had done it to make “good TV.”
Why people act worse on reality than they would in reality, is a mystery. Other than avarice and desire for empty fame, the main reason I did TCA was to feel what it would feel like to be in that situation. I did it to see what made people act like that. Not everyone falls off a motorcycle without a helmet to become Gary Busey. Some people do it just because there are cameras around. When you’re in it, it seems like the producers must be making this shit happen, but I don’t think they were. I don’t think they have to do much to drive people like us crazy. We start with a leg up.
Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow introduced me to the idea of “ego depletion.” I read it after my tour of duty on The Celebrity Apprentice, and it explained some of the mysteries I experienced doing that show. Studies have shown that if you make someone very self- conscious about everything they do and say, their self-control just gets tired out. The ego can be exhausted. It’s the very trying to be one’s best on camera that puts one at one’s worst on camera. You just can’t keep it up that long. You want to be at your best, but pretty soon the internal censors are exhausted, take a break, and pretty soon sweet Arsenio is yelling things like, “I’ll tell you what a fucking bitch whore she is!”
The non-sexual question I’ve been asked the most since TCA is “Were those others just faking?” It’s a question I can’t answer. I know Lisa Lampanelli pretty well. She did our movie The Aristocrats and we’ve been out together socially. We’ve talked. I sat with her in a room while she was yelling at Dayana Mendoza (who had been Miss Universe). Lisa and others had problems with Dy (she let me call her that), but I had no problems with Lisa or Dy. I just didn’t like Clay having a heart-to-heart talk with me. Lisa was really yelling. She was really crying. It was really real. I felt it was sincere. I felt that Lisa was really frustrated and really upset. I sat there. When people are really upset, I sit there. You can find a few ex-girlfriends who will vouch for that and not as a good thing. While she was yelling, she yelled something like, “I’ve been putting up with this shit for eight weeks.” I don’t remember the exact number of weeks she said. But I do remember it was way, way more weeks than we had been there. And I remember it was the right number of weeks it was going to be when it aired. It was both of those things. The show is shot with about two days for every week. We shoot six days a week and during most weeks we do three tasks and each one of those tasks is a week of broadcast. The first task was three days and some of the broadcasts used more or less than one task, but… overall, the amount of time we were there was about a third of the amount of time that it took when broadcast. Lisa was really upset, but the amount of time she said she’d been disgusted with Dy was the amount of time the show would be on the air, not the real amount of time we’d been there. So, they could use that video and not violate the chronology of the show. Lisa wasn’t lying, she wasn’t faking, but she was aware she was on TV. We were all professionals, we were all aware of the camera, but we were also living our lives. It makes it very crazy. I spent a lot of time saying to Paul Sr., whom I love, “It’s not real.” But that’s not true. It’s also not TV. It’s really not TV. When I was having my heart-to-heart with Clay, the full endless horror of it was never broadcast. It was edited down to a minute. When I’m on Piers Morgan and he’s ripping me a new asshole, that’s TV, I know that every word he says is going out. But The Celebrity Apprentice is so long that you know the vast majority of stuff will never be seen, but cameras are still on; it could be seen. It’s Schrodinger’s showbiz: it’s all fake and it’s all real at the same time. The situation itself makes everyone crazy.
The production isn’t entirely blameless. There was a lot of alcohol available at any time it could be even slightly justified, but most of us never drank a drop, and even the drinkers were moderate. But the producers didn’t need anyone drunk; they got their telegenic outbursts from ego depletion. And after someone had an ego-depleted outburst, they’d reward the impropriety. In real reality, there would have been hell to pay for screaming epithets at people, but in TCA world, there are no repercussions. No one loves anyone on the set enough to say, “Hey listen, man, take a little break and think about this.” No one cares. We’re all trying to save our own sorry asses. Then the next day, Trump says something insane like, “I’m glad you showed some backbone. I like passion.” He means, of course, he likes passion for his little TV show, but it feels like he’s saying the outburst was a good thing. We’ve chosen to make this whackjob, with the cotton candy piss hair and the birther shit, into someone we want to please.
I made a deal with the producers and myself that I would pretend to care what Donald Trump thought of me. I believe, in the real world, that I care less about what Trump thinks of me than he cares what I think of him. When he was into his free-form rants in front of a captive audience, he would talk about articles written about him and defend himself against charges made, as far as I could tell, by random bloggers with a few hundred hits. Attacks that could have no impact on his life at all. It sounded like this cat was Googling himself, being bugged by what was written, and then defending himself to people who were trying to improve their careers by playing a TV game with him. He sat on this throne, and told us he’d made a good business decision by selling a house of his for much less than the asking price and these bloggers should know that. They should know he was a good businessman. The nightmare of Trump is not that he doesn’t care what people think; it’s that he desperately cares what people think and… he’s doing the best he can. I don’t know Donald Trump. We’ve crossed paths a few times, but I’ve never talked to him. He talked to me, but I was on a show where I wasn’t supposed to talk back. I still did, but only a little. I disagree with him about a lot, but you know, I disagree with you about a lot, and we still get along. He was wicked wrong about the birther shit, but I’m wicked wrong about a lot, and we both have stupid hair.
So, in order to sell more tickets to my Vegas show, I abandoned my family for weeks, was sequestered in a gaudy hotel, and pretended to care what Donald Trump thought of me. You can’t pretend to care about something for more than a day without starting to care about it. Pretending to care and caring over time are the same thing. So, Arsenio blows up, Trump singles him out and shakes his hand, I listen to Clay tell me how I should act, and that’s the new norm. Our egos are depleted and we’re still on camera. That poor Loud family. At least we knew what we were getting into.
I cracked in a different way. I never raised my voice, except in jest. I’m not a yeller. Yelling in my family was always a joke. Our family pouts. I will never see TCA. I don’t watch anything that I’m in and it’s not the kind of show I watch anyway, but I hope my pouting doesn’t look too bad on camera. If it does, I’m sorry, I’m a pouter. From what my wife says, the show depicts me fairly accurately. So there.
I suppose there’s a chance that some of you are reading this book because you saw me on The Celebrity Apprentice. Collectively, the people who have seen Penn & Teller’s Letterman and SNL appearances, bought my books, seen my movies and acting roles do not add up to the viewers of that one show.
So, thanks, Mr. Trump, and thanks, Clay. Doing the show was a great thing for me and, all things considered, I really like and respect you both.
I should have jumped out the fucking window.
Listening to: “Sweetheart Like You”—Bob Dylan (This REALLY explains all of Celeb App) 
Left to right: Michael Andretti, Dee Snider, Your Humble Reporter, George Takei, Paul Teutul Sr., and Lou Ferrigno. 
