Eating Hot Dogs Like a Freak, with Stephen Dubner | Big Think

Eating Hot Dogs Like a Freak, with Stephen Dubner

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Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, on his latest book with Steven Levitt, Think Like a Freak.

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Stephen J. Dubner:

Stephen J. Dubner is an award-winning author, journalist, and radio and TV personality. He is best-known for writing, along with the economist Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics (2005) and SuperFreakonomics (2009), which have sold more than 5 million copies in 35 languages. Their latest books are When to Rob a Bank... and Think Like a Freak (2014).

Dubner is also the author of Turbulent Souls/Choosing My Religion (1998), Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper (2003), and the children's book The Boy With Two Belly Buttons(2007). His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Crime Writing, and others.

Freakonomics, published in April 2005, was an instant international best-seller and cultural phenomenon. It made numerous "books of the year" lists, a few "books of the decade" lists, and won a variety of awards, including the inaugural Quill Award, a BookSense Book of the Year Award, and a Visionary Award from the National Council on Economic Education. It was also named a Notable Book by the New York Times. SuperFreakonomics, published in 2009, was published to similar acclaim, and also became an international best-seller.

The Freakonomics enterprise also includes an award-winning blog, a high-profile documentary film, and a public-radio project called Freakonomics Radio, which Dubner hosts. He has also appeared widely on television, including a three-year stint on ABC News as a Freakonomics contributor. He also appeared on the reality show Beauty and the Geek. Alas, he played neither beauty nor geek.

Dubner's first book, Turbulent Souls, was also named a Notable Book, and was a finalist for the Koret National Jewish Book Award. It was republished in 2006 under a new title, Choosing My Religion, and is currently being developed as a film.

The eighth and last child of an upstate New York newspaperman, Dubner has been writing since he was a child. (His first published work appeared in Highlights magazine.) As an undergraduate at Appalachian State University, he started a rock band that was signed to Arista Records, which landed him in New York City. He ultimately quit playing music to earn an M.F.A. in writing at Columbia University, where he also taught in the English Department. He was an editor and writer at New York magazine and The New York Times before quitting to write books. He is happy he did so.

He lives in New York with his wife, the documentary photographer Ellen Binder, and their two delicious children.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Stephen Dubner: Whenever somebody does something so much better than everybody else, whether it’s a competitive thing or otherwise, it’s natural to ask well what do they do that’s so different? So we tell the story of Takeru Kobayashi who you may recognize his name as the best, maybe slightly disputed now, but a great hot dog eating champion. When he competed in his first Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Coney Island hot dog eating championship, the world record was 25 and one-eighth hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes.

And his first competition – and guys have been competing for many – 40 years or so. So, you know, it wasn’t an overnight thing. And his first contest eating hot dogs he didn’t just win and he didn’t just set a new world record, but he doubled the old record – 50 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes. So naturally you would ask how could he be so, so, so much better? Was he an anatomical freak or was there something in his methodology and his approach and in his strategy and so on. That’s what we set out to find out. We spent a lot of time talking to him about his approach. And it turns out what he did was he looked at the way all the past competitors were doing it, which is basically you have a pile of hot dogs and you pick one up two hands, eat it, and then fast as you can, dah, dah, dah, slub down some water, swallow, and then keep going as fast as you can.

He looked at it and he thought is that really the right way to solve that problem or to attack that challenge. And he thought maybe, but not necessarily. And so he decided to kind of break it down and try to experiment from top to bottom, and in Think Like a Freak we write a lot about the need for experimentation. Experimentation can give great feedback, great answers.

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