You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.

Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program.

Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure.

We hope you enjoy it.

I was on the Ray Darcy show in Dublin.

They'd a boy from the country who could eat the hottest chilies,

munching through Scotch bonnets and then going to the Charlotte Reaper.

The sweat was coming out on his head. He was looking purple and Ray was saying,

well you have another. And the guy looked at me and I thought,

I've got a professional responsibility here. I said, oh please please don't I said everything in your

physiology is telling you it's time to stop. Mad absolutely mad.

Absolutely mad.

But that particular kind of madness has faded, sort of over the past decade,

...