On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and crazes, examine the forces that shape our culture, and tell the stories that create the realities we share, and sometimes the realities we don't.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American hysteria.

Hundreds of thousands of happy endings got their start with us.

They watched your video, they've seen your photo, they read about you, they know whether you're like opera or you hate baseball.

With completed questionnaires, the computer cupid gets cracking.

I did go home thinking, what have I done?

I really didn't want to do this.

I'm not having fun doing this.

The new one. It was the early 1990s when the World Wide Web started screaming out to a largely disinterested America, promising, nonetheless, to revolutionize

the human experience in ways previously unimaginable. At the time, a new internet startup was about

to get their first major TV interview, and their communications director was prepping their

founder and spokesman, a dorky 30-year-old computer genius with a mess of brown hair crowned with a

growing bald spot. She tried to lay down the law, all but demanding the eccentric Grateful Dead fan avoid wearing

any colorful, complicated, Dan Flashian patterns, and to make sure he didn't say anything that could cause

undue controversy. He arrived the next day, however, wearing a bright tie-dye shirt, telling his team that the station would now be conducting the interview in his office, live from his multi-colored beanbag chair.

Once the camera started rolling, he channeled another band, I'm going to assume that he loved the Beatles, telling the interviewer,

quote, match.com will bring more love to the planet than anything since Jesus Christ.

The communications director may as well have been struck dead on the spot.

That is, until she realized that a man like this would attract a whole lot more attention

than a Silicon Valley mannequin in a powder blue button up.

Match.com's founder, Gary Kremen, as many of his fellow computer obsessives, had had trouble finding

love in the past, trying out newspaper personals, video dating companies, traditional matchmakers,

...