Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lore cast, the show that explores the background of Tolkien 15, we are seeing a transformation happen in front of us.

Thorin is falling to the dragon's sickness.

He is now in a location where he has complete control of the treasure that he's been seeking

from the beginning of this adventure.

And that treasure is tainted.

It's tainted with the disease that is left there by Smog the dragon, not just the toxic fumes and the,

I don't know, I'm sure it doesn't even smell very good because if a dragon slept on a pile

of treasure for years, it probably doesn't smell very good. But there's something more going on.

There's this dragon sickness and it's starting to take full effect, not just Thorin,

but some of the other dwarves as well. And this is a clear analogy. It would be silly to say that

this wasn't a reference to how power and wealth corrupts. And yeah, in the broad

strokes, of course that is true. But there are more nuanced details here

that are worth investigating beyond just the kind of thing you would write in a high school essay.

You could probably make a case for a few different things. So keep an eye out for some of this

as we get through this chapter and moving forward. The first is how malleable the facts are.

Look at the conversations that are had. Look at the way the different groups play out their

version of the stories. Look at the way that they use specific words to label what the other

side appears to be doing in order to manipulate the conversation.

Notice that oftentimes the facts are used in order to support their specific goal rather

than for their goal to bend around the facts. This is a telltale sign of using information in a corrupted manner. This is one of the

reasons why the scientific process is the way it is. It's because it's trying to fight against

these natural biases where we want to take the information and wrap them around the thing we want

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