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.

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 world record, and I'd read the Carolina Reaper, which was the world record for thirteen 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 plans? And you know, that's 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 Forts, Pennsylvania. And when we moved there, we had a very big glte. I mean it was huge, and the gardens got bigger and bigger and got 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 attic. 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 screens 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 can makes any sense. My parents got me off of 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 seventeenth 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 fami, lady, 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 is 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 a 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 pepperccini 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, 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 snodding. 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 mile pa. 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 hadn't decided that I didn't want to live anymore, but I really, you know, I I I still didn't want to kill myself, if that makes any sense.

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 world record, and I'd read the Carolina Reaper, which was the world record for thirteen 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 plans? And you know, that's 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 Forts, Pennsylvania. And when we moved there, we had a very big glte. I mean it was huge, and the gardens got bigger and bigger and got 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 attic. 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 screens 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 can makes any sense. My parents got me off of 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 seventeenth 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 fami, lady, 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 is 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 a 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 pepperccini 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, 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 snodding. 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 mile pa. 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 hadn't decided that I didn't want to live anymore, but I really, you know, I I 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 but Pepper Company, and that said Curry, and he's telling a heck of his story about his early life and the problems he had with alcohol and drugs, but also the curiosity 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. 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 Hibibe 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 Ouramerican Stories dot com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give, and we returned to our American stories. Let's return to Ed Curry and he is the founder and president of the pucker Butt Pepper Company.

And you've been listening to the founder and president of the Pucker but Pepper Company, and that said Curry, and he's telling a heck of his story about his early life and the problems he had with alcohol and drugs, but also the curiosity 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. 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 Hibibe 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 Ouramerican Stories dot com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give, and we returned to our American stories. Let's return to Ed Curry and he is the founder and president of the pucker Butt Pepper Company.

So I had 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 looked 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 te top Camaro and drove out in a blizzard looking for this place. But when I got there, it was a rehab hospital. And I told him I didn't need to stay there, you know, they talked me into stay in. Oh sorry, I gotta try something hot. We're cooking a project here. I think it's good. Whoo, I think it's real good. Whoa Uh. So I wound up staying thirty three days at that hospital. Funny sidebar about this. When I was about seventeen years old, I went to my neighbor's house, but his mom and dad had gotten divorce 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 at, and she she was a counselor there when she told us that, And she told me, she said, I told you back in nineteen seventy nine you were going to wind up here, and you did, you know? So I'm starting to study peppers in college and We're coming up on first semester finals. Now I got a bunch of people in my room with a keg of low and Brow Dark, and we're doing bondheads and other various things. I think, well, I think a few of us popped 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 twelve of us in there, and this was the week before Thanksgiving, so it was like the Tuesday or Monday before Thanksgiving of nineteen eighty one, and I said, I am going to make the hottest pepper in the world. She wrote that down, all right, ed Curry, hottest pepper in the world. We fast forward to two thousand and seven, we had remained friends. I called her up and I talked to her into moving down to South Carolina and helping me run this blooming business. And about two weeks later she produced the notes from nineteen eighty one 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 one point two seven five 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 nineteen hundreds, 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 ailipino, so that would be zero to me, whereas you might be five thousand 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 like the medical community, you know, because like capsaicin is, capsinoids are used in a lot of things medicinally and have been since their early nineteen hundreds, sportscreams, you know, Bengay, that kind of thing. So to standardize it, they came up with a machine called an HPLC, a high performance liquid chromatic RAP. But that's where the science comes around. 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 rehabing 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 cap sasin in any form, hot, sauce, whatever, peppers, there's a nerve receptor that only mammals have, TRVP one that reacts with the cap sasin 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 heating peppers, but because your brain thinks you're on fire, it also releases a huge amount of don't mean an 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 chug and milk, you know, throwing up, crying or are you going to 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 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 people had reaction to eating peppers, those in the recovery community went back for seconds. Now, through the late eighties early nineties, 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 loved the dirt in South Carolina, and I loved the history of South Carolina. And I kept on going back.

So I had 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 looked 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 te top Camaro and drove out in a blizzard looking for this place. But when I got there, it was a rehab hospital. And I told him I didn't need to stay there, you know, they talked me into stay in. Oh sorry, I gotta try something hot. We're cooking a project here. I think it's good. Whoo, I think it's real good. Whoa Uh. So I wound up staying thirty three days at that hospital. Funny sidebar about this. When I was about seventeen years old, I went to my neighbor's house, but his mom and dad had gotten divorce 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 at, and she she was a counselor there when she told us that, And she told me, she said, I told you back in nineteen seventy nine you were going to wind up here, and you did, you know? So I'm starting to study peppers in college and We're coming up on first semester finals. Now I got a bunch of people in my room with a keg of low and Brow Dark, and we're doing bondheads and other various things. I think, well, I think a few of us popped 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 twelve of us in there, and this was the week before Thanksgiving, so it was like the Tuesday or Monday before Thanksgiving of nineteen eighty one, and I said, I am going to make the hottest pepper in the world. She wrote that down, all right, ed Curry, hottest pepper in the world. We fast forward to two thousand and seven, we had remained friends. I called her up and I talked to her into moving down to South Carolina and helping me run this blooming business. And about two weeks later she produced the notes from nineteen eighty one 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 one point two seven five 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 nineteen hundreds, 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 ailipino, so that would be zero to me, whereas you might be five thousand 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 like the medical community, you know, because like capsaicin is, capsinoids are used in a lot of things medicinally and have been since their early nineteen hundreds, sportscreams, you know, Bengay, that kind of thing. So to standardize it, they came up with a machine called an HPLC, a high performance liquid chromatic RAP. But that's where the science comes around. 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 rehabing 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 cap sasin in any form, hot, sauce, whatever, peppers, there's a nerve receptor that only mammals have, TRVP one that reacts with the cap sasin 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 heating peppers, but because your brain thinks you're on fire, it also releases a huge amount of don't mean an 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 chug and milk, you know, throwing up, crying or are you going to 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 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 people had reaction to eating peppers, those in the recovery community went back for seconds. Now, through the late eighties early nineties, 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 loved the dirt in South Carolina, and I loved 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, O an angel, you know what? A load of you know what? Well, there are people who believe it and don't tell Edgarrurry he didn't see an angel.

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, O an angel, you know what? A load of you know what? Well, there are people who believe it and don't tell Edgarrurry he didn't see an angel.

And then of course.

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.

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.

In response to that heat.

It's fascinating, and of course it fascinated Ed Curry and saved ug 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 but Pepper Company here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories, and we're listening to Ed Curry, the founder and president of the puckerbut Pepper Company, sharing his story. Let's pick up where we last left off.

It's fascinating, and of course it fascinated Ed Curry and saved ug 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 but Pepper Company here on our American stories, and we continue with our American stories, and we're listening to Ed Curry, the founder and president of the puckerbut 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 thirty what seven thirty eight year old man. I had to humble myself and say, Mom and Dad, can I come and live with you? And to my surprise, they said yes right now. I didn't realize there were going to be a ton of roles 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 fourteen. 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 gotten within forty eight 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 fridge for her name, and she was like, who wants to know, looking straight at me, and I asked her for her 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 so 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 I said, will you form it now? I'll see with me. And she was like, what are you trying to say? Are you trying to tell me 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 and peppers and tomatoes. And she was like, what are you doing, you know? And I said, well, I'm going to build a greenhouse back here. She was 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 eighty one. I'm going to make the hottest pepper in the world. I'm going to cure cancer. I'm going to cure heart dise And she's like, well, if that's what you want to do, that's what you do. She had no idea how much fruit would come off of all those plants. So she's like, what are we going to do with this? And I said, We'll make hot sauce and salta 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 giving a lot of stuff away, okay, and she said people will buy this and I said, no, they won't, and 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 do you do? 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 twenty thousand plants. You know, it just kept on growing from there. The end of two thousand and six is when I saw my first farm land and we planted that in two thousand and seven. 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 knew the science behind it, and you know they were just doing low level research, spare time stuff. Not real. Let's see, two thousand and seven we started the farm and in two thousand and six I had gotten my first store front, 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 a mason jars sometimes in woozies. You know, I was designing labels. They look 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 of years and we're we've been getting it tested over at Winsor University and 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. All she goes, actually, your first s 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 Luquisha. 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 Luquisha graduated in two thousand and nine and she published a poster as part of her gradu You know, they do projects. She published a poster showing a bunch of data on what was at the time called HP twenty two B 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 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 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 nineteen hundreds.

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 thirty what seven thirty eight year old man. I had to humble myself and say, Mom and Dad, can I come and live with you? And to my surprise, they said yes right now. I didn't realize there were going to be a ton of roles 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 fourteen. 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 gotten within forty eight 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 fridge for her name, and she was like, who wants to know, looking straight at me, and I asked her for her 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 so 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 I said, will you form it now? I'll see with me. And she was like, what are you trying to say? Are you trying to tell me 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 and peppers and tomatoes. And she was like, what are you doing, you know? And I said, well, I'm going to build a greenhouse back here. She was 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 eighty one. I'm going to make the hottest pepper in the world. I'm going to cure cancer. I'm going to cure heart dise And she's like, well, if that's what you want to do, that's what you do. She had no idea how much fruit would come off of all those plants. So she's like, what are we going to do with this? And I said, We'll make hot sauce and salta 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 giving a lot of stuff away, okay, and she said people will buy this and I said, no, they won't, and 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 do you do? 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 twenty thousand plants. You know, it just kept on growing from there. The end of two thousand and six is when I saw my first farm land and we planted that in two thousand and seven. 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 knew the science behind it, and you know they were just doing low level research, spare time stuff. Not real. Let's see, two thousand and seven we started the farm and in two thousand and six I had gotten my first store front, 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 a mason jars sometimes in woozies. You know, I was designing labels. They look 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 of years and we're we've been getting it tested over at Winsor University and 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. All she goes, actually, your first s 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 Luquisha. 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 Luquisha graduated in two thousand and nine and she published a poster as part of her gradu You know, they do projects. She published a poster showing a bunch of data on what was at the time called HP twenty two B 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 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 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 nineteen hundreds.

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. 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.

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. 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 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 four hundred 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 ninety percent accurate, and we want to use the money to get two more researchers and get this to market. And I 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, I have developed a process with nano robots to deliver chemotherapy into cancer cells, and there's only ten 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 verson 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 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 had 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. He goes, I remember you. You said, pepper scure cancer. Let's figure out why. And 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 of a 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, there's a key on a capsianoid that causes an autoimmune sequence in cancer and kills the cancer. It causes it to kill itself. Delivery method is the problem. Not everybody elite 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, twenty eleven, a funny thing happened through a miracle, absolute miracle, God story. My wife and I 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 any income except for the pepper business, which was not making enough money to sport itself. It got to the point where I was borrowing money for payroll, always paying back but robing 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 promised 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 morning until you know, two or three in the afternoon, and then driving to the farm and working the farm and then go in and make an odd sauce at night. Between the two jobs, I was running about eighteen hours a day. So we're still growing but struggling. I had like twenty nine 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 all, 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 an heart attack? And I was like, no, I'm crying, man, It's okay. It's okay. 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 playing a whole lot of major manufacturers, and I mean major manufacturers, Fortune five hundred companies with the products they need to make the products. Say 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 hot top peppers that we've made that just taste 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 eleven fifty five gallon drums of salt mash to make this wing sauce. And I showed their head chef, who's right here in the same hometown. You can replace fifty five 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 eleven fifty five gallon drums. It had to do with a big business saving money on the product that they were selling a lot of. And see pepper X. It's three times higher 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 a dad to a ten year old and a twelve 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, 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 I had to be taught what it was to be a real man and a husband and a boss and a leader. 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. 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 one 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 keep this going for another twenty three years.

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 four hundred 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 ninety percent accurate, and we want to use the money to get two more researchers and get this to market. And I 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, I have developed a process with nano robots to deliver chemotherapy into cancer cells, and there's only ten 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 verson 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 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 had 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. He goes, I remember you. You said, pepper scure cancer. Let's figure out why. And 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 of a 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, there's a key on a capsianoid that causes an autoimmune sequence in cancer and kills the cancer. It causes it to kill itself. Delivery method is the problem. Not everybody elite 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, twenty eleven, a funny thing happened through a miracle, absolute miracle, God story. My wife and I 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 any income except for the pepper business, which was not making enough money to sport itself. It got to the point where I was borrowing money for payroll, always paying back but robing 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 promised 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 morning until you know, two or three in the afternoon, and then driving to the farm and working the farm and then go in and make an odd sauce at night. Between the two jobs, I was running about eighteen hours a day. So we're still growing but struggling. I had like twenty nine 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 all, 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 an heart attack? And I was like, no, I'm crying, man, It's okay. It's okay. 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 playing a whole lot of major manufacturers, and I mean major manufacturers, Fortune five hundred companies with the products they need to make the products. Say 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 hot top peppers that we've made that just taste 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 eleven fifty five gallon drums of salt mash to make this wing sauce. And I showed their head chef, who's right here in the same hometown. You can replace fifty five 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 eleven fifty five gallon drums. It had to do with a big business saving money on the product that they were selling a lot of. And see pepper X. It's three times higher 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 a dad to a ten year old and a twelve 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, 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 I had to be taught what it was to be a real man and a husband and a boss and a leader. 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. 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 one 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 keep this going for another twenty three years.

Had a terrific job by the production, editing 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 to 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 much many Americans do. They're crooked lives in the sense that they 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

Had a terrific job by the production, editing 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 to 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 much many Americans do. They're crooked lives in the sense that they 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