[daunting music]

[Ed] Your hands will start shaking.

Your heart will start going faster.

You get sweaty, your eyes water, your skin flushes.

The mucus membranes run,

so you get snot pouring out your nose.

[Narrator] Ed Currie is the evil genius

who brought the world the Carolina reaper.

The world's hottest hot pepper.

The Carolina reaper is a beautiful fruit

that is hiding a package of evil inside

and it's the hottest pepper in the world.

I get to hurt people from all over the world

every single day.

I may have a little sadistic streak to me.

[Narrator] The aptly named Currie

has been hyper-focused on one thing since 1981,

hot peppers.

More specifically, he is obsessed with crossbreeding

different peppers to make them as hot as possible

by upping their level of capsaicin,

the ingredient that gives hot pepper their heat.

The Carolina reaper is an absolute capsaicin beast.

I made the Carolina reaper by breeding

a pepper I got from a doctor from Pakistan

with a pepper I got from a coworker at the bank

from the island of St. Vincent.

I was just trying to raise capsinoids levels

in the naga that I got from Pakistan

to see if I could get one of the sub-apsinoids to go higher

and we got the Carolina reaper.

It was a gift from God.

[Woman] In 2013, Currie's favorite pepper

was officially crowned the spiciest pepper in the world

by the Guinness Book of World Records,

but how spicy is that?

Everybody knows what a jalapeno is.

They run between 3,000 and 5,000 scoville heat units.

Thai chili is maybe 20,000 scoville.

Habanero is on average, maybe 100,000.

Then you get into ghost peppers.

They're really about 600,000.

Then you got the Carolina reaper

coming in at 1.642 million scoville heat units on average

with a peak heat of 2.5 million scoville heat units.

We're talking roller skates to space shuttle, you know?

[Narrator] Now, remember that peppers are organic things

with lots of variation, including spice and size.

For example, jalapenos tend to range from 3,000

to 8,000 or more scoville heat units

and are generally twice as big as a reaper,

which themselves range from 1.5 million to 2.5 million.

And heat is a subjective thing, but still,

let's try to put it into perspective.

Roughly 10 spicy habaneros

hold the same amount of capsaicin as one reaper.

You'd need about 60 serranos to match a Carolina reaper.

And it'd take 600 jalapenos, give or take a couple hundred,

to match the amount of capsaicin in one mind,

equivalently-sized Carolina reaper.

Carolina reaper does not do the same thing

to me anymore because my body is used to it,

so I need something hotter.

[pepper crunching] So good.

[Narrator] Currie has bred almost 500

distinct pepper plants,

constantly trying to push the level of heat

one pepper can hold and he's not finished.

Yeah, we're still breeding peppers

that are hotter and hotter and hotter.

I used to think that about 4.3 million

was the hottest you can get a pepper.

I've already proven myself wrong

and science has now proven

that we can get a lot hotter than that.

[Narrator] While the Carolina reaper

still holds the Guinness World Record,

Currie says his Pepper X is even hotter.

It's the main ingredient in this fiery hot sauce,

the hottest in the hit YouTube series Hot Ones.

To create new super hot peppers,

Currie uses a pretty straightforward

crossbreeding technique,

interbreeding two different pepper plants,

hoping to combine attractive traits

into a brand new plant.

It's the same method human use

to turn a gray wolf into the Chihuahua, the bulldog,

and even the poodle,

except plants need a little more help.

[Ed] It's a 50/50 crap shoot

but we look for a really nice flower

and we use these paintbrushes to go around the flower

and pull the pollen out

and then when you have enough of the pollen,

you go to the female and you paint that pollen

onto the flowers and then you do this process

over and over and over again.

[Narrator] It takes patience to create a new breed.

A lot of patience.

Plants in the first generation

tend to carry a lot of their parents' traits.

Breeders can start to tease our specific traits

in the subsequent generations

through selective breeding.

It generally takes about eight to 10 generations

to stabilize a hybridization

and give predictable traits and consistent fruit.

[Ed] If we get desirable traits

like high indices of any of the capsinoids

we're looking for,

then we'll keep on going on the cross.

If it doesn't work, then we gotta start all over again

and it's a very time-consuming, very long process.

[Narrator] Currie grew up gardening,

so this level of botanical knowledge

is second nature to him.

My mother was a master gardener

and she taught me how to breed plants

and irises, lilies, you know,

different things up in Michigan

so that's where I literally got that

and I took it to the dope level.

I started trying to crossbreed pot when I was younger

and it was dangerous [laughs].

[Narrator] So he decided to grow something else

and landed on super hot peppers,

like the Carolina reaper.

I was on a search for hotter things than I could get

and this was a Vietnamese restaurant

that specialized in spicy food

and I asked them to make it the hottest they could

and they said no, no, no,

and I said yeah, yeah, yeah,

and when I ate it, I got a rush.

I literally got a rush like I was taking some dope.

[Narrator] Currie has been sober for over 20 years now

but he says that a natural high has kept him going,

producing and eating hotter and hotter peppers.

When I first ate the reaper, it knocked me to my knees.

I was like three years clean.

I hadn't felt that feeling in a long time.

I knew that was hot.

You get this euphoric feeling

and that's your body trying to overtake the pain

that the chemical reaction is giving

and eventually, the endorphin rush overtakes the pain

and when you get into the higher pain,

you get the more pleasure so it's just choosing the dragon.

[Narrator] As Currie's tolerance grew and grew,

his pepper-growing hobby ballooned

into a full-on all-encompassing lifestyle.

When I met my wife,

she wouldn't have anything to do with me.

She called me a funny little man.

When I asked for her number, she said not a chance in hell,

but I heard she liked salsa

and I was growing tomatoes and peppers and stuff

so I whipped up some peach mango salsa

and she talked to me.

We got married nine months later.

So I put like 1,400 plants in her backyard

and we were making hot sauce and salsa

with what we weren't using in breeding.

[Narrator] And that salsa won her over.

She convinced him to start selling his sauces

instead of giving them away

so he started Pucker Butt Pepper Company

and in 2012, he quit his high-paying job in banking

to dive head first into spicy peppers.

Approximately 4:00 a.m. every morning,

I start sorting through those peppers

to sort for grade, to sort for color,

and I separate them into the mash peppers,

the seeding peppers, the ones I wanna eat

and the ones we're gonna dry.

[Narrator] Currie grows peppers.

He makes hot sauce, he makes salsa.

He makes mash and mustard.

He dries the whole fruit and makes beef jerky.

He even saves the seeds.

Last count, I think there was 3,800 seeds in my office,

different types,

and we got more stashed all over the place.

I think we're around 7,000 seeds.

Different types of seeds.

Some of those are gonna be for sale to the public.

Some of them will never be on sale to the public.

Some go to the medical community.

And some are just 'cause I'm an addict

and I can't stop, you know,

I can't stop collecting 'em.

[Narrator] The capsaicin is a strong, strong irritant

to our skin, eyes and lungs,

and there's so much of it in reapers

that caution is needed while handling them.

When people are seeding, they wear double gloves

because the oil inside the peppers

will actually eat through nitro gloves

but that's not because they're protecting their hands.

My hands are on fire all the time.

That's 'cause they're protecting

the soft parts of their body.

They take the gloves off before they go to the bathroom.

See, where I was touching those peppers earlier

is on fire right now.

The air is actually spicy.

[Narrator] For more than 100 years,

peppers have been measured using the scoville scale.

It was started by Wilbur Scoville in 1912.

Originally, the level of spice

was determined by five individual taste testers,

but today, the level of heat is measured in a lab

and so Currie knows exactly how dangerous his pappers are.

It was subjective then, now it's analytial.

Everybody uses the same process.

No one's tastes are involved.

If you put my wife and had her eat a reaper,

she would tell you it's 10 million scoville.

If you have me eat it, I'd say, eh, it's 100,000.

You know, that's subjective.

The machine doesn't lie.

It measures everything in the same way.

[Narrator] Curries works with a local chemist

to find out exactly how much capsaicin

is packed into his peppers.

We grind those peppers and emulsify them

and then we pump them through a machine

called an HPLC or high performance liquid chromatograph

and that measures the different properties

that are in a pepper.

You can go for the tannins, the capsinoids,

flavanoidS, coloring agents,

whatever you wanna do.

We analyze all of it.

There's a very specific math equation

that put the area of the peaks in

to come up with the scoville heat units.

[Narrator] All this obsession with heat

might seem crazy, but it couldn't come at a better time.

America's appetite for spice

is getting bigger and bigger every year.

US hot sauce industry saw 150% growth from 2000 to 2014

with steady increases since then.

Today, it's a $1.5 billion industry in the United States.

I believe it's because

of the changing demographic of America.

They brought with them food that we never had before.

I mean, when I was growing up,

there were no Thai restaurants.

There were no African restaurants, Caribbean restaurants,

Indian restaurants.

But as the demographic of America changed,

they brought in their food cultures

and we got exposed to that.

[Narrator] And then there's the internet

where people post painful videos

of themselves eating peppers constantly.

Hot sauce is now a mainstream thing.

People are always doing some crazy stunt with it.

This didn't happen 10 years ago.

For those of you out there

that want to eat a whole Carolina reaper,

I highly recommend that you do not do it.

[Narrator] Despite these warnings, business is good,

and Currie gets to spend most of his days

surrounded by what he loves the most.

I get out of bed at 3:30 in the morning

just to go and play with peppers

and I stay in there all day long,

on fire eating them all day long.

This is my happy place.

[light music]