supermegashow - EP 5 - Spicy Topics (w/ Vernon Shaw)

Episode Date: February 24, 2017

We talk to the wonderful Vernon Shaw about peppers...and other stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Man, Ryan, it's feeling a little spicy in here. Ooh, can you taste that? Ooh, yeah. That's a pin. It tastes a little, you know, it's a bit sweaty. A little sweaty, but a lot of spice. It tastes as if it would be wearing a hat and glasses. And some awesome shoes, maybe.

I don't know. Oh, wait! Oh, yes! It's Vernon Shaw. That's how I get introduced. That's how you get introduced. That's not even the worst. I appreciate how nice you were. You lumped us into the worst though.

I want to say top five of the worst. Okay. Well, that's a top five of some sort. We're not the worst. So that's all that matters. Guys, thank you for having me. No problem. Thank you for being a part of this.

It makes us feel nice that people like you can step into Matt's room and feel comfortable. For once. Yeah, because we're recording this in my bedroom since our main recording computer is dead. And, you know, it's not often that I get people in my bedroom that feel comfortable. But today I have Ryan and Vernon Shaw from Hot Pepper Gaming in my bedroom, all together. Hey, thank you so much for having me. I said that already. Fuck.

It's okay. You can thank us as much as you want. You want to thank us again? No. Oh, okay. Well, we recently actually did some Hot Pepper Gaming episodes. Yeah, do you guys want to get into that? Yeah.

Let's get into it. Okay, so to give everybody the rundown, I run a weird little channel called Hot Pepper Gaming with my friends. And it's a channel where people try to review video games directly after eating hot peppers. And that is literally it. And you should go check it out, by the way. You probably already have checked it out. I mean, we're smaller than that channel. Stop that.

Be nice to yourself. Go in that search box. Check out Hot Paper Gaming. Hot Paper Gaming, dude. Go check out Hot Pepper Gaming. We were on there today and I don't know when those videos are going to be going up. However... Within the month. Within the month, yeah. So make sure you go subscribe.

Check that out. So I think it's important to... Sorry, it's really cute how you guys almost kissed. What? No. Don't get the shippers anything. No, we're really cute how you guys almost kissed. What? What? No. Don't get the shippers anything. No, we're literally hours after you guys had just eaten the hot peppers. So I'm really curious to see where you guys' headspace is at. Well, okay, so I haven't felt any repercussions yet. And what I know is that right now my bowels are a ticking time bomb.

I know that probably come 3, a.m i'm just gonna feel something i'm gonna rush to the bathroom and then it's gonna be let's take it from the beginning right okay because um we've been we've been buddies for a bit uh we've been dming back and forth and just sort of worked out where you guys uh asked me to be on this podcast but also i was really really like wanting to get you guys on hot pepper gaming yeah so uh we decided to do a quick little day like uh an evening thing where you guys came over to the game grump space and shot hot pepper gaming with us and then um i got dinner and then we came here so uh to sort of describe to the listening audience what i saw from my end when you guys both went on matt went first and you know

like in fight club where where edward norton wanted to destroy something beautiful yeah it was it was it was literally that like you ate the pepper and i i watched your face crumble in front of me and go ahead no no it's all you it was basically like the second i took the first bite i was like hey you know this this isn't that bad because first of all let me preface this by saying, when it comes to hot things, I'm a little bitch. Like even mild salsa can get me coughing and stuff. It's just ugh. So a big habanero, habanero.

And we gave you a mean looking one, yeah. Oh, it was big. It was massive. It took two whole mouthfuls to swallow it. And that was something new to me. I've never actually really indulged my tastes in hot peppers. And this was just something completely new to me i took that bite i chewed it up um first swallow some juice went in the back of my throat

and just right then i realized i'd made a big mistake yeah and and it's it was just watching you disintegrate like that because it wasn't what it was just what was happening inside and how much your mouth hurt but i saw your eyes turn red i saw tears down to me it was this it was this wow i can't speak guys oh it's okay it was as if there we go it was as if he saw god for the first time and was very disappointed in what he saw no i expected you to come out of hot pepper gaming with a white streak down your hair just like permanently scarred forever but holy shit like right after we cut the cameras i know i'm not gonna spoil too much because i want you guys to go watch it because they are definitely

good episodes but um right afterwards i went into the bathroom and i sat on the on the cold hard floor by the toilet uh with a water bottle with tears in my eyes and and god i was gagging i couldn't breathe it was absolutely awful and and this was only just a habanero, which is how many Scovile units? About 150,000. 50,000? 150,000 maybe compared to like a million on a ghost pepper. Oh my God. So what is the hottest pepper?

Carolina Reaper. The Carolina Reaper. That's the hottest synthesized pepper. Okay, so Ryan and I are actually from South Carolina. Do you know if it gets its name? Because it's from... It's one of the Carolinas. I don't know, man.

Okay. I mean, they're the same thing, basically. Yeah. They're both just as racist, so. Yeah, but if you weren't bad enough, and again, I felt like I never want to hurt my friends, but just by design. We could tell because you kept asking, are you sure you want to do this? Probably five times before the...

Yeah. A good five times. I continually pointed to the door and I was like, I wouldn't be mad. I get it. I get what this channel is. Because you've done it yourself before. Plenty of times, man. What's the hottest pepper you've ever had?

Carolina Reaper, twice. Oh, you've done it? Yeah. Describe that. Oh, it was bad. I don't know, man. It wasn't as bad as I expected it to be because probably the worst and best one i'd ever done was uh like a really fresh ghost pepper um and that one it hurt so much but and it was such a different pain than uh

than a habanero and that like it's sort of like it hurt and then it built and it built and it built and you could feel your like your extremities kind of growing numb and your vision start vibrating. And just all of these things of your, like your, your, your sort of like autoimmune system to sort of like attacking your own body. It's very euphoric. Like if it wasn't for the, like one of the side effects,

if it wasn't for the side effects of like it being hot and painful, it's a drug. Essentially. It feels like it would be a drug. By this point, I feel as if I've done it like a master's degree worth of research into spicy things. So what's happening when you eat a hot pepper, nothing's actually burning inside of you. It just triggers the heat receptors in your mouth that make your brain believe that it's on fire.

So it goes through this process where your mouth starts watering in order to shut out whatever's on fire. Your brain gets flooded with endorphins and adrenaline to combat the pain and all that. So once everything stops hurting, once the heat receptors stop being fired, you're just left with a brain full of adrenaline and endorphin. So that's why everybody says that there's a bit of an addiction process to eating spicy food because you do kind of, in a sense, crave the good introspective feeling that you get after you eat something spicy. Holy shit. Would you consider yourself addicted at this point? I mean, I moved from a medium spicy guy to a hot spicy guy. So nobody likes hurting that much, but I definitely feel that it takes a little bit more to have me reach for the milk.

But I do genuinely love spicy food now. Now it hurts so good. Yeah, before Hot Pepper Gaming, I was just like, ah, spicy food. But now I'm like, ah, spicy food. It's great. It's good. So I was actually wondering this earlier, uh, clue me in on like what, what made you start hot pepper gaming?

Why did you like, what, what gave you this sadistic idea? It is like, Hey, let's give people peppers and watch them suffer. So like, like there's the, there's the, there's the funny story and like the biz story, right? Like the, there's a, the funny story was that like, um, you know, I made a tweet about it and I was like, Hey, it wouldn't be funny that like um you know i made a tweet about it and i was like hey it wouldn't be funny if um if we did a show where people tried to review video games directly after eating hot peppers and i went back and looked at it and it got two retweets and one favorite and that was enough for me to be like all right let's do it let's do it but uh like the the the the biz thing was like um i was i I made Hot Pepper Gaming with some friends,

Aaron Schmalfeld and Jared Rose and I think you guys have met them before and they're like, they're great and they're so cool and first of all, we've always wanted

to work together on something and second of all, it was like, career wise where I was at, I was working at a YouTube company and I had all these strongly held ideas

about like, how you make a good YouTube channel and like, what it takes to like, make shareable content and all that stuff and I didn't have a way to really prove that i knew it other than doing it yeah but doing it

yourself so like so that's sort of what birthed top ever gaming was like me and me aaron and jared getting together and saying like hey we want to show people we know what we're talking about and we did that and um it was cool to see uh to feel right for once. I love the little set. It's a very visually pleasing set. That one's actually credit to Aaron Schmalfeld. If we're up to... You didn't clap, Vernon. She's great.

She's great. Yeah. If it were up to me, it would have been on a white background. It would have looked really dumb. But Aaron, for as small of a change as it is, like putting it up against a yellow background, like that did so much for branding and recognition and like how someone could perceive it online. And like it's remarkable how small of a thing, a change that was, but how big of a difference it made. Angie has made it easier than ever to connect with skilled professionals to get all your jobs projects done well. I absolutely love this because you know, if you own a home, it can be really hard to maintain. It's hard to find people that can

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like yellow just fits and it looks really nice peppers are yellow man no you know Ryan I peppers are red I know a little more about peppers

than you alright well we got the pepper expert what different colors can peppers be oh it's it's usually a stoplight so it's like red green and yellow

what about bell peppers Vernon those are orange some of them are orange. Habanero is the one we ate. That was orange. Fuck you. Fuck. Okay, we got to stop this fucking podcast.

Okay. Yeah, the color doesn't necessarily matter to how spicy something is going to be, so you can have a variety of color peppers and be different spicy, but the different levels of spicy, but the yellow backdrop was sort of like a color complementary thing and again you know color theory not really my not really my forte so it was cool like it's one of those and you guys might know a little bit about this but like when you collaborate with people who you trust and you know and you who who people who you artistically appreciate you see how you know like something as like something as

dumb as hot pepper gaming like being a collaborative process like that it really it really shines and you kind of become more than the sum of your parts when you're working with people that you trust yeah especially like when you enjoy what you do and you seem to enjoy uh you know giving people some pain in a i don't know about that no but like okay so like i don't know if i've ever talked about this on a podcast but i feel like oh here we go yeah you got that you got that super mega exclusive guys oh yes no but like i i don't feel like i talk about this enough but you know like i feel like myself aaron and jared we uh in the life of hot pepper gaming kind of added our own

like i don't think i don't know if it would have become as big as it did without us adding in our own little like our own little secret sauce to it right you know like i got this obsession with shareable media and like kind of how to structure and how to brand something like aaron was so like had so so many good ideas about like how to like build it from an artistic perspective or how to how to make it look or how to like like the original iterations of hot pepper gaming was reading from a typed out script and it turns out it wasn't as funny as as like having an outline and trying to get from point to point and like that was something that you end up forgetting in the heat of the

moment exactly literally literally intended you like the pun thank you yeah and then like so like aaron had a lot to do with like how how the video looked and like like she was what like probably the first person to tell me that i was an idiot for trying to do a for trying to do a script and then like jared who was like if you know jared for five minutes you know what i'm if you talk to jared for five minutes you know what i'm talking about but he is such a wild card and it was his video that sent hot pepper gaming into the stratosphere so like i feel like you know the three of us coming together and like even as something as dumb as a youtube channel um like you could see that artistic stamp that all of us put on it that i think push it into like the public eye it's great i love it and like you were you

were you were talking um just about the different peppers i kind of wanted to hit on that topic totally real quick you said the color doesn't you know mean anything to the spiciness but you picked out certain peppers on how they did they how they physically appeared the one you gave me was very veiny yeah that's another uh that's another jared rosen pat Rosen patented. Like he's the, he's the, the torture artist. He will find the pepper that hurts you because there's a couple.

Okay. So there's a couple of things you got to know about a pepper. It's so the things that are hot inside of peppers is what's called capsaicin. And it's this, it's a, this oily substance and it's contained within the seeds of a pepper. I was going to say, because what I've noticed from eating peppers in my life within the seeds of a pepper. I was going to say, because what I've noticed from eating peppers in my life

is the seeds are always the fucking spiciest part. So normally when people cook jalapenos, or when they do jalapeno poppers, they'll cut open a jalapeno and they'll scoop out all of the seeds so you get the flavor of the jalapeno without necessarily the burning, ouchy hotness. Which is a scientific term, thank you.

The burning, ouchy hotness. Yeah, um, which is a scientific term. Thank you. The burning ouchy hotness. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, you would do that. So the thing to remember is that the, like the,

the seeds kind of are, they come out of like the membrane, which is like the center of the pepper closest to the stem. So you, you have to keep an eye on like whether or not you see a lot of veins in the peppers. If it's a little translucent, there's,

there's a weird art to it to like, to, to identify something that has a large membrane with a lot of seeds in it. Well, it definitely proved to be very fucking spicy. Yeah, we didn't even... Ryan, we didn't even talk about yours. Did you want to go into it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, let's talk about it. Yours was interesting because you held it together a little better than Matt did.

Not to say that Matt didn't have a valiant effort. You both... You climbed a mountain, man man you climbed a goddamn mountain but um there was just something so romantic about you staring into the camera Ryan and just delivering talking points with tears streaming down your face were they streaming no no my face was numb I couldn't tell what Matt described it okay so so from behind the camera what I could see was I see Ryan. He eats the pepper, and then within a good 20 seconds, his eyes just turn completely like blood red. They glaze over, and about a minute later, he has tears on both cheeks, just rolling down his cheeks.

It was like somebody told him his puppy had died, right? Oh, my God. But he still had to give a speech at his school. Yes. Wait. I had to give a speech at his school. Yes. Wait. I had to give a speech at his school? Yeah, yeah. No, like imagine you're in fourth grade and you're about to give a...

So terrified. No, you're about to give a presentation and right before you found out your puppy died. I thought you were saying... But she still wanted a good grade? Yeah. Oh, I had to fight through it. Yeah. Yeah.

Martin Luther King was a great... Oh, God. What if... Do you think that's the next step in hot pepper gaming? Trying to... Public speeches? Describe political figures. Oh, man.

The next step in hot pepper gaming is trying to eat less hot peppers, man. No, that's sort of the thing about YouTube is like, if you do something right, you got to be prepared to do it forever. Yeah. Okay. So that's the sort of tough thing about hot pepper gaming is that like i really really love doing it um it just hurts oh my god well that's the thing though like um with hot pepper gaming you said like be prepared to do something again and again and again yeah how like what is your opinion on

like fads change people will get tired of a certain thing over time like do you feel like um hot pepper gaming is different in that aspect or do you do you have ideas to counteract that like what what do you think of that whole idea of fads in youtube and entertainment and how they change over time and stuff like that and how does that relate to your channel it's a yes or no thing like it's um so the first thing to touch upon is like the algorithm will always change right like different types of content will be favored for different reasons. Like you saw before 2012, it was like a very kind of clickbaity sort of articles. Like it was things that would get you to click on them because, um, algorithmically YouTube

videos were weighed by how many views they got. Top 10 naked women dressed as Minecraft characters. There you go. This is, this is pre Minecraft though. Actually it was a top 10 naked women in RuneS yes yeah there you go perfect perfect you got it uh post 2012 it then became like viewer retention like how long someone was watching something so like it started valuing different things so that's where you saw the rise of let's players and unboxers and and and like skylander weird stuff oh yeah yeah so it so so that's always going to be tweaked and it's always gonna,

it's always going to change and like different things will always be valued in different ways. My weird counteraction to that is like, I think that you should always create something and that this is half every game. This is anything that I create online of like, you have to create things that someone wants to share with someone else. Uh,

because when you do that, you sort of exist above whatever algorithm favors whatever just because you put the the success of your video in the hands of those watching it right and and the thing about videos of people uh stumbling over their words as they are burning alive after eating a hot pepper that that's something that regardless of the algorithm regardless of if it's 2012 or 2017 like people are going to want to watch that and share that so lord i hope so i i don't see that trend uh like fading away well it's fresh it's sort of you know you saw it in different iterations we aren't the first person to do people things with hot peppers online um but the there was a whole section like

there was a whole time period where that was the big thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the super interesting thing about that is the very human... Not to talk too deeply about the art of comedy as it pertains to eating hot peppers, but there's something really, really special about trying to do something serious, but having something that lets real human emotions out. Because you don't have to be a funny person to come on Hot Pepper Gaming just because hot peppers bring out a very real thing in someone. That's why you had us on, right? Oh, stop it.

You guys are great. Don't be nice. Okay, the requirement for the rest of this podcast is that you guys have to be nice to yourselves and believe in yourselves, okay? What? Come on. I didn't sign up for this shit. No, we're keeping this this

podcast positive okay that's what that i swear to god get some positive vibes get some positive vibes in there yeah but uh but yeah so like it's it's it's that it's like it's i i hope that we heed in something like keenly human in terms of eating something spicy and then just being human about that it's the man falls down it's the guy getting hit in the crotch. It's all funny. It's Owl My Balls. And I know that we're sort of hurtling further and further. Into that idiocracy future.

And I know Hot Pepper Gaming is very analogous to Owl My Balls. And I get that. But I hope it makes people laugh. And I hope it gives people real laughter. But past that. I think that. I think on YouTube, YouTube is cool because you have the weird luxury of being able to make the same joke

over and over and over again and finding ways for it to continue being funny aka let's players yeah you always maintain the same format but I think the way you subsist off of that, the way you survive off of like just making the same joke over and over and over again is to find ways to care about it still and continually care about it and continually care to make it different and make it better and make it funnier. And I hope we do that with Hot Pepper Gaming.

I mean, I've always been a fan of the show like when you when you first started i saw episodes and like this is before i guess i was even a thing because like by that at that time i had like probably 5 000 people if not lower than that like following me on twitter or whatever i wasn't like a personality or say i guess i can say i'm somewhat of a personality now i've grown a lot bigger since then but like i would have i never expected it like hot pepper gaming was this like cool show that they're bringing these creators on and i never expected to actually be on it and it's like it's this weird moment i was i was in there and i was looking at the center i was like fuck this is so cool this is great and like and i know the person who's behind it and i'm cool with them and it's just it's it builds this cool community because like people enjoy the content but like it's also fun creating the content and being a

part of like there's inner workings and like, like, there's a different type of style when it comes to creating content, especially live action content where you're talking about where you're dealing with people's real emotions coming out. Yeah. And I have to say, like, just I guess in all that after I'm gushing or whatever, but, like, seriously, thank you for having us on the show. I'm so glad. it like i want to say is like it's strange from my perspective too that like out of out of nowhere happy like i get i get emails regularly people saying that like my goal is to eventually be on be on your show or to be big enough to be on your show and like like at like as far as youtube goes man we're still technically small fish you know like there's huge people out there and like we're kind of like this weird strange niche community and it's such a it's such an honor to to like to be a strange culturally

connective tissue in the youtube gaming scene of like like someone thinking that they've made it when they've been on hot pepper gaming when i'm really just like i'm just a guy man like i'm just a guy with a really dumb idea you're sitting across from us we're sitting on a bed you're sitting in a computer chair this is this is as real as it gets but it's like i don't want to make this the gush session man but like make it the gush set but it's gush the um like it's just so cool the the youtube community the the youtube gaming community at large is like this really really cool thing where like you surround yourself by other passionate people who just give a shit you know and like there was a large portion of my life and i was like making stuff and nobody cared and my only saving grace and the only thing that kept me going was like the knowledge that

like at the very least i try hard you know and and like it's so it's so validating to know that like if you keep doing that and you keep keep showing that you're like trying really hard and you're trying so hard and you continue to try to be better like people will notice that and people will appreciate that in you and like you surround yourself with other passionate people who try hard and that's that's great yeah because recently matt and i have been up every night to like 5 a.m or 6 a.m trying to get videos out because like i mean super mega it is technically like a full-time job but it's not what's you know it's not what's giving us money it's not what's paying rent or anything like that so it's kind of like it's a side thing right now.

Maybe one day it will become big enough. That's great, but we have fun doing it, and we're hoping that the effort that we put into it shows and we build this community. Because the community is the cool part about it. Absolutely. We are going to a convention. We're going to VidCon.

It's going to be our first convention. Oh, I'm going to be there too. We should hang out. Yeah, let's hang out. We're going to hang out together. No, meet us at VidCon. We're going to be hanging out convention. Oh, I'm going to be there too. We should hang out. Yeah. Let's hang out. We're going to hang out together. No, meet us at VidCon. We're going to be hanging out with Vernon Shaw from Hot Pepper. I've got a hotel room if you guys want to come up to my room.

Bounce on the bed. Yes. Stop. If you guys want to come to my room and do beers. Yes. Yes. Yeah, well, Vernon, I'm only 20, so I can't actually. Oh, God.

Really? I'm so old. But I'm 21. I'm 21. I can have a beer. But, I mean, but I'm 21 I'm 21 I can I can I can I can have a beer but I mean

there's no police in a hotel room Matt stop it stop it Vernon you would let's you don't know

you can't see how much I'm winking at you right now but let's just let's just say this right now Vernon you would never give alcohol to a minor absolutely

say it I'm not a minor full sentence my name is Vernon Shaw and I would never What? Jesus. Just make sure you cut his audio in post, Ryan.

It sounds like he says, My name is Vernon Shaw and I would give alcohol to a minor. Wait, wait. Speaking of alcoholic beverages, I don't know. Have you ever had... Do speaking of alcoholic beverages i don't know have you ever uh had do they make alcoholic beverages out of like things like peppers yeah they do they do and they're almost like from from my i don't know i don't think i've had enough of them to develop a taste

not not a taste but like an opinion on the matter but everyone i've talked to has universally hated oh oh i imagine that sounds miserable yeah it's a it's not necessarily a novelty thing and i'm sure there's people who do it right i just gotta maybe make an effort to go try them i don't know if you do them on the show they don't they just do they have a spicy aspect yeah okay i was i was wondering like because you said the seeds were the main part like i guess they get the capsaicin like i guess oh yeah buddy i feel like it would just be like drinking watered down hot sauce basically that's pretty much what it would be like that drinking watered down hot sauce, basically. That's pretty much what it would be like.

It just does not sound appetizing, man. But that pepper. You just pop it off and chew. There's a crunch. Nice little crunch. The juices. Just let it marinate in your mouth. It's all good stuff. I'm a picky eater, and I used to just run away from anything vegetable crunchy, if that makes sense.

Anything that has that good old vegetable crunch to it, I would run away from. But recently, I actually, I tried a burger for the first time with tomatoes and pickles and stuff. Wow. And being on your show and having a pepper, just biting into it and actually swallowing and eating it, it's a big thing for me, Vernon.

You're helping Ryan. You know, Ryan's like a turtle, okay? He's like a cute, beautiful little turtle, and he's in his shell, and he's always been in his shell, but, you know, with people like me being able to cook him up a burger, and people like you being able to give him a pepper, you're letting him, you know, slowly climb out of his shell. Oh, that's so great. And expand his neck area and his legs out from, you know, that's so totally wicked. Cowabunga, dude.

Dude, thanks. Here's the thing about hot peppers. The weird phenomenon that we've seen after doing this show for so many years is that there are certain people who develop an addiction to hot peppers after being on our show, without a doubt.

Can you name names? Yeah. One of the ones I always like pointing toward is Rodrigo Huerta, El Cidsa 1984 he's this amazing animator um he did hot pepper gaming with us and then i uh i hung out with him a couple months later he's like yeah dude i love spicy stuff he likes spicy before but now he loves spicy stuff and like you were saying yeah i i talked i talked to his girlfriend and and she was like yeah he just like all he does is he goes like to costco and buys those big jars of pickled peppers and he eats them and then he tries to kiss me and and like i

couldn't count the number of people who come up to me it's like yeah i'm addicted to spicy food now thanks to your channel was that an important aspect of the story yeah i tried to kiss me yeah yeah yeah it was was he trying to trick her was he trying to trick her to like like spit the seeds down her throat no because like the spiciness is on your lips. Oh, yeah. I learned that today. After I ate it, I don't know why, but after I ate it, I wiped my mouth with a paper towel, and that just triggered my lips.

It was in your eyes during the recording, too. Yeah, you did it, too. The thing is, it'll get caught in your pores. What happens when you get sprayed with pepper spray, which is sort of the same concept, is to combat it, they'll throw you into a really, really cold shower, and that'll get rid of it for a time being. But the weird trade-off is that you get capsaicin in your pores. So if you take a hot shower the next day, you just get to experience it all over again.

Like a sunburn, if you get in the shower after a sunburn i actually have a question have you ever considered doing hot pepper spray gaming where people try you pepper spray someone i mean they try to review a game while they're pepper sprayed no man like we we found out that there was a sort of a northern limit where it stopped being funny and started being dangerous dude it's just a prank bro yeah it was like because because comedically uh we we play up the the weird rivalry between myself and jared and like it's like this sort of funny comedy joke of me trying to like kill the guy with peppers um but there was a there was a time when like we gave him like it was called like hot sauce from the second dimension or it's like second dimension hot sauce and like he scream vomited into uh my bathroom we were filming at my apartment at the time he just like scream

vomited in my bathroom in front of people that he like really really respected and i was like all right we're hitting we're we're hitting the reset button on this thing because i actually don't want to hurt my friend in a documentary it would be it was then that we knew we had gone too far is it possible like okay so um when we did this you were you were very like careful like are you sure you want to do this because i don't want you getting hurt how how hurt can you actually get from consuming like large amounts of capsaicin um can you actually can you die i don't know you physically uh from what i've read you can't actually die from the capsaicin. But a big worry is like someone who is allergic to peppers or has pre-existing heart conditions or pre-existing stomach conditions like stomach ulcers.

Then hot peppers can exacerbate whatever ailment you have. So by and large, peppers are a very healthy thing for you. There's generally no negative side effects and they're considered like are a very healthy thing for you there's generally no negative side effects and they're considered like really really actually good for you they can help with congestion yeah exactly congestion like it speeds up your heart rate it it um it does a lot of cool stuff to like boost your immune system i believe makes you cry makes you feel we all need to feel yeah sometimes yeah but like if if you're if you're allergic to peppers and you don't know it and you come on to Hot Pepper Gaming, that's an actually dangerous thing.

Yeah, that wouldn't be very fun. Should we have gotten tested? I mean, we're fine now. I mostly just ask people if they eat spicy food beforehand. In today's economy, saving money is like an extreme sport. Coupon clipping. Promo code searching. It takes skill.

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Book your flights to Europe starting at $549 at airtransat.com. Conditions apply. Air Transat. Travel moves us. Like, my thing is, I want to build a tolerance because one of my favorite foods is I love Korean food, but most Korean food is like unbelievably way too spicy for me. Like bibimbap?

I love bibimbap, but it's too spicy for me because I'm a little bitch. So if you can help me build my tolerance, maybe we can go to K-Town. And maybe we can gradually work. Ryan, are you trying to kiss me? You guys are so cute. I'm just seeing how close you are. I just love you guys so much. I want you to know.

Thank you. We love you too, man. I love you more than I would. So basically, we should go to k-town koreatown and get get some spicy korean food and we can all build our top well i mean ryan and i can build our tolerance and you can be like our coach but i'm happy to like um i i live in koreatown i'm not gonna say where for obvious reasons but you guys go go find them yeah yeah find my house no just kidding i don't live in a house that was the first test it lives in a pepper field in korea yeah yeah i um um i live out there and like i'm just

showered with fine korean meat stuffs on a daily basis and say that again showered with fine korean meats okay awesome. Yeah. So if you guys need the good Korean barbecue place, just let me know. We have a Korean barbecue... Never mind. I don't want to say the name because then people will...

But what about the Korean barbecue were you going to say? I like bulgogi. I like it too. Do you like bulgogi? Yeah, I like bulgogi. How about you? Yeah!

We just wrote a children's book about Korean food. Dr. Seuss, we're taking the mantle here. That's a saying, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, how are you guys feeling now that it's been a couple hours? Did you feel the high? Did you feel like the good vibes?

I felt the euphoric energy, and I also emptied my bowels right before this podcast. That might not be the end of it. That's what i was thinking because it was so soon afterwards i like you know i feel like it takes some time to get through your system so i feel like the the the emptiness of your bowels right now was not what we took earlier and i feel like now that your bowels are empty that just means there's more hollow space to be attacked by the capsaicin yeah it's like okay so peppers are like the the monster in like a Chinese horror movie

like where it like, you think it died, but then it comes back, right? Yeah. Oh my God. Like, and like, you don't, you, you never really,

you can't be sure that it's died unless it's exploded on screen, right? It's like at the end of the first Friday the 13th movie, like I think everything's good

and then you see Jason come out and snatch the girl out of the canoe. Uh-huh, yeah. You guys haven't seen Spider-Man or Ryan't seen oh it's from the 70s spoiler alert is 70s or 80s i don't know honestly like that that um sorry i'm freaking my way is that a metaphor no what is that called was that a metaphor you just did metaphor metaphor what are you like comparing well what the comparison you just made was the best comparison i've ever heard a little bit of an analogy an analogy yes that's what i always confuse analogy with anagram or uh what is it with anagram no what is it when you when you

use like or as a that's a synonym oh i actually no no not symbolism symbolism i just burped and guess what i tasted boys was it bibimbap my dick ryan it was a it was a hot pepper from hot pepper gaming close enough yeah but uh but but i i feel pretty good right now i don't i don't have any you know maybe a dull ache in in the in the abdomen region keep hydrating like i can't i can't um stress that enough just like drink a bunch of water i mean i definitely feel like my bowel area kind of massaging its way to get ready for another hell hellish get ready boys that'll do it here we go i like the only time i've ever had like a real bad experience was um ryan and i have this hot sauce or we did have this hot sauce that came

it's like a tiny little 8080 bottle that came in a coffin. That was the box. It came in a coffin. It didn't come in a full-sized coffin. We didn't get like six people to deliver it to our house in a hearse. You open it up, and it's just a tiny little bottle. But it was this thick black sauce. It was like Blair's, right?

I don't know what it was. We have it, don't we? We have it in our... No, no, no. It's at someone else's house. But do you know how many Scoville units it was? Wasn't it like a million? I don't want to fudge the facts here, but it was hot.

It was something spicy. It was more than the habanero. Habanero. Habanero. God damn it. But basically, all I did was I dipped a toothpick in it, and then I licked the toothpick. And the second it touched my tongue, it spread to the back of my throat. You could feel it like radiation.

Oh, yeah. And it was bad, and it passed on after about 30 minutes. And the next morning at about 5 a.m., I awoke in my bed with like a sharp – like someone stabbed me in the stomach in my sleep. And I ran into the bathroom, and I had the worst 30 minutes of my life where it was just – it was like eating a pepper through my asshole, basically. And I know that that's probably going to happen tonight in the middle of the night. Oh, yeah.

The fun thing about hot pepper is that the same mucous membranes that can detect heat that exists in your mouth are also in your butthole. Yeah. So that's going to be real, real fun. I'm excited for you. I don't know if the body processes the capsaicin or if it just spits it all out again. It spits it all out again. Oh, no. So is there a difference between the experience you would have ingesting hot sauce versus a pepper?

Just in sort of the feel to it, right? The sort of, like, I feel like, for me, eating peppers is easier just because it's kind of like going down with something. Yeah. When I do, like, the only time I've ever thrown up from hot pepper gaming was when I did a shot of hot sauce. A shot? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it just like-

Jesus. It just like coated my throat and it coated the esophagus and it just didn't feel right the whole time and like my body for whatever reason just like i don't want this in there don't want this that's bad stuff yeah yeah but like i'll i'll eat spicy spicy peppers all all day okay like how how spicy do you like i want to gauge our uh difference in tolerances how how spicy is like tabasco or like Texas Pete to you? I love throwing Tabasco sauce on anything. Okay, so like Tabasco sauce

I like it too. I like it a lot. I put it on my breakfast things. Not like my cereal or anything. My eggs. But I had like a little spoonful of Tabasco once and it fucking killed me. So like if you did a spoonful of Tabasco, would you just be perfectly fine? I don't know if I'd be perfectly fine. Like the thing is like i i kind of myself and everyone else in hot pepper gaming

we kind of believe that the scoville system is a lie in a sense because like because they're they're there are habaneros that i've like laughed through and there are habaneros that like gave me that same like numbness of extremities that i experienced with the ghost pepper, right? So there's a point where everything just hurts. And I'm sure if I took a shot of Tabasco sauce, that would probably fuck me up for a bit. I don't know how long it would fuck me up for. I wouldn't necessarily want to go through it, but that's just the game, man. Everybody reacts differently to spicy things. You can build a tolerance in a sense, but it's just a very individual experience yeah because there was actually there was a girl there today um

and and she was just downing the the peppers just like for fun yeah yeah yeah that's sam sam uh sam lightamer she's yeah yeah sam light hammer coolest last name that's really your last name yeah light hammer that sounds like something from an mmo that's fucking awesome like it's it's like come on it's like sorry sam i keep talking so much on this whatever like welcome to the internet shit um uh she she hosts uh all chat on for league of legends she's cool as hell oh really but yeah yeah so um it's it's lightamer like i said light hammer Yeah, but she goes by Light Hammer on like... Oh, that's so cool. Which is cool as hell. It's like one of those people like...

I feel bad for whoever marries her and tries to take away such a cool ass name. If I got married to her, I would legitimately just be like, Hey, can I take your name? Would that be cool if I just take your name? Matt, you have a girlfriend. No, I'm not talking about actually getting married. No, no, Ryan, I'm just talking about the last name. Call her up.

Call her up. Tell her what you just said. No, guys, it talking about actually getting married. No, no, Ryan, I'm just talking about the last name. Call her up. Call her up. Tell her what you just said. No, guys, it's nothing like that. No, but I've always wished that I had a cooler last name. I mean, I don't dislike the last name. Matt Watson is a good-ass name. Vernon. Thank you.

My name is probably the most kind of bland. Ryan McKee. No, you guys got tight names. No, Vernon, you've got a... Vernon? What a fucking cool name. Vernon Shaw. That sounds like a director.

Like, the film comes in. It sounds like a Birdman-type director. Directed by Vernon Shaw. Well, here's the thing. So, Vernon as a name is in stereotypical storytelling, it's always an old person, an uncle,

or a fat kid that you don't like. Okay. Yeah. It is my goal in life to try to make Vernon a cool name again. You have broken the stereotype. Dude, you have. It's already cool. You're a cool guy. That's just the goal.

It's just to have people stop thinking that Vernon is for old people, like mean uncles or fat kids. That's actually really funny. I don't know. The thing about Ryan's last name is it's McGee. Not spelled like most people spell McGee. Yeah, when I met you, I thought it was Mick-gee. M-C-G-E.

Yeah, I've never seen it spelled McGee. And therefore, a lot of people say Maggie when they see your last name. Like, Ryan Maggie? My middle name is also one that people have trouble with. What is it, Ryan? Elias. E-L-I-A-S. But they're like Elias, Elias, Elias. they do a bunch of stuff i just go but i just say elias it's easier

people can understand it i think the like proper way to say is elias like almost like e-l-i-y-a-s like that's just how it is i don't know my grant that was my grandfather's names i like that though i actually i was really like one of my best friends in high school his last name was shaw yeah maybe you're related to him probably timothy shaw wait that's uh sorry my older brother's name is timothy shaw are you serious yeah no shit really that was like one of my best friends in high school yeah whoa that's weird well that's wild that there's another one have him hit me up tweet me that's really weird actually to be honest yeah dude sorry i love my brother a lot cool guy yeah yeah should we should we go should we go hit him up well uh we run uh we run scared to care together actually oh really and that's

coming up yeah you guys are gonna be on that aren't you yeah yeah tell us more about scared to care uh it's actually it actually predates hot pepper gaming it predates um you know like everything that i did in in youtube so far and it's one of those things that sort of like informed where i wanted to go with my life in terms of like weird online content production. But a couple of years ago, um, uh, maybe five years ago, my older brother and I, my older brother was associated with a charity in, in,

in college called Camp Custom that organizes yearly summer camps for the children of cancer patients. Um, and after he graduated college, like we were talking, he was like, yeah, I kind of want a way to like make like like keep working on that charity because it was really important to him and and you know because it was really important to my brother it became really important to me um so we started kicking around ideas and um this was before let's play got really big or like before before um you know like it was like this is before twitch.tv existed before like gaming live streams were that big of a thing like it was kind of like burgeoning but um nobody was

like super just trying to do weird shit with it so uh we were like all right let's both uh let's take turns on either like two nights first night i try to play through the entirety of amnesia the dark descent on a live stream and the more people donate the more my older brother and his team of friends like would try to scare me and then the second night uh my we would switch uh switch places and Tim would try to beat uh Amnesia the Dark Descent and I would try to scare him based on how much people donated it's so cool yeah thank you so much yeah I didn't know that you were actually like i didn't know that you were the one behind scared to care oh thank you it's a it's tattooed on me really that's so cool yeah yeah last year we well to give you uh some perspective that i'm really proud of

like the first year of scared to care we raised about a thousand dollars and that was huge for me and i love that's great yeah yeah yeah and then um and then like the more i got into the youtube world the more i made contacts and more like one thing fed the other and like uh last year i was like all right if we raise forty thousand dollars i will get the logo tattooed on my body and we did and now myself and my older brother have scared to care the scared to care logo tattooed on ourselves and it's one of those things it's just a reminder of like how much we care about the charity and like it's so cool to see how big it's gotten holy shit dude that is that is like really awesome i had no idea that you actually even did that thank you so much yeah it evolved into like a 48 hour

live stream and like we all got all these ideas of like how to turn it into like a its own 501c3 non-profit and how we can sort of like have this thing exist as more than than like whatever work myself and my older brother and like our team of friends put together into it. So it's easily not only one of the most stressful things in my life, but also the thing that makes me the happiest to see that happen into sort of, I don't know, it's different from YouTube, right? It's different from getting a bunch of retweets for a joke. Like you can see that you've actually like...

Yeah, you can see they're not just pointless numbers that boost your ego. They're actually numbers that make a difference. Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh man, for whatever piece of shit that I am, at least I'm putting something out into the world that helps people and actually affects kids' lives. Moreover from that, there's a couple of emails that I have saved. Sorry, there's a couple of emails that I have saved,

and most of them are related to Scared of Care. And one person told me that Scared of Care inspired them to start getting involved with charities at their high school. But this year I received a really, really cool email from someone that says like, I was there for the second Scared of Care. And that was what sparked a love of video games for me. And because of that, I became a programmer. And then I was watching the Game Grumps stream and you were on it and your name rang a bell. And I remembered to all those years ago when I watched Scared of Care and I just wanted to say like, hey, like it was good hearing about you.

And it's cool to see you're still in that. Like, and because of you guys, I became a programmer. And to like see, to see that sort of like effect that you would have. That impact. That's so cool, man. I know. Like, like to sort of finish the thought, like you never put a number to like youtube views or twitch views or whatever and um you know like working on something as big as like scared of care as big

as uh hot pepper gaming or is like gargantuan sizes like the stuff i've done with the with with game grumps you never really put on like that face in a room that you stare at, and I was thinking about it, and when I was 16, one of my first jobs was, I worked at this place called Shroian Amphitheater in Northern California, which was a big concert venue, and I got off of work, and the person playing the, the, the huge concert venue that night was Coldplay and Chris Martin was there on stage. And he's like, uh, he was like, Oh,

he got up. It's so nice that there's, there's my English accent. He's like, Oh, it's so nice that there's 20,000 people out here. And I was like, I looked around and like this entire stadium of people.

And it's like, wow, that's, that's 20,000. And now whenever I do something on the internet, I gauge my success in how many Coldplay concerts it is. That's how everyone should gauge it, really. That's how the view should work on YouTube.

One-eighth of a Coldplay concert. Oh, I got a whole Coldplay on this one. Yes! I went full Coldplay. Well, that's really cool to hear, man. And, you know, I think that that is about all the time we have on this. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, absolutely, man.

It was great to have you as a guest. I think Ryan and I can come out of this with a much greater understanding of the fine art of pepper trees. Not just that, but a wonderful understanding of you as a person and all the wonderful things that you were involved with. It's always, walking up to here, it's like, man, we don't have to do podcasts. We could just be friends. So it's a real goddamn honor that you guys brought me on here. Yeah, of course. And I'm a fun person to talk to, and I really, really appreciate this, and I hope we get to do it more.

Oh, yeah, and thank you for coming along and enjoying, and riding on this goddamn fucking podcast train with us. It's been fun. See, what happens when I can't think of something to say is my brain just shits itself. Just got to fucking die. But seriously, thank you for having us on the show. Thank you for taking the time to come over here and help us with our little shtick here. And honestly, just thank you for also being a good friend. Thank you, man.

Vernon, I want to say the same thing, but I don't want to sound like, you know. Remember as a kid, your friend's parents would take you out for pizza, and you'd be like, thank you. And then all your friends would be like, thank you. And you're like, oh, copycat. So I mean it when I say thank you for having us on the show and being on the podcast. Cause you're, you're a lovely, delightful young man. Oh man. I'm 27. He's way older than me. Oh my God. Where, where, where were you when I, when I was at prom? i wouldn't even even been able to ask you to uh you're like in the sixth grade no when you were in prom what what uh senior year um fifth grade so i would have been in elementary school jesus christ there you go that's it that's

a weird that's a weird thing to think about um but no seriously guys the pleasure is all mine thank you so much for having me here and and thank you as well we're throwing the thank yous back and forth and then we might as well thank all the people listening to this right now. Yeah, thanks, guys. Yes, the podcast. I know I'm bad on my word, but it's going to – You know Matt promised to have it up on iTunes, and he hasn't fulfilled that promise. Okay, it's going to be on iTunes by next week, I promise.

It's not as easy as you think it is. I said that last week. Ryan, it's going to be on – I've been busy, dude. Okay, whatever. Well, I guess that that's the end of it. Let's have one big cumulative... Bye! God damn it.