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For the second edition of the series “Interviews with Non-Evil People,” I talked with David Nadelberg, writer, multi-time podcast and TV producer, and the founder of the long-running, international, hit live show Mortified and its associated podcast from PRX.

We talked about the value of spite, projects falling apart, failure, bad bosses, and more.

Context: We’ve been friends for a decade after connecting on Twitter in 2015 over the weirdly confessional nature of condom reviews on Amazon (which I imagine I was reading aspirationally albeit anxiously as my greatest fears at the time included getting pregnant but also gaining weight if I went on birth control to prevent getting pregnant). Last week, he was actually just taking me out for a birthday coffee but I decided to turn it into an interview because we were there and why not. We went to Emma’s Torch, a cafe in Brooklyn that provides culinary training and job opportunities to refugees and then walked around for a while. (That was the place he picked. Not getting paid to promote them. But it’s very nice and you should go!)

For transparency: This interview has been massively condensed and edited for clarity. It also just kind of abruptly starts. The thing to know about interviewing professional storytellers is that while they’re great at carrying narratives and can entertain you for days, they are also really hard to interrupt with questions so the order of our conversation had to be reconfigured so it wasn’t one giant monologue leading to a series of questions. Although that would still have been a fun read.

About future guests: Right now, I’m doing the thing that all podcast hosts do at the beginning of their series where they interview their friends. I hope to slowly gain fame and notoriety so I can get bigger names but not so much fame and notoriety that people say I’m selling out and merely a pit stop on a celebrity’s promotional tour.

One of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately is spite and whether spite is a useful tool for anything. 

So I have two different examples of how spite played into my career. Example one: when I was in my late twenties, I sold a reality show to VH1 called True Hollywood Asshole about my abusive ex-boss that he amazingly agreed to star in. I had worked with him as an unpaid intern during college and then later as his assistant where I was parking his car for him. 

When he read the pitch, before he knew I had written it, all he said was: "Wow, this pitch is really vitriolic," which is the first time I ever heard the word vitriolic, and I've never forgotten it since. When he found out I was the one who wrote it, he was like, "wow, I always knew you'd have some kind of success," and asked what I had been doing. I told him that I was an entertainment journalist and I was writing for this startup’s website, reviewing movies and doing press junkets and puff-piece celebrity interviews. And he goes, "that's not an entertainment journalist." And I had such low self-esteem that I agreed. He was like, "no, an entertainment journalist is someone who's writing about deals and all that." So I believed him. I believed the narrative he told me. 

What happened with the show?

We shot a pilot and it turned into a really terrible, toxic production. What a shock, because the star of the show was a toxic human being. It doesn’t get picked up. That's all good news for me, as far as I'm concerned. 

I guess the best way to describe it is there was something sinister atmospherically. And I had been warned, "Don't do this TV show. Don't do something with negative intentions. Don't spend your time with revenge."

And I learned from that thing. I got what I wanted. I got my asshole. But I was seeking out something that was energetically negative and poisonous. And I was warned. I didn't listen to the warning.

So how can spite be a positive thing? 

In my late twenties, I was selling TV shows left and right and I was like, "oh, my God, my life has happened. This is gonna be my future." And all of them, in a short time period went poof. They all got canceled, and rather than me seeing that as success at a young age, I just saw the failure part of it. 

When trying to figure out what was next, I remembered there was this idea in my back pocket for years. I'd found this love letter that I wrote in high school and I wanted to do a night of unsent love letters as a comedy event because I had a lot of stand-up comedy friends. At some point along the way, I realized it should be old diaries and other ephemera from people's childhoods and I decided it was gonna be called Mortified. I was gonna rent a stage and charge enough to break even. And even if it didn’t, I just wanted to have one night where I was the green light. Whatever was good about the show was my responsibility, and whatever's bad about my show was also my responsibility. But I would know that whatever was bad about it, whatever was poorly executed in this show, would have come from a good place.

And how did it go?

It went from a thing that I thought would be one night of my life to something that took over my life. It then became a TV pilot for Comedy Central. When it didn’t get picked up, the agent who was involved in the deal told me to walk away. He said “Let everybody forget about it for six months or maybe a year, and then come back to it. Because people in this town see this as a failed pilot." And I hung up the phone, and I got really angry. I was like, "Nobody sees it as a failed pilot. No one knows about it. Not even people in the industry know about it, so fuck you, dude." So I called a venue and told them that I had a show that typically sold out and I wanted to have a residency on their best night and promised it would sell out. And for whatever reason, they believed me and I was there five or six years. And we only left that venue because we got bigger. 

Mortified would've ended after the pilot happened if I believed that its only purpose was to be a TV show. But it wasn’t. It was a thing that brought people joy and I earned my money back on the rental of venues and saw that I could just keep doing this. 

So are proving someone wrong and doing something because you don't like someone both examples of spite?

In the case of Mortified, that sort of healthy spite motivated me.

My first byline for The Hairpin was because someone else that I had interned with at the time wrote something for The Hairpin and I was like, "Fuck her. I'm gonna get in The Hairpin," and then I did. So that was spite, but it wasn't me out to get her in any way.

You actually had no vested interest in harming her career. You just wanted to be competitive and be at least as good as she was.

And then I've had other spite where it's like I'm seeking vengeance, and that doesn't get anywhere. 

Right, where you want to destroy something.

Is that the difference?

In the case of True Hollywood Asshole, I don't know that I was trying to destroy him. I just knew he was entertaining to laugh at. And he was arrogant enough that I knew he’d love it. 

So maybe it’s the difference between making someone you don’t like into content versus making your own unrelated content because you don't like someone.

Yeah, it's a good question 'cause was the concept of True Hollywood Asshole a bad idea from moment one, regardless of "don't work with this guy?” It's hard for me to separate that. 

I do think it's gross, this culture of like, "Oh, he's such a pain in the ass, but, like, what a character!"

Do you think we are over, at least in creative industries, this idea that at some point, you're so good that you're allowed to be an asshole? Or are we getting to the point where we've seen that magnified on a global scale and are now prioritizing niceness?

In his heyday, Simon Cowell, and I see this certainly in the Trump era a lot with people, the thing was like, "look, I may not always be polite, but I'm speaking my mind. I'm a real straight shooter. I tell it like it is. I'm a no-bullshit person."

And everybody on a dating app, by the way, says the same thing about themselves. "I'm not into games. I'm a straight shooter." Everyone believes this narrative about themselves.

And believes that that is a good quality.

It's a quality we all value. But it's a fucking lie, it's a complete fallacy, especially in the case of people like Donald Trump, Simon Cowell, or name your outspoken person. When Simon Cowell would see someone and be like, "I'm sorry, but you're the worst performer I've ever seen in my entire life," unless he's constantly hearing someone who's the worst performer, unless that bar just keeps amazingly getting moved, he's fucking lying. That is performative cruelty. 

How much of that was just for entertainment value?

I just think there's this culture of people who believe that just because you're being brash means you're being honest and that is not true. 

I mean, if we're talking about social media, that’s what gets engagement. There's a really good Edward R. Murrow quote that I had as my high school yearbook quote in senior year, which is "Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you're any wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.” [Obviously, I spelled “wiser” as “weiser.” no regrets]

It’s admirable that somebody is not controlled by others, but there's also something to be said for considering others.

I think with people like that also, they are so confident that you don't believe yourself anymore. Like, the gut instinct to be like, "This person's wrong," just shuts off, 'cause you're like, "Well, they're loud, they're confident. Clearly, they know better."

When I was younger, I believed myself to be small, and so whenever somebody else who had more authority than me would say, "well, this is how we're gonna do it," I would back down because I assumed that if they’ve been doing it for all these years, they must know better. And I didn’t want to be seen as bossy or problematic.

But it's better to be bold and have an opinion and lean into your idea because if you don't stand up for your idea, your idea will be mush. And then you'll be stuck with mush. And maybe mush will get picked up and go to air, and you'll have a success, but then you are still standing behind mush. You're selling slush, but it's not as good as ice cream.

How do you prevent yourself from selling slush?

There’s this thing that I call “producing defensively” as opposed to producing on the offense, which is to say, when you produce defensively, you're leading with your fears of what you don't want the thing to be. And so everything is being driven by a protective instinct rather than with strength and excitement and trust. You should have some amount of defense, but you should never lead with it.

[start of Dave’s non sequitur] That lady who just passed us had this very nice smile on her face. I think she's listening to a podcast, but she just seemed like she was from the 1700s. Something about her face seemed very 1700s, but then she's wearing modern clothes, so the whole thing just seems silly. Like: I know you're a time traveler. You can't fool me. [end of Dave’s non sequitur]

You and I are in this weird, interesting position where we created a thing that was successful, but somehow the skills and experience don’t really transfer into anything else. Now you can't find work, despite the fact that you created a live show that’s run for over two decades plus an associated podcast and Netflix show. What does that feel like?

It feels like a failure. I see this ex-boss keep scaling upwards. I feel bad all the time. It's really not having a good impact on my romantic relationship. I don't feel like a man. I don't feel like a provider. It's fucked with my head.

For several months, I wasn't seeing any friends. I’d feel embarrassed when someone's like, 'What's going on?' And what they meant is career-wise 'cause I don't have children to update them on. And so I’d just feel embarrassed. 

I have parlayed Mortified into other things. Like, I have sold shows that are not branded with Mortified. I've sold projects. I've gotten other gigs, but none of them became successful enough where they led to other jobs. Even the ones that were good and many of them were really good. 

That's what I talk about all the time with people. You grow up hearing that you will have something that leads to something else, that leads to something else, that leads to something else, and your career will go upwards. But I feel like with every project, it just ends there.

I really do believe if you keep opening doors you can walk through, you got to keep going. But at some point, you get tired, and you also get bitter and that's where I'm at. 

I’m trying to figure out how to end this interview on a hopeful note.

I’m changing chapters. But everyone that I know is changing chapters. Many of them are becoming therapists. Everyone’s changing chapters including the industries themselves. 

[we walk past a hair salon]

I should get my hair cut.

[note to reader: two days later, he got his haircut.]

You can reach Dave at DavidNadelberg.com or find him on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/davenadelberg/