Mortified creator Dave Nadelberg is the guy behind—yes—Mortified, a "cultural phenomenon" (per Newsweek) that consists of a live show in cities around the world (from Austin, LA and New York to Amsterdam, London and Guadalajara), two books, a TV show, a documentary and now a podcast. The Mortified concept, in short, is this: people take diary entries, letters and any other ephemera from their childhoods and read them on a stage (the books featured collections of some of them, the TV show had Nadelberg going through personal artifacts with celebrities, the documentary documented the entire project and the podcast consists of recordings of live shows accompanied by interviews with the performers). As the guy who created a project that gives adults a chance to connect with their old selves while taking the shame out of previous, potentially ludicrous, thoughts and feelings, Nadelberg is a thoughtful soul. Though he's not an addict, he's worked through his own share of issues over the years, all of which we get into here. In this episode, we discuss male sluttiness, why therapy doesn't need to take place in an office with a shrink and how sex is psychological, among other topics.
Vice writer and editor Mitchell Sunderland is what they mean when they talk about wunderkinds and also what they mean when they talk about human miracles. Okay, so the wunderkind fact: he's 23 and already the Managing Editor of Broadly, Vice's forthcoming women's interest channel. Now for the second part: he grew up in Florida which, according to him, is traumatic in itself. He comes from a family where his mother would fall asleep at the wheel while on Ambien. She also breastfed him until he was five. Then, last year, he discovered that the man he'd always thought was his father was not. So there's been some stuff to work through.
It wasn't all disastrous though; Sunderland's brilliance, humor and charm saw him through and he became the party throwing king of his high school, charging the jocks who'd once been mean to him $10 a head as an entrance fee. But things came to a head after he spent his junior year of college in England and Sunderland, inspired by previous podcast guest Alexis Neiers, ended up getting sober the day he was hired at Vice. In this episode, we talk about the ridiculousness of trying to get sober in England, why New York parties aren't as decadent as Florida ones and thinking people intervening on you are calling because they want to have a threesome, among other topics.
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or listen to it on Soundcloud or Stitcher. Find Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Vice. Mitchell Sunderland photo by Matthew Leifheight.