In Person of Interest we talk to the people catching our eye right now about what they’re doing, eating, reading, and loving. Next up is Sean Evans, the host and cocreator of genre-defining interview show, Hot Ones.
You’ll never hear Sean Evans slander chicken wings or hot sauce, even if he’s tired of eating them. The 38-year old host and cocreator of Hot Ones is now in his 10th year of shooting the YouTube interview show in which he and a celebrity guest each eat 10 wings coated in increasingly spicy hot sauces.
In 25 seasons, over 350 episodes, and nearly 4,000 sun-hot chicken wings, Evans has interviewed musicians, actors, and comedians alike, grilling them with questions about life and work as they push the limits of the Scoville scale on the human palate. Gordon Ramsay cursed violently. Aubrey Plaza snorted a glass of milk. Pedro Pascal sweated profusely. (Don’t get us started on the eerily nonplussed reactions of Lorde and Ariana Grande.) Amassing more than 4 billion views and 14 million subscribers, Evans and his team created a phenomenon—evolving the talk show genre along the way. (Hot Ones hit another milestone last year: BuzzFeed, which acquired the show in 2021, sold First We Feast, the show’s parent company, to a group of investors including Evans himself.)
As Hot Ones enters its 26th season, we put one of the most well-known interviewers of the social media era in the hot seat, learning about his interview process, why the Hot Ones format succeeds, and what makes a great hot sauce.
How does it feel to be on the interviewee side of the table?
I’m much more comfortable on your side of the table than on this side of the table. As a host I’ve worked hard on trying to just sit back and let the flow state take over.
Do you get into a flow state as you interview on Hot Ones?
Yeah, it catches the track on wing three or four. You can see at that point if you’re going to start to win this person over. Even though you’re dealing with huge stars and some of the most confident people, there is something about eating this gauntlet of fiery chicken wings in the bizarre context of it being on a TV show with four cameras pointed at you. We have to create this chemistry, this rapport, this energy, and this rhythm, and everything’s stacked against you to do that. A couple wings in is where it starts to catch the rhythm.
How has the show changed over its 10 years?
The show hasn’t changed at all. It’s the same set. It’s the same bald guy with his questions and the lineup of hot sauces. Personally, I’ve changed. I can’t watch stuff from the first three, four, or five years. When I look back on it, I’m wincing.
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.
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.
