Since The Donald keeps intoning that millions of people are vying for the “coveted” position as his apprentice, I did the math and figured there should be about 1 for every 300 Americans who supposedly tried out for his show. Or, if you allow for the rest of the world, 1 million out of 6 billion equals a 1 in 6000 chance of randomly meeting someone in the world who tried out for his show.
Since the SDMB community is a fairly sizable population, we can empirically verify the veracity of Trump’s statement: has anyone here ever tried to become his apprentice?? Does anyone here know anyone who tried to become the apprentice?
This may be a large sample, but it’s also a self-selected group. You’ll almost definitely get a higher sample of Jeopardy-hopefuls here than the main population, and you’ll probably get a lower than average number of people who wanted to be on Big Brother.
I haven’t tried to become the apprentice, but I did meet the producers of The Apprentice: LA. They came into my restaurant and were watching one of the episodes that hadn’t aired yet on their laptop. I kept bringing them diet Pepsis, and even though their bill only came to about $15, they left me a $20 tip and one of them gave me his card (it was because I told him I was a writer working on a new sitcom, which I am, but I haven’t finished it yet. Of course, they are all raving about reality shows right now).
No, but I did end up chatting a little with one of the contestants from this season once I found out that she and I went to the same college and she’s from the town I’m in right now. She was actually very nice and said that the editing was, more or less, even-handed overall even though they occasionally edited the show to create incompetence where there was little or none.
I actually have a co-worker who applied to be on the first season. I don’t think it went any further than him sending in the application – I never heard that he had any kind of audition.
Most of the contenstants for The Apprentice seem to be MBA / real estate sales / lawyer / PR firm types - a group that is underrepresented on the SDMB.