Dr. Bret Devereaux

And so you'd start the water boiling to mix your coffee, and you'd be mixing your coffee, and you would soak your hardtack in the coffee.

And all of the

which would make it soft so that it doesn't break your teeth.

You need to soak hardtack before you eat it.

And all of the bugs and stuff in your hardtack would come out and float to the top of the boiling water where you could scrape them off and throw them away.

Oh my goodness.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah, this is just what you did.

And on ship, you might use grog for this purpose, which grog is watered down alcohol.

I really do like that line.

So Saruman's problem, almost invariably, is that he makes these intricate clockwork plans that require every component element to succeed in order for the plan to have any chance at success.

And in the event, almost everything goes wrong.

But when you actually piece them apart, any component part that went wrong is

would cause a huge problem what's striking is that in in the hunt for the ring in unfinished tales we get a little bit of insight that we don't get from the from the lord of the rings specifically that even when the before the witch king even knows where the shire is yeah sauron is aware that saruman is betraying him which puts the failure point for saruman's plans really early

Yeah, it does.

And speaks to this.

And just to sort of back up on this, Saruman's fundamental problem is having betrayed both the Free Peoples and Sauron, he is in a position where at best it is get the ring or die.

Yeah.

Because if he doesn't get the ring, he's not militarily strong enough to prevail against Rohan and Gondor on his own or to prevail against Sauron on his own.

And so he either gets the ring.