‘Awards Chatter’ Live Pod: Sean Evans on a Decade of ‘Hot Ones,’ Buying the Show From BuzzFeed and Interviewing Secrets

Sean Evans, the host of YouTube’s Hot Ones — an unconventional interview program that launched a decade ago advertising itself as “the show with hot questions, and even hotter wings,” and has gone on to release 369 episodes that have attracted more than 4 billion views and featured the consumption of some 3,000 spicy chicken wings — is the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast, which was recorded in front of a journalism class at Chapman University.

Hot Ones has been described by Vanity Fair as “the closest thing the Internet has to a late-night talk show” and by the New York Times as “a breakthrough pop-culture phenomenon” — the show has even been spoofed on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons — while Evans, 39, has been hailed by Forbes as “among the country’s most revered interviewers” and by Bloomberg as “the David Letterman of Generation YouTube.”

Over the course of a conversation in front of — and eventually including — students enrolled in the Chapman University course “The Art of the Interview,” Evans reflected on what was going on in his life and in journalism that resulted in the creation of Hot Ones for Complex’s First We Feast blog, which was later acquired by BuzzFeed; how he prepares for and conducts interviews; what motivated and will result from the 2024 purchase, by Evans and a consortium of others, of Hot Ones from Buzzfeed for $82.5 million; how he feels about Hot Ones becoming eligible for Primetime Emmys in the same categories as the traditional late-night talk shows that inspired him as a kid; plus much more.