It's like climbing everest, but with more intestinal distress

You would pay money to say you've played tennis against the world's best player. You wouldn't pay money to spar with the world's best boxer. Even if it was free, you probably wouldn't agree to it. That would be stupid.
Cut to: me trying not to visibly panic whilst having a bit of the earth's core between my teeth.

I'm referring to a pepper called the Bhut Jolokia. Guinness World Records has recognized as the hottest pepper in the world. I don't even know why civilians are allowed to have it. Bhut Jolokia is 400 times spicier than tabasco sauce. That's like showing up to a squirt-gun fight with Hurricane Andrew.

An engine's horsepower rating is a very simple number to understand: 100 is not enough; 200 will get the job done and 900 will peel your face off. The exact scale for measuring spiciness is not very useful. Peppers range from the low thousand degrees Scoville to several hundred thousand of these magic degrees. The spice seller had instead chosen to replace the degrees Scoville system with a base-10 scale.

The process was simple: you take a chip, spoon a little of the hot sauce on your chip, and then down the hatch it goes. I started with a spice blend numbered 7. I didn't care so much about what the flavor was but 7 of 10 was a bold opening salvo. It was good, I could handle it with ease. But like all men, I knew that 7 of 10 wasn't good enough.

Down towards the more menacing end of the scale was a blend with a 10+ out of 10 rating and a warning that under-18s were not allowed to sample this blend. Again, this sauce didn't put up much of a struggle. Flush with a sense of invincibility, I asked if they had anything hotter.

They did. And here, the Bhut Jolokia enters the story. The description of the sauce gave a surprisingly unhelpful 14/10 rating. If an amplifier says it goes to 11, you can understand that will be painfully loud. But 14? That number might as well be infinity. It just boggles the mind.

Like most peppers, the spiciness of the Bhut Jolokia doesn't come immediately. Your first taste is citrusy, with a bit of tomato. It seems a bit of a letdown, a bit of a joke. As if you're supposed to pretend that it is unbearably spicy to scare off anyone who hasn't tried it. And then the spiciness knocks you off your feet. And then it kicks your teeth in for good measure.

The Bhut Jolokia is over one million degrees Scoville. The runner-up clocks in at a mere 600,000 degrees. There is, simply put, no pepper which comes close. I'm trying to think of adequate ways to describe the way this pepper feels in your mouth. Napalm, perhaps. Or a blast furnace. This is not hyperbole for comedic purposes. You genuinely believe that the inside of your mouth is melting like an Edward Munch painting.
Dairy, we are told, helps soothe the burn. This is not the case. I sought out a free sample of yogurt in hopes of diminishing the lava flow. It did nothing. The yogurt vaporized on contact.

I sought out water instead. The man at the booth asked how I was doing, unaware to the unquenchable inferno contained within. I don't recall what I told him, but I recall that I was somehow using a tongue I thought had dissolved minutes ago.
"Mate," the man behind the desk said "you're shaking." So I was.

The test of intelligence is the ability to recognize and learn from your mistakes. Will I ever eat one of these again? Yes.
And with that kind of mindset, I wouldn't blame you for thinking that I'd taken a couple of knocks to the head, courtesy of the boxing world's heavyweight champion.