S13 EP14: Do I Love You?

0:00Hey, parents. How do you make smarter choices for your kids' college today? That's where Sally can help. With Sally, you can find scholarships, funding options, tools, and guidance all in one place. And if you need a loan, Sally has options for different families and different situations. College is only worth it if you do it right. So don't just help your kid go. Help them go smarter. Sally.com slash go parents.

0:30Josh Widdicombe:Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. It was a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it. Tonight, we feast. An offer you can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees, may apply. This episode is presented by Tui. You've got to love a family holiday, Josh. Oh, you've got to love it. Who wouldn't love it, Rob? But do you know what the problem with holidays is? You don't get enough of them. That's the problem. Exactly. So you need to make the most of your holiday, which is why Tui gives you more.

1:13Josh Widdicombe:So that's got to be easy booking for incredible destinations with amazing hotels that offer all the things you love. Perfect beaches, mouth-watering food, on-site splash parks, wellness centres, swim-up suites, and fun stuff for the kids. And now you can get even more by joining the brand new Tui Smiles Reward Club for free. We're talking members-only deals, personalised rewards from Tui and some of their brilliant partners and plenty of chances to win amazing prizes. Love it. Get more from your holiday book now and discover the Tui Smiles Reward Club at tui.co.uk. Atoll and Abta protected. Hello, you're listening to Parenting Hell with...

1:54Ronnie, can you say Rob? Rob. Beckett. Beckett. And can you say Josh? Rob. Widdicombe. Wicked. Well done.

2:05Josh Widdicombe:Go on, Ronnie. Ronnie, great name. This is my nephew, Ronnie, age two, saying your names on a recent holiday to Mallorca. I'm also mum myself to Florence 7 and Arthur 3. My son Arthur has a speech disorder. I hope one day he'll be able to say the intro, but until that day, Ronnie will do. Oh, that's nice. do you know what grace you can have i was going to say fast track i don't know how i can't help you on that actually hey well look i'm sure he'll be absolutely fine to do it at some point i had a speech disorder disorder did you say is that the right word yep um and had speech therapy and now i speak for a living too much thank you for all the laughs overduced and keeping me company on my early and late commutes to Heathrow while I work for Rob's favourite airline.

2:53Josh Widdicombe:All the best, Grace, from Fleet in Hampshire. You want mine? Very good. Well, not great, Rob, but we're going to do an emails episode. A correspondence. Correspondence episode, because I can't quite take on talking about the present at this moment. Okay, you've dropped a bit of a sort of, you've made people be more interested about what you're up to. what's going on actually last episode or do you want to mention it slightly yeah i'll mention it slightly last episode i was in a dark place then i was in a great place do you remember the last episode i started in quite a bad mood rob yes you you weren't probably the worst mood i've ever been on parenting hell yeah i'd say it was very it felt like no it was quite a shock it felt a bit like you'd caught me and rose having an affair and then gone through with the podcast yeah because the, you know, contractual obligations.

3:48I've got to deal with Spotify.

3:50Josh Widdicombe:At the end of the day, I'm a professional. But now you just obviously were having a bit of a low moment, as we all do. It's doubly annoying because Rose is going to get half of this from our divorce, and she'll get half of the half that you get from your divorce when you get together with Rose. So Rose is sitting three quarters of this money. She's going to be the only one on a hole. She's going to be the only one on a hole, apart from Lou, who I'm now going to try and chat up.

4:21Oh, how long until that was all fine? Do you know what I mean? There'd probably be a couple of years of it being a bit rocky. It would be weird when people are like,

4:30Josh Widdicombe:I missed a few episodes. Now Josh is talking about Lou and Rob's talking about Rose. What would you do kids wise? You'd probably just have a kid each. Sort of like, I'd have one of yours, you'd have one of mine. We don't use their names anyway, so it wouldn't affect people. As long as you kept the boy, I'm fine. Yeah, exactly, yeah. We'll just swap one of the girls. Swap the eight-year-olds. Done. Deal. Done. See, look at that. No need for family cult. My eight-year-old, by which I mean the one that's not mine. But is your new wife's? How's mine getting on?

5:07Yours is all right. My one's an art there. How's mine?

5:13Josh Widdicombe:um so i actually had a two-hour nap after that it turns out i was incredibly tired yes just a bit exhausted but you're right now well i was i was in a great place um i just don't want to go into it fair enough but we've had some more pet drama and it's too grim to go into to go into i'll deal with it next episode but we're in the middle of it we'll deal with it whenever you want to deal with it. There's plenty of other stuff we could talk about at the end of the day. This is a bit of fun. Just to repeat. If it gets too much. The fish are fine.

5:50Josh Widdicombe:I actually walked in to feed the fish yesterday and I thought you fucking c***.

6:03Why couldn't it be you? Why couldn't it be you?

6:07Josh Widdicombe:Just for once. How long does a fucking fish live? Do I love you, the fish? Now who's the heartless pet owner? I like you and I feel annoyed if people don't feed you, but I won't be thinking. Well, it must be people out there that love their, really love their fish. Yeah. I think I could get into a coy carp. The ones with little mouths, you know, if you've got me in a pond, they look like a bit of, I feel like I could form a connection with a goldfish. I'm always going to struggle with a goldfish. Like a load of tropical. That might be fun. No, I think it needs to be like one or two sort of like unique ones.

6:48Like if you had like a little puffer fish thing, you'd be like, oh, yeah, like give him a name and you'd be sad if he or she died. Yeah. But I think, you know, seven orange ones just bobbing about.

7:00Josh Widdicombe:It's been a tough end of the holiday. So we're going to put a pin in the fish. I know, we're going to put a pin. In the bleak news. And let's do a bit of correspondence. And also we're going to put a pin in the Lou. We're just going to come back to all that stuff. The Lou voice note is coming. We're just going to do correspondence for this episode. Yeah, and we're not actually shagging each other's wives. Are we? We do correspondence. Let's do correspondence, Rob. So let's do correspondence. Right, Rob and Josh. I've been having the same issue of Salish and Jordan Matter. but have recently found that you can block certain TV shows from showing up in your daughter's profile under parental controls and it will never show up again on Netflix.

7:45Thank you, Julia from Pangborn. There you go. That's good. We've been doing them like family YouTube watches where we try and find creators that are suitable. There's a guy called Hangtime. He's quite funny and silly and the kids love it, but it's fairly sort of all right it's not like a weird screaming fake video weird 50 year old dad getting his daughter to do videos anyway so yeah if you've got any other recommendations of youtubers that are not rude or weird or feels a bit dodged let us know because then we can give out uh recommendations

8:23Josh Widdicombe:if you're interested in that right um i read the new book by john ronson that's about kind of men in this day and age right it's fascinating there's an incredible chapter about his relationship with graham linihan but there is a chapter about this guy who makes he's a far a single father of two and he starts putting videos up on youtube of him and his kids just for people he knows and then one of them gets a load of hits and he kind of chases the algorithm and he becomes so successful that youtube give him he's getting 500 million hits on videos right and youtube give him an expert that he's allowed to call for help and all these kinds like he's just a mega creator and he ends up doing this thing which is like because you can't do the same thing more than three times you have to be changing your ideas up in the ante up in the ante up in the ante and he ends up doing this thing called bad babies which is him and his two kids um all dressed as babies having food fights and stuff and it basically ends up ruining his life it's so fascinating really what's the what's the creator called i can't remember what he's called um which is but he he just chases to get more and more hits more and more hits and the you to the point where some of the things you're like if and then it becomes the reason it ruins his life is because on youtube kids it's accessible content but people come to his later stuff way before the earlier stuff so it just looks like he's this insane guy who's a terrible father who's doing these videos with his kids because they haven't witnessed this kind of creeping it's like frankenstein's monster yeah yeah oh that works babies work oh food fights work let's do boat and it's like these horrible piecing together of analytics and data exactly the title is like babies mega food fight hell do you know what i mean like all these parenting yeah yeah parenting hell all these words that people search all the time and um but it's wild right it's a wild story and he becomes one of the things there's this thing called i think elsa gate which is these this kind of public outcry at the videos that people are getting served on youtube yeah on kids youtube and he becomes one of the faces of it and he makes fuck loads of money but it ruins his life and he come barely now he's living just a he just doesn't like leaving the house it's so fascinating oh wow i don't look that up because i can see how they get caught up in it because it's quite intoxicating views going up likes going up money going up if we do this we do that but like and that but that's always sort of been like it's what it was like I think I said it before, but like product-led or market-led, where these YouTubers, if you're market-led, you'll just do whatever.

11:27Oh, they want more of that. Let's do that. Whereas I think what we do here is a product. It sounds a bit wanky and business talk, but like it's a product-led thing. Well, we just chat and throw it out. And if people like it, they like it. It won't come to shock to any listeners that we've never done any research at all ever on what – I don't even – I won't even fucking read a comment or something, you know. I've blocked Reddit and all those things just because I actually think that ruins you because then you become too aware of what you're doing when you've just got to do it and if people like it they like if they don't they don't you can't i think it's dangerous game

12:00Josh Widdicombe:there's uh and without it's wanky again but i think it's a good phrase that i heard someone say which is if you're doing it for clicks that is not your art that is not what you what you want to be doing that's not how you express yourself if you're going this will get me more clicks that is not no this is as shit as it is because this is what we want to do

12:26i've got absolutely nothing in me to change it beyond this into a mega tv oh when someone said that do you ever want to go to america and break america i thought i've

12:37Josh Widdicombe:thought of being big in america again are you fucking kidding do you know how long i've worked sorry you could see you you'd start in the clubs well i've done that i'm not doing it again when does it end you're fucking kidding me oh yeah so i started i started my uh street photography instagram account this week yes i saw that very good photos oh thank you and i've followed loads of photographers and one of them's got 500 000 followers yeah and he instantly dm'd me and he said if you want help getting more followers follow my program it's initially free and i was like an instant i was like oh shit and i was like what are you doing this is the opposite don't get dragged into going these are the photographs that take these what why is everything this quest for fucking bigger and to be fair we're as you know we're all to blame for it i'm not saying i'm No, but we were like that at one point.

13:39So the thing is, though, the difference is we've got established podcasts, touring, TV work and stuff. Whereas, like, if you were working in the Guardian writing outdoor, you know, you're a journalist.

13:50Josh Widdicombe:And he says you could get 500 ,000 followers as a photographer. Then you'd be, oh, actually, if that can impact my life, maybe you would go down that route of doing it. And I totally think that would have been the right thing for you to do then. But for you now to do that again is sort of like, well, you can if you want, but what for, Josh? yeah exactly i've got no interest because it was what is that then you're just becoming a science model as opposed to creating something people would like exactly anyway hi that's uh that's the end of fucking news night pair of fucking boring old right got an email here craziest baby food fight this we asked this last week josh because the old baby food fight stuff's really clicking well on the old cpu unit thumbnail fucking oh it makes me sick and do you know what the worst thing is we did have a we did have a conversation just before this about thumbnails so it's only because we just definitely have no we didn't have a conversation about thumbnails we just i just said on our feed we've got to have a photo of it the football one for the football episodes and i think that's a basic level that's cool i put i said that's labeling that's not thumbnails yeah thumbnails is not like right take a photo of this and put loads of fucking bombs behind me head can we have that as the thumbnail crazy fucking chat from josh and rob josh and rob unleashed on your ear holes

15:27This episode is brought to you by Tesco Mobile. Josh, how are you with the kids' slang? Oh, mate, I try.

15:35Josh Widdicombe:I'll be honest, I try, but they might as well be speaking a different language. I don't know what she ate means, and I do worry about it. And when you hear something like, oh, we cooked? Well, I presume, you know, was it on an induction hop? That's what I'm thinking. We can't be alone, though, Josh. Loads of parents out there feel like they can't understand half of the words their kids use. The thing is, that can also mean a lot of us don't always understand what's going on in our kids' online lives. Exactly. It might not always feel easy, but sitting down with your kids and asking them what something like RIS means can open up important conversations about their online lives, Rob.

16:12Josh Widdicombe:Those chats help us keep up as parents, which helps us keep them safe online. So if you're feeling stuck about having the online safety chat, visit the Tesco Mobile Online Safety Hub, where they have plenty of tips and resources for keeping you and your family safe online. The perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub, followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today.

16:51This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro Plans.

17:24Josh Widdicombe:Um, Rob. Yeah. You're going to have to do the emails because I've, this is the level we're working at. Yeah. I've managed to delete the email Michael sent us to the emails. Okay. Don't worry. I'll take the lead. Do you know what though? This is a bit professional because I'm getting my office done. I'm going to buy, right? What do you think of this? Yeah. metal like screen thing with like little holes in on wheels so i can like pin to it a parent in hell i printed out a bit of paper and will get in behind me printed out on a bit of paper whatever you know i mean i'll sign or sign we'll get a sign but yeah the thing is like we are just three blokes so there isn't a team that's like oh okay i'll put an email into the fucking signage team it's either michael like and michael's been promising me a screen behind me for fucking months, Michael.

18:13You've got one. Well, it's not fit for purpose. Michael, where's my screen? I'm actually in a dispute with the delivery company who are saying it's been delivered. And I'm saying, no, it hasn't. So I think one of your neighbours might have your screen. Really? Well, they're saying it's been delivered and they're saying they're disputing. Do you live next door to Elizabeth Day? Hang on, did you get... I reckon it might be in my house somewhere. We've got a delivery confirmation from them. I've asked them for photographic proof, well over two weeks ago. No, they won't provide a photo. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm saying it hasn't been delivered.

18:47Josh Widdicombe:Well, they've got to be able to provide a photo. That's the whole point of taking a photo of your fucking... Precisely. Yeah. It's quite like, it's a sort of long, narrow. It's a sort of a closed rail on wheels. You wouldn't miss it if it had been delivered. There's a box that looks like that in my... You've got to be fucking kidding me. You've got to be fucking kidding me. Michael's in a dispute. Fucking hell. He's knee deep in a dispute here. Rob, I think that might be by the washing machine. Go and have a look. One second. While he's gone, I'll tell this anecdote. My friend showed me their street WhatsApp group yesterday, and they had a picture on it of a package being held by hand that they hadn't received.

19:33Josh Widdicombe:They just put on the street WhatsApp group, does anyone recognise this thumb?

19:40Josh Widdicombe:Shall we just carry on without him? Yeah. Getting Alfred Byron in a lot of niche and interesting things your kids are into. Yeah, yeah, go for it, yeah. Oh, there we go. That was good, that. I looked up and thought he might be back. Here he is. Michael, continue the dispute. What was it? It was a sort of like a floating thing that goes in our above-ground pool that you can put drinks in that's not been opened because no one's been in the above-ground pool for three and a half weeks. It's now September. Niche and interesting things your kids are obsessed with or into. Go on. Hello. My five, almost six-year-old son loves history, but is particularly obsessed with the Battle of Rourke's Drift.

20:24Josh Widdicombe:Rourke's Drift? What's that? I don't know. Well, I do know because it says it here. He has watched the film Zulu more times than I can remember. How old is he? Five, almost six. And when he roleplays, he recreates the gun sound with historical accuracy. He also cried at bedtime a few weeks ago because he will never be a Zulu. Right. Strange child, she's written. Lauren, spiritually 20, realistically 37 from Hereford. So it's got a PG rating. Has it? Yeah, and he's five. I watched it as a kid because my gran was obsessed with that film. She thought it was excellent. And it's about Michael Caine.

21:04Josh Widdicombe:Yeah. Not Michael Caine, he's playing a role. and they're i mean presumably michael's seen it it's they're a battalion of british soldiers who kind of hold their position against an onslaught of zulu fighters in a kind of blood bath right is that right michael yeah yeah it's basically our version of the alamo yeah so what's the alamo stuff is it racist feels racist it's probably probably not ideal in this day it's quite it's quite colonial it's not ideal they weren't defending fucking gilford were they no p.s his idea of a good time is going to the crematorium near us to find soldiers gravestones so where's where is rook's drift it'll be it'll be the boar war won't it rook's drift Anglo-Zulu War.

21:56Josh Widdicombe:Oh, it wasn't. The Anglo-Zulu War. It sounds... It doesn't sound great, does it? The Battle of Rourke's Drift was a famous 1879 Anglo-Zulu War engagement where roughly 150 British and colonial troops successfully defended a supply depot against 3 ,000 to 4 ,000 Zulu warriors. Yeah. They just kind of keep coming, the Zulu warriors. Should we not have been there really in the first place? Hi, guys. I've been loving your segment about our kids' hyperfixations and thought I'd share mine. My five-year-old little boy, Louis, adores the 20th Century Fox logo and theme tune. Oh, I love that. That's great.

22:33Josh Widdicombe:That one. It started when we tried to watch a film, but all he ever wanted to do was rewind over and over to the 20th Century Fox theme tune, the start. In his words, it's totally epic. It is totally epic. I love it. We managed to find a 3D print of the logo, which he now takes to bed.

23:00Josh Widdicombe:It's also extended to all major US film companies, in particular Universal and MGM, and he always points it out. Interested to see where this interest takes him. Stay sexy and relatable, Rosie. Hollywood, that's where he's going. Yeah. I have a weird food confession to share with you all. When I was a kid, I used to have the job of feeding our cat in our laundry. One day I was curious to know what a cat biscuit tasted like. As it turns out, I was quite fond of the flavor of a cat biscuit. So from that day forward, every now and then when I passed the laundry, I'd pop a cat biscuit in my mouth for a delicious snack.

23:35I told my husband this story a few years back, and as it turns out, he used to do a similar thing. He used to sneak into the back room where his dog was and lick the end of his dick. Funny the things you're into. I made that up.