Neil deGrasse Tyson, in case you didn’t know, is a pretty smart guy. He’s the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City, and it seems he’s always on some TV show or web series (or the Nerdist Podcast) breaking down complex scientific topics into basic language we can all understand and learn from. It turns out, though, that it’s a bit harder to be coherent when your mouth is burning because you just ate the hottest chicken wings you’ve ever had in your life.
That’s a harsh reality Tyson came face to face with recently, when he guested on the web series Hot Ones, a talk show that features a regular interview augmented by the challenge of eating a line of 10Â progressively hotter wings. As the show goes on, the guests get more unhinged, although Tyson was able to keep his cool pretty well, as he tends to do.
Over the course of the 25-minute episode, Tyson and host Sean Evans start with a wing covered in Sriracha and work their way up to Blair’s Mega Death Sauce, which has a Scoville level of 550,000. Scoville units, by the way, measure how spicy a food is; for reference, a habanero pepper has a Scoville level between 100,000 and 350,000. The hottest ever Carolina Reaper specimen, the hottest chili in the world, was measured at 2.2 million Scovilles.
The point is that Tyson was dealing with some real heat here, all while talking about Pluto’s former status as a planet, the time he almost became an exotic dancer in college, and some scientific rap lyrics from Kanye West and others. He also announced on the show that he plans to be more active on Instagram, so that’ll definitely be another feed to follow if you want to spruce up your timeline with entertaining and engaging posts.
Check out the video above, and let us know in the comments if you think you’d be able to tackle this hot wing challenge. Don’t feel too bad if you don’t think you’d make it all the way: Jim Gaffigan, Rob Corddry, and DJ Khaled are among those who weren’t able to complete the gauntlet.
Featured image: First We Feast/YouTube
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