It wasn't like I grew up wanting to be a competitive eater at all. Not like a lot of people, like football players, famous people - they knew that that's what they wanted to do when they were young.

I think the traveling is what drew me into 'The Amazing Race' years ago.

I think Peter King... he's kind of narrow-minded.

When I'm eating I try to make sure I can breathe through my nose the entire time. If I have to breathe through my mouth, there's no way I'm eating or swallowing.

I'm really normal except for the competitive eating.

The bigger the crowd, the more likely I'll do whatever it takes to win.

I lose now and then. I get lazy. And sometimes I work just hard enough to win.

I can't always go out to a restaurant and have a normal dinner.

I'd like to go out on top, preferably breaking a new world record on the Fourth of July.

There are times when I'm not eating buns if I'm on a low carb diet. I'll have hot dogs and romaine lettuce, but if I'm at a baseball game, I'm always eating a hot dog.

There's no better feeling than beating someone who's up on a high horse.

Maybe in America there's more of an emphasis on food than there should be. But when I look out at the audience during a competition, some people are shocked, but most people are smiling.

Mom only gets angry when I don't visit her enough. She raised six kids to be 100 percent independent and work for everything we achieve. I mean, we don't expect anything for free.

I don't really get hungry that much. Sometimes I get cravings for certain foods. But I can go all day without eating.

They don't sell the Nathan's hot dogs hardly anywhere in the West Coast. So I have to special order them, and I just end up getting Nathan's to ship them to me.

I was able to get a civil engineering degree and travel around the world and eat.

It's addicting, beating the heck out of people and eating hot dogs and making people smile. I do feel like garbage afterwards, but so what? Most people feel like garbage after a long day of work.

There's no better feeling than knowing I'm going to break the guy next to me. His body will shut down, and I will keep eating. Then I will look out and see a crowd of happy people.

There's a couple of foods that if you see me eat them in a contest, you can tell I like them. Grilled cheese sandwiches, chicken wings, ribs, hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza. I mean, those, they go down like I was made to eat them.

The hardest is foods I am not familiar with. Gyros, I lost that one; I don't like tzatziki sauce very much. I did kimchi in Korea, which was rough: fermented cabbage and spicy.

I love to eat internationally and do eating contests everywhere. Traveling around, meeting people, and doing different things.

It was hard for me to take competitive eating serious at first. When I made people happy, I became addicted to that. It's been a fun, fun ride.

Kobayashi won't talk to me. He hates me.

It's pretty rare for them to not be in our fridge, I have usually a good supply of all-beef hot dogs.