Africa magazine, and wrote another novel, Speak No Evil, released last year. In this episode of Time Sensitive, Iweala shares with Spencer Bailey his exceptional experiences as a writer, researcher, doctor, entrepreneur—and now, CEO.

The media tends to hyperbolize and boosterize technologists and the work that they do, creating all kinds of absurdly over-the-top titles for them. But when CBS’s 60 Minutes dubbed Kai-Fu Lee “the oracle of A.I.” earlier this year, it was actually a spot-on assessment. Lee has indeed been at the forefront of the field for more than three decades and is without question an artificial intelligence visionary. There are few people in the world who understand A.I. so astutely, especially within so many social and cultural contexts. His accolades speak volumes: In 2013, Lee was named to that year’s Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people, and this January, he was named co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s A.I. Council. His new book, A.I. Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, quickly rose to become a New York Times bestseller. Lee’s got one extraordinary résumé: After receiving a B.S.in computer science from Columbia University in 1983, he went on to get his Ph.D. in 1988 from Carnegie Mellon, where developed Sphinx, the first-ever speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system. In 1990, he joined Apple as a research scientist, heading up multiple R&D groups there for several years. From 1998 to 2005, he worked at Microsoft, where he established what would become Microsoft Research Asia, and later, upon returning to the U.S., he was named a vice president at the company. In 2005, he decamped to Google, resulting in a widely publicized five-month legal battle with Microsoft. Once settled, Lee helped bring Google to China, overseeing its growth and operations there for four years. Lee now runs Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in start-ups in China, many of them in the A.I. space. As of a year ago, according to Bloomberg, Sinovation had $2 billion under asset management with more than 300 companies in its portfolio. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Lee shares with Andrew Zuckerman his fascinating story of emigrating from China to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at age 11; why he remains rationally optimistic about A.I. (and its increasingly potent presence in our lives); and how a recent bout with cancer drastically altered his outlook on life and work.

Teresita Fernández defies expectations. For more than 20 years, the Miami-born, Brooklyn-based artist has pushed boundaries, literally and figuratively, through her large-scale sculptures, mixed-media works, and high-profile public installations, such as the seemingly illusory “Fata Morgana” in New York City’s Madison Square Park in 2015 and cocoon-like “Autumn (... Nothing Personal)” at Harvard University last year. Her highly evocative work, at its heart, explores the many complex layers embedded in things—an idea that’s inspired, in part, from the traditional East Asian garden concept of shakkei, or “borrowed landscape,” something she discusses in-depth with Spencer Bailey on this episode of Time Sensitive. Even if Fernández’s beautiful, affecting art can be enjoyed on the surface, to fully grasp her shrewd explorations of landscape and her exquisite experimentations with materials—from ceramics to charcoal to gold to graphite—viewers must look at them closely and read them deeply. If they do, they’re likely to come away with a greater, and certainly more real, understanding of the complicated colonial history of the Americas, as well as the sublime beauty inherent in so many of the natural wonders around us. In the lead up to her mid-career retrospective, “Teresita Fernández: Elemental”—perhaps her most ambitious exhibition yet, opening at the Pérez Art Museum Miami this fall (Oct. 18, 2019, to Feb. 9, 2020)—the 51-year-old artist recently came by The Slowdown’s New York City headquarters to share stories about her life and work, from being raised by hardworking Cuban exile parents in Miami to studying for her M.F.A. at Virginia Commonwealth University in a then largely Confederate-proud Richmond. As this interview makes clear, Fernández’s life is as wonderfully layered and complex as her art.

Bjarke Ingels communicates the value—and world-changing potential—of architecture with the giddy enthusiasm and excitement of a sci-fi obsessive anticipating the next big Hollywood blockbuster. This is an analogy that especially makes sense when one gets deep into conversation with Ingels, as Andrew Zuckerman recently did for this episode of Time Sensitive. At age 44, the Danish-born Ingels has become one of the most widely known and talked about practitioners in his field, reaching a level of fame and notoriety that most leading architects don’t see until they’re nearly twice his age. How did he do it? The answer lies largely in comics, or at least that’s where his success story starts. Dreaming of becoming an illustrator or cartoonist, Ingels found a path to architecture through art school. This background allowed him, over time, to shrewdly distill compelling narratives into everything his firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), does, whether a Copenhagen waste-to-energy plant that doubles as a ski mountain, a proposed floating city in the sea, or a Shenzhen skyscraper. On this episode, Ingels discusses his circuitous path to prominence; why he named his newborn Darwin; some of BIG’s latest undertakings, including The Dryline masterplan in New York; and why architects, developers, city planners, and others all need to take a longer view when it comes to creating our built environments.

Kate Young, the stylist for red carpet luminaries such as Selena Gomez, Margot Robbie, and Michelle Williams, has one of the shrewdest eyes in the business. Given her background—she comes from a family of competitive athletes and began her career at Vogue as an assistant to Anna Wintour, from whom she learned the ability to schedule periods of “utter focus”—this may not be so surprising. But she has carved her own distinctive path. Pairing fast and slow periods of time into her annual routines, Young believes in (and finds) balance. She achieves as much largely by moving between the bustle of New York City, where she lives and works during the week, and upstate New York, where she has a home and spends summers and weekends. Her style reflects this. In contrast to the attention-grabbing gowns and outfits she chooses for her clients’ public debuts, Young’s approach to what she wears is more “inward-facing” and functional—though she does confess an affinity for a particular Cartier bracelet and, at certain times, enjoys sporting a fancy pair of shoes. Beyond her standout styling work, she has designed a line of lingerie in Japan and, more recently, sunglasses for the brand Tura. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Young discusses her sports-filled youth in New Hope, Pennsylvania; studying English and art history at the University of Oxford; the realities of styling celebrities in the Instagram age; and the public misconception of luxury.

Jon Gray, the CEO of the Bronx-based food collective Ghetto Gastro, describes himself as a “dishwasher.” It’s a cheeky description, but there is a kind of truth to it. After all, his cohort at the firm includes chefs of very high caliber: Malcolm Livingston II (formerly of René Redzepi’s Noma in Copenhagen and, before that, Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50 in New York), Pierre Serrao (formerly of Cracco in Milan), and Lester Walker (formerly of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market in New York). Though Gray himself does cook, his role at Ghetto Gastro is not necessarily in the kitchen, at least certainly not primarily. The high-flying but still refreshingly down-to-earth smooth-talker is, instead, its marketing mastermind, linking the group up with the worlds of art, architecture, design, and fashion—worlds he’s deeply immersed himself in for more than a decade. Since its founding in 2012, Ghetto Gastro has grown into a cultural force, literally and figuratively cooking up projects that verge on performance art for clients including Apple, Bank of America, Cartier, and Instagram. In this episode of Time Sensitive, the 33-year-old Gray shares the story of how, in the face of a jail sentence at age 20, he turned his life around—and how, after a stint in fashion, he found a calling in combining food with art and design.

The actor Peter Sarsgaard cannot be pinned down. He may be best-known for his portrayal of John Lotter in 1999’s Boy’s Don’t Cry. Or as Charles Lane in the 2003’s Shattered Glass. Or perhaps for his roles in films like Garden State (2004), Green Lantern (2011), and Jackie (2016). Or maybe as the CIA chief in the 2018 Hulu miniseries The Looming Tower. Or it could be for his stage work, on Broadway and Off-Broadway, in plays such as The Seagull, Kingdom of Earth, and Burn This. For good reason, the 48-year-old is among the most talented, versatile, and unassuming actors working today. In large part, Sarsgaard’s prolific career and success stems from the fact that, beyond the screen and the stage, he has thoughtfully cultivated a rich array of interests in things far outside of acting: Running. Mandolin playing. Gardening and horticulture. Writing. On this episode of Time Sensitive, he speaks with Andrew Zuckerman about how each of these outside engagements continues to feed his life while also helping fuel his acting.

“Why make a podcast right now?” So begins this 10-minute introductory episode of Time Sensitive, a conversation between the show’s two co-hosts, Spencer Bailey and Andrew Zuckerman. Time Sensitive is the debut platform of the conscious entertainment media company The Slowdown, co-founded by Bailey, an editor and journalist who has written at length about architecture, art, culture, design, and technology, and Zuckerman, a filmmaker, photographer, and creative director whose work is largely concerned with the intersection of nature and technology. Consider this episode a “who we are, how we got here, where we’re going” primer. Each week, going forward, Time Sensitive will release an interview conducted respectively by Bailey or Zuckerman with a leading mind in business, the arts, and beyond who has made a profound impact in their field, contributed to the larger conversation, and is concerned with the planet we all share. Episode 1 [include URL to episode], with actor-marathoner-musician-writer-horticulturalist Peter Sarsgaard, is now live. In the weeks to come, you’ll hear lively conversations with Ghetto Gastro’s Jon Gray, fashion stylist Kate Young, architect Bjarke Ingels, artist Teresita Fernández, and more. The common thread between all of them? They’re curious and courageous—and each has a distinct perspective on time. Special thanks to drummer Billy Martin, who composed the Time Sensitive theme music; art director Omar Sosa, who collaborated on the design of the Time Sensitive site and identity; web developer Eric Bichan, who coded the site; and sound engineer Pat McCusker.