Are Hot Ones’ Sauces Actually Hot? 🌶️
Reviewing Howtown’s investigation
blog.seventy-eight // I’ve been thinking a lot recently about our relationship with sensationalism and art. Posting on algorithm-driven platforms means that compromise is a given if you want your art to be seen, but when does the compromise of the two become a compromise of character?
Some recent conversations in the office have made me look at this question in a new light. My current perception of art is centered around looking at where I am right now—and how past and future art has and will shape me. It’s a broad stroke, but that width, I believe, is a necessity for what is such a broad thing.
Once you lose the effect that art has on you—what is, in my eyes, the most foundational thing to creation—it more than likely also loses any consequential effect it has on others.
It’s up to you whether you think that consequentiality matters more than getting increased eyeballs on what you create. For me, I’ll keep striving to be shaped by what I make.
I’ll pass it off now to the one and only NGL for this week’s main review. Scroll down to read—oh, and enjoy.
— judd the intern
P.S. Last blog, we recapped our latest Block Party—and shared photos from the event. You can read it here.
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Video: ‘The truth about Hot Ones sauces’ (2024)
Creator: Howtown
Runtime: 21m 32s
Review by: Nate Graber-Lipperman
In the eleven years since a beardless Ezra Klein took to camera to explain the importance of “explainer journalism,” Vox—the publication in which Klein once served as cofounder, and editor-in-chief—has become a mainstay on YouTube.
More specifically, the “Vox video” has become a genre unto itself, known just as much for its informative scripts and sliding animation style as the deep farm system of talent it helped develop. That system went on to launch some of the most popular independent journalists and video essayists on the platform—Phil Edwards, Cleo Abram, and Johnny and Iz Harris, to name a few.
Speaking of Cleo, back in 2022, she told me about a founding producer at Vox who helped her get her first big break on the video team: Joss Fong. And two years after Cleo went independent, Joss would follow in her footsteps, launching a new YouTube channel alongside fellow journalist Adam Cole.
That channel, Howtown, has a simple mission: “We look into where facts come from,” Joss says, one minute into their video, “The truth about Hot Ones sauces.”
Like their contemporaries, Joss and Adam have mastered the art of hooking us viewers in with human-interest stories. But good topics alone don’t keep us watching. No, the duo’s output is stylistically addicting, with smooth transitions, high-quality imagery, and curiosity-inducing sound effects.
And the Howtown video in question takes us on a journey, all stemming from a question: Are the sauces celebrity guests consume on Hot Ones as hot as the talk show says they are?
What follows is a scientific exploration of what makes chili peppers spicy, which includes fruit-eating rodents and a special fungus; interviews with pepper-loving “chilihead” creators, who harbor their own suspicions over the true spiciest sauce; and an explanation of the Scoville scale, the rating (named after nineteenth century pharmacist Wilbur Scoville) widely held as the prominent marker of hotness.
This journey alone makes “The truth about Hot Ones sauces” well worth the watch. Nevertheless, there’s a twist saved for the last three minutes of the video that genuinely had me on the edge of my sofa. Once the hard data starts rolling in, you can’t help but stay until the end.
Again, Joss and Adam are well-versed in YouTube. But that doesn’t mean they resort to retention-heavy editing. It’s just good storytelling.
And on first glance, you might think, With everything going on in the world, is this the kind of topic that really requires a heightened level of investigative journalism? I certainly harbor my own doubts upon scrolling through the endless amounts of oh-so-clickable video essays these days, all promising to scratch an itch and go down some rabbit hole you never knew you were interested in.
Yet Hot Ones has played a not-so-minor role in the explosion of the hot sauce industry. To dismiss the show is to ignore its influence, and Hot Ones’ popularity is built on the very trust Sean Evans and his famous hot sauces have formed with viewers over the last decade. And that trust sells a lot of bottles.
Therefore, what sets this video apart is how its creators unpack a convoluted topic within a larger Internet conspiracy theory, translating it to an audience accustomed to opening the YouTube app during lunch breaks. Sure, it’s nominally about hot sauce, but it’s really about the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, the gray areas within most of our lived reality.
“We like for effects to have one cause,” Joss says roughly a third into the video, essentially laying out a grander thesis. “But there’s really no reason, scientifically, why something couldn’t be driven by multiple things.”
Somewhere, a bearded Ezra Klein is grinning ear-to-ear.
Nate’s Score: 5/5
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‘A Billionaire Tried to Make a Movie. It Was a Disaster.’ (2025)
Creator: Toni’s Film Club
Runtime: 32m 34s
I feel like I’ve heard the story of Empires of the Deep in passing—a film-obsessed Chinese billionaire sets out to self-finance the biggest of blockbusters, a “Transformers-meets-Shakespeare,” and fails miserably—but never with this much depth.*
In a storytelling-driven retrospective, film essayist Toni’s Film Club compiles over a decade of documentation on this cinematic fiasco, seamlessly blending it with present-day interviews from key cast and crew. This, in turn, paints the full, very chaotic picture.
Toni traces how the film was set up to fail from the very beginning—and the many ways it spiraled further into manic disarray. The extraordinarily absurd story, paired with Toni’s charismatic and comprehensive commentary, makes it a video you can’t help but keep watching.
Judd’s Score: 3.5/5
‘through & through’ (2025)
Creator: miles murphy
Runtime: 24s
There’s an intangible feeling to this one.
The twenty-four second runtime of this video feels incorrect. We get glimpses into these moments that coincide with each other so completely, underscored by a time capsule of a track that found its way into the mainstream only recently.
miles murphy’s sound design and color is on point, as per usual with these type of videos. But murphy’s video feels different; every single frame tells its own unique, yet unifying, story. murphy builds a world for us, takes us around it, and just as we’re getting used to it, it’s gone.
At least you can always rewatch it.
Judd’s Score: 4/5
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* Pun intended.