Cayenne You Handle the Heat in Audible Australia’s Original “It Burns”?

At Audible, we truly immerse ourselves in our content. Our Australian team recently celebrated the launch of their first local Audible Original production, It Burns, which delves deep into the cutthroat world of competitive chili-eating, by sampling the “hot” in hot sauce.

Their “friendly competitive chili-eating competition” gave the team’s taste buds a hit of what acclaimed Australian presenter Marc Fennell explores in the series. He takes listeners from the Australian Coast to South Carolina to deconstruct long-held allegations that an Australian chili-growing family was cheated of a Guinness World Record. As a chili-lover himself, Fennell discovers the pursuit of spiciness is about much more than chilis as he digs into a dark, unforeseen cultural underbelly. It’s about how people use pain–whether their own or others’–to shape and define their sense of self and feel more alive.

“It’s a war filled with larger-than-life characters, broken friendships, getting high off extreme heat, addiction, BDSM, mental health, misguided spirituality and death threats,” says Fennell of It Burns. “It forced me to explore aspects of my past that I have never really dealt with.”

While the in-house chili-eating contest did not delve quite that deep, it did have a range of hot sauces, from the mild to the super-hot, along with chili chocolate and a large jug of palate-cooling milk. And, of course, a lot of laughs.

It Burns is available exclusively on Audible. It’s the first of many Australian Audible Originals launching on Audible.com.au in 2019.