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Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And to get our podcasts, and I urge you to do so and subscribe, go to Apple, Spotify, or iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Our next storyteller is an American chili pepper breeder who's the founder and president of the Pucker Butt Pepper Company.
And by the way, you've probably seen him on Hot Ones, on cable, Hulu, or wherever you get your television. Let's take a listen to Ed Curry. All right, I'm smoking Ed Curry. I'm the president owner, mad scientist, and chef at the Pucker Butt Pepper Company. And I'm known for making hot sauce and known for breeding peppers. I've read the Pepper X, which is the current Guinness World Record. And I've read the Carolina Reaper, which was the world record for 13 years.
Those are the peppers people know about, but there's a whole lot more common. Now, you know, people often ask, how did I get into doing plants? And, you know, that's really a story that goes all the way back to my childhood. I grew up in New York and we were fortunate enough to be one of the houses on the block that had a yard. And my mother made beautiful gardens. And that was rare for New York City. And, you know, we would go out as little kids and help her in the garden.
It wasn't really anything of interest. It was more of, hey, let's hang out with mom. And then we moved to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. And when we moved there, we had a very big lot.
I mean, it was huge. And the gardens got bigger and bigger and I got more interest in it. And one of the things my mother started showing me how to do, she would get different colors from flowers by crossing tubers or by adding nutrients into the ground that caused the flowers to come out, not what they did the year before. So that really, I was a smart kid and that kind of piqued my interest into, oh, this looks kind of cool.
Maybe I can do this, you know. And then we moved to Michigan. But by that time, essentially I was a full blown addict. I had been drinking through my childhood.
I got a lot of trouble in elementary school and junior high, drinking and doing drugs and smoking when you're not supposed to be. So that got me interested in, well, if I can breed, you know, flowers, if I can do stuff with that, what can I do with pot? You know, at the time, the only real source for any knowledge on pot was a magazine called High Times. And, you know, I tried crossing different strains of pot that came in, but those were high school attempts.
Those were kid attempts, not really science attempts. Even though I knew what I was doing, I really didn't know what I was doing, if that makes any sense. My parents dropped me off at college at a very young age because, as I said, I was a smart kid, you know, so I was ahead of grade of everybody else.
I went to college on my, I think it was my 17th birthday. It was kind of funny because my dad gave me a case of Heineken dark, a case of Heineken light and told me if I wanted to continue living the lifestyle I was living, I better find something to cure heart disease or cancer because that kills our family and you're going to die pretty young, you know. And, you know, I took that to heart because I wanted to keep on partying.
That's plain and simple. So, I went to a place called the library, trying to research who didn't have heart disease or cancer. I found a study that showed that people up in the equatorial band, whether they're westernized or not, had very, very low heart indices of heart disease or cancer. I mean, almost as ill. At the time, there were five indices I could find that were common in all those different cultures and the one that I could standardize in the lab was capsaicin. So, that really piqued my interest in peppers. I always liked hot stuff, you know, growing up in New York in a half Italian family, I was exposed to pepper flakes and pepperoncini and cherry peppers and things like that, but nothing really hot. So, during one of my trips back home, I went to a place called the West East, which was a restaurant that was run by a Vietnamese family, and I told them I wanted the hottest thing they had. They said, no, no, no, you know.
I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, let me try. And when I ate that, it threw me for a loop, okay, but it also made me feel really good. It kind of got me high, you know, and I kept on eating and I kept on drinking those Thai coffees and I kept on eating, sweating and snotting. I asked them where I could get those peppers, and they gave me a bag full of peppers, but they also gave me a little pepper plant. It was a Vietnamese bird pepper, and that was my first exposure to what I thought was a hot pepper, which now I would say is a mild pepper. I'd pop them like candy, you know, but the very first thing I did was go back to my dorm room and I fed them to other people I knew just to watch their reactions. But, you know, again, the addiction was taking a toll on my life, and I kind of, you know, I saw an angel.
I thought, you know, looking back on it, I had decided that I didn't want to live anymore, but I really, you know, I would, I still didn't want to kill myself, if that makes any sense. And you've been listening to the founder and president of the Pucker Butt Pepper Company, and that's Ed Curry, and he's telling a heck of a story about his early life and the problems he had with alcohol and drugs, but also the curiosity he had and the affection he had for this thing called peppers. He had discovered and learned to love peppers from his Italian side of his family, but not hot peppers. But he had discovered and learned hot peppers. I'm half Italian and we love peppers. We put peppers in everything, but not the kind that he's talking about. That had to happen when he walked into a Vietnamese restaurant and discovered the true nature of hot.
And of course, he was also descending into a dark place, and he was thinking of ending his own life, but not actually thinking about going through with it. When we come back, more of the story of Ed Curry here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.
But we truly can't do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
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And he is the founder and president of the Pucker Butt Pepper Company. So I decided one night in a blizzard to open up all the doors and windows. And I put a massive amount of drugs and alcohol in front of me.
I was ready to, you know, just put myself to sleep essentially. And I saw an angel. It was an angel. Okay. And I know that because I went look for footprints and there were no footprints in the snow.
All right. And that angel told me to go to a place called Brighton Hospital. And I knew where Brighton, Michigan was. So I loaded up my teatop Camaro and drove out in a blizzard looking for this place. But when I got there, it was a rehab hospital. And I told them I didn't need to stay there.
You know, they talked me into staying. Oh, sorry. I got to try something hot.
We're cooking a project here. I think it's good. All right.
I think it's real good. All right. Whoa. So I wound up staying 33 days at that hospital.
Funny sidebar about this. When I was about 17 years old, I went to my neighbor's house, but his his mom and dad had gotten divorced and his mom worked really far away. So we go down and sit around his kitchen table and do bong hits and drink whatever was in the liquor cabinet and just have fun. And she walked in on us and she said, one day you guys are all going to wind up where I work. She turned out to be the director of the hospital I went to. And she, she was a counselor there when she told us that.
And she told me, she said, I told you back in 1979, you were going to wind up here and you did, you know? So I'm starting to study peppers I'm starting to study peppers in college and we're coming up on first semester finals. I got a bunch of people in my room with a keg of low and brown dark. And we're doing bong hits and other various things.
I think we all know. I think a few of us pop some mushrooms and one of the girls who was in the room for part of her final, she had to ask people what they wanted to achieve in life. And she went around the room and someone said they were going to be a doctor or someone said they were going to be a lawyer.
He did turn out to be a lawyer. You know, there were like 12 of us in there. And this was the week before Thanksgiving.
So it was like the Tuesday or Monday before Thanksgiving of 1981. And I said, I am going to make the hottest pepper in the world. And she wrote that down. All right.
Ed Curry, hottest pepper in the world. We fast forward to 2007. We had remained friends.
I called her up and I talked her into moving down to South Carolina and helping me run this blooming business. And about two weeks later, she produced the notes from 1981 showing that I was going to make the hottest pepper in the world. And I had already given Winthrop University what became the Reaper to test. And at the time it rated the hottest that was ever measured at 1.275 million Scoville units. Let me explain what a Scoville heat unit is for you. And that's the measurement we use to see how hot a pepper is.
In the early 1900s, a guy named Wilbur Scoville came up with this scale and it was a very subjective scale. It was how much of a liquid it took to dilute a pepper until you couldn't feel any of the heat. But see, for me, I don't feel any of the heat from a jalapeno.
So that would be zero to me. Whereas you might be 5,000 ounces to not feel any of the heat. So that was the Scoville heat scale for a long time. But then science caught up with the needs of the medical community. Capsaicin is capsinoids are used in a lot of things medicinally and have been since the early 1900s.
Sports greens, you know, Bengay, that kind of thing. So to standardize it, they came up with a machine called an HPLC, a high performance liquid chromatogram. But that's where the science comes in. So anyway, getting back to I got clean. Okay. And I couldn't go anywhere. I was in some legal trouble. And I needed something to do with my day because essentially I had to go to a bunch of meetings, a bunch of rehab, a bunch of everything. So I started messing around with peppers. But again, really just to hurt people who I knew from rehab and in meetings.
It was fun, you know? And then like my sponsor at the time, he was like, hey, you're getting high off of these things. And there's some fact to that. When you eat capsaicin in any form, hot sauce, whatever peppers, there's a nerve receptor that only mammals have, TRVP1, that reacts with the capsaicin to send a chemical signal to your brain saying, you're on fire, don't eat this. But if you put it on your skin, you get the same reaction. But it's just a brain trick.
There's no actual heat and peppers. But because your brain thinks you're on fire, it also releases a huge amount of dopamine and endorphin into your system, kind of like a runner's high. So you either get a fight or a flight response.
Some people don't like what's going on. So they're the ones who run around chugging milk, you know, throwing up, crying. Or you get a fight response, you know, and you kind of like what's going on.
You do it again. You know, there's nothing you can stop for the physiological. Like I just ate some hot. My saliva is running. My nose is running. My eyes are watering. My skin kind of flushed. You know, that's just physiological reactions from the base brain. Nothing you can do about that. But my I'm an addict in recovery.
Okay. My body kind of likes that feeling. So my body goes to the fight response.
So I kind of noticed early on that even though a lot of a lot of people had reaction to eating peppers, those in the recovery community went back for seconds. Now through the late 80s, early 90s, I had moved back and forth between Michigan and Carolina half a dozen dozen times trying to change my circumstance. But wherever I went, I was there.
So the same thing happened no matter what. But I loved South Carolina. And I love the dirt in South Carolina. And I love the history of South Carolina.
And I kept on going back. And you're listening to Ed Curry. And he's the founder and president of the pucker butt pepper company. And my goodness, what a complicated life he's leading. There's a blizzard one night he's in college. And there he is, well, he's just downing a massive amount of pills and drugs. And in the end, as he put it, he was just trying to go to sleep permanently. And it didn't happen as he put it, he saw an angel. And he said it was a snowy day, and there were no footprints. And that angel told him to go to a rehab his friend's mother had told him he'd end up in many years before. And for those of you who think, oh, an angel, you know, what a load of you know what?
Well, there are people who believe it. And don't tell Ed Curry, he didn't see an angel. And then of course, there he is with that pepper obsession. And for some reason, well, he just likes hot, and really hot. And hearing about the psychological effects and the physiological effects is remarkable, and how some personalities deal with heat, and another doesn't, and how the body produces, well chemicals in response to that heat. It's fascinating. And of course, it fascinated Ed Curry and saved Doug Curry. It's very clear that this obsession saved him from narcotics, and alcohol and drugs.
When we come back, more of the story of Ed Curry, the founder and president of Pucker Butt Pepper Company, here on Our American Stories. From football playoffs to basketball madness, TCL Roku TVs are the best way to stream your favorite live sports with all the biggest sports channels, a sports zone with all available games in one place and apps like iHeartRadio with sports podcasts such as The Herd with Colin Cowherd. Cheering on your favorite team has never been easier. A big screen TCL Roku TV offers premium picture and sound quality so you'll feel like you're right in the action. Find the perfect TCL Roku TV for you today at go.tcl.com slash TCL Roku TV. Are you looking to step up to a 4k smart TV, one that gives you unparalleled clarity and picture resolution? Then we've got good news for you because the Vizio 65 inch V series 4k smart TV is now just 348. With all your favorite apps built in, you can stream straight out of the box.
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To shop now, go to NFLshop.com. And we continue with our American stories and we're listening to Ed Curry, the founder and president of the Pucker Butt Pepper Company sharing his story. Let's pick up where we last left off. So the very first thing I did when they told me I could leave the state of Michigan was I called my parents. I had to humble myself.
I'm a 30 what seven 38 year old man. I had to humble myself and say mom and dad can I come live with you? And to my surprise they said yes. All right now I didn't realize there were going to be a ton of rules I really didn't like when I got there. They didn't trust me at all and they had every right not to trust me. But I called a buddy of mine who had been one of my best friends since I was 14. He immediately packed his family and his two small children you know his wife and two small children up came down and packed me up and moved me down to South Carolina. I was gone within 48 hours of the court setting me free. When I got here it was November so there really wasn't much I could do as far as planting or anything like that. But the one thing that did happen was I met a young lady okay and I asked her for her name and she was like who wants to know looking straight at me and I asked her for a phone number and she was like not a chance in hell she like in front of me she called me a funny little man and she was rude to me seriously rude to me but in one of the events for the group that I met her in I heard her say I wish someone would make salsa and I got together all the stuff to make some salsa and I made peach mango salsa and she asked who made the salsa and I was in okay she doesn't like me saying this because she's a Christian southern woman but in the springtime she moved me into her house okay I had officially asked her to marry me already but we were walking in the beach in Hilton Head and I took all the silver out of the inside of the pack of a cigarettes all the silver and while we were walking I formed a ring out of it and I got down on my knee on the beach in Hilton Head and I said Linda would you form a limited liability corporation with me and she said what you know I said will you form it I'll see with me and she's like what are you what are you trying to say are you trying to tell me you want to get married and I was like yeah and she wore that band of cigarette wrapper for the rest of the weekend you know it was really really cool but she moved me in in the springtime and she went away for some conference and I went to Home Depot and bought five gallon buckets in bulk and I bought a ton of dirt and when she came home every square inch of her yard was filled with peppers peppers and tomatoes and she was like what are you doing you know it's well I'm gonna build a greenhouse back here she's like why and I told her God has put in on my heart that I need to do peppers I've been doing stuff with peppers since 81 I'm gonna make the most of it I'm gonna make the hottest pepper in the world I'm gonna cure cancer I'm gonna cure heart disease and she's like well if that's what you want to do that's what you do uh she had no idea how much fruit would come off of all those plants so uh she's like what are we gonna do with this and I said oh we'll make hot sauce and salsa and give it to our friends you know make Christmas presents and stuff and we started giving that stuff away and the next year after we got married we were given a lot of stuff away okay and she said people will buy this and I said no they won't and uh she proved me wrong we went to a local farmer's market and we sold a lot of hot sauce and a lot of salsa in one day and she said let's form a business and that's when we formed our first hot sauce business and I decided that we weren't going to have enough volume in peppers so I asked the neighbor I said hey if I plant peppers in your yard because he was always like what are you doing I said if I do this in your yard and pay your electric and water bill will you be cool with that he was like oh that's fine with me and then another neighbor saw that and I made the deal with that so the second year we had three yards in the neighborhood filled up with you know approximately five six thousand plants the next year we had seven yards filled up with about 20,000 plants you know it just kept on growing from there the end of 2006 is when I saw my first farmland and we planted that in 2007 again it was all about really hurting people and I had a few contacts in the medical community and they were like they were taking samples of peppers but you know I was saying this is the compound we need to look at you know I I knew the science behind it and uh you know they were just doing low level research spare time stuff not real stuff let's see 2007 we started the farm and in 2006 I got my first storefront okay and we were selling a lot of hot sauce a lot of hot sauce but it was crappy hot sauce I really wasn't doing it right you know we were selling in mason jars sometimes in woosies you know I was designing labels they looked like two-year-olds had done them things like that but I've got this really hot pepper okay and I've been hearing people with it for a couple years and we're we've been getting it tested over at Windsor University and uh one of the grad students who's testing my stuff said you know you're beating the current Guinness world record right now and I was like oh I had no idea you know no idea at all she goes actually your first test beat the Guinness world record but now that the plant's becoming stable why don't we get some data and why don't you do a world record and her name was Laquisha I wasn't I wasn't even looking for a record all the people who worked for me at that time were in recovery okay and they were all every single one of them was a character and all had trouble finding direction and we were the biggest group of misfits you could ever find in your life if there was a mistake to be made we made that mistake okay and sometimes we didn't learn from those mistakes we just made them again and again trying to prove ourselves right you know but Laquisha graduated in 2009 and she published a poster as part of her grad you know they do projects she published a poster showing a bunch of data on what was at the time called the HP 22b showing that it was the hottest thing in the world showing that it was the hottest thing in the world and the internet went crazy people were calling me liars people calling me a thief people you know there there was one group that was like this can't be we don't know who this guy is but what happened with that is I also went to the real experts reached out and the real doctors reached out and the real scientists reached out and in talking to them they they figured out that I knew a little bit about science you know and I told them what I was doing and a lot of researchers were very interested in the medical benefits that I purported for peppers and showed them through research since the early 1900s when we come back more of the story of Ed 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stories and we're listening to ed curry the founder and president of the pucker butt pepper company sharing his story let's pick up where we last left off so business is growing i'm getting a lot of international recognition from all the press i was invited to participate in something called the charlotte ventures and when i went there i didn't feel like i belonged but they picked me to be in the finals and the first lady who went up is like i have 400 and some researchers in my facility she was a doctor we've discovered a pinprick test for breast cancer to get rid of mammograms it's 90 accurate and we want to use the money to get two more researchers and get this to market and i was i'm looking at you know around me and everybody's in doctor uniforms you know and it's a big auditorium full of people and the next guy goes up and he's like uh i have developed a process with nano robots to deliver chemotherapy into cancer cells and there's only 10 percent of it you know and i want to use the money to do more field tests you know and blah blah blah and the next person gets up and they're like curing some eye disease and the next person gets up and they're curing some other disease and then it was my turn and i i went up and i was like my name's smoking ed curry i invented the hottest pepper in the world and i don't belong here and i walked off the stage you know and i got third place i got third place i couldn't believe it because they the judges were looking at all the data not just our speech but that got me in touch with doctors who are really interested like that doctor with the nano robots he goes you used to be fat and i was like yeah i used to be fat you know because i remember you you said peppers cure cancer let's figure out why and uh that got me in touch with people who were doing als which got me in touch with people who were doing obesity which got me in touch with it all sudden all these people in the medical community were listening to the things i was saying looking at the research i had done you know you can look up all this stuff online i mean uh there's a a key on a capsidoid that causes an autoimmune sequence and cancer and kills the cancer it causes it to kill itself delivery method is the problem not everybody will eat a stupid hot thing like this all day long okay and it's up to the medical community to come out with something we'll see what comes of it but anyway 2011 a funny thing happened through a miracle absolute miracle god story my wife and i were were in the delivery room as our daughter was being born we adopted a baby girl two years later the same miracle happened and we had a baby boy but in between then i had worked for the banks and my bank got bought by another bank and i was planning to take a leave of absence and the day i was leaving for my leave of absence i got let go so i found myself without a job without an income except for the pepper business which was not making enough money to support itself it got to the point where i was borrowing money for payroll always paying back but rob and peter to pay paul essentially so my wife was like you need to work full-time in the pepper business and make that profit and i was like okay i made you a promise baby that i would not i'm going to find a regular job because i promise you until all the debt was paid back i would not stop working and she relieved me of that promise and i went full-time in the pepper business see beforehand i was working at the bank from like four or five in the morning until you know two or three in the afternoon and then driving to the farm and working the farm and then going to the farm and then going to the farm and making hot sauce at night between the two jobs i was running about 18 hours a day so we're still growing but struggling i had like 29 employees i really didn't need them all but you know people needed jobs the downturn in the economy caused my friends to need jobs and i hired them all and i was sitting at a thing called the southern women's christmas show looking around at the people who were working with me trying to decide who i was laying off by payday because i had two weeks to pay them all the money i opened if i laid them off and my phone kept on buzzing i finally i looked down and the phone was ringing and it was someone from guinness and it's like congratulations ed you're officially amazing you have the guinness world record for the hottest pepper in the world and i started weeping i literally got down on my knees and started weeping and praising god and someone thought i was having a heart attack and they called the little ems unit and this ems golf cart thing came around the corner and they were like who's having a heart attack and i was like no i'm crying man it's okay it's okay it's tears of joy you know not sorrow but from there on it has been every day has been a journey that's an absolute miracle whether it's good or bad i've been able to grow this business to the point where we were supplying a whole lot of major manufacturers and i mean major manufacturers fortune 500 companies with the products they need to make the products they have i got to meet my friends at hot ones we make sauces for them and they make a lot of hot sauce and my sauces are going worldwide as the hottest and the mildest sauce no one will believe me but my goal isn't about making the hottest pepper in the world because there's hotter top peppers that we've made that just tastes like crap so you can't use them for anything it's more about the flavor and the heat and economies of scale there was a national distributor making a wing sauce they were using 11 55 gallon drums of salt mash to make the swing sauce and i showed their head chef who's right here in the same hometown you can replace 55 gallon drums with a five gallon of carolina reaper and get the same heat and better flavor and they did the experiment and then they bought reaper okay because of the economies of scale they're saving the cost of 11 55 gallon drums it had to do with a big business saving money on a product they were selling a lot of and see uh pepper x it's three times hotter than the reaper so now if i approach that company with pepper x they can cut their cost in a third right now i'm that i'm a dad to a 10 year old and a 12 year old if you had told me that was going to happen i would have told you you were out of your mind i was not meant to have children all right even though i was clean i really didn't grow up until i was married to linda for like six years seven years i was still a child inside i had to learn what it was to be a man and then what it was to be a man and then i had to be taught what it was to be a real man and a husband and a boss and a leader i had to seek out or god put in my life men who could teach me those things so now i can support my family and be a father and a husband to my family uh when you add up all the people it's a lot of people and some of them even call me a father figure you know and then my community that i live in which i support by donating everything i can and having our company do everything i can then my church community which i support a hundred percent i am just the only word thoroughly blessed to have gotten on this journey built this business and be in the position i am today we'll see what tomorrow brings if it all disappears tomorrow i'll still be a happy man because i know that's god's will for my life but hopefully i can keep this going for another 20 30 years and a terrific job by the production editing and story of the thing and storytelling by our own greg hangler and a special thanks to ed curry he's the president and founder of the pucker butt pepper company and what a story he told my goodness he was on a ledge he was out there it was the birth of his daughter he'd adopted a child two years earlier he was working in a bank while dabbling with a part-time pepper business that wasn't really even meeting its bills or just barely and then he gets the notice from his bank that legit job he kept to be an honest man and he thought he was going to give him a leave of absence and it turned into a layoff and what did he do well thanks to his wife who had faith in him he turned that part-time pepper business into a full business but even there he was teetering until he got that call that he was indeed the holder of the record the guinness record for the hottest pepper in the world as he put it he has a thoroughly blessed life so many americans do their crooked lives in the sense that there aren't straight lines they live but crooked ones and and ed is a perfect example ed curry's story a classic american story here on our american stories you wouldn't settle for watching a blurry tv would you so why settle for just ok tv sound upgrade your streaming and sound all in one with roku stream bar this powerful two-in-one upgrade for any tv lets you stream your favorite entertainment in brilliant 4k 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Whisper: medium.en / 2024-02-22 16:41:37 / 2024-02-22 16:58:04 / 16
