Behind the Bastards - George Shea: Hot Dog Villain

Episode Date: February 10, 2022

Jamie Loftus is joined by Robert Evans to discuss George Shea the founder of Major League Eating who popularized the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Chuchescu was the dictator of Romania. What? Yep. I'm Robert Evans. This is a podcast, Bad People. Sometimes I shout the name of a dictator. Well, I didn't want to just do Hitler again. It's my big day and you did that. I've opened a lot of episodes that just show my shouting Hitler. What? That's a good name. I know that. That's a good name. There's so many things that

you could have done that worth that. I mean, it was really going to be that or atonal screeching. I tried to go with the high effort version. All right. Fine. Fine. You know what? If it takes giving you a little pat on the head for that to get things moving. I always want to have a pat on the head. I know. I know. Yeah. Jamie. Yeah. Loftus. Yeah. Jloft. Jloftus. You're circling around a really popular nickname. I am. Jamie, today we're doing a special Reverso episode of Behind the Bastards where you join the rarefied air of people who get to read episodes to me because there's some other fucker called Joey Chestnut and he eats hot dogs and you're angry about him, right? That's basically the pitch. That's not the pitch at all. Well, I don't know what the pitch is.

There's a motherfucker named Joey Chestnut and I'm in love with him, but that has very little to do with what I'm going to be talking about today. So you've actually gotten the story 100% wrong. Joey Chestnut is someone that I love. Now, the bastard that we're talking about. Because you've been talking about Joey Chestnut for weeks and I still have no idea who he actually is. Did you just say weeks? First of all, I'm offended. This has been a year of my life. Yeah, but selfie weeks is all I ever remember back to. That's true. Okay, so Joey, okay. This is, we're off to a terrible start. Is it Joseph Chestnut if you're being formal? It's Joseph Chestnut if you're nasty. His dad's name. The best thing about Joey Chestnut is that

his dad's name is Merlin and that's just his different name. There's a motherfucker walking around named Merlin Chestnut. If you tell me his job is anything but foraging for mushrooms in the woods, I'm going to call you a liar. It's a close second. He's a public school music teacher, which I feel like fits Merlin Chestnut, the profile. Fucking Merlin Chestnut. Mr. Chestnut, my music teacher. So Joey Chestnut is not the bastard we're discussing today, although he is intimately involved in the events that I will be describing. Joey Chestnut is, for those of you who don't know, the hot dog eating champion. And just in general, I believe the eating champion of the world at this time. Most recently. He's like the Joe Frazier of putting a lot of things in his mouth and then

not puke it. Okay, that sounds a little dismissive of my husband's accomplishments, but go off. The, Joey, I saw Joseph this last year on, he competes. Of course he did. He competes in the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island on the 4th of July, every single year going back to 2007. He's won 14 times. He's lost once. I will tell you why. It's a very funny reason. But at this point, he's basically just competing with himself. He wins by a good 20 to 30 hot dogs every year. And so that's more hot dogs than a person should be able to eat right there. Just the margin he won by is too many hot dogs. Will you just toss out a number? How many hot dogs do you think I saw Joseph Elizabeth Chestnut eat

on the 4th of July in 10 minutes, 10 minutes this last year? I'm going to guess 60. It was 76. Jesus fucking Christ. It was 76, narrowly beating his former record of 75 on the previous year. Too many hot dogs. He is, well, okay, yes. But what left Joey Chestnut? We have strayed so far from God's light. First of all, that is my husband you're talking about. But I do see where you're coming from.

There is, there's so much to talk about when it comes to competitive eating. I can't possibly cover it all. So I'm narrowing it to American hot dog eating from the past 40 years. And the main bastard to discuss is a man named George Shea, closely matched by his younger brother, Richard Shea. So that is the topic. Dick, Dick Shea. Dick, Dick, Dick Shea. So that's the topic of today's episode. I've titled it George Shea Hot Dog Villain. I couldn't do better than that. I'm sure that that is a good title. That's probably what we'll just put out as the title of the episode. Now, in short, who he is, explain to me quickly.

When did we start doing this as a species? When did we start like having contests to see how many hot dogs a motherfucker could eat? It goes way, way, way back. There's so much, there's so much to discuss in terms of hot dogs in general, how they relate to American culture. And I'll just say right at the top, I'm writing a book about it, which is why I know so much about it. This is even deep in hot dog culture for a while now. Oh, I've been as deep in hot dog culture for the last eight months. So if you enjoy this episode, please buy my book that comes out next year. This is a very tiny part of it. It's a good question. There's no, like,

exact moment where eating contests became mainstream. They definitely, George Shea would have you believe they became popular at first in America, but they didn't. America very, very, very much ripped off the current competitive eating craze and kind of style and broadcasting tendencies from Japan, where it got very popular starting in the 90s. So it's gone, it goes back hundreds of years as does hot dog culture in general. I mean, sausages and ground up meat goes back to fucking BC. Yeah. Yes. But, but yeah, as far as formally broadcast eating events, they're, they're newer,

newer than sausage at least. And America very much ripped off Japan in terms of how we do it. That's not an uncommon story. So, all right. Okay. Okay. I'm ready. I'm ready to learn, Jamie. I'm ready to learn about this wonderful new subculture. I'm very excited to tell you about it. Please ask any questions at any time because it doesn't make sense. Yeah. I mean, my first question, which I would ask them is what, what, what, what about the poops? That's got to be a problem for these guys, right? They are very cagey about the poops, Robert. I've been trying to find that out as well. They're very cagey about the poops. What I can say is that there is, there's so much,

like any athletic event, which I do believe this is. There's a lot of showmanship involved. And so, for example, what Joey Chestnut will do after eating 76 hot dogs, which I have to repeat, he did. Yeah. That's a significant fraction of, of, of like a cow. Yeah. That's a good chunk. Yeah. Good chunk. And, and I, I was in the press pit for that event. And then at the end, Joey Chestnut, I can't tell if this is something he's made to do or something he does by, of his own volition, but he does not leave the stage right away. All the other hot dog eaters who lose the contest are allowed to leave presumably to throw up and shit. They will never admit to this, but I'm assuming that that's what they do.

Joey Chestnut does not leave the stage. He stays on the stage for upwards of an hour, right after eating 76 hot dogs, smiles and answers questions for the press. Yeah. So he's, he's said in interviews that he doesn't throw up piss and shit right away. I am bullshit. A little skeptical of these claims, but I, you know, it's his body and his choice. And I respect his bodily autonomy to hold in however much process meet he wants for as long as he physically can. And that is true love. Joey Chestnut's real girlfriend gave an incredible quote. Okay. I think like in the last couple of years where she was just like, Joey smells different after like his pores, but not even just like sweat, but like just like there's meat

of course it's radiating off of him. It's incredible. It's incredible. I mean, because he's holding an entire refrigerator worth of meat inside his body. I joke about being married to Joey Chestnut because I am, but I mean, God bless that woman. I don't, how do you, how? I don't know. Sounds, you have to have a number of plumbers on speed dial because you can't take somebody being busy, right? Like they've got to get out there right away if there's a problem. Look, Merlin's son gets the job done. We're talking about George Shea. George Shea, which we'll be getting very deep into is the MC and the kind of the person who made, who effectively publicized the Nathan's hot dog eating contest. And by extension, kind of hand

selected Joey Chestnut to be the face of that kind of endeavor. So here are some things that George Shea has said in capacity of the MC of the hot dog contest on stage. I'm just going to throw three out. He says this on stage on Coney Island, quote, while introducing a hot dog eating contestant, quote, his mother held him close and whispered in his ear. She said, you are of mind flesh, but you are not mine own. Fate is your father and you belong to the people. And then he'll bring out a hot dog eating contestant. Here's another one. He was buried alive under 60 cubic feet of popcorn and he ate his way out to survival. The David Blaine of the Bowel, the Evil Knievel of the Elementary Canal, the Houdini of Cuisine, please welcome Crazy Legs Conti. And then, of

course, an older man who is white and has dreads comes on stage and eats 40 hot dogs, right? Are you getting kind of decadence of what I'm... Here's another one. He will do whatever it takes to win. Three days ago, he broke up with his girlfriend and euthanized his dog to leave a void of emptiness inside of him so he can fill it today with hot dogs and buns. And then he brings out some other guy. And this has been going on for... George Shea has been doing this for 30 years. He has said a lot of things over the years. What a life. And it does take a turn, but he said a lot of things. It's taken a couple so far. Broke up with his girlfriend and euthanized his dog. George Shea has said a lot of things, some of them about what makes someone a champion,

some of them about what makes someone an American, and a lot of them about hot dogs, because that is what his job is. Most of what George Shea will tell you is complete bullshit, and he will be the first to tell you that. Here are two quotes from him that I think are the closest to the truth as he's ever told. The first is something he said to Mel magazine last year. He said, you could argue that people are so inured to everything that there's very little downside to causing controversy. The second thing he said was in 2019. In 2019, there was a 30 for 30 about this hot dog eating contest. And George Shea is very much the villain. He says this, a lot of what I say literally isn't true in terms of words, but emotionally, it is

true. And that is sort of the entire ethos of what George Shea does. Werner Herzog has said some similar things. I mean, is there an episode in the works? No, because he's a perfect man who lived the ideal human life. Well, George Shea, he simply hasn't. He's a very fucked up man. George Shea and his brother Richard Shea are a large part of why the Nathan's, Dickie Shea, are a large part of why the Nathan's famous hot dog eating contest is one of America's most disgusting traditions right up there with drone strikes. They're not the entire reason. Wouldn't be a bad place for a drone strike.

First of all, don't say that because I go there. Look, we're going to have to sacrifice some good people in order to deal with the problem. Please, me and Joey and Badlands Booker. Have you ever seen Badlands Booker or Matt Stoney? I'm talking about some of the greatest champions in our culture, Robert. Yeah, I have no idea who those people are because they do eating contests and that's not a thing most people know about. You're sick in the head. You're so lost. Okay. So, George and Dick Shea made this a very popular cultural thing in the US by channeling energy, excess, and showmanship. They are the founders of Major League Eating,

which was founded in 1997. And they are also the perpetrators of a bunch of deception, racism, and misogyny that exist in service of America's Great Dish, the hot dog. Now, Robert, we've discussed hot dogs before. And I am curious if you have updated, improved your views on the hot dog at all. Because last time we talked about it, you said octopus was a hot dog, which was just so commonly long. It is. And it's delicious. Great hot dog. I mean, it's an octopus on bread and I'm sure it's delicious, but it's not a hot dog. Hot dog to puss. I think hot dogs are defined by the fact that you can't possibly

limit them to a specific sort of meat. Anything on a hot dog bun is a hot dog. Well, that's a gorgeous assumption. I would say that it tends to be a meaty paste that can only be created under the least ethical circumstances possible. So, if we have the octopi in your hot dogs are dying in the most unsavory ways. I will guarantee they are. I mean, as a general rule, if we're getting it from the sea, we're destroying the ocean's ability to support life in order to do it. Well, no, I understand that. But I just have you ever seen video footage of a hot dog factory because it's it's unique. It's uniquely bad. Yeah. I mean, what I love, I will say,

I prefer hot dogs that are mixes of unspeakable nightmare meats. Of course, because I want when I'm eating a hot dog, I want to feel bad about myself. Well, you should. You should. And I have. And my life is really I've taken years off of my own life, not out of not out of eating hot dogs, which people will say they'll cite this study being like, oh, every hot dog you eat takes 36 minutes off of your life when it's like, well, serotonin adds to your life. So it's pretty much evens out. Yeah, absolutely. But the psychic guilt of eating this many hot dogs is what's removing time from my life. The Shea brothers create so they created major league eating into a marketable

sport in the US, drawing heavily from the sport's early success in Japan. So today, there's over 250 eaters who are registered with major league eating, and they've expanded to competing outside of hot dogs. They started with the Nathan's contest, but now they compete fucking everything. There are wings contest, there's pie eating contest. There's Joey Chestnut started with asparagus eating. That was that poor woman. That was his breakout moment, Robert. He ate asparagus in San Diego and ascended to a great man. There's calamari. There's ramen. There's everything. There's like hundreds of categories. And now Joey Chestnut's currently the face of major league eating. But it wasn't always that way. The Shea brothers grew up in

the 1960s. George Shea was born in 1964 or five in Boston. Richard Shea is four years younger. They grew up in Maine with no particular interest in sports or competitive eating whatsoever. Richard Shea describes them as being very introverted teens who did amateur magic and listened to the Smiths and REM together. Well, that does make sense because the state's board of Maine is slowly waiting for death. I was about to say, I mean, I think that as far as teenagers in Maine, that's not that bad. Amateur magic, there's a lot of worse ways to go. Yeah, you stare into the gray skyline and wait for your life to end. That's what all the kids get up to in Maine. I spent a lot of time in Maine as a kid and I never made a single friend.

No, nobody has friends in Maine. It's not allowed. Your only friend is the echoing emptiness of the woods. But I will say the streets are paved with signed Stephen King books. And I do love that. That part is nice. I do love that. So they grow up in Maine. George later enrolls in Columbia University in New York. He wants to be a fiction writer. This is a big part of the George Shea myth. He's a fucking dweeb. He's walking around, listening to the Smiths and REM on his little cassette player. He's a huge fan of James Joyce and Flannery O'Connor, who he claims to these to this day are his biggest writing influences when he's writing the introduction to hot dog contests, which are, to his credit, sometimes very literary. So he wants to be a

fiction writer, but he graduates in 1986 and has to get an adult job while he's working on a series of failed plays and novels that never get off the ground anywhere. But he starts living in New York and working for a series of pretty high profile ad men. And so the guy who gives him his big start and gets him into the Nathan's famous hot dog eating contest is this guy named Morty Matts, who is extremely fascinating in his own right. He also, it's like the most ad man name I've ever heard. So Morty Matts invented the Nathan's famous hot dog eating contest, although he denied this for years and years. Meanwhile, Dick Shea, who kind of fades in and out of this story, he went to Villanova and later kind of just he's kind of like writing George's coattails throughout

this experience, this whole story. Oh, no, Sophie's internet. We lost Sophie. Okay, cool. Well, everyone, back at home, we lost Sophie. We lost Sophie. You know, we're gonna go to ads now, might as well. Oh, yeah, do you want a product or a service, maybe? Yeah, let's go check out ads while we see if those fucking assholes at Spectrum can get Sophie back on the internet. Wow, Robert, that was very... First they dropped corn cob TV and then they dropped Sophie. Motherfuckers, they think we're a bunch of dumb hicks, Jamie. That was a very professional pivot. I loved every second of it. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way. It's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergey Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on

the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, my God, those ads were great. And what's even greater is that Sophie's back. The spectrum gods have taken all of my happiness. Yeah. And they still haven't brought back corn cob TV. They still haven't. And I have a bad feeling that they won't, even though I've really enjoyed the programming, including iconically cough and flop. Of course. Of course. I mean, one of the greatest shows on television or was. And they didn't rig shit. I don't care what people say. No, they didn't. I've been there. I've seen it. I wrote. Yeah. You know what? It was it's great television. We're talking about George Shea. Okay. George. So George Shea,

he graduates from Columbia in 1986, starts working for this ad man named Morty Matz. Morty Matz is an absolute legend in the field. He's still alive. I think he's like 97 years old. I'm going to just kind of skip down to what Morty Matz has done because his resume is just extremely wild. Morty Matz says when he takes over the Nathan's hot dog eating account and begins this contest, he gives a series of made up legends as to how long this contest has existed, all of which are lies. He first says that there has been a contest since 1916 when Nathan's opened. He says that four immigrants held a hot dog eating contest on the pier on the 4th of July to determine who was the most patriotic. That was a lie. He then pivoted to say that the contest

began in 1941 as a protest to World War One. And that was a lie. Wait, World War One in 1941? Sorry, World War Two. Okay. And then he... Okay. In 1941, if you're protesting World War Two, you're probably not someone you would want to associate your sport with either. Look, to be fair, he's lying. Yeah, of course, of course. And then Morty pivots this again and says in 1971 that it was begun as a protest to the Vietnam War. He makes up all of these weird lies. No, Jamie, what is your lioness to when lying is good or not? Because I have a thing that I've been doing for a while now where whenever I have a close friend or loved one, I tell them one lie. And it's always something very subtle. The first

example of this is I convinced the person I was with for a number of years, just as the result of a casual conversation once, that the band Hansen had died in a terrible bus crash. You told me this literally last week. Yeah. And like, I know. Well, I'm trying to say, what is the line? Because sometimes it can be fun to do that sort of stuff. And then someone brings up a lie. What is the lie you told me? And what is the lie you told Jamie? I never tell anyone what the lie I've told them is. I know the lie you... I know the lie Robert told me. He didn't tell me when someone was named Daddy. Oh, yeah. But that was for an altruistic reason. I had to say Christmas. What's the lie you told me? I never lied to you. I will never tell you. I never lied to you. That's great. The point is

that you should never trust anybody. And that's why everyone gets one lie. I trust you. I know. That's what makes it so dangerous. I want to know the lie. I only lie. It's the opposite of gaslighting. I want to know the lie. God damn it. I'm so sad. I don't think that these are bad lies. I think that these are very marketing-y lies. And Morty Matz, because he's still alive and he's literally almost 100 years old, he admits in 2010, it's too old and he's still working, which I'll get. He's currently working on rehabilitating the reputations of some mega church pastors. That's what he's working on in his twilight years, meaning he's 97. But he admits in 2010 that all of these origin stories are lies and that it was Morty Matz's idea in the early 70s to start holding

this contest to drum up some publicity for Nathan's hot dogs. Other things about Morty Matz that I would just like you to know is that he's almost 100. He fought in World War II. He's currently still the press agent for the Durst family, Robert Durst. He's been a busy man lately. He's at work. His career is equally fascinating to me. He is the reason George Shea exists. George Shea came up working for this guy who did, like George Shea, I think a combination of very funny and very evil things. Some things that are attributed to Morty Matz as sort of innovations for better or worse in American PR. He's said to have popularized the idea of a perp walk, so like marching a suspect into police headquarters for people to take pictures of.

I guess that that was something that he kind of innovated. You should not want people to know if that's the thing you helped invent. Well, that's the thing about these guys, though. They don't care. It's all about impressions. It doesn't matter what the impression is as long as it's getting attention. So he fully claims, whether it's true or not, that, yeah, I'm the guy who invented the perp walk. He worked with the New York mob in the 60s. He invented that big national debt. What do you say worked with the mob? I don't have any more information than that. That's just what he said. He's worked a lot. He, I think he self-described, gaudy adjacent mob is what was said. He invented the big

national debt clock that was, I don't know if it's still there, but it was in Times Square for a very long time. He invented that with the Durst family. He invented the current route of the New York City Marathon so that it would go through more areas and get more press. He's working with mega church pastors now and he created the Nathan's hot dog contest. He's done a lot of stuff and his legacy is very all over the place and I really am just like, should he still be alive? I don't know. Definitely not. I'm going to answer that one. I'm going to say maybe, you know, he should have hung up his little hat a long time ago. But all that to say, he creates this myth around Nathan's hot dog eating contest and already there's a lot of mythic qualities to the hot dog

or to the hot dog industry in general. It doesn't really fall under the purview of this story. You'll just have to buy my book next year to find out Robert. But it, I mean, it's very, very well known that like the meatpacking industry is a fucking disaster and that the hot dog isn't an American dish. It was brought here by German, Polish and Austrian immigrants as sausages and kind of innovated over time by independent carts. The real American quality to hot dogs is the industrial era and the most American thing about hot dogs is the worker and animal abuse that comes with their production. So like whether it's like, I mean, to this day, it's like, you know, you've got Upton Sinclair reporting on meatpacking in the jungle, right? And then you've also got as

recently as last year, there were those meatpacking scandals after Trump, you know, sent out that executive order to say that the meat factories must remain open. And so there were these huge coronavirus outbreaks at meatpacking industries. And there were like executives and managers taking bets on how many workers were going to get coronavirus because of this executive order and their own incompetence to protect their own workers. Like it's just an absolute, like the story of hot dogs is truly the stuff of nightmares. But George Shea's job is to make it very American and very appealing and very watchable, right? So George Shea starts working under this guy, Morty Matz, Mr. Perp Walk himself, Mr. Robert Durst's best friend in the 1980s. Okay. So

George Shea prior to this had been sort of like working his way up in this company. He was slowly, I feel like, I mean, it's we hear this story all the time, he was just slowly giving up on his dream of becoming an artist in pursuit of becoming a very evil person, you know? So much like Hitler, a friend of the pod, Hitler. And then the reverse Hitler, George W. Bush, like there's all these failed artists who end up doing the most fucked up thing you could think of. George Shea, fortunately, there's been like multiple people who are like, thank God George Shea only is interested in hot dogs, or he really could have done some damage because he's truly like, a very fucked up person. But in the 80s, he would do all these

sorts of things for Morty Matz. There was one account of him convincing an attractive woman to sit on an egg for two weeks and claim that she was trying to hatch it. That was some PR he did. What was that PR for? What was that sell? I don't know, Robert. I don't know. Oh, you've got to know who it was for, right? Was it like an egg selling company? What is this? My source there, and I wasn't interested in learning more, to be perfectly honest, my source there is it's in the 30 for 30 documentary where George Shea is showing the documentarian around his office and says, hey, this is one of my early successes. And he points to a newspaper clipping that I could not find online fucking anywhere of a woman sitting

on an egg saying, woman sits on an egg for two weeks. And he's like, this is one of my early successes. I'm assuming he was advertising eggs, but I don't know. Yeah, it must baffling. Okay, great. Okay, that's wonderful. I love this mystery. Listeners at home, find out what he was selling. Another thing he does is this is to promote Palisades Park. He puts an elephant on water skis. These are the things that he's doing to prove himself to Morty Maths, right? And it works. And Morty Maths, by the late 80s, early 90s, says, hey, I want to bring you in on the Nathan's hot dog eating account, you know, start coming to these contests that I've been holding since the 1970s. So this is the story that George Shea tells about how he came to take over this contest

beginning in 1990. Again, George Shea is saying it so it very well could be a lie, but this is what he says in 2021. He says that he first became more intimately interested in 1990 after noticing that a hot dog eating competitor was cheating during the contest. So he went up to his boss Morty Maths and said, hey, someone is cheating, we should do something about this. And then, quote, big Morty told me to go over and get a cop to arrest the guy, which I thought was crazy, unquote. But basically what this taught him was it doesn't matter who wins, it just matters how much attention it gets the company. And it's with this mentality that George Shea takes over the Nathan's hot dog eating account in 1990. The first one he runs is

in 1991. And by this time, Richard Shea was slowly starting to become involved as well. Some things that he did throughout the 90s before establishing major league eating and after, there was this huge scam he did where he wrote a scholarly article that he submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine called The Belt of Fat Theory. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard of this from the King of the Hill episode about competitive eating. Yes. So that was a real thing. He basically made up this complete bullshit lie, submitted it to the New England Journal of Medicine. And then upon being rejected, got a ton of press for saying, I can't believe the New England Journal of Medicine doesn't

think that the belt of that fat theory is any good to get more people to come to the contest. And it worked. It like it always works. That was fascinating. I mean, and also I think I kind of want to lie to the New England Journal of Medicine now too. Seems like a worthwhile thing. What's your lie of choice? I mean, you said one lie. Does that apply also to the New England Journal of Medicine, Robert? Yeah, I think I might try to get them to believe that Hanson died in a bus crash. I think that's a critical interest to them. The other major thing that he does before founding Major League Eating, the belt of fat thing came after. But before that, the critical innovation that he makes to this contest is that he invents a prize,

which there wasn't previously. There was just a winner and then it's over. There weren't champions. It wasn't viewed as a sport. People weren't supposed to be invested in a year round. It was just kind of a yearly stunt. Yeah, it sounded like a lot more reasonable than what it's become. Yeah, but George Shea decided, you know what? I think this is going to be a sport. So he invented something called the mustard belt, which he made with an old belt, a bunch of paint from an art store and rhinestones. He made it on the floor of his friend's apartment and just brought it to a contest in the 90s and said, this is a symbol that you're now competing for, which very, very quickly increased interest in competing. There's kind of the idea of this WWE style belt that you

could win for winning the contest. And I would say that the current Nathan's contest is equally built on Japanese competitive eating TV shows and the WWE because George Shea's wife is a writer for the WWE, which is also endlessly interesting to me. She produces soap operas and writes for the WWE. This is just like the most pageant style family of all time. Incredible, really? It's very fun. And it's also in the 90s that George Shea becomes the emcee of these events. So Robert, I made you look at a picture of this guy. Listeners, if you haven't seen a picture of him, I would Google the term George Shea hot dog. There's a bunch of George Shea's in the world. Robert, how did you describe this man? Can you describe him?

Roger Stone dressed as the riddler if the riddler came from the antebellum south. And that's also kind of the vibe of his performance as well. So his job of emcee, it's all energy. It's all very mythic overstatement. And his job is to basically bring on the most normal looking people in the entire world and make them sound like their WWE wrestlers, which he's been doing for 30 years now for better or worse, very effectively. But this is how George Shea describes what he does in 2021. He said, quote, a guy eating a bunch of hot dogs is one thing. But a guy in a straw hat pounding the tables like an apocalyptic preacher is such a contrast that it really drew people in, unquote.

So he developed this style of introducing competitors and attributing these very mythic qualities to him. So this is from the New Yorker in 2016. It says Matt Stoney represents youth. George Shea says, youth is feral and it is vicious. Joey Chestnut is a hero. George Shea says, he has God's username and password, which I think is awesome. I mean, some of them are pretty good. And Sonya Thomas, who calls herself the Black Widow, is a villain. George Shea says, she is the darkness driven ever westward by the rising sun. So it just looks very dramatic, performative style. So, okay, by the late 1990s, George and Dick Shea founded Major League Eating, which still exists to this day. Dick kind of stays

in the background, although later on, he will begin to work as a color commentator on ESPN when they start to broadcast them nationally. But we're not there yet. The 90s for the Shea's are very kind of scrappy. They are starting to start contests around the country. Nothing really bad has happened yet. They're just trying to get this made up sport that they invented to take off. And it's sort of working sort of not. But it does. And I'm not sure why, but it does feel like competitive eating is one of those things that couldn't really take off until we had 9-11 happen. I'm not sure why, but I think 9-11 was critical for competitive eating. You're almost right. You're almost right. Much like the movie

Shrek, competitive eating really takes off about two months before 9-11 happened. But it's very, very close. It takes off in... I think that this is actually... I think that Shrek came out in July 2001, maybe June. And competitive eating, Major League Eating really starts to take off in 2001 for a reason I'm about to tell you. But yeah, Major League Eating was a very scrappy, slowly, slowly building momentum throughout the 90s and early 2000s. They've got this big goofy logo that has Latin on it and the Latin translates to engorging truth. So it's just all ridiculous. So what they're missing, essentially, in getting this sport that they've invented to take off, is any sort of champion or person worth rooting for. That is very much what is missing.

And so they find their first major champion who becomes, I think, kind of a huge casualty of George Shea's villainous tendencies. And that is a Japanese eating champion, Takahiro Kobayashi. Do you know of Takahiro Kobayashi, Robert? He does not. Is he who they named the Kobayashi Maru for? I don't know. I think we're... I don't know what you're talking about. Okay, that's fine. That's fine. No, I don't need to explain things. Please continue. I very much know who Kobayashi is. So Kobayashi, he was a very, very popular figure in America for a span of like five to seven years. But he was a Japanese eating champion who first begins

to compete in America in 2001. And so he was invited by Major League Eating to come from Japan to compete in America at the Nathan Tata Gating Contest because there was already, you know, cultural infrastructure for competitive eating on TV and in pop culture in Japan. And so there were all of these kind of like low budget competitive shows that Kobayashi became a minor celebrity in because he was this very, I don't know, he was just really fun to watch. He was like 23 years old. He was really skinny. He had a six pack. He had like a signature move called the Kobayashi Wiggle. He was just like this like sexy heartthrob who girls loved and he could eat so much meat in one sitting. And that was his whole thing. But what kind of sent him

apart in terms of what impressed people about him in America was that he trained as if he were an athlete. Like he had an actual training regimen and stayed very lean and wasn't, you know, what Americans associated competitive eating with, which was just like people gorging themselves. Like there was strategy involved. So Kobayashi comes in 2001 and the Shays are very, they are always emphasizing his otherness since he gets to America. They're emphasizing, oh, look at this skinny kid. He says he can eat 50 hot dogs. What a liar. You know, all this stuff. But Kobayashi comes to America and in a single event on the 4th of July doubles the record for a number of hot dogs that you can eat in at that time 12 minutes.

So he eats 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes, does a lap, a full lap around the closest American and people lose their shit. And he immediately becomes this kind of huge viral in early 2000s terms figure in America. So the Shays are very quick to say, oh, we've got to keep this guy, you know, around. This is the most attention our competition has ever gotten. And they encourage Kobayashi to keep coming back, which he does because now he's becoming an American celebrity. There's access to money. He's in like a Mastercard commercial. He becomes, you know, a minor American celebrity now. And what is like interesting, and this is all laid out in the 30 for 30 documentary, which I would highly recommend called the good, the bad, the hungry,

is that from the very, very beginning, the Shays were always rooting for and against Kobayashi. They were saying, well, this guy can eat more hot dogs than anyone else. But what if an American could do that? And they were always kind of trying to stoke the very American tendency to dislike people who are not American. And so Kobayashi was not really hyper aware of this at the time, because he became an American celebrity so quickly that he thought he was going to be, you know, in New York for a weekend in 2001, not, you know, not in September, but he was just going to go, you know, to America for a couple of days. So he didn't speak English fluently. And he didn't really understand for a while how he was being talked about right in

front of him, even though I mean, there's a lot of footage of it. And it's pretty unsettling. And over time he starts to realize kind of what is going on. But he becomes a celebrity and he wins the contest in the US for the next six years. He wins every single year from 2001 to 2006. There's no real American competitor that can touch him. And the Shays kind of continue this process of building him up so that they can keep their operation, you know, popular, but also constantly saying, let's get an American in here. They were very, very much seeking out an American champion, which brings us to 2007, where Major League Eating's first viable rivalry comes out and the Shays are fucking all over it. And guess who comes into the picture at this point,

Robert? Guess who it is? It's Joseph Chestnut, baby. He is and he's exactly who they're looking for. He is a random white guy from San Diego whose dad's name is Merlin. He is like the champion that they're looking for. And so this is extremely bad news for Kobayashi, who at this point has a lot of American cultural clout. But the second that there's an American rival for him, the Shays are very, very clearly switching their allegiance. And they're doing this through promotional materials. They're doing this through the press. And all of a sudden, Kobayashi is being villainized in the press instead of lifted up as kind of the only hero of this sport. What is especially frustrating about that is that Joseph Chestnut only became a competitive eater because he was

a huge fan of Kobayashi. Like literally every current American eating champion started because they watched Kobayashi on TV when they were kids because he was this just huge figure. He could do things that no one else could do. He trained, you know, he was very artful in the way he ate. And so Joey says that he saw Kobayashi on a terrible Spike TV broadcast, which again, the Shays are getting all sorts of money off of this because they sign Kobayashi to major league eating. He's not allowed to work for anyone else. And they start to kind of like license his appearances out. So they're making a ton of money off of his success. And when Joey's a teenager, he sees Kobayashi on American TV, losing a hot dog eating contest to a grizzly bear.

What? This was on TV, Robert. He watched, there is on Spike TV, Kobayashi, I mean, the list of TV appearances he had. How was it legal to do that to a grizzly bear? That can't be good for them. Look, I don't know. I mean, it shouldn't be legal to do, to, to Carol Kobayashi. I mean, they, but it's, and it's interesting to listen to Kobayashi talk about his views on American culture and how that changed over time because he, I mean, it was just the Shays were very much escalating. The second there was interest in the sport, they were like, okay, Kobayashi can eat 50 hot dogs. Okay, what can we get him to do on TV? We're going to get him to compete against a grizzly bear. We're going to have him eat cow brains against a bunch of American

weirdos. Like they had him doing all of this stuff and he's in a contract that is mutually beneficial. Like he's making a lot of money, but he can only do what they say he can do, which becomes a big problem later on. But Joey seems kind of like it started as a big problem. I would argue everything you've described as a problem. It is. It's a huge problem and it's, and it's one of those things. It reminds me of the podcasting industry in that there's just no, that I have no notes and I'm so grateful that it exists. But there's no, there's no precedent for it. You know, like there, there was never a major league eating contract. People, you know, they're, they're marketing it as a sport, but people who are in sports don't think it's a sport. So it just kind of becomes this weird

novelty thing that if you are the person in power in making these contracts, and there's a significant language barrier between you and your champion, you can fuck someone over pretty heavily, which is what they do over time to take care of Kobayashi. So Joey, Joey sees Kobayashi lose to a grizzly bear and says, I want to be a grizzly bear baby. He said, all right, Merlin, get in the car. We're going to start eating asparagus. And that's what Joey does. I mean, Joey like is so inspired that he decides he wants to be an eating champion. And while he's in college in San Diego, he starts training with his mom and he wins a local asparagus eating contest. And slowly it becomes clear as he's competing in more and more, you know, increasingly prestigious eating events

that he might be an actual threat to Kobayashi. So when the Shays get wind of this, they see Joey Chestnut, who is really the most whatever guy, I mean, I love him dearly, but he's just some guy, right? And they, but he can eat a lot of hot dogs. And they're like, okay, this is the American champion that we want. Let's push this rivalry as much as we possibly can. And so by 2007, there is an established rivalry between Joey and Kobayashi. And they're pushing it. And at this point, beginning in 2003, off of Kobayashi's popularity in the US, ESPN begins broadcasting this event every year. It's been on ESPN every single year since 2003. They split it by gender in 2011, which I'll get to because there's no reason to do it. And it's fucked up. But they broadcast the

men's competition on ESPN. And they broadcast the women's competition on ESPN three. Because, well, you know, but anyways, as of 2007, all genders compete in the same contest. So the big three competitors in this contest that the Shays are pushing are Kobayashi, Joey Chestnut, and Sonia Black Widow-Thomas. And Joey beats Kobayashi. And this is a huge turning point in the sport, but only because it very much changes the way that the Shays approach marketing their now two champions. So Kobayashi doesn't quite understand this at first. He was at first, like, kind of excited to have someone to compete against because it was, I guess, kind of like, they had to keep pitting him against animals because no one could compete with him. But now,

all of a sudden, well, there's this guy he can actually compete with. And he was kind of excited about it, only to find that very, very quickly, the tide changed at the Shays, you know, encouragement to being as racist to Kobayashi as you could possibly be in service of Joey Chestnut becoming the American champion. So Joey wins in 07. And immediately, the crowd turns on Kobayashi and the Shays are encouraging it. They're saying all sorts of, I don't want to say what they were saying, it was very racist and immediate. And they're draped in American flags, shouting USA, USA to Joey Chestnut and kind of in it. Right. And it's like, in a single moment, you know, Joey is like changed from some guy from San Diego into a symbol that is very much not within his own

control. And the Shays are in control of that symbol. And so, you know, after 2007, Kobayashi is the other, the extremely other non-American enemy. And Joey is the American champion, right? That's great. Thoughts? Yeah, I mean, it's, it makes, it makes sense that like, they would abandon the guy who had made them all of this money as soon as there was a chance at having an American and and like use him cruelly, because it seems like that's exactly the kind of people they are. Yeah.

I don't know. It's, it's, it's wild that competitive eating sounds more or less exactly like the WWE. Yeah, for sure. There we go. But you know what isn't unethical to its workers? Oh, no. The podcasting industry. Uh-huh. For sure. And you know what that's supported by?

Oh, okay. I was like, where is this going? These, these products and services. Exactly. God bless. USA, USA. Yeah. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI, sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good, bad-ass way. It's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the

Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. And look, I lied a little bit. There's a lot of unethical stuff in the podcasting industry. For example, sometimes Sophie asks me to get up as early as 1130. Okay. That's, first of all, violence against Roberts. And I won't stand for it. Second of all, we just found out a few minutes ago that you are a liar. So

what is an example of a lie that you've told me? No. One lie. Everybody gets more. No. Was my lie the daddy thing or is it a different lie? No, no. That was for a utilitarian purpose. I had to do that for everyone's sake. You can't go categorizing your lies like that. That's bullshit. I, it's called categorizing and I do it all the time. Does my lie have anything to do with Anderson? I can't say so. I think I know what it is and I'm furious. I can't say. Wow. What? Okay. Do I want to know?

Everyone gets one. I'm furious. Everyone, including the listeners of this show, you know, everybody gets one. One lie. You know, it's the lie. Robert loves 100% of you. I've never said that. That's the lie. I know, but that's the lie. He loves you all. He loves about 40% of them statistically speaking. That, that made me too much. But that's the lie. That's the lie. Okay. So. Curious. It's 2007, you guys. Joey is the champion now and everyone is, the tide is very much turned

on Kobayashi and George Shea, being himself, being his straw hat villain, is very upfront about what he was trying to do here. He says this in the 30 for 30 documentary in 2019. He says, I have always used pro-American rhetoric and the belt is a national prize from the day the belt was made. Reminder, the belt was made by him in a living room out of cardboard. He says, quote, you think I want Kobayashi to win six years in a row necessarily? If he wins, he wins, but that's not great for the narrative. You need to understand that there's an American hero and you can be a hero in the same exact way,

but you can't be an American hero because you weren't American, unquote. So that, he's very, very clear. Okay. He's like, hello, I am racist about my weird cardboard belt that I made. And this is where, I mean, it genuinely, like it's, it's difficult to watch and learn about because this, like for some time, I mean, he's fine now, but like this like really destroyed Kobayashi's life for some time where, you know, he describes being completely shocked and scared at how the American public very rapidly

turned on him once Joey Chestnut became the champion. He said, quote, I didn't understand American culture, so it scared me. And George Shea, you know, this guy who is contracting him and is in complete control of his finances is going on live television and mocking him to his face, you know, after, immediately after Kobayashi loses, George Shea gets on stage in his little outfit and says, the dark days of the last six years are behind us of his own champion and, you know, raises Joey Chestnut's fist in the air. And Joey's role in this is insidious and passive where in all of the interviews,

Joey's very aware of what's going on. He knows that he's being, you know, raised as this champion and he knows that Kobayashi's being mistreated, but he doesn't stand to benefit from saying anything. And so he doesn't. And it's clear in kind of clips that you can find that the Shea brothers and George in particular are very much trying to control Joey Chestnut's behavior. You can see in a series of promotional clips that they'll ask Joey a simple question of like, well, how does it feel to beat Kobayashi, you know, and Joey is, he's a simple man, you know, he'll, he'll say things like, like, it felt good, you know, like, and then, you know, George Shea will be off camera offering him

mythic punch up to, to what Joey said, to make it sound meaner and to make it sound more, you know, jingoistic and all of this stuff. There's this incredibly fucked up clip where George Shea, I mean, he's, he's filming a promotional clip talking about the day that Joey Chestnut defeated Kobayashi. And he says in this very, I don't know, he's like, you know, the bullshit is at 11. And he says, after that event, I went back to my room and I wept. I silently wept because something was lost. We had a hero and our hero was no longer invulnerable. And I wept. And then there you are. These people are eating too much food. Like, stop it. Stop taking it so seriously. Stop being like this. Well, he's lying though, because it's like right after, you know, he says,

and I wept, there's a pause. He thinks the camera is cut. And then he starts laughing because he's making it all up. He's doing it to humiliate Kobayashi and elevate Joey Chestnut because he doesn't give a shit. And he just wants people to watch the fucking broadcast. Like he does it. It is like a level of I'm certain that he's a jingoistic racist person. But there is there's like a level of lawlessness here that really uniquely unsettles me where it's like it's kind of hard to know what he thinks about anything, because he'll just say whatever he needs to say to get attention. Like it's it his views could be anything. It's I don't love it. So after this, Kobayashi becomes understandably frustrated with Major League eating.

He loses his mother, which also kind of makes him want to be closer to home. He doesn't want to be in the US so much anymore. He's also being actively mistreated by people in the US. People are like cornering him on the streets of New York and screaming USA in his face. And he's saying like, I felt unwelcome. I was shocked. They used to cheer for me. And I started to feel like I wasn't welcome in America anymore. So he wants out, you know, he's he's not being treated well in this contract. There's been this WWE style heel turn that he is not consented to. And people are treating him like shit. And so he competes against Joey for a couple more years. It's on and off. I believe I mean, Joey is edging him out most of the time. I do believe that Kobayashi wins against him at

least once in that stretch of years. But by 2010, he's done. And Kobayashi tells George Shea, I'm not competing in the competition this year. I'm done. And this was partially because George Shea would not release him from his contract because all of major league eating was so dependent on this rivalry specifically. He didn't want to let Kobayashi out. He just wanted to keep calling him a piece of shit on live television and saying racist things and having that be how Kobayashi made his living. So he says, I'm not going to do it anymore. And at the 2010 contest, there is a big dramatic event where Kobayashi refuses to compete but does go to the contest wearing a t-shirt that says free Kobe and basically starts this chant in the crowd among Kobayashi supporters. And this

is all an ESPN. You can watch the whole thing. Joey is in the middle of competing against no real viable competitor at this time except for the Black Widow. And Kobayashi is in the crowd wearing a free Kobe shirt. I really want a free Kobe shirt. I think our listeners can find that for you. There's somebody here listening who is deep into eater culture and is going to be now yelling at me that eaters are what you call people who are part of the weird fetish community and not appropriate as a term for these athletes. And they're very angry right now. They're shrieking at me through their headphones in the middle of a Trader Joe's. I hope I'm getting this right to whoever that listener is because it's a lot to

take in. What's fun about stuff like this, Jamie, is no matter how much research you do, you were wrong in a specific enough way that somebody is literally shitting on the floor of a Trader Joe's having a stroke in fury because you've gotten a fact wrong about Kobayashi's early practicing career. Some shit. It's going to be great for this. It's going to be great. Insight into your life. My listeners are very nice. Okay. He's wearing a shirt that says free Kobe. He starts a chant saying let him eat, let him eat. And Kobayashi is like, I mean, he is a showman at heart. He can eat a lot of fucking hot dogs, but he's, again, no offense to my husband, Joey, but he's got the showman personality and the technique that Joey Chestnut

has never had. Joey Chestnut's an awkward guy who could eat 76 hot dogs. That's basically what he can do. Kobayashi has like an air about him. He's very exciting to watch. And so what he does is storm the stage after the contest ends saying, I want to shake Joey's hand. That's all he says. What George Shea identifies is an opportunity that goes back to him being at that 1990 contest saying it doesn't matter what the right thing to do is have him arrested and people will watch that. And so George Shea, it is said, there's no proof that George Shea ordered this, but it stands to reason. George Shea tells security, arrest Kobayashi on live television. And that's what happened. He was dragged off the stage, he was slammed into the, and he was arrested on live

television. What the fuck? Yeah, the champion. Why couldn't people just watch fucking other dudes eat too much? Like, why does all of this nonsense have to happen? It wouldn't be on ESPN if it was just guys eating. I mean, it is absurd, like how far they're willing to go. And it is also absurd how effective it is because this was a huge story. Like when Kobayashi was arrested at the contest that he had won six previous times, at the contest that he had popularized in the first place, and they fucking arrested him. Like it was just, it was, it's, I'm very deep into this, but it is very compelling footage to watch. And again, George Shea, years later, is very upfront about what he was trying to do. He says this last year, he says,

when Kobayashi stormed the stage, it was phenomenal, unfortunate in so many ways, but phenomenal for press. That's how it grew and grew. It was always about the free media. This year, we had something like 40 billion consumer impressions, just a massive number and huge value. And so again, it's just, he doesn't care. Like it's whatever the thing is that's going to get attention is the thing he will do. And in this moment, it was arrest Kobayashi, which is, you know, it, yeah, how do you feel about that? I, I think they've overcomplicated watching people kill their hearts through processed meat. And I'm, I'm livid, Jamie. I'm the angriest I've ever been.

Good, good. I was hoping that this story would get you there because it is a very, it's so, I mean, and it's so like, specifically American in the ways that it's infuriating, because it's all just like weird PR and eating things that are bad for you. Like it's all so ridiculous. It's already, it was never going to be a good thing because it's, it's bad to eat 76 hot dogs. Like it's not a good thing to do for a number of reasons. Be careful. Be careful. But, but, but they've just made it so unpleasant for no reason. And I am, I'm livid. Do you understand now, though, why people say that it's good that George Shea only applies this skill of evil to hot dogs? Because imagine this somewhere else. It was.

Yes, I am glad that he stayed out of politics. I guess people like him are going to do damage somewhere and maybe siloing off them to the competitive eating community is better than some things. But I mean, the main person who screwed here is Kobayashi, who I just, I love Kobe, free Kobe. He's devastated by this happening, obviously. He says, I thought the US was a place where people would be recognized as an American hero because of their achievements. And I thought that where you came from and what race you are had nothing to do with it. And Joey Chestnut said in response to this entire event, maybe I lack a little empathy because Joey Chestnut, I mean, this he's not the bastard on the chopping block here, but he,

he, you know, he doesn't say anything. He doesn't say anything in Kobayashi's defense in spite of the fact that Kobayashi is the only reason that he's even doing what he's doing. He very much goes with the flow with the Shea brothers every single time. So, okay. So that's kind of the extent of the men's contest to this day. I mean, ever since Kobayashi left the sport, Joey has lost one time. And I will tell you why now it's very funny. After Kobayashi's gone, Joey Chestnut, like to this day is the face of the company. The Shea's love him. He plays ball with fucking whatever he makes, you know, like two to $300,000 a year, competitive eating. He's got a vanity mustard line. He loses once in 2015. And it is very funny.

In 2014, he proposed to his then girlfriend on stage immediately before eating 70 hot dogs. She says yes. It's all, we're all like, woohoo, you know, and George Shea facilitates the proposal. It's all very weird and corporate. 2015, Joey Chestnut shows up to the event and you find out through a series of very funny ESPN color commentary that the wedding was called off. And she dumped him. It's not clear. Good for you. Good for you, honey. She was, she was said to have been his trainer. You got to wash that man right out of your hair. And Joey is so upset that he was dumped that he loses to my other hot dog eating crush, Matt Stoney, who's a very popular YouTuber who's objectively just a very good looking person.

But he loses to Matt Stoney in 2015. And then does that thing that scary people do sometimes, that he was so upset that he lost to Matt Stoney, you know, the competitor associated with youth, that he spends the next year getting absurdly good at eating hot dogs and then comes back the next year and has been undefeated since. And he has a new girlfriend now, which I'm assuming he balance, you know, he balances in his marriage with me. She says he smells like too much meat, but they seem to love each other. I don't know. I ordered some of his mustard. It's not my business. Quick word. Why are you enabling this is what I is what I want to know because you may be kind of bastard here yourself. Why are you enabling this horrible industry? Why am I enabling the

hot dog industry? Well, no, not the hot dog industry, the competitive eating industry. I'm fine with the hot dog industry. Well, there's there's so much about the competitive into the eating industry I haven't gotten to cover here because it doesn't pertain to George Shea. For example, so many people in the hot dog eating community are fucking each other. It's fascinating. I mean, you would have to you would have to just fuck other hot dog people because the meat smell is going to be a problem for anyone else. Robert, literally, so I went to the contest this year. The current women's champion could not compete because she was eight months pregnant with another hot dog eaters baby. Like it this shit goes deep.

It is a fascinating subculture and I can't let it go. They're just ordinary folks doing the worst thing they can think of for not even a lot of money. One of the worst things I can think of doing yourself is this entire sport. It takes a lot for me to be like, well, I guess football doesn't sound so bad anymore. A little bit of CTE here and there. I still think I mean, if you watch clips, which I know you're not going to, Kobayashi really not. It peaked with the Kobayashi chestnut competitions, like take the Shays out of it. Their competitions were very exciting when they were pure and it was just like two guys trying to see who can eat the most meat. It's very fun to watch their techniques are very different.

They're whatever. Okay, I have to tell you one more thing about George Shea and it pertains to how he doesn't like women either. There is a champion who is a woman for some time in this same era of Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut. Her name is Sonia Thomas. She's really cool. She also came into the sport after seeing Kobayashi on TV. She's a naturalized U.S. citizen. She came from South Korea. She managed a Burger King at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and was like, I can eat a lot of Burger King. Let me see if I can eat a lot of hot dogs. She got really fucking good at eating a lot of hot dogs and she was consistently the second and third place in an all-genders competition for years.

But in 2011, the Shays decided that they wanted to separate the contest by gender. There was no reason given for why this was other than just misogyny because every other competitive eating contest in the country at that time was not separated by gender because there was no reason to do that. Yeah, why would you ever think that's necessary? Stomachs is stomachs. Sonia Thomas had this real run in the mid-2000s of she was beating Joey Chestnut all the time and she was beating Kobayashi. She's kind of erased from the main narrative but she was a huge competitor who was just very fun and she loved the Backstreet Boys and the Carpenters and she worked at Burger King. America is not ready for a woman who can eat a

lot of hot dogs. We're 20 years away from being able to accept that fully. Clearly not because it was like all the press around her was very misogynist. Like in every piece written about her, it was written about like she had an eating disorder as if every hot dog competitive. Yeah, literally the entire sport is an eating disorder, people. Like all of them have one. Yeah, it is a professional eating disorder. If you are eating 76 hot dogs, that is an eating disorder. I mean, she's still around. She stopped competing after a while but she's, I mean, she is very petite. The first time she won, she weighed 99 pounds and ate 37 hot dogs. Like she's very petite. That is a significant amount of her body weight in hot dogs consumed.

I think it's more impressive that she can do that than Joey or Kobayashi can do fucking anything but whatever. Like so beginning in 2011, the Shays decide actually we, and this is after Kobayashi's departure from the sport, we want to separate men and women. They give no reason and they immediately move the women's competition to ESPN3 where no one will ever see it. They changed the belt from a mustard belt to like this pink pussy shaped thing and they cut the prize money by 75% of that if you are a woman who can eat the most hot dogs, which Sonia Thomas always was, you would only get $2,500 as opposed to the $10,000 you get if you win the main contest on ESPN. The Shays put a lot of pressure on Sonia Thomas to endorse this

decision and sort of posited as a good thing and she made the point at the time saying, you know, maybe this will be good. Maybe more women will get involved in the sport. This is fine. I don't feel the need to ask for more money. But it blows up in her face, you know, the women's contest to this day is still broadcast on ESPN3. The amount of money is I mean, there's still a lot of disparity in terms of Joey Chestnut makes a hell of a lot more money than the current women's champion, Mickey Pseudo, who was pregnant with, I can't emphasize it enough, another hot dog eater's baby. And they still give women a pink Pepto-Bismol belt instead of the mustard belt. And this year, Bill de Blasio gave the women's belt away. So it was insulted,

really horrible all around. So that is the story of George Shea. He is still emceeing the contest to this day. He's still uplifting Joey Chestnut as the one true champion. Fortunately, with time, there are, you know, competitive eaters that are now less financially dependent on the Shea brothers specifically than they were when Kobayashi was kind of at his peak in the US because internet. So there are competitors like Badlands Booker and Matt Stoney, who have millions and millions of subscribers on YouTube and TikTok. And there are more ways to be able to eat or chug a lot of food and make money from it that are not inherently connected to these two fucking weirdos. But for the most part, they still have the market very much cornered.

It's here that I will include. George Shea recently joined Cameo. If you, Robert, describe Cameo because you describe Cameo to me. It's where people who are technically famous get paid what are actually kind of embarrassingly small amounts of money in order to make random videos for strangers on the internet. All right. Well, for me, it was not an embarrassingly small amount of money because I pay. So I've been withholding this fact, but I wrote a whole show about being Joey Chestnut's fictional wife. I've been workshopping it here. It's called Mrs. Joseph Chestnut America USA. It's all about my tortured marriage to Joey Chestnut. And so for this show, I wanted to get a Cameo from

George Shea encouraging Joey Chestnut to break up with me was the point of this. I paid 120 US American dollars for this, Robert. And he sent me whatever this is. Okay. Sophie, can we watch it? 120 dollars is good for Joey Chestnut. It's very funny when someone like Rudy Giuliani is in there and making videos for 150 bucks because it's like, you, you shouldn't be that cheap, Rudy Giuliani. Like, Robert's gonna, it's not a good video. And the thing is, even though it makes no sense,

there's no option on Cameo to respond to someone and say, Hey, that's not what I asked for. That's not what Cameo's for. You don't, you don't get to Cameo to have an equal relationship with these people, Jamie. Here's what he's said. You ready, Robert? Ladies and gentlemen of America, citizens of the world, we now address Joey, a man of incredible strength, a warrior king who stands with a land meets the horizon, steadfast and unshakable upon whose shoulders God has arranged the flesh of an archangel, a man of immense wisdom who, while he is faced by abundant challenges, will stand on the ramparts of victory overlooking a sea of truth because he will never stop and he will never stand down and he will never submit

and he will never surrender until his bones are cracked and splintered and scraped like chalk on pavement until the very dome of heaven collapses and the black avalanche of space pours down around us. He will fight on. Why? Because the rock on which he stands is not a rock. It is the United States of America. And now it is go time. It is go time time. It is go, no, go, lock and load, love him and leave him smoking if he doesn't see you want to see a sea on either side. Time, time. It's condition red. All hands on deck, batten down the hatches, belly up to the bar, do it to it, feel the burn, fire in the hole, hold the phone, go big or go home. Game on, game day, game face, never say, never, never say, die, never give up, put up a

shut up, shape up a ship out, show me the money, make my day, good night, Irene, wake me when it's over, it's go time. Onward from Jamie. Do you like the end? I like it at the end where he goes, from Jamie. It's a real person. First off, I'm not happy that you gave this person $120. I'm really not. I don't feel good about it. I'm so mad. You should not feel good about it. I don't feel good about it. That was worth every penny. No, it wasn't. It was bad. I feel, I really thought that I was, look, I've used cameos in my shows before. I used a Heidi Montag cameo in my last show to great effect. For a bossamist girl, I remember it was wonderful. To great effect. Yeah. George Shea, what was that that we just heard? We just heard someone

have a meltdown. Yeah, I mean, it's, I guess, an element of it's, it's competent showmanship, but also it's the kind of showmanship you have when your sport is incredibly boring and you feel like you have to throw a bunch of nonsense in there because all it actually is is watching people eat fucking hot dogs. Okay. First of all, again, I feel the need to say, watch your fucking mouth. Yeah. This is going to be a lot of, there's going to be a lot of people messaging me after this, being like, Robert, I love your show, but I also have been a fan of competitive eating for years and I need you to know why you're wrong. And I'm just going to let you know now, not going to read those emails, people. I do feel like there is significant crossover between

your audience and people that like competitive eating. And that's not an insult because I am that audience. I, the thing is, it's, I, I do believe that it is a sport and I believe that it is a sport that is run by two fucking weirdos that shouldn't be in charge of the sport. And I believe that Joey Chestnut is a complicit, you know, he's, he's half complicit and half trapped and free Kobe is how I feel. I want to share one more quote from George Shea. And then I'm going to absolutely die. Yeah. So again, this boils down to one man and his younger brothers desire to, you know, just create a bunch of bullshit where it doesn't need to be and have it be extremely successful. So last year, George Shea says in an interview to Mel magazine, he

says this, humans can't understand something without a narrative. So we'll make one up in the absence. And that's a very powerful thing. And ultimately, I think that's what he does. He creates a narrative where one doesn't need to be to get people excited and upset. And he's very good at it. And he'll weaponize the worst of people in order to do it. And that's the story of George Shea. Well, I hated this, Jamie. I, it actually feels great to hear you say that. I feel like that means I did an okay job. Yeah, you did a wonderful job. I, I, I don't like these people and I don't like what they're doing. They're bad. I maybe you shouldn't have food. Maybe that's not a thing we get to have anymore. You know, what's cool though, is that um, Kobe

still competes, but he can be, he competes in a different area of New York against nobody. He just eats a ton of hot dogs with his like friends and community just and he regularly just quietly has an eating disorder. No, no, he didn't know it's community. It's exciting. Like it's community eating. He didn't, the, the, the exciting that you are giving the negative twist to that story. I'm going to give the, the positive twist to watch him eat. No, it's a community. No, it's just like a community event that he and his wife put together of like, it's a, it's free food for everyone who shows up and then Kobe eats a ton of hot dogs because that's what he's famous for. And that's what he's really, really good at. And so I thought it was very

that's fine. Cool to see him, you know, like they didn't, they didn't make him quit. He still does it and now he does it for himself. I'm happy for him. They didn't take away the thing he loved the most. I would, I would eating a lot of meat. Yeah. I mean, I, I do think, yeah, people have, people have the right to, I want to eat a lot of meat. I just find all of this deeply off-putting, Jamie. Free Kobe. I'm glad that Kobe's doing better though. Not a fan of Joey Chestnuts though. Look, Joey Chestnut is, you know, yeah, look. Also Joey Chestnut absolutely has the name of a character in, and I think you should leave sketch. It is, and that is just his name. And then the further you go up the family tree, the scarier the names get. Merlin Chestnut. Come on.

There's, if you want to see something really fucked up, which I know you don't, but the videos of Joey Chestnut, because there's like no protocol for how you should train to eat 76 hot dogs. So Joey Chestnut's just doing like free form jazz on how you would prepare for something like this. And there's these horrifying video clips of him, um, gas, like he does sit-ups, but he does sit-ups where he's gulping air. Like he's trying, and then he chews on a little plastic ball for 20 minutes a day to get his jaw all limber. And like, he just, he does all these, I mean, I guess it works. But to what end? He's, I do think that ultimately Joey Chestnut is not an ethically good person. But on the other hand, I think he is being

forced to kill himself for our entertainment. And I think that that is very sad in, in its own way. I, I guess, yeah, yeah, that's sad. All of this is bad. That said, I will be there at the 2022 contest and I might actually train and see if I could maybe get on stage in the women's contest. Cause I think you only have to eat like 11 hot dogs in 10 minutes. I could do that. Yeah, I could do that too. Um, well, there you go. But no, no, I don't, I don't support this, but I hope you survive eating all those hot dogs. Oh, you're no fun. I, I, I, I couldn't be less supportive of this for you, Jamie. Maybe that's the one, maybe that's the one lie he's telling you, Jamie, we don't know. That's, yeah, you're, I got to eat. Um, when I was leaving

the contest, they, they put like a plate of a pyramid of 200 hot dogs in front of Joey just again, for the showmanship of it all, he only ate 76. And so for the rest of the 125, they just give them out to the audience. And so I got to eat one of Joey's leftovers and it did feel really special. Well, I don't like that. I don't like that at all. I'm not, I'm not going to say I'm happy for you, but I'm glad you had an experience that you require just wasn't happy for me because I thought it was very fun to eat Joey's soggy little leftover felt good. I said, Oh, in the middle of a pandemic felt safe. Yeah. I mean, I wasn't going to bring that part up, but yep. Yep. Well, Jamie, you got any pluggables? If you possibly want to interact with me after what you just heard. Um, yeah, you

can, uh, you can go on, uh, Twitter or Instagram, you can find me there. Um, uh, Jamie left his help on Twitter, Jamie cry superstar on Instagram and just set a reminder in your phone for a year from today saying, Hey, did I pre-order Jamie's book raw dog that comes out in April 2023? I sure hope I did. And then you can buy that book that will come out next year that I'm currently, um, absolutely torturing myself, uh, trying to, uh, complete. So I hope you read it when it comes out. It's about, um, this, I mean, truly this George Shea stuff takes up a couple of pages. There's just so much about hot dogs and their history. Um, and, uh, and there's just a lot. So I hope you read it. Check out raw dog. Incredible title. Very excited for that. I really pushed

for raw dog. And I love it. I'm satisfied with the outcome. Uh, and you can listen to any of my podcasts. Uh, my year in mental Lolita podcast, Bechtel cast or AC cast about the Kathy comics. Follow your heart. Thanks for letting me do this, Robert. I had a lot of fun putting this together. Thank you for telling me this. See, doesn't it feel exciting to be on the other side and you feel absolutely deflated and like dying at the end? I feel great. Yeah. I'm just going to sit alone in a dark room for the rest of tonight. Yeah. What do you think I do every fucking time I'm on this show? Yeah, that's fair. This is, this is very, I mean, Carmen, I may have to go just prop open one of my old Hitler books to cheer myself back up. There you go. A little bit of

vitamin H. Robert, speaking of books, they can pre-order your book after the revolution. Yeah. Google AK Press after the revolution and you can pre-order my book. And if you pre-order it, it comes with a special signed book plate in it, which is a nice little art sticker thing inside the book that has my signature on it. So pre-order it, AK Press after the revolution. Uh, please buy my novel. It'll be out in May. You can have it in hard cover. I'm still working on the sequel. I just finished chapter four and started chapter five, so it's humming right along. Will you sign mine? Absolutely. If you order a pre-order it, you'll get a signed one. Oh, fuck you. And we got a behind the bastards live stream show on

February 16th, 17th. One of those dates. It's momenthouse.com slash pie in the bastards. Yep. Wee. That's it. All right. Over. Much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you

get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.