2025.09.25: Never Swallow The Worm

That's my opinion!

Hey, we're recording the podcast!

Guys!

Good

morning to you, wherever you are, because

it is morning somewhere!

For September 25th, 2025.

My name is

Friday Burns, sitting right over there.

She's literally just sitting down over there.

It's Ashley Burns.

Hi, Dash, everybody.

You love doing this to me.

I'm like, oh no, I'm gonna get all my stuff in order.

Oh, no.

Started the podcast, and are we in.

So we're heading back to the dentist today for our follow-up appointments.

We didn't tell everyone the results of our stellar dental appointment.

Well, I guess they weren't quite stellar.

I would say like maybe A-

So, yeah, we got to go back to the dentist today.

I need a filling, and you're getting...

Oh, do you need a filling?

I need a filling.

When was the last time you went to the dentist?

See, that's the thing.

Let's talk about this.

Let's have real talk.

Okay, real talk is, so that's one of the things that fell off with the move and with the pandemic and everything is we established a GP, but we never established a dentist.

Right.

So I've never been to the dentist in Scotland before.

Five years you've been here.

Yes, but it's actually longer than that.

I haven't been to the dentist since I was pregnant with Finn.

So it's been like seven years since I've been to the dentist.

Now, that sounds like a long time.

That's a very long time considering you're supposed to go twice a year.

But the nice thing, I guess, is that I have like one tiny filling that I need to get done.

So I have like one tiny cavity in seven years.

That's not bad.

I'm giving the credit, honestly, largely to vibrating teethes.

Okay.

Good.

Those can be like my edging comments yesterday.

Vibrating what?

Yeah, it's so usually though, that that average does average out where you're supposed to go twice a year.

And if you don't go for like five years, then you have to go 10 times in one year to correct all the problems.

But no, I was in the same boat.

I hadn't been in probably about five years.

And I got that wonderful, horrible situation where I sat down, they looked at it, they go, your mouth is fine.

Like, I've just dealt with that my whole life where it's cavities are just not a thing.

Have you ever had one?

I had one where I had a, this is dental stuff we're talking about here.

So trigger warning.

I had a wisdom tooth that grew in sideways.

They call that impacted.

It was impacted.

It had impacted and it grew in sideways against one of my back molars.

And it, I guess, rubbed or just made a situation back there where I had to have work done on my back molars.

But that's pretty much it.

You're just just sitting there and you just like, you hear them like bringing in like the back hose.

I'm like, eee, eee, just inside your mouth.

They're like setting up the cordons.

They're like, we got a situation here.

It probably didn't help that I got my wisdom teeth removed as part of a pharmaceutical experiment.

Yeah, I mean, you know,

that was a choice for sure.

That was the one where like they chose whether or not to like give you pain medication.

It was part of like a double blind.

placebo trial where it's like you might get pain medication you might get just whatever you know anti-inflammatory That's what it was.

They were testing an anti-inflammatory.

Tylenol.

So here's the thing.

Dude,

can I just say,

I just miss a simpler time in our lives.

Like this week, I'm supposed to have an opinion, a political opinion about Tylenol.

And escalators, I'm supposed to.

People were disappointed that we don't talk about this stuff every day of the week.

It's like, this is exactly why.

I got to sit down and form an opinion, a political opinion of a goddamn escalator, actually.

Yeah, I think that the best political opinion about uh escalators was already formed by mitch i have none i have zero none whatsoever who said uh it's you you escalators they never break they're just temporarily stairs right sorry for the convenience

good lord that was my opinion but i just want to go back to a simpler time actually

when i could hate the government and love my wife and that's it that's all i want to do look you you can make that choice that would be a t-shirt if this was rushy we should make a t-shirt

what do you What do you think was the most successful internet t-shirt of all time?

Internet t-shirt?

The Live Strong bands.

I know it's not a t-shirt, but that's like what I think of:

the Lance Armstrong Lives Strong, those yellow wristbands that like everyone had them.

And then everyone else decided they were also going to make a wristband.

So then there's a purple band for this company, and there's a red band for this company.

And before you know it, everyone's wearing like a rainbow of of like rubber bracelets on their wrist.

And then,

like, overnight, no one was.

We knew the guys that shipped those, by the way.

Did you?

Yeah, they had the contract before he went on Oprah.

And then he went on Oprah, and they went from like shipping a thousand a day to 12 million.

I feel like everyone

in like high school had one of those.

Like, everybody had one.

It's a good call.

It's a good, I mean, as a product, that's probably the one, and there's probably nothing close to that.

But as far as t-shirts go, I felt like I saw that goddamn

keep calm and chive on shirt for the chive.

Remember the chive?

The chive website?

The chive might still be going, but yeah, that shirt was everywhere.

Everywhere.

They also like made it the basis for their website for like three years where they would just post pictures of people who were wearing the shirt wherever.

I saw that.

Maybe I was too tied in or like tuned into that stuff.

I saw that everywhere.

I mean, I feel like there was, once again, a period where everyone had a keep calm and verb on t-shirt or poster of some kind.

But I think that you probably saw Chive stuff all the time because they were Austin-based.

Right?

Yeah.

They were in Austin and they're probably going around to like all the same events that like the local radio stations are just like chucking t-shirts at people.

If they're really lucky, they're getting, ooh, do you remember the video of there was a girl?

In like, I think

a basketball court and she was throwing t-shirts.

Actually, do you know this video?

She could throw a t-shirt with like pinpoint accuracy to like the top rows of the stadium.

It was incredible.

This girl, if they got her to throw the chive t-shirts, no wonder everyone's wearing them.

Is that person?

That's who they should cast as the new Wonder Woman in the DCU.

I don't know, my future wife.

She would say that.

She plants her back foot and just, and someone had the forethought to shoot it in slow motion too.

She just chucks this shirt to the upper deck.

And it might be just me like putting this in my head but I feel like she threw it to the exact person she was trying to throw it to like there's even some story that she was trying to throw a shirt to her dad up in the states who's up in the nosebleeds and it's incredible sign her up I love that video and I love that woman just a little bit like it just her ability to throw a t-shirt that's all it takes that reminds me of a story I saw coming out of China It's about some guy who's like five foot five and he's dating a very tall woman.

Let's just say she's seven feet tall.

She's a very tall woman.

And how his parents are disowning him, and he shouldn't be in this relationship with this woman.

I don't know what category of news this falls under.

You know, it's just like odd stories coming out of China.

But all the photos of him with this giant lady, he looks so fucking happy.

I was sure.

Like, if you're into tall women, what's not to love?

And how are you going to find?

And it's like, I got a tall woman.

What a rare thing to find a woman over like six five right right yeah right she must be very tall i saw we'll link all these in linkedub but i saw uh i saw this other thing where it's an interview where it's like two really tall people but you can't really tell that they're super tall because they're tall next to each other yeah within the frame it's all relative they look the same and uh

they immediately start vibing with each other and it's incredible like you you watch the video and you'll watch these two people it's like clearly these two people people are immediately in love with each other well you you've got to though like at some point right you find your people and you go oh thank god finally, someone who's not going to walk up to me and go, well, you're tall, aren't you?

Finally, I can't.

Yeah, you can reach the top shelf.

I just hate the government and love my girlfriend.

That's my super tall girlfriend.

That's it.

You got someone that is literally on your level.

Yeah, I think

the Chive shirt, that would get my crown.

I think I saw that goddamn thing everywhere.

There was a lot of homestar shirts back in the day, but it was a really specific audience.

Yeah, and I was just in tune with that stuff because t-shirts, I always said t-shirts were like the economy of the internet.

Yeah.

And I feel like that's that's definitely definitely changed, but for a while it was like the, you'd go to a convention and like what t-shirts you saw on people absolutely like you wouldn't, you would note specific t-shirts and you would note specific brands on people at conventions.

But we were also very much in the convention scene at that time.

Yeah, yeah.

The best-selling shirts of all time for Rouche Teeth were, probably going to leave one out here, people like grapes was huge.

For a very long time, the ask me about my zombie plan and the legitimate strategy shirts which i think both of those are back in the store right now i'm i'm not sure about zombie plan we i think we know zombie plan might have been left we do have the legitimate strategy shirt in the store right now but i don't think zombie plan's i'm i'm there's one there's one i'll see if we can find the art files i must be forgetting but there's like those were the big ones for such

such a long time the uh this something came up just recently And I was kind of shocked by this because it was something where I very much thought I had my finger on the pulse.

And now I'm wondering if I'm, if it's just me or the children who were wrong.

Somebody called out the fact that we don't put the logo on the back of the shirt, what they call the yoke, up on the top in the back.

We don't put the rooster teeth logo and the URL on the t-shirt.

And people are like saying, why don't they do that anymore?

What happened?

I like that.

I thought everybody hated that.

We have the art for that, but it was a conscious decision not to because you didn't want people to feel like

they were a billboard if they bought a shirt.

But maybe part of buying the shirt is showing that you're supporting the thing.

Also, by the way, it makes this shirt, what, two bucks more expensive or something like that?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, to manufacture.

So there was a couple different factors that went into it, but the main one was, I didn't think people wanted this.

I thought it was like a benefit for the company and not for the person who was buying the shirt.

Advertising, like, oh, you're paying us to advertise us?

Great.

I thought it was eliminating kind of a sneaky peat kind of advertise, but I guess not.

I guess people actually did like it a lot.

I mean,

I guess weigh in.

Weigh in, please.

I would like to actually hear what people think about the yoke on the back of a t-shirt.

Also, if you never buy a t-shirt, shut the fuck up.

I don't care about what your opinion is.

Yeah, go back to the business.

Go back to your Live Strong band.

People always have opinions about t-shirts when they don't ever plan to buy a t-shirt.

They've never bought a t-shirt.

Really, you're not a customer at that point.

Your opinion, you're just fucking shit up.

But if you're the person who buys a t-shirt on the internet, let me know.

Do you want the yoke on the back of these things or not?

Do you ever wonder if you like learned the wrong lesson from things?

So this is like, yes, the yoke of the shirt is like, this was an impression that you had, right?

And you're like, I learned the wrong lesson.

I did.

But I'm wondering that.

So about our trip to the dentist today, I'm wondering the same thing.

Because, so seven years, one cavity, and you go, that's great.

I got really lucky.

Only one cavity in seven years, huh?

Yeah.

That's me.

It could save me a lot of dental trips.

I can do whatever the fuck I want at this point.

Right.

Like, am I learning the wrong lesson from this?

You know what you're doing, though?

You're building up that average of like two per year.

And like, when you're 70, you're gonna have to go to a thousand dental appointments here's what i'm gonna do

i'm gonna when i turn like 70 i'm just gonna have them take out any of the teeth that remain and like do that thing where they like make teeth on the end of a screw and then just drill them into my jaw and then i'll have like this set of like chompers that's gonna last into like eternity i always like to think about like the future people from the future looking back at us and going Or even just like our own grandchildren going, you did what?

You drove your car to a place where you filled it with explosive liquid?

Did you need a license or train?

No, we just did it.

You know, we just figured it out.

Sometimes you'd spill the explosive flammable liquid all over the place.

No, no, the biggest stressor was making sure you put the right flammable liquid in and not the flammable liquid that was actually going to make your engine explode.

Not that European flammable liquid.

But yeah, the same thing with like dental stuff.

I do think that that's something

that they will just fix and it'll be like, wow, you used to go and they would drill into your face and all this horrible stuff we would have to put up with.

And even just the ongoing care.

Do you ever watch the sci-fi series Farscape?

I've watched a little bit.

I wouldn't, I can't say that I've like, I've watched Farscape.

I've seen some episodes completely out of order and with no context.

So, yes, and no.

Is that the one?

Hold on, which one?

Does that merge with Babylon 5 in your head?

I was just going to ask, I was like, is that the Jason Momoa one or was that Babylon 5?

Or was that

Stargate?

They're all just mushed together in one giant thing of like independent sci-fi series.

In the first episode of Farscape, it's like a modern human falls through a wormhole, I think, or something.

He ends up in the future, but like also out in space somewhere.

Anyway, they put a worm in his mouth that is a dental care worm and it just goes through and cleans his teeth all the time and he swallows his.

What, like sharks?

Well, it's like a, it's just like a, they have a name for it.

It's like called the dentifree or something like that.

I forget what it was.

That has stuck in my head because I was like, I would 100% put that worm in my mouth.

Yeah, but what if you're not?

He lives in your mouth.

Okay, but now I have questions.

How did he swallow the worm and how do you not swallow the worm?

I think he swallowed it immediately.

I think he didn't let it establish itself, you know?

I don't know what it is.

Oh, it has to like cake root.

Got it.

Okay.

It was like a funny little bit.

Here's what it's going to do.

It's going to like just gradually over time eat your tongue and replace it.

Okay, let's

step away from the worms in our mouth discussion while it's early in the morning.

Would you put nanobots?

Like, I wouldn't put them in my bloodstream day one.

I'm not going to need early.

Would I put them in my mouth?

Would you put little, like you have like five or six nanobots that just are like a work crew that goes around your mouth and keeps it clean, like keeps all the little crevices and all that neat?

Here's what I prefer.

Would you do that?

No, here's what I'm going to prefer, right?

Where it's recommended that we brush our teeth twice a day if we only want to go to the dentist once every seven years.

So

I would like to have a device that is kind of like those teeth whitening kits, right?

Where you get like the big glit and then you just like put it, I'm I'm going to put it over my teeth in my mouth.

And then it's going to have little machines that reach out like little arms and go, scrap, scrap, scrub, scrap, scrap.

And then I'm done, right?

And then I remove them.

Yeah.

And then I just take the machine and I put it in the UV cleaner or whatever to clean that gross stuff.

Okay.

And that way I don't have to have nanobots living in my mouth like wondering what they're up to, being like, hey, are you guys like setting up the cordons, right?

You got you back, bring you in the back home, beep, beep.

You know, I don't have to worry about any of that.

Yeah, and you don't have to to floss yourself either, right?

That too.

Yeah.

That's the other thing too is like.

Do you floss as much as you're supposed to floss?

I am now because we got to go.

It was weird the way they do stuff in stages here.

We've learned this even with maintenance on cars.

Like we have to go a distance to go and get our car worked on.

It sucks because the first appointment is always like, hey, this engine light is on or whatever, or we're having this problem or we're hearing this noise and we think it's this.

They go, okay, we'll bring it in.

Here, for some reason, you bring it in, then the whole day goes by and you're like, can we get our car back?

Yeah, we had a chance to look at it.

We'll get to it tomorrow.

Like, okay, so then we got to like arrange travel to get, get down there and get it back.

Then we get it back and they go, the engine light is on.

It's like, we know, that's why we brought it in.

They're like, okay, well, we booked you in for service like two weeks from now.

I don't know if this is a UK thing or a rural thing.

It's like everything is two appointments.

Dentists, the same way.

We went for our checkup and now we're going back for a cleaning.

In America, that's all at once, man.

They put you on the conveyor belt and you go through and do everything.

Well, I think that what we had because we were new patients was like a new patient checkup thing where that's the one where they like they went in and they took the x-rays and they did all that stuff.

And they're like, all right, now we're putting together a treatment plan for you.

Okay, that's fair.

That's that's the other thing: we are going to a private dentist, and that's a big distinction here.

Uh, where uh, there are NHS dentists where you don't pay anything, you go to the dentist.

The catch is you have to get on a waiting list, and apparently, the waiting lists are years long to get in, uh, to like get on the patient list for a dentist.

So we just went private because we're Americans and we're used to paying for it anyway.

Like it feels weird when stuff is free.

And so it almost feels like more comfortable having to pay them.

But it's also how you get like the white, like the porcelain fillings.

Otherwise, I guess they're just like, you know what's free?

Metal.

Right.

Get the big giant silver filling in your mouth.

Right.

Which I think holds up longer anyway.

It comes with free nanobots, though.

Am I right?

It comes with lead.

Bleaching.

So I think what we had was like they're putting together a treatment plan, and that's supposed to be like a nice luxury thing because they're assuming that we don't live as far away as we do.

Everyone told us when we showed up here, it's like everyone does private dental care.

Like everyone loves the NHS.

It's beloved.

They're very upset with it these days because it used to be better than what it is now.

But everyone to a person told us here, just get a private dentist and do it.

And we were like, okay, fast forward five years.

We finally did it.

And I got the zero.

I got the thing.

No cavities.

You know, there was, I think I told the story in the RT podcast where one time I thought, I'm going to go get my teeth like done.

I'm on camera a lot.

I'm going to get my teeth.

Like, I don't want to see.

You get that thing where you're like, they make them all like exactly even.

And so they look like chiclets.

Yeah.

And they're all like white and shiny and like perfect and maybe a little bit too big.

Like that character in something about Mary.

Just get the giant white teeth, like Baba Booey.

But I thought, you know, I'd take a look and maybe get some work done.

And the cosmetic dentist said, I'm not going to touch your teeth.

And I wouldn't recommend that you have this done.

Because once you start down that road, then you're suddenly in a like a 10-year cycle of maintenance where you're going to have to have so much work done.

He goes, and if you don't have cavities, if you never get cavities, just don't mess with your mouth chemistry.

You've got, you're very lucky.

Don't fuck with it.

So I'm like, okay, I get it.

But also like you,

it's just affirmation of all the terrible stuff I've been doing all along anyway, that I haven't developed any serious problems.

Well, you know what?

It makes me wonder because when I was a kid, I did have a lot of cavities.

Like I remember I had like six cavities at once no shit really yeah like six cavities when i was a kid this is when i was in grade school uh do they mention

or are they just what like nuke it from orbit and start over what do they do no i had a it was a bunch of fillings and i the thing is i don't remember if all of those were necessarily on like you know the permanent teeth or the training teeth uh and so i i just i had i must have eaten horribly and never ever ever considered even looking at a toothbrush like was it the kool-aid that did it i don't like i don't feel like I have a particularly low sugar diet now.

I don't feel like I avoid the things that all the dentists tell you to avoid.

I don't avoid coffee.

I don't avoid tea.

I don't avoid sugar.

I don't make sure that I get less than 20 grams of, you know, sugary things in a week.

And so on.

Like, I don't.

worry about a lot of that stuff.

I just do the thing.

I brush my teeth twice a day and that's about it.

And I don't avoid any of that.

So what did my diet look like when I was like seven that I could get that many cavities?

Sugar is probably the the key because like the 80s and into the even the early 90s, that's when they established that fat is bad.

Everything was fat for

great.

Sugar is great.

And I can remember as a kid on a regular basis interacting with a one-pound bag of sugar.

And I feel like I haven't really done that as much as I did it when I was a kid.

I went back and looked at the

recipe to make Kool-Aid, and it was two cups of sugar, one packet of Kool-Aid.

And I think,

and I think it was then like two liters of water.

It's hummingbird food.

Yeah, yeah, yep.

It was insane.

I remember having, and

I had friends who would call Kool-Aid

juice.

Even as a kid, I was offended by that.

I don't think it's ever interacted with a fruit before.

Do you want some juice?

It was like, it was so sugary, it was gritty.

Like, if you drank from the bottom of the pitcher, that same pitcher everyone had with the little push button top.

Oh, yeah, then it would have like the, it would have, there'd be the grit at the end or you have to like stir it and you could, you could see the sediment rising as you stir it.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I would imagine too, people who drink like sweet tea in Texas and stuff, they probably still have lots of problems with cattle.

But I feel like that's something we've moved away from.

No, sweet tea, that one is the one that they have to superheat the tea.

Yeah, we read a whole episode about sweet tea.

Do you remember?

Yeah, I do.

It's just, it's still weird to me that they have, they had to develop such an advanced scientific technique to get more sugar in the liquid.

That's got to be the sugar companies, right?

That said, look, we've already got them where they've got grit at the bottom of their cup.

How do we add more sugar into a liquid?

Like, what can we possibly do to stop this?

Top scientists on this, and they came up with a recipe for sweet tea.

Gross.

They probably invented the Luby's cafeteria.

to distribute this stuff to.

That's my conspiracy for today.

Big Sugar invented sweet tea and then established Luby's cafeteria in order to distribute it to the American public.

All right, well, I want to say a big thank you to today's sweet teas, Craig Riley and Jeff Boyardi.

Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show, patreon.com/slash morning somewhere and roosterteeth.com.

Yeah, thanks for the copyright flag there, pal.

Using a trademark name.

All right, that does it for us today.

September 25th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.