Chelsey Weber-Smith

Chelsey Weber-Smith is the creator and host of American Hysteria. Follow American Hysteria on Twitter here and on Instagram here.

Kindly introduce yourself.
I’m Chelsey Weber-Smith, the writer, co-producer, and host of American Hysteria, a show that investigates our moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, and archetypes, basically our special brand of fantastical thinking. We do so using extensive research, sociology, psychology, and even biology to explain why we fear what we fear from the Puritans to the present. 

Outside of this show that seems to have taken over most of my life and my thinking, I once was a poetry grad student at the University of Virginia, and much of my summers used to be spent hitchhiking or living in the canopy of my truck, Old Handsome. I’ve traveled to almost every state this way, and currently live in Seattle where I grew up in the nearby suburbs. I love shooting BB guns, camping and obsessing over the campfire, playing music and writing, watching TV, going for really long walks where I don’t know where I am going while listening to true crime podcasts or country music.

How did you start podcasting?
I used to work for an entertainment company as a blogger and content producer. I suggested that we create a podcast and was eventually given the green light for a show we called Behind True Crime, where I would interview people who worked in the genre about their personal connection to the content and more importantly, their moral relationship to their work. I wasn’t expecting to get such amazing guests: Co-writers of the late Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Billy Jensen and Paul Hayes, the creator and host of the Dirty John podcast Christopher Goffard, famous criminology Katherine Ramsland, Creators of Netflix’s Wild Wild Country, as well as subjects from Netflix’s The Keepers, Director of HBO’s Paradise Lost docuseries (and Netflix’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile), and guests close to the issues of Scientology, serial killer psychology, and a lot more.   

There is NOTHING LIKE American Hysteria. How do you come up with ideas for the show?
I grew up with a weekend dad (you know what I mean) who was a conspiracy theorist and fantastical thinker. He believed the world was going to end on December 21st, 2012, a date that would finally come when I was in my early 20s. When nothing happened, as I expected (though I did go sit by the ocean all night and dramatically accepted my death just in case), I started a slow dissociation with the fantastical kid he helped raise, while trying to keep the good parts. I was obsessed with mysticism my whole life, believed in the Illuminati (minus the anti-Semitism and racism I later discovered), and distrusted science. My brain chemistry, like my dad’s, means that something times the world becomes suddenly flush with beauty and meaning, and then gray and dismal as dry dirt. It took until very recently to figure out the best ways to channel both parts of myself into my work. Much of what I thought I knew has been confronted as I make the show. So it is as much a form of self-education and therapy as it is a historical show. Also, I have been obsessed with ghosts and human potential stuff since I was a kid, and my favorite thing to read about and study were urban legends. My favorite childhood book was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which led me eventually to a love of analyzing why these stories carry through in different forms, and what they mean about being human. The format is essentially an academic essay each episode, I’ve been an academic all my life. But I find academia to be so deeply inaccessible to those outside of it, but also the place to go for expert analysis (not always of course). I am also a nonfiction writer, so I try to combine poetic writing with humor and history because I think poetry makes everything more accessible, makes everything easier to feel. There is very little feeling in academia, and I think feelings, despite their apparent opposition to rationality, are the real path to personal and political change.

Some of your episodes are potentially polarizing, yet you find a way to make them seem really friendly. How do you maintain that balance?
Well, being a codependent person helps immensely. I use that word to mean that I am overly concerned with the feelings of others over my own, something I have to work on constantly to maintain my own needs. I care a lot about what people think, and I feel like I am trying really hard to reconnect two disparate national sides. My values for myself, the way I feel like I can be effective in my goals, is to invite people from as many sides as possible (because there are far more than two political identities), to engage with difficult content in a “safer” way. I use my own personal narrative in hopes, and I try as much as possible to call myself out for my problematic parts, so others can do that work themselves rather than closing down when they are accused of the racism, sexism, classism, and queerphobia that our show often centers around. I want to be clear that these are my own values for myself, I don’t expect others not to use their own strengths, which can definitely include confrontation, something that can be effective, but that I am not very good at. There is a need for all the communication strengths that each individual can add. American Hysteria is a gentle show, and I think the humor of it breaks up the ugly things about our past and present that are hard to stomach and can cause combative feelings. 

What has the response been to your show?
From what I have seen, overwhelmingly positive. But my sensitive ass does not read the reviews. I get a lot of messages that give me hope and push me forward. All I want in the world for the show, besides finding a way to make enough money to get by, is to help others take self-inventory to better relate to those they might feel are ‘others’ and help those that have been ‘othered’ by our culture to feel more understood in their righteous anger and their sadness, as well as their exuberance and strength, to give context to the present moment and untangle the weeds of the archetypical characters we have created out of one another. I trust the opinions of my friends and Rod, Riley, and Miranda, the three beautiful stars that also work on the show, and I look to those in my life to tell me if I am veering off course. I know I have been accused of being in the Illuminati, which is fun for me. I know reviewers get pissed because I apparently blame everything on white men. I sure don’t think I do that, but I guess these big boys are relating a little too heavily with the white dudes of the past. We have plenty of white guy listeners who want to hold themselves accountable and don’t feel attacked at all, so whatever. There is always someone waiting to hate you, isn’t there? I am terrified of the internet most of the time.

What has been the most fun episode to record? The most difficult?
I think the most fun show has to be Phantom Clowns. It was just so hilarious and I am such a die-hard horror fan, so getting to talk about that, and also finding a way to heighten the archetype of the clown into a pretty hilarious philosophical being felt fun for this poetry dork. The hardest, man, so many of them are so hard. I’d say our Terrorism series, just in terms of how to lay it out, I rewrote most of it the day before recording late into the night, and my partner Miranda who also works on the show, let me pace and pull of my hair while trying to form sentences and being really kind to me, same with the episode called Dangerous Teens. Trying to confront some of the harder realities about school shootings that could go against our cultural narrative is SCARY. Also, Monsters, and trying to figure out how to talk about this particularly horrible history of racism as a white person. That is always the hardest part—being careful, making sure I am using the right sources, making sure I am educating and speaking as an outsider trying my best to understand and then pass that on.

What have you learned about yourself making American Hysteria? What have you learned about America?
In terms of America, I think the biggest thing that has been confirmed to me is the damage our extreme polarization has done to what it means to be a human. Each and every person is a complicated infinitude of parts, sometimes productive, kind, and malleable parts that serve a higher social purpose, and sometimes ugly, destructive parts that degrade the march toward a just society. It has always been this way, two sides digging in their heels, and of course, one side I always agree with far more than the other. But for myself, I work to understand the other side as much as I can stomach, and it’s often really fucking hard and really fucking gross. There are so many people that are too long gone for me to even dream of reaching, but there are millions who waver between red and blue, who feel that both sides are no longer representing them, and likely never did. The work I have done means that I have traced prejudice all the way back to the Puritans and their early explorer counterparts and the narratives they told to justify what they wanted, and then to follow those threads and ways of thinking all the way through our history until the present starts to make more sense. We inherit who we are and what we think; we are responsible for changing that, but we are also responsible for understanding that that process is more complicated than internet shaming, and more about the systems that make problematic individuals than the individuals themselves.

How have you been able to grow the show? What worked?
Networking, always. But networking for podcasters often looks more like mutual support. What I love is that this world hasn’t figured itself out yet; it hasn’t become a capitalist machine, and therefore, there is a kind of subtler economy happening underneath, a non-competitive sharing of audiences through ad swapping and crossovers. There isn’t as much of a drive to “protect” what is “yours”; there is far more value in joining in the community, because really, podcasting isn’t competitive, we don’t lose our listeners to a competing show, we just give them something else to enjoy.

If you were going to start a new podcast, don't worry about whether or not anyone would like it or any of the logistics, what would it be?
Ahh, keeping this one quiet as I have a couple ideas that hopefully will come to fruition… 

What would you tell someone who wants to start a podcast but is afraid?
Really think about who you are and what you enjoy. That could be anything from social justice to a recap podcast about Degrassi (yes my partner and I are considering this). Start somewhere manageable. As mentioned, my first podcast was an interview show, totally different from American Hysteria. I love true crime, and I love thinking about the costs of what we love, and the benefits. So it was a show about true crime combined with sociology. Make it your own; be creative with format. Don’t just say, I want to be the next My Favorite Murder. Have reasonable expectations. It’s hard work, and it’s disappointing. Make sure you work from a place of love and hopefully fun, don’t focus on the numbers until you need to.

What is your biggest goal for American Hysteria? Why did you make it?
In a nutshell, I want to help us understand ourselves, and ultimately each other. We have to do that through understanding our history, how we got here, and what the past can tell us about the present. But beyond that, especially in this third season that does focus more so on my own experiences and reactions to what I am learning, I want it to create a more productive place for self-analysis and self-inventory. We are a nation of outrage and a nation who loves to place blame on anything but ourselves, and in doing so, we project our internalized bullshit onto others, ignore our own problematic behaviors, and lose touch with our built-in desire to work toward community, even when it’s hard. I also want to tell stories, to make people laugh at the same time, so we can get through the hard stuff together, the dark corners and the weeds, without so much of our special brand of American fear.

Thanks, Chelsey!