You know, I finished up Celebrity Apprentice.
I finished, I came home, I had a book on my reading list that was Daniel Kahneman's
Thinking Fast and Slow. I opened it up and started reading and realized I was reading
kind of two things at once: an explanation of what I'd gone through on Celebrity Apprentice
and the best magic book I ever read. I don't think Daniel Kahneman knew he was writing
a magic book. I don't think he knew he was writing about Celebrity Apprentice. But
he might have. When I was on Celebrity Apprentice, I would see people who I knew fairly well,
and I would see them acting in ways that I found wrong for their personalities, inappropriate;
I found embarrassing at times. And I couldn't figure out why. When you're outside
of the whole thing, you say, well they must be giving them a lot of alcohol which
alcohol's always available, but most people on my team didn't drink. So that didn't
work. So maybe you're telling people to act crazy because it would make better
TV. That wasn't happening either. No one ever talked to me about that. And then I read,
and this is not Kahneman's work, he was quoting someone else, he just kind of brought
it together for me. He talked about ego depletion, ego exhaustion. And it turns out that if you
just put cameras on someone, like you're doing to me here, and you ask them to talk,
they will speak a little clearer, a little better, a little more carefully than they
would if there were no cameras around. But that only works up to a point. And we
tend to think of, or I always tended to think of, I don't know about anybody else.
I always tended to think of some willpower as a character trait. My mom would talk
about, you know, Penn, you have to have willpower. With a lot of willpower you have
self-control. It was very, very important in my family, very important. And I thought
it was a character trait. This was something that maybe I'm born with some of it, but
I also want to develop. And the mind-blowing thing about Thinking Fast and Slow, reading
that book, was that it is not a character trait. It is not a quality. It's a muscle.
The ego, the sensor, the thoughtful part of us that controls us, the self-control, is
something that requires effort, and a lot of effort. And after you've used that for
a while, if they if you make someone very, very careful about what they say for
hours, they walk by a piece of chocolate cake and they're on a diet, they'll still
eat the chocolate cake. When I was on Celebrity Apprentice with the camera's on me all
the time and carefully watching my move, I did not make any attempt to eat healthy. Cheeseburger,
French fries every single lunch. I just don't have the energy to use my self-control that
way. And for me, when my ego breaks down, when self-control goes away, I actually get
very quiet. What I tend to do is shut up. And if you watch Celebrity Apprentice, as
the day goes on, I am less provocative. I am less confrontational. When I am well-rested
and working and full of self-control, I am very aggressive. It's what I do for a living.
When I get tired, I get quieter, I don't have conflicts with people. I have to push
to be an asshole. Other people who are very, very nice and whose images were very nice
I mean their public image is very pleasant and sweet, after these cameras were on
them, you know, for five, six hours, all of a sudden that, what I'm calling a muscle,
that self-control, would just be exhausted and they would just spew out anything that
was popping into their heads, really angry squabbling and yelling and pressure. And it
was a fascinating way to look at it. It had never crossed my mind that what was happening
was not some sort of mental illness but simply a kind of a lack of self-control caused simply
by this ego exhaustion, which is very different. I'm not saying that well, the way
I understood Kahneman's book or this section of the book is not that they were physically
tired or even mentally tired, but that self-control, that ego part, was tired. That part that says,
you will kind of want to do this, but you should probably do that. It was fascinating.
And the first thing I did when I read the Daniel Kahneman book was I bought copies
for all the producers on Celebrity Apprentice and sent it to them and said, "Oh, by the
way, this is what you're doing". And it's very funny that Kahneman talks about
all these studies that have been done where they've put people in a room with TV cameras
and had them do tasks to watch how they acted, and said, you know, they could have just saved
a lot of time. They could have just turned on the television. Almost every show is a
reality show, and they're all based on that technique, that kind of anti-Hawthorne
effect, that after you're watched for a little while you do better, and then it all
falls apart.