I don’t think it was a great interview show in the beginning. I was young, I was green. I look back and I’m projecting and moving a lot. The show had this cult audience early on, and that really motivated me to look at this as not only a unique concept, but also to try to make what is unimpeachably an excellent interview show.
Photograph by Victor Llorente
How has the talk show landscape changed since Hot Ones began?
When we started there weren’t that many interview shows on the internet. Now there are a million, and there are so many podcasts now. We were able to do this “rose in the concrete” thing because we weren’t competing against much, to be honest.
Back in the beginning I felt like we were the only ones on the beach. You could do a late-night show, but then it wouldn’t be novel. If somebody was doing the internet interview of record, they would go to Hot Ones. Whereas now there are dozens of places to go.
How do the wings and hot sauces affect the interview?
The wings, the gauntlet, the format in general—I think they play in two ways. One, simply as an activity. If you’re doing an activity, it takes your mind a little bit off of the formality of sitting down and talking to someone. And two, because when you eat Da Bomb Beyond Insanity, there’s no way that you can remember your media training.
When celebrities come in, they’re in a PR-driven flight pattern. The scorching hot wings take celebrities who are on a pedestal and knock them down to a level that everyone knows: dying on hot sauce. It’s an equalizing experience. And in that moment I think it truly reveals who this person is.
Has your understanding of celebrity changed in your decade of interviewing on Hot Ones?
It used to be this sort of exclusive club by definition—a lifestyle that was unobtainable. Now everyone’s a celebrity. Now there’s so many different categories and so many different things. TikTok and streaming, IRL streaming—those didn’t even exist as platforms when we started this show. And now they’ve birthed an entire new celebrity class, an entire new influencer class, and that’s just in this decade. So it’s like, well, what’s going to happen in the next decade?
What makes a great hot sauce?
I like a sweet heat situation. I like the way that it can Trojan horse in the heat. Some pineapple, some apricot, something that kind of brings in the heat as sort of an aftereffect because I feel like the trail that heat leaves behind is so much better than the punch that it meets you with immediately.
I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you: flats or drums?
I started off as a drum man. There’s just something about it that is easy to eat—it has a built-in handle. But over the years I’ve actually become more of a flat man. I enjoy the ritual of splitting and tearing bones. Anecdotally, I think that the meat is more tender and better on a flat than it is on a drum—I’ve come to prefer it.
