Last night's The Apprentice: LA saw the ending of the on-air Tim/Nicole romance.  Tim Urban was fired, but his time with Nicole did not end when he walked out of that boardroom.  As you can read in the below interview, Tim and Nicole are still together, nine months later.  Tim was kind enough to stop by and speak with us at BuddyTV earlier today.

Both the transcript of the interview, as well as the audio, can be found below.


How did you find yourself on The Apprentice?  Was it something you had always wanted to do?

Tim: You know, its funny.  I don’t know what other people's motives are, but mine definitely was not “I want this job, this is my career path, I need to work for Trump,” at all.  Mine was that I’m a big fan of the show.  I’m kind of addicted to the show and I was watching season 5 episode 1 and across the bottom of the screen it scrolled come to “Universal City for open casting call” so I thought “Hmm. Well, what the hell?  Why not?  It sounds kinda fun.” So, I went and one thing led to another and suddenly I’m on the show.  You know, once I was there for me it was more kind of this fun...really fun, crazy game that I was about to be playing for a month that would happen to be on national TV.


We've got to talk about it...but you were involved in the biggest subplot of the season, with you and Nicole.  Looking back at it, do you regret even getting into it?

No, I don’t actually.  Given, you know, if this hadn’t turned into much I would have just kind of looked back and been like “Why did I do that?” but the fact is what you're still debating is ten months later and um, its um, its great so I would never regret that.  That’s certainly not something that I would ever want to go back and not do.


Do you think it affected your job performance at all, do you think you could have gone further in the show?

No, I think...this is why I was so adamant about this whole thing, it would never ever affect me on a task or never affect her on a task.  For one, we’re both too competitive.  During tasks, we’re just in task mode, obsessed with winning, that’s all we’re thinking about.  bBoth of us, and everyone on that show, and there’s no reason I would go half ass because of her, that’s just ridiculous.  On the other hand, it certainly affected the outcome for me, I think that, that is in the end what led to my firing.  So, I’m not sure that’s exactly how I wanted it to happen but that’s how it is. 


Watching it from home,the whole editing of the situation, do you think they over-played it to make it look a lot bigger than it was or was it pretty true to life?

I think they over played it a little because of course this is, that’s good TV in their mind.  It was pretty dramatic, everything you saw was pretty much real, I was definitely pretty shaken up about it in the last episode, two episodes ago or whatever it was when it happened. That is kind of how it happened, how the team kind of said “Ooh, this is the way we can all be saved because we can all get rid of Tim like this”.  And now we’re saved and it was a real alliance they formed to protect themselves because it's easy to get rid of me now.  That’s pretty much what happened, pretty accurate I think.


For anyone who reads The Sports Guy on ESPN.com, Tim’s been mentioned a few times, mostly in a good way, until last week where he threatened to disown you.

I read that, I’m a huge Sports Guy reader and he actually sent me an email that morning and he was like, “I’m teasing you today.  I'm warning you,” and I opened the article and was like “Oh God”.  Yeah, he said I was disgracing the Sports Guy readers by falling for this girl in the middle of the process and how I should go and make out with Trump’s secretary to get her back, which I didn’t, unfortunately. It's funs, it's valid criticism, I definitely brought it on myself but I look at it and I think he and I will still be on decent terms hopefully at the end of this he won’t quite disown me.  Maybe. 


I guess the fact that you two are still together sort of puts the whole thing in a different light, doesn’t it? 

Yeah, I think because 90% of these things are fake and are forced.  The fact is I really had a serious thing for this girl, I just did and I think that was me, I think she came around later and I think it's actually, towards the end, what you're seeing right now, I don’t think she really thought that we were or anything was going to happen after.  But that’s not really how it ended at all or anything.  By the end of this whole thing we were really tight and this real relationship and this fully real thing.  We took a trip together right after this to kind of get away from everything and have some time and since then it's been a really good thing.  That’s why, for one thing, I’m not going to look back on this and have these huge regrets because of that and two, if people want to criticize me, they can criticize me but its only to a point because this was really a good thing.


Is it weird watching these episodes, then?  Do you watch them together at all?

Its funny, we only watched one together, because she lives in Chicago and watches it with her whole family and all her, you know, her brother owns a bar and bunch of friends at this bar sitting in this bar that her brother runs.  I watch it with a bunch of friends in LA, so we both kind of like watching with these people.  So, it's tough, but we watched one together.  It's kind of funny.  Imagine you get in a fight with your girlfriend and you're all angry about it and whatever and its over, and then nine months later you get in that fight again because you're watching it again.  So she and I are in these hilarious passive aggressive fights all week where we’re talking and we’re laughing and happy about the whole thing and then I’ll throw in something like “Oh yeah, I wouldn’t have gotten fired if it wasn’t for you,” and she’ll be like, “You brought this on yourself,” and then we’ll laugh and it's awkward and we move on.  But you know we’re taking it lightly, its like 8 months ago or 9 months ago; you can’t really hold grudges from that, it’s a little silly.


Last night's boardroom got kind of intense at points, especially between you and Frank.  I know there’s always way more boardroom footage than we actually get to see, was there anything that you wished the audience could have seen from them?

You know, I got to say that I got a pretty fair edit in that board room.  I was worried.  You know when you get fired, you don’t always get your side of the story told.  Sometimes they very actively take it out on purpose so it makes it look like Trump made the right decision.  And, so the audience is pleased.  Like Surya and Marissa and Martin and other people who I feel like they just told one side of the story.  And I was worried, I was really worried because I was saying, “I know that I was really great player on that team and I know that it didn’t happen like they said and I was worried that they were going to just show it the other way.”  And show me being useless.  But they didn’t and so I can’t really complain, there was one thing that kind of came up that I think is the truth and I kind of, its too bad that it didn’t make it, which is that Trump at one point, kind of said to James and Steph “Aren’t you guys getting rid of the stronger player?” and I think that’s what they were trying to do.  I think they thought of me as a bigger threat to win the whole thing than Frank was.  You know I do think that was the case, and, that said, I do feel like the people watching would kind of be able to figure that out themselves so I don’t have any real complaints about the edit, I really don’t.


You want to tell us what you have planned for the future?

Music is my thing.  It's kind of another reason that it was a game to me more than anything.  I wanted to win but it wasn’t about the job because music is my thing.  I want a career in music and I write music and that’s what I’ve always done.  In the last year I was lucky enough to get connected with this great producer Glenn Ballard who has done a bunch of big stuff.  Alanis Morisette, Dave Matthews and stuff like that.  You know, I was just happy to meet him and he had me play the piano for him.  He liked it and he said “Let's do a record together.” 

So, that could not have been more exciting thing for me.  He’s just so cool, he brought me in, had me play for like 3 hours, he said, “ Just play the piano, play it and don’t worry about it.”  And then we listened to the whole thing together and picked out little pieces that we liked and he said “We’re not doing songs.  These don’t sound like songs, songs have this rigid structure to them, this sounds like just good piano music. Let's just record it for what it is and not force it into this structure of a chorus, verse, chorus of a song.”  So, we did and then Glenn did a great job producing because that’s what he does and he’s the best at it.  So it came out well and I think it couldn’t have been a more fun thing.  So I’m hoping to really get that album to people and get people listening to it and show an interest in it, and hopefully keep going from there.  Its on iTunes, you can just search for Tim Urban.  It's also on my website, timurban.com; you can buy it either way.  So, people who are interested, you can check it out. 

(Interview Conducted By Oscar Dahl)