 Can you believe that this guy beat the world record for a hot dog eating? No? I can't blame you. I had a hard time believing it myself too. But there's actually an amazing story of how he was able to pull it off using not his muscles but his brain. If you are interested to learn how he did it, stay tuned for this practical critical thinkers episode. The guy you saw in the video is Takeru Kobayashi, who later became known as Kobe. You may be guessing that maybe he was eating loads of food all his life and that it's just his metabolism that makes him skinny. Apparently he did have a good appetite but that's not where his real strength lies in. Our story actually begins with not an abundance of food but the opposite. In autumn of 2000, Kobe and his girlfriend had such a shortage of money that they were forced to use a candle in the evenings for light as they were unable to pay the electricity bill. One day Kobe's girlfriend, without telling him, decided to enroll him in a televised food eating contest where the winner would receive five thousand dollars. Kobe was smart enough to understand that he wouldn't be able to beat his competition by sheer eating power alone. Instead he came to a conclusion that his only chance to win was to outthink his competition. At the time he was a student of economy in Yokaiji University where he learned about game theory. That came in handy. He started breaking down the rules of the contest and learned that it had four stages. Each stage consisted of a different type of food and only top finishers from each stage advanced to the next one. Kobe then went on to study previous events and he noticed that most competitors went so hard in the early rounds that even if they did advance they were too exhausted and stuffed to do well in the finals. His strategy was to conserve energy and stomach capacity by eating just enough at each stage to qualify for the next one. It wasn't exactly rocket science but then his competitors weren't rocket scientists either. His strategy worked out and he brought back five thousand dollars alongside electricity back to his home. While there were more eating contests in Japan, Kobe had ambition to go all the way to the pro level right away. He set his eyes on the super bowl of competitive eating, Nathan's famous fourth of july international hot dog eating contest. The rules were simple. A contestant ate as many hot dogs and buns, HDB officially, as he could in 12 minutes. Condiments were allowed but no serious competitors would bother. Beverages were also allowed. Any kind in any quantity. In 2001 when Kobe decided to enter the Connie Island Contest, the record stood at a mind boggling 25 and 1 eighth HDB in 12 minutes. In his very first Connie Island Contest, Kobe smoked the field and set a new world record. How many hot dogs and buns would you guess he ate? The record, remember, was 25 and 1 eighth. A sensible guess might be 27 or even 28 HDB, but he ate 50. Yes, you heard that right. 50. That's more than four hot dogs and buns per minute for 12 minutes straight. The slender 23 year old Kobe had essentially doubled the world record. Kobayashi then won Connie Island again the following year and the next four years too, pushing the record to 53 and 3 fourths HDB. No past champion had won more than three times, much less six in a row. Initially his dominance at Connie Island was perplexing. Some rivals thought he was cheating. They thought that maybe he took a muscle relaxant or some other foreign substance to quell the gag reflex. He was also rumored to have swallowed stones to expand his stomach. There were even ideas that Kobayashi represented a Japanese government plot to humiliate Americans at a contest held on Independence Day, and the Japanese doctors had surgically implanted a second stomach in Kobe. Yet none of these charges seemed to be true. So why was Takero Kobayashi so much better than anyone else? Turns out he trained for his first Connie Island competition for months in isolation in a one long bout of experimentation and feedback. Kobayashi had observed that most Connie Island eaters used a similar strategy, which was not really much of a strategy at all. It was essentially a sped-up version of how the average person eats a hotdog at a backyard barbecue. Pick it up, cram the dog and bun into the mouth, chew from end to end, and glug some water to wash it down. Kobe wondered if perhaps there was a better way. There was nowhere written in the rules that the hotdog must be eaten end to end. His first experiment was simple. What would happen if he broke the dog and bun in half before eating? This, he found, afforded more options for chewing and loading, and it also let his hands do some of the work that would otherwise occupy his mouth. This manure would come to be known as the Solomon method, after the biblical king Solomon, who settled a maternity dispute by threatening to slice a baby into two pieces. He then questioned another conventional practice, eating the dog and bun together. It wasn't surprising that everyone did it. The dog is nested so comfortably in the bun, and eating it this way is what makes the experience pleasant. But Kobayashi wasn't eating for pleasure. Chewing dog and bun together, he discovered created a density conflict. The dog slash sausage is a compressed tube of dense, salty meat that can practically slide down the gullet on its own. The bun, while airy and less substantial, takes up a lot of space and requires a lot of chewing. Having realized this, Kobe started removing the dog from the bun. Now he could feed himself a handful of bunless dogs broken in half by pretty much swallowing them and then following with the buns. He was like a one-man factory. As easily as he was able to swallow the hot dogs, the bun was still a problem. So Kobayashi tried something different. As he was feeding himself the bunless, broken hot dogs with one hand, he used the other hand to dunk the bun into his water cup. Then he'd squeeze out most of the excess water and smush the bun into his mouth. This might seem counter-intuitive, but the bun dunking provided a hidden benefit. Eating soggy buns meant Kobayashi grew less thirsty along the way, which meant less time wasted on drinking. He experimented with water temperature and found that warm water was best, as it relaxed his chewing muscles. He also spiked the water with vegetable oil, which seemed to help swallowing. His experimentation was endless. He videotaped his training sessions and recorded all his data in a spreadsheet, hunting for inefficiencies and lost milliseconds. He experimented with pace and he found out that getting a lot of sleep was especially important. He was also weight training. As it turns out, strong muscles aided in eating and helped resist the urge to throw up. He also discovered that he could make more room in his stomach by jumping and wriggling as he ate, a strange dance that became known as the Kobayashi shake. Just as important as the tactics he adopted were those he rejected. Unlike other competitive eaters, he never trained at an all-you-can-eat restaurant. He also found that drinking gallons of water could expand his stomach, but the end result was disastrous. He would apparently then would start having a sort of a seizure, which obviously was not a desirable result. You may still think that maybe Kobe's success was simply due to an anatomical, freak, once-in-a-lifetime coincidence. But the best evidence against this argument is that his competition began to catch up with him. After six years of domination at Connie Island, Kobayashi was overtaken by the American eater Joey Jaws Chestnut, who went on to win numerous Connie Island contests later on. Some of Kobe's other rivals also started copying his methods and their results improved significantly too. This story is well detailed in a book called Think Like a Freak, where the authors explored what lessons we can learn from it. The first is about problem solving generally. Kobayashi redefined the problem he was trying to solve. What question were his competitors asking? It was essentially, how do I eat more hot dogs? Kobayashi asked a different question, how do I make hot dogs easier to eat? This question led him to experiment and gather the feedback that changed the game. Only by redefining the problem was he able to discover a