First We Feast

Creator · Verified

Food-media channel behind Hot Ones, where celebrities answer questions while eating increasingly spicy wings.

#23Hub rank

15.6MYouTube followers

About First We Feast

First We Feast is the food-media empire behind Hot Ones: the interview show where celebrities eat increasingly spicy wings while answering increasingly personal questions. Host Sean Evans — unflappable, impeccably researched — turned a gimmick into the best interview show on the internet.

The origin story is pure Complex-era internet. First We Feast started in 2012 as a food blog under Complex Networks, founded by Chris Schonberger with a simple thesis: food is the illuminating lens into pop culture, music, travel, and everything else. The YouTube channel followed in February 2014. Then, in 2015, Schonberger asked a 28-year-old Evans to host a wings-centric interview show — and Hot Ones was born. The first episode featured rapper Tony Yayo, ran about five minutes, and had no hot-sauce bottles in sight.

Nobody expected what came next. The format is genius: pain as truth serum. Ten wings, ten progressively hotter sauces — from a mild start to a finale pushing two million Scoville units — while Evans asks the deep-dive questions nobody else bothers to research. As the heat climbs, guests drop their guard, and the revelations pour out: A-listers crying, confessing, and bonding over shared suffering.

The research is the real secret weapon. Evans’ preparation is legendary — guests routinely marvel at questions nobody else has ever asked them. It is proof that preparation beats provocation, even with a mouth full of Da Bomb. That rigor is what separates Hot Ones from every imitator: the spice gets the headlines, but the journalism gets the guests.

The guest list is absurd: Oscar winners, pop stars, athletes, chefs, and cultural icons of every stripe. The show went mainstream-viral in 2016 with a Key & Peele episode that opened the door to bigger and bigger gets — Kevin Hart, Tony Hawk, Gordon Ramsay, Jennifer Lawrence, Ryan Reynolds. Evans has now eaten more than 3,000 wings on camera across 360-plus episodes, and the show has racked up billions of views.

The accolades followed the audience. Hot Ones won the 2018 Shorty Award for Best Web Series and the 2019 Webby for Food & Drink, with Evans taking back-to-back Webbys for Best Web Personality. In 2021, the show earned a daytime Emmy nomination for outstanding entertainment talk show — a web series standing shoulder-to-shoulder with broadcast television — the same year BuzzFeed acquired Complex Networks, and First We Feast with it, for roughly $300 million.

The brand kept expanding. Hot Ones: The Game Show launched on truTV in 2020, reimagining the format as a pepperdome competition. First We Feast diversified beyond wings with The Burger Show, Tacos Con Todo, and Feast Mansion — but nothing touches the flagship. The hot-sauce empire is real too: branded sauces, the Truth or Dab card game, subscription boxes. Hot Ones monetized the pain — and fans happily pay to suffer along.

Then came the plot twist worthy of the show itself. In December 2024, Sean Evans, Chris Schonberger, and a group of investors — including Soros Fund Management, Crooked Media, and Mythical Entertainment — bought First We Feast back from BuzzFeed for $82.5 million. The host became the owner. The kid who ate wings for a living now runs the company, with Evans as Chief Creative Officer and Schonberger as CEO, plotting live events, new talent, and new platforms. “The future is spicy,” Evans said.

What makes the story remarkable is the counter-programming. As traditional talk shows hemorrhage viewers, Hot Ones stayed steady — because it understood something television forgot: the interview is only as good as the interviewer, and the audience can smell a lazy question. Evans never asks a lazy question. That discipline, paired with the most ridiculous premise in media, built a brand worth tens of millions and a format that spawned imitators on every continent.

From a Complex side project to a cultural institution, First We Feast proved that food content could be the best interview content — one wing at a time. Hot wings, hard questions, legendary television: the show with hot questions and even hotter wings remains the internet’s definitive celebrity interview — and its host owns the whole spicy empire.

The Hot Ones guest strategy remains the industry’s best booking playbook: catch people at their most interesting, then add hot sauce. The revelations — career confessions, secret projects, genuine emotion under genuine duress — turned the show into journalism’s most delicious ambush, and every publicist in Hollywood now understands that surviving the wings is a rite of passage.

And the empire keeps finding new rooms. Live events, international versions, new hosts, new sauces — the brand that started as a food blog in 2012 now spans a media company its own host bought for $82.5 million. The lesson of First We Feast is the lesson of the whole internet era: take the work seriously, take yourself lightly, and never — ever — ask a lazy question.