[Camera Man] Go ahead and put it in your mouth.

Go!

[Narrator] Since the first time it was announced

to the public that we were growing these, there were

literally thousands of YouTube videos of people eating

Carolina Reapers all over the world.

I get a kick out of most of them.

I made a huge mistake!

Though it can be unpleasant, it's not a dangerous thing

Oh my God!

It's only getting worse!

(coughing)

[Narrator] It's a chemical reaction your brain perceives

as heat so you will stop doing it.

I'm gonna lay down.

This sucks.

(uptempo modern classical music)

I'm “Smokin'” Ed Currie.

I created the Carolina Reaper.

I got into breeding peppers in college and just really

was interested in getting hotter and hotter peppers once I tried them.

Guinness awarded me the world record for the hottest pepper in November of 2013.

To breed these things, I crossed a ghost pepper

with a habanero, and what came out was this evil

looking pepper that had warts all over it,

blisters they call them.

And the first time I tasted it, it knocked me to my knees.

(uptempo flamenco guitar)

We get our peppers tested regularly at Winthrop University by doctor Calloway in the chemistry lab.

All peppers are measured by Scoville heat units,

which tell you how hot the pepper is.

Bell peppers have zero Scoville heat units.

Jalapeño is about 5,000, a Serrano 20,000,

red habaneros 200,000, ghost peppers 600,000,

then you get to the Carolina Reaper,

which is 1,569,000 heat units, the hottest thing in the world.

(playful string music)

When you eat the Carolina Reaper, the first sensation

you get is sweet, and then all of a sudden the heat

starts going, it's like burning, burning, burning!

Then the physiological stuff starts.

Your eyes will bloodshot, they just start

tearing up and watering, the skin flushes,

you start breathing hard, your metabolism

starts raising up.

Some people say it's like eating molten lava.

Others will say it's like licking the sun.

To me, it's like eating a charcoal briquette

and no matter what you do you cannot get that burn

out of the back of your mouth.

I mean it's crazy.

A lot of what I do is creative expression.

You look for traits in one pepper, and you look

for traits in another and you try to combine them

and keep both those traits.

There are other breeders who are trying to break our record,

but, uh, we've been holding unreleased peppers in our back pocket

that are twice as hot or more than the Carolina Reaper

that we could submit to Guinness at any time.

My perception of what the limits are, of how hot

you can breed a pepper has changed as the science

has progressed over the years.

Just tell me something can't be done, I'm gonna figure

out a way to do it.