Most of us don't want to commit murder. That's my weird hypothesis about people.

Welcome to You're Wrong About I Am Sarah Marshall.

Today we are learning about the Donner party, and we are learning about it with Chelsea Webber Smith,

a host of American hysteria, one of my favorite podcasts, and probably one of your favorite podcasts

if you're a fan of this one. You just might not know that it's one of your favorite podcasts yet, but it will be.

Both Chelsea's show and this show are often about American folklore and the stories that we grow up kind of knowing,

but that maybe change completely when we learn the details.

And this is one of those stories. So I was really happy to go farther back in time than we often do,

and to have Chelsea try and separate Smith from fact, and also to look at the areas where that has become impossible,

because that's one of the things we like to talk about as well.

We did an episode on the Diathlon Pass Incident not long ago, and this is a survival story as well,

and a story about people who found themselves in circumstances that it might be impossible for us to imagine,

and what they did in those conditions. And I think these are certainly stories that are always interesting to me.

It's part of why I watch so many horror films. I think there's something for all of us in asking ourselves how we would react,

and how we would like to think we would react, and maybe the distance between those two things when we think about situations like this one.

We have really tried to stay out of goringness for its own sake. That's kind of a theme in the show that when we talk about scary stuff,

our goal isn't to scare you for the sake of it, but we also aren't trying to hide the scary stuff either.

So if you're not in a place where you want to hear about people in survival situations, extreme physical arrests, or cannibalism,

this isn't going to be a good episode for you.

But that's that our focus in this episode is really on the people who are involved in the story,

and what we can learn about them now, what their relationships were like, what they were trying to do to maintain some kind of a social order

in the face of annihilation, and we want to talk about the people, and then what happened to them a secondary to that in our telling.

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