Meet Ted Barrus. He’s a budtender at Dean Greenz in Portland, and kind of a masochist, it seems.
His YouTube stunts include reviewing absurd fast food items, talking to himself in cars, and rubbing hot peppers into his eyes.
For this installment of his meandering web series, Ted holds up the Guinness World’s hottest pepper, a Smokin Ed’s ‘Carolina Reaper,’ grown by the aptly-named PuckerButt Pepper Company. These little bastards reach 1,569,300 Scoville Heat Units, a scale used to measure a pepper’s spiciness. For reference, a jalapeño is between 2,500–5,000 SHU’s.
This is why Ted must take the Carolina Reaper on. It’s a personal affront to his manhood to allow such a majestic pepper to exist unchallenged. Why he needs to smoke it in a bong is unclear.
He tears a chunk off of the pepper and stuffs it into his bong bowl, after observing how oily it is. Yep, that’s the pain oozing out. “I dunno what’s gonna happen,” says the man who’s clearly already kinda high — and has done a lot of horrific things to himself with peppers. “You only live once, and this is the first time I’ve been scared to do something on YouTube.” Words to live by.
Don’t try this at home, or at your friend’s home, or at your auntie’s home. Don’t do it.
When the smoke reaches his mouth, our hero Ted starts speaking in tongues, looking pleadingly at the camera for some kind of help, like Lucifer himself has grabbed the lining of his lungs and won’t let go. Chugging water won’t help, buddy.
If he’s lucky, he got out of this without tearing a hole in his esophagus or damaging his lungs. We at least know that he lived to upload the video to YouTube, if he ever regained feeling in his arms.
Messy breakups, deranged antics, pets gone wild. The Internet car-crash you can’t turn away from. For more Hot Messes, check out: Woman Claims Wendy’s Served Her 4-Year-Old Daughter Fries Covered With Weed and “Suck It, Trebek”: How Alex Trebek Fired Up All Of Nerdom With This One Word.
