DOD6: How Much Privacy Should Our Kids Have?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Tom: Welcome to Dear Old Dads, the podcast that's just resting its eyes. I'm joined by Thomas Smith and Eli Bosnick. I'm Tom Curry. Hello, gentlemen.

0:00:37 Thomas: What's that? I was resting my ears. I was just resting them, though.

0:00:41 Tom: My dad literally used to say that, that resting his eyes thing, and I used to believe it when I was little. Like, I'd like, oh, dad's just restin' his eyes. Like, his eyes just get tired. If I rest my eyes, I'm 44 years old. If I close my eyes for an extended period of time at all, I am out. I'm out and

0:00:45 Eli: Mine too!

0:00:58 Eli: Yeah, I can't play hide-and-seek at this point in my life. If I actually close my eyes during hide-and-seek, I am asleep.

0:00:59 Tom: Yeah No I

0:01:03 Thomas: Tried one peekaboo and then we just hear g-dum-gum. Eli's body just falls down.

0:01:06 Eli: Yup, exactly.

0:01:07 Tom: I used to with with my oldest when he was little, I used to read to him bedtime stories every night, so every night we had like a little routine, you know, and I'd read him his stories and I swear to God I would fall asleep, I'd put myself to sleep reading, I'd just start nodding off in the middle of reading the book or I'd tell him a story, I did a lot of like just making up stories and just sitting in his room and just telling him stories, stories, and he loved it, but he never would like fall asleep to it, so it'd like 30 minutes in to tell him the story and I'd be, and then, and the stories just increasingly get less coherent as I would just nod off and he would just, he wouldn't wake me up, he'd just play

0:01:23 Eli: Heh heh heh heh. Heh heh Heh heh. Heh

0:01:43 Thomas: There was House Targaryen and they are the-

0:01:46 Eli: Heh heh

0:01:45 Tom: Right yeah I'd just be like, and then the king, and then I'd be like, every, he used to tease me, he's like, "Dad, every time the king shows up I know you're about to fall asleep because like whatever the story's about, it'd be, be like scuba diving or something, I'd be like, then the king and I'd fall asleep and he I can't even read a book anymore without falling asleep I'm

0:01:47 Eli: Heh. Ha ha ha ha heh heh. Mm-hmm.

0:01:59 Thomas: Yeah, and then Michael Scott had a gun the end. It was a So, man, I have not Exactly that. That's better to be as a parent. I think that's better because what I have is can't fall asleep the day or at night and then in the morning can't wake up, which is like the worst possibility for a parent, and I'm dealing with that right now. Oh, it's no fun.

0:02:22 Tom: I'm like a five hours guy, like I'm fine, I'm okay, I sleep five hours a night, usually between, between five and five and a half, and I can do four and anything under four and I'm a grouch, like I'm it's that's tough I

0:02:31 Thomas: That's insane. I need some of your stem cells or something. Can you mail me? I need a solid 23 hours of sleep to feel okay. Anything short of that, I feel miserable. I don't, I actually don't even know if there's a number. I'm just tired. Like it's just plain tired.

0:02:36 Eli: Ha ha ha ha. Heh heh ha he heh hey.

0:02:37 Tom: Can't And Oh, oh, I'm exhausted. Don't get me wrong. I actually had a sleep study done. This was back when I was in, I used to fall asleep. Like I was extraordinary like everybody else. I was crazy sleep deprived for a super long time through school and everything else. And I would fall asleep, I'd stop at a stop sign and I'd fall asleep as soon as my body wasn't moving.

0:03:07 Tom: So I kept, I kept pliers in my car and I would pinch my, my forearm to stay awake when I I was driving. Um, real safe stuff, real, real good idea, sort of safe stuff. But I was working full time. Like I was work in a 40 hour a week or 45 hour a job. And then I was going to school full time and I was commuting to both. So it was

0:02:49 Thomas: Yeah. Oh my God. Jesus.

0:03:26 Eli: Mm-hm.

0:03:26 Tom: Just an insane amount of hours. And so I would drive around and I'd pinch myself with these pliers to stay awake, or I'd get out of the car and like run laps around my car in the, you know, to stay away. But, uh, I at stop signs sometimes. And like, I would just fall asleep. I went to the doctor and And I was like, I think I got narcolepsy or something like this. Something is wrong. I fall asleep just all the time. And so they ordered a sleep study. And I Was like there after the sleep study, the guy's like, you have like a 97% sleep efficiency. You're just exhausted. You just need to sleep more. And I'm like, all right, more.

0:04:00 Eli: Yeah.

0:04:00 Thomas: Yeah. Does narcolepsy mean needing to sleep at some point within a 24 hour?

0:04:04 Tom: Right.

0:04:04 Eli: Right, ever?

0:04:06 Thomas: Yeah. We find out Tom's dad says that you shouldn't ever sleep. You should be awake 24 hours a day. Sleeping is for weak, weak people. Oh.

0:04:07 Eli: Eh. Yeah. Mm-mm.

0:04:14 Tom: I did a thing. I had 10 week semester at the college. So we had trimesters, 10 week trimesters. And I convinced myself that you didn't have to sleep every day. You could get away with sleeping every two or three days. Um, so I would, I, I, I did a 10 week thing where I was like, I could just sleep every other day. And so for, for the 10 week period, more often than not, I just slept every other other day. I would just, it was the only way to get all my school work and work work and everything else done. And so for 10 weeks I slept every other day. And then I then I considered it a grand success. I was like, this is terrific, I, I'm getting so much done. And then the next semester I was like, I bet I can wean myself off. This is probably just a, yeah, so I tried to go two days off and one day on for sleeping. Yeah, I was, fuck, I'm 22, your body will just do whatever you tell it.

0:04:26 Thomas: My God.

0:04:57 Thomas: Wean yourself You're Like Building up. Up an immunity to iocane powder if I just Yeah. I

0:05:05 Eli: Right. Right. Yep.

0:05:03 Tom: To do Right. It's total nonsense, so I I did the, I did the one day on, two days off for just a couple of, just like two or three times. And then I just, I slept like a full 20 hours. I missed all my classes. I woke up like at like seven o'clock at night or some crazy shit. And I sort of looked around, I'm like, all right, just gonna sleep at night like people do, that's just, this is a bad call, so but I do find myself like I fall, fall asleep at the drop of a hat now. Like I fall asleep 45 seconds if I lay down

0:05:25 Eli: See Yeah. I'm

0:05:32 Thomas: Love that you went on this Homeric journey to discover the truth of, I guess I'll Just go to sleep at night, okay, world, fine, you win, what

0:05:38 Eli: Sleeping at night. We'll See, I always fall for internet stuff, like there's no internet thing that I haven't fallen for. And so pretty recently, like insultingly recently, I fell for the Uberman sleep schedule thing. And I was like, hey, I work from home, I could do this, I I would love the extra hours. And I got like four days into it. And Noah and Heath were like, hey, your lag's really bad. And I was like, no, my internet's fine. And they were like, well, are you staring into middle distance after each sentence? And I was like, oh, yes, this

0:06:16 Thomas: Is this What is this thing? I don't know what this trend is.

0:06:19 Eli: Is a lie. It's just a fun internet lie. Like, here's the thing that we don't talk about enough is that there's whole parts of the internet that are just a bunch of people Lying.

0:06:19 Thomas: Oh, Yeah, most of it, yeah.

0:06:29 Eli: To each other and themselves.

0:06:31 Tom: I think you're the only one that doesn't know, that's, that's seriously 90 to 95 percent of everything online. I

0:06:33 Thomas: Oh,

0:06:31 Eli: Yeah. It's, it's fucking crazy, and the uberman sleep schedule is apparently based on a uh, air force exercise which was like, you take tiny naps throughout the day and then you end up, way, you like, you only have to take eight 15 minute naps and then your awake the rest of the time. And it's perfect, and it was developed by the U.S. Air Force for pilots. And so much so that the Air Force has had to come out and been like, this is not a thing. What you're talking about is, we did a study on pilots and whether naps helped when they were on long flights, and yes, they do. There's no magic sleeping pie chart that works.

And the internet was like, I've been doing it for seven and a half years, it works for me, sure, I'm lying, love Steve or whoever the fuck I'm calling myself. And because I have just no critical thinking skills, I was like, great, I want to do it. And just absolutely blasted my psyche for a week and a half. See, for me now, though, here's how sleep works for me now. My body and my brain are like a terrible mobster in a dark mob movie, right?

0:06:53 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:44 Eli: So I'll come to it and I'll like, hey, brain, I need you to have five hours of sleep for the next week because we've got this going on. And my brain's like, all right, I'm going to need one month long depressive episode episode with crying jags and I'm like oh brain I I don't know if I could do that and they're like I'm sorry the boss said and i'M LIKE OKAY FINE ONE MONTH OF REALLY DEEP DEPRESSION WITH CRYING JAGS OKAY COOL BUT I CAN NOT SLEEP FOR THIS AND THEY'RE LIKE YEAH ABSOLUTELY WE WOULD TALK TO THE BOSS THAT'S WHAT IT IS YEAH

0:07:55 Tom: Love

0:08:10 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:13 Tom: That you went down this like elite level biohacking type bro bullshit to podcast, not to like fly a jet In a war or whatever. Like you're just like

0:08:22 Eli: NOPE THE

0:08:22 Thomas: Yeah. To Like kind of talk good for an hour, yeah, I well tell an hour on the topic. So, so my life is miserable currently. And it's what's funny about it is I made it through. I have two children. I've two beautiful, lovely, amazing children who I love so much. And I made it through their infancy, their newborn phase, their whatever. Fine. You know, tired here and there, but basically fine because we, you know, we worked out good strategy and we were super lucky with our kids. They're both good sleepers.

Uh, Arlo was a little tough with the, he's the laziest fucking kid in the history of time in every way. It's funny when you get a lazy kid, I don't know if either of you had a lazy kit, but Phoebe, not a lazy kid. Arlo, everything's lazy. He wouldn't latch on to a fucking nip.

How lazy do you have to be to where your food source is, your mom takes a boob and puts it in your face and is like, this is how your existence is, like you just get to do this for food, and the baby's like, "But that's hard though."

0:08:24 Tom: Um, Right. Sending

0:08:26 Eli: WAY

0:09:19 Thomas: I don't want to latch my mouth all the way. Can I just sit here and it just drizzles it? He was so lazy. And I made it through all of that stuff relatively unscathed until fucking probably two months ago. My life is hell because I'm caught in a perfect situation. Arlo, he's either a mad genius or he's just the most inconvenient child. He is now waking up at about 5 a.m. every morning.

0:09:48 Tom: Oh, nope.

0:09:49 Thomas: To be, and I'm not a fucking morning person. I'm not a Tom. I can't go five. I have to sleep. I get to sleep and when I finally do, it's, you know, at least midnight, if not one to two, you a. m. And then I can can wake up in the morning. It's just my sleep cycle. I not a morning person, just a night person. That's why I feel awake. So it's tough for me. I m trying to adjust, but like it's biology.

You can't fucking and adjust biology. And so he wakes up at 5am, 6am. And here's the thing before when he was too little, he was trapped in his room and it was fine. It was whatever he would play. We got to it when we got to it, that was fine, but now he's big enough so that he can get out of his room. But crucially, he's not big enough to handle taking a shit himself. So he's, so we, we can't even just lock him in the room because every morning he'll wake up and be like, I pooped. And then there's, like, at 5 a.m., there's this just giant, comical, huge dump in his pull-up every morning at 5, 6 a.am. There's nothing. There's not a goddamn thing we could do. You can't leave him in his shit. That's horrible.

0:10:29 Tom: No. Oh, Yeah.

0:10:50 Thomas: Nope. So, I'm just, I know.

0:10:50 Eli: Nope and yeah

0:10:51 Tom: Well, stop giving him coffee first thing in the morning, you know, I mean, he's like smoking a fucking cigarette and having a cup of joe, like it's running right, right through them.

0:10:58 Thomas: Apparently, he's

0:10:57 Eli: Are those are those raisin bran boxes under his bed

0:11:01 Tom: You

0:11:02 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Bunch of prunes and stuff like all over. That dude is just ready to start his day. He's the the most morning person I've ever. It'S the most incompatible thing for me ever. So I've been miserable lately.

0:11:13 Eli: Here's the kicker to that kind of stuff right especially when it's biological for for your kid, is that you can't be an asshole about it, right? If you could walk into their room and be like, what up, fuckface? I guess we shat ourselves again. Woo! It would almost make it, like, sane, except you've got to come in and be, like... Hello, my love. Yup, 5.30 in the morning. That is the sun rising outside. Books are fun. A, B, C, D... Like, honestly, if I could just vent some poison when those situations arrive.

0:11:19 Thomas: Exactly. Yeah. Oh, it's so funny because I do a little bit because he wakes up and he'll be like, why is it dark outside? I'll be oh, why isn't dark outside? Why? Oh, I don't know, because the sun isn't fucking awake yet, because nobody should be awake. Child, what are you doing? I will say, as it, you can't be... You sarcastic, and with a child doesn't that's you, not good. The biggest challenge, because I am all about, and we've talked about a lot of these things, you know, meeting kids where they are, realizing they're, they're kids, you know, they can't do, it's out of their control, everything, you know, there's just little kids. The hardest challenge I would say, one of the biggest times that that is challenged for, for me personally, is when Arlo started to be potty trained, he took forever because he's the laziest fucking sack of kid ever. He took forever, starts to be putty trained. The minute they go from, all right, you're potty-trained, to still shitting their pants, you're like, oh, come on, dude, we went through this whole thing. That's the hardest time.

0:11:46 Eli: Yep.

0:11:50 Tom: Guys,

0:12:36 Thomas: Cause you're like I've seen you do it. I've you go to the toilet. I was so proud of you. It was amazing. You are 10 years old. It took you way too long, but I've see you do it. And then when they don't do it, you like, Like, this is maddening. The difference between a kid shitting in the toilet and a kid shitting at his pants is, I don't know, two hours of work. Like, it's just, it is. It's horrible.

0:12:54 Eli: A

0:12:57 Tom: Are just like way better dads than I was, like, when, when, because, like, I would get up in the morning, like, I'm not a morning person or a night person, so don't mistake me, like, there's no point in my day where I don't want to go to bed, like, I always am just like, fuck, I'm tired, just let me go to, but I, so I'll drag myself up or keep myself up, whichever, ever end of the spectrum, but, like, when the kids would, like, wake me up early in the morning, I'd clean them up, I'd hand them one of those, like, things, like the little treat trap things, so they can only spill 80 and not 100 of it on your carpet, and then I'd, yeah, and I'd be like, we're watching Blues Clues, you can sleep on my head, or whatever, and I'll just lay on the couch, like, I'm a bad. I, like, I might, that's, that's like, that screen time in the morning has no limits, like, no, like, I don't fucking Spice Channel comes on, I'm like, I don't even care, don't Even Care, 5

0:13:27 Eli: Kong Toy,

0:13:33 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, my God. I did that exact thing. I did. That exact thing? Oh, yeah. Tom, you and me. Yeah. Hardcore porn. I don't care. It doesn' t matter. Whatever is on there.

0:13:50 Tom: 30 in the Morning, It's Like Fucking Anal Sisters 3, I Don't, I Don't Give A Shit, Like I Do Not Care,

0:13:54 Eli: That's right son the rectum is nightmarishly elastic. I'll see you at 8:30.

0:13:57 Tom: Yeah.

0:14:00 Thomas: One of my fondest memories is, I, I used to watch Phoebe on Fridays and not do daycare just to get some more time with her, and so it was Phoebe Fridays, and again, because I'm not a morning person, I have this distinct memory of one of the Fridays just being, just not able to do it, I was just like, I don't know what happened, I couldn't sleep maybe or something, and I was like, I can't do it, I'm gonna lie down on the couch. It was exactly what you're describing though. Phoebe, literally, literally, I just have memories of going in and out of consciousness for, I don't know, an hour, two hours, three. I don'T know. Cause when you're in that state, you just don't know. Yeah.

0:14:29 Tom: Six Weeks, Whatever, yeah.

0:14:32 Thomas: And she's just crawling on me, doing these different things, playing with my head, like doing all this different stuff. And it's actually in retrospect, one of my fondest memories. Cause it was so cute, but I can't believe it now. Like I can't even imagine doing that now. Cause they're so big.

0:14:32 Tom: Dude, Dude, Finn used to lay on my, he used to use my body as a couch. All The Time, Like Up until he was, was like, seven, like, I would lay on the, I would lay sideways, and I'm fairly, like, big guy, so, like, I would lay sideways and he would just sit on my shoulders, or sit on my hip and play video games, and I would just be the couch, and it would just be like, I'll just like, that's

0:14:48 Thomas: Oh, it's the best. Oh. It's the best.

0:15:00 Thomas: Ah, the best, you know, that, that's what, when they make the weighted blankets, that's what they're trying to reproduce, is that, a mate? No, it's the best, dude, the feeling of your kid, like, their, their weight on you. Oh, it's so nice. Little chemicals, love it.

0:15:10 Tom: It, yeah. An issue popped up this week, I wanted to see where you guys landed, so I've got a, I've got a good friend of mine, and you guys might just, you might be in a different place, but you probably have a philosophy about this or you've thought about this, so a friend of mine posted something, she's, she's got a daughter that's gonna, guess, 12, 13, somewhere right around there, I've got some teenage kids as well, and so the, the daughter is at that place in her life where the door is locked all the time, where her bedroom door is just locked all the time, you walk up, you knock on the door, there's like this long protracted pause, and and it's just like a voice from inside the pit, just yelling and annoyed. What do you want from inside?

0:15:51 Thomas: Oh, man, wow.

0:15:55 Tom: The room, and it's, it's weighing on her, my, like, friend is getting justifiably, I think, annoyed by this. And so she had posted, you on Facebook, hey, this is happening with my, my daughter, and I'm not 100% sure how to handle the privacy, the thing with the disrespect, or the, you know. Hey, I need something from you, you got to answer the fucking door piece. And I was thinking about this ever since I saw her post, because I had, I've come around full circle on this issue. I had real aggressive parenting around the lack of privacy in my home. So I'm curious if you guys have thought about privacy, and how much privacy your kids should get, and how you balance that with them just not locking themselves away or doing shit you don't have access or visibility to.

0:16:40 Eli: All right, so here's a peek behind the curtain of my father's madness, which I feel like we haven't gotten on this show yet, so I'm very excited to share it. Um, I thought I had complete and total privacy as a kid. I had doors that closed, I had private email, I had private chat rooms, I did whatever I wanted on my computer in my room, there was nothing that ever got monitored, and my parents trusted me with the privacy.

And like, my dad was really intuitive, so, like, sometimes something would be going on in my life, and, like, he would just know, you know, he would just, like, know, and he'd ask me, like, a pointed question about something, and I would tell him, uh, and then, like, that was usually how they found out about stuff. Uh, I later learned, after he passed away, that my dad had a, uh, keyboard recorder on my computer, had access to my uh, emails, had access, and had a clone of my phone the entire time I lived under my roof, and and Mom was like, we should not do this, this is a gross violation, he was like, look, I am going to be there when someone tries to fuck my son. And this was like, this was a major

0:17:36 Thomas: Yeah

0:17:48 Eli: Fight that they had said yeah, was that, like, I am not going to be a fun, good dad who didn't see it coming, right, got a way with, like, a lot of stuff as a dean, and what I realized now is that my dad was very clearly just checking that key, that log, and being like, yeah, no, that's fine, he's sneaking over that person's house to smoke some pot, allowed, like, he, he just, he was just like, look, there are certain unsafe things that kids do, and like, here's the thing, like, I know, I have thought about this and I've gone back and forth on this for years, and if I'm really honest, I'm like, that's great, that's a really good idea

0:17:48 Tom: Do that's a weird sentence to say though, isn't it? I

0:17:50 Thomas: Yeah. Hopefully he phrased it better. Yeah.

0:18:09 Thomas: Wow. Oh,

0:18:26 Eli: Because there were a couple of dangerous situations that came up where my dad, again, without me knowing, would just sort of sit me down and be like, like, hey, I'm a little worried about these people. Or, you know, you ever want to talk about this kind of stuff? And he would just, like, intervene with what I thought were my dad's psychic powers before things got too real. So, like I'll give you a great example of this is that, like at one point I was supposed to fight a kid at school, right? And so there was chat about it, and then someone was like, hey, I hear he's going to bring like a weapon, and so you should, should bring a weapon, and my dad obviously saw that, and so he was like, hey, you know,

0:19:02 Thomas: Oh my god, and

0:19:05 Tom: Please tell me he gave you a sword or something. Like you got to bring a bigger weapon,

0:19:07 Thomas: He's yeah, he sold tickets to the fight, he was ready. Finally.

0:19:10 Eli: Yeah.

0:19:10 Tom: You need a spiked mace is what you got, a brain, son.

0:19:13 Eli: A buddy of mine said he would never make a sword again, but, uh, he made one for you. No, he said he was like, hey, he Was, you know, I've been hearing at the middle school that there's a lot more bullying going on, are you dealing with anything like that? And I was like, wow, man, you are fucking insightful, dude. Yeah, I'm going through this thing. And he was like, well, you know, that's, that's not a fight, that's someone who wants to really hurt you, and like, we should get adults involved. And I was like, yeah, you're probably right. And of course the kid didn't, it was just like the rumor mill, and it all got worked out, right? But that kind of stuff, but like, there were very select times in my life where my dad intervened using his weird big brother police

0:19:13 Tom: Right,

0:19:17 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, Hattori Hanzo, Yeah.

0:19:42 Thomas: Wow. Oh.

0:19:52 Eli: State to keep me safe. And look, I would love, I would love to lie to our audience and be like, I'm not gonna do that, I am absolutely gonna do that. I'm so sorry.

0:20:02 Thomas: Man. Yeah.

0:20:03 Eli: I know it's wrong, I know it's a bad, bad Eli. You gotta trust him, you gotta keep him safe, I'm so sorry, oh my gosh, I'm checking myself so hard, I'm doing it, I'm fucking doing it because

0:20:16 Tom: This is, totally in line with your upbringing, where you weren't allowed to ride bikes around, though. Like I would have been shocked if you had, if you were not allowed to just like go for a leisurely bike ride, yet you had total access to the internet. That That would be not in keeping. That Would Be A Really Bad Call.

0:20:17 Eli: Right. If there was a self-driving bike that my dad could have been in control of without me knowing it, and he'd been like, yeah, off you go boy, have a good time.

0:20:38 Thomas: Well. Also, there's definitely an age difference thing happening here, didn't, I, we even have cell phones, you know that much.

0:20:45 Tom: No, same.

0:20:46 Thomas: Like a few kids did in high school, but if you were to clone that, it would have been cloning that, like, you know, could do the snake, the Nokia, you know, I don't think there's much to clone like, so that's there's an age thing there, and also I love that your dad somehow turned into a tech whiz just to be able to spy on you, like my parents, if you said clone a phone, my parents would be like, the sheep or something, like, what do you do, you take the DNA and then yeah there's no way they would any idea.

0:20:55 Eli: Yeah. Right. Dolly the shit so I think I know how he did it, which is that he would say, um, they're gonna put antivirus software on all of our phones and stuff, uh, because he was a consultant for universities, so he would just go to the tech guy at the university, and he's like, hey, fuck up my, my kid's phone and computer for me, my guy.

0:21:30 Thomas: Wow, what about the, okay, it's one thing if your dad does it, that guy though? Hi, can you help me hack into a child's phone, like, just monitor it all the time, that's, that's an iffy, does, you think he takes people up on that a lot?

0:21:31 Tom: So yeah.

0:21:42 Tom: Does he have like a weird business card? Like just like a really weird fucking business card. He's not sharing with just everybody kind of a thing. Did he take cryptocurrency? I guess the way to ask is Does he take crypto?

0:21:43 Eli: I right? Exactly. Yeah.

0:21:53 Thomas: I thought of a version of that the other day. And now compared to you, Eli, this feels completely tame. But I like if we talk about kind the of values here, like I want my kids to have as much freedom as possible without obviously something catastrophic happening. Like, that's the balance I want. Now, that that's not everybody. Like, I think there are plenty of parents. And I don't know if they'll be our listeners, but, you know, more conservative types or even just old fashioned types, if they're not like, you Know, politically conservative, who will be like, No, my kid doesn't get any privacy. They don't. They're a kid.

0:22:39 Thomas: They, but now I feel like, no, you know, I can remember what it's like to be a kid, and I can remember what it's like to be a teenager, and like, some amount of freedom I think is quite good, and they're going to make decisions that aren't the best, but whatever, like, it's not, you know, that's part of growing up. They're going to do it anyway, probably, but if you maintain that freedom and that good relationship, then maybe you can be more of a part of it and like maybe communicate with, with them more about it. But I thought the other day, because we're in a lucky position where Phoebe's kindergarten is going to be like a few blocks away, we're going to walk there. And then I was thinking, like, oh, maybe when she's bigger, she can just walk herself to school, like they used to do in Tom's day, back when old grandpa Tom over here was, was a kid. And there I was like, no.

0:23:19 Eli: Okay.

0:23:18 Tom: Did You Guys not walk to school? I walked to school in Chicago down 63rd Street, like Mother

0:23:25 Thomas: Wow. Yeah.

0:23:26 Eli: Are you ready for the most insane thing, I lived across the street from my middle school and my dad still drove me to school every morning because

0:23:37 Thomas: Like waited in the car lineup for like an hour. Just, yeah. Yeah.

0:23:39 Eli: Well, Well, because the back of the school faced our house and I'd have to climb a bunch of stairs.

0:23:41 Tom: I Just Oh, my god, when

0:23:48 Thomas: Just to finish that thought though, I was thinking, okay, maybe I'll let the kids walk to school by themselves. But I like, maybe I'll put it, you know, one of those tiles on their backpack, you don't like, just in case, like some sort of tracky thing. I don't. And I told Lydia, I was, like, what if we did that? I don't want to, I will never look at it. Like I'll never look at it until the day of, like, where's our fucking kid? Like, did something happens and then I'll look at. But Eli over here is just like, no, not only am I going to be monitoring it all day every day, I'm also gonna clone their phone

0:23:50 Eli: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

0:23:58 Tom: Put An air Tag On him Eli's Gonna Tag Has Fucking kids like a lion In The wild Like

0:24:18 Thomas: Yeah

0:24:19 Eli: I would microchip my kid in a fucking second. Here's the thing. 18-year-old Max, my son, may come to me someday and say, you absolutely violated my privacy. I listened to that podcast episode. I'm disgusted with you. I'm not speaking with you for months. And I'd like, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I did that to you. Do you remember how no adult fucked you?

0:24:40 Tom: Man.

0:24:42 Eli: Do you remember that time an adult didn't fuck you with their fuck abilities. Right, you'll be mad for as long as you want, I will sleep, you know what I would never sleep about again? You getting fucked. You know, I'll sleep like a blaster saint about you not getting fucked and being mad at me for a summer.

0:25:02 Tom: Yeah.

0:25:02 Eli: Other thing is, and look, look, we're on a parenting show so it's a little bit safer, but you're not supposed to say like, as a parent, because everyone one's having the same experience all the time, but like, Will tell my son, look, when you have a child and you know what parental love feels like, I think you're gonna get this a little bit better, right? Because when you don't have kids, you're like, I know what love is, Ashley touched my dick the fucking Hulk movie, and I love her. And it's like, no, this, I found a ballroom in my heart filled with nothing but you, my son, and so I am going to track you like a cat, like an outdoor cat, and I'm sorry about that, yeah.

0:25:18 Thomas: Oh.

0:25:41 Tom: It's, funny, because like, mentioned on the show before, but like, the kids are my kid, two of my kids are getting old enough to where they're going to start driving at some point, and I am 100 going to put like air tags or or some similar under the seat or in the car, because there's no way. There's no way. There's absolutely no way that I'm going to say, here's something that goes 125 miles an hour, weighs 2,000 pounds. You got to use a half a calorie of energy to make that happen. A tank of gas can move you 400 miles away from me for $45. But yeah, I'll just figure you do a good job.

0:25:53 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Well It'll be 45 a gallon by then, but yeah.

0:26:17 Tom: Yeah, that's true. Well, by then it's like six months for me. So yeah, 45 a gallon, you got it, yeah. You're right. You're right.

0:26:17 Thomas: Oh, sorry 30 bucks a gallon

0:26:23 Tom: Yeah.

0:26:24 Thomas: Yeah, oh

0:26:21 Eli: Standing by the smear against the tree that used to be your kid. I was a very open parent, I was very trusting, um, oh

0:26:28 Tom: Yeah.

0:26:31 Thomas: Man but where does it end? And I think Eli is like, not just wherever I want it to end, and that's fine, um, but I don't know, I do think there's trade-offs here, and I think he lies solidly on the on the two, two, 1984, big brother side of the trade-off for my liking, but I, the tracking the car thing though, you're not, that's not gonna stop him getting in an accident, that's gonna just tell you Where.

0:26:33 Tom: No.

0:26:54 Thomas: The accident was

0:26:53 Tom: It's Not but It's: gonna Let: me Know: yeah it's going to let me know where they're at if something goes wrong it's gonna let you know you the thing is like you get to a certain age and I I don't know how you guys were but like I lied to my dad fucking constantly so I my dad had extremely strict rules up until my early 20s. I lived with my dad for my throughout, throughout college. So I didn't go to a dorm or go away to school. I lived with my dad through college. And so all the way through high school and into college, I had be home every day at six o'clock for dinner.

And then 99 days out of a hundred, he'd be like, you're in, just stay in. So, I essentially had a 6 p.m. curfew every, just every day for years and years up until my, you know, I'm 19 years old. I'm in college. I have a 6p.m curfue, but my dad worked worked a billion hours and he lived his, his room was on the other side of the house. And I, my room was on the other side and had a window out to the deck. And so I just snuck out every single night, every single night as a teenager,

0:26:54 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah

0:27:08 Eli: Yeah

0:27:55 Tom: I'd wait for my dad to go to sleep at nine o'clock at nine 30. My buddy would page me on a pager. My dad didn't know I had because I'm old and cell phones weren't a thing, I had to page, I just took the clip off and kept kept it in my pocket all the time. My buddy would page me when he was on the way over. I'd open the window, hop onto my deck, jump over the fence. He'd turn the car off. So it didn't make a lot of noise. He be two or three houses down. I'd hop in his truck and then we'd screw around until four or four 30 in the morning. The joke was like, well, when you hear the birds singing, it's time to get home, cause dad's going to be up at five. And so, you know, you, you sneak back in the house at five and literally my dad never caught me one time. And I know

0:28:02 Thomas: He might have cloned that pager Wow

0:28:04 Eli: Which

0:28:33 Thomas: Wow.

0:28:33 Tom: He he didn't catch me because he would he like still wouldn't find that funny if I if he listened to this show and he found that out right now he'd

0:28:39 Eli: You wouldn't, to be clear.

0:28:40 Tom: Be pissed, he will never listen to the show so it's perfectly safe saying it.

0:28:41 Thomas: This is crazy and you're like 60, we've covered 40 something, you're old so that many years and he's still that's crazy.

0:28:43 Tom: Yeah. Yeah. I'm 44. Yeah. Oh, he would be

0:28:49 Eli: Yeah.

0:28:51 Tom: Furious if he found out I lied to him.

0:28:53 Thomas: I I have something in between, perhaps you two, which is I could not get away with anything because I lived in, you know, a fascist regime, uh, and in, in the country, on top of a hill, you know, in the middle of nowhere, so like there wasn't a lot to be done.

0:29:02 Tom: Oh,

0:29:08 Eli: They had the high ground.

0:29:09 Thomas: I could have somebody like swing by with their tractor and like, you, you know, hop, but like the couple times I did get away with anything, it was like Ocean's 11. You know, there's like one, one time I got to a party in high school one time. I had to go to such lengths. You have, you guys don't fucking know. I had to like keep up an elaborate, like, cause my parents would, first off, my mom was the teacher for a hundred years. So she taught all of my friends, parents, like whenever I'd be like, like, oh, here's a friend I made. She'd be like, oh yeah, that's what's name's kid. You know? Cause everybody just fucking stays in the shit town USA basically. And she taught all their parents. It's insane. It was the worst thing.

0:29:17 Eli: Yeah. Right.

0:29:38 Tom: God. Oh, this sounds Horrible.

0:29:50 Thomas: Oh, it was awful. And so she'd be like, yeah, I know them. And also be, they would be like yeah, I know then, you're not hanging out with most, most people. It was like, you're hanging out with them, cause you she didn't like them or she thought they, you know, whatever, would a be bad influence or something. But then like one time in high school I was like, oh, I'm going to my friend's house one fucking time, one time, and it was the heist of a lifetime, because I kept up this ruse of like, oh yeah, you can talk to his mom, because they always had to verify, they had, my mom would talk to the parents and be like, you're there, right, you're doing, you know, she would do all this fucking legwork, and somehow I kept it up where it's like, yeah, yeah, she's gonna call you, she's going to call you, dot dot, you know, and me and my friend kept it forever until I get there finally and obviously the parent wasn't there, there, the whole, whole, the thing was the parent wasn't there.

0:30:35 Thomas: It was going to be my only party in the history. And to that, until college, I didn't get to go to another party. It Was the one time and she wasn't There. So we did this like, Oh, she went to sleep thing. And I could hear my, the wheels of my mom's mind turning of like, all right, she knows this is bullshit. But like, at that point I was like 30 miles away and over and above everything else. My parents were lazy, well, you my dad was lazy as fuck and my mom worked. So she she, only had so much bandwidth for more stuff after working and making dinner and doing everything for everybody. So I think she was like, all right, you know? And so one time I got away with it.

0:30:52 Eli: Exactly.

0:31:10 Tom: Did you guys have privacy in your bed? I know Eli, you thought you had privacy, you had fucking security cameras and your teddy bears or whatever. Were you allowed to like lock your door? Were you, were you allow to lock your door, Thomas?

0:31:23 Thomas: Oh, we didn't have locks on our doors. There were no locks on the entire house except for the like external door that we didn't even bother to lock. Cause what is it?

0:31:23 Tom: Okay. Your parents didn't have a lock

0:31:31 Thomas: Is a deer going to break in? Like there's nothing I'm telling you. I don't know if you guys know what the country is like there's not another house for miles.

0:31:31 Tom: On their door. Well,

0:31:35 Eli: He

0:31:40 Tom: You but the locks on interior doors are just privacy locks. Like it's

0:31:44 Thomas: Oh no, we didn't have any of those. So we had one on the bathroom and then I think my little sister locked herself in and it was a huge disaster. And so my dad took it off and was like, nah. But we mostly had privacy in our rooms. For one, there's nothing that we could have. We didn't have phones. We didn't have, the, you we had the family computer that was not in anybody's room so there wasn't a whole lot in the room that, you would be like, them wanting to know about, but I will say this about my weird dad, he also has no self-esteem, so it's not like he was the kind of dad who's like, I should know about what's going on, or I ought to, dot to dot, there was, he had almost no self in that way, it's hard, hard to explain, but psychologically it makes sense to me to where it's like, he had all the rules and whatever, but he wasn't, he gave, he gave us some amount of independence within the horrible Amish living that we had, you know, like, yeah.

0:32:06 Tom: Worrisome.

0:32:32 Tom: When You're done raising the barn, your day is yours.

0:32:36 Thomas: Yeah, well,

0:32:36 Eli: Yeah. He was like the jailer, not the king, right, like he just works here.

0:32:40 Thomas: He's also just so self-absorbed, that's like, yeah, whatever you do, your thing, I just, whatever, I, you wasn't anything to get away, you know, he was very firm, they were very firm on the rules of the no driving with other kids and, know, going to anything where the parents aren't there and all that shit, like I said, I only got away with it one time, and, to finish that story, next day my mom picks me up and I think she could kind of know, but we, we couldn't, nobody could acknowledge anything because it was such a fucking violation, like this was a massive, you thing I got away with, and she just said in the car, she was like, I think we'll just not tell your dad.

0:33:09 Eli: Right.

0:33:10 Thomas: Because, because I would have been murdered, like, you know, it just would have been, I, it would have been like, okay, you are now confined to your room for the rest of your life.

0:33:18 Eli: Forever.

0:33:18 Thomas: Like you will never come out, yeah.

0:33:18 Eli: Yeah.

0:33:19 Tom: That's Actually really cool of her though, like she understood that like that's what being a teenager to some degree is, like it's pushing those boundaries and it's

0:33:21 Eli: Yeah.

0:33:19 Thomas: Yeah oh No, here's what that actually was, Tom, I love the thought, what that actually is, is she's already fucking managing living with this hellhole narcissist at all times anyway, not giving him one more thing to be upset about is like, all right, it's fucking not

0:33:28 Tom: Okay.

0:33:39 Tom: So this is falling asleep on the couch where your kid sits on your head and watches Blue's Clues, that's what this is, it's just, you just don't have one fucking ounce of energy left and

0:33:41 Thomas: Kind of this is being in a codependent relationship and not wanting to fight about another thing and, like, like, whatever, I got away with one thing, I was a good kid otherwise, so it wasn't a big deal.

0:33:54 Eli: Just

0:33:56 Tom: So when I was growing up, my dad, so my biological parents split when I was about two or so, and then my, I lived with my mom for a while and then I ended up living with my dad, and then mi dad has been with the same woman for 42 years, so they've been together for 42 year, give or take, and they've never lived together, so this woman is effectively my stepmom. She's been in my life for four decades plus, but she comes over every Saturday. She doesn't come over on Sunday. She doesn't come over during the week. She comes over on Saturday, and every Saturday, like she was, she ruled the roost, right? So, so when she was coming over, she was kind of in charge, and she had a different sort of rule set than my dad and my brother. And I lived with the other six days of week, so six days a week, there was like our rules.

0:34:43 Tom: And then on Saturday, there was like these different sort of family rules that we had to sort of get used to. And we also had pretend that those were always the rules, right? Because if you didn't pretend those were Always rules, then there was going to be she's going to be pissed. And there was gonna be a fight. And like, nobody wanted to see that stuff. So like, there's a lot of like, kicking you under the table when you were about to say something wrong, or like divulge that you did something that like she wasn't going to approve prove of. So she was, she was very much in charge and she had this weird fucking thing about privacy. So from time to time, for whatever reason, I never have been able to figure out why she would just use some random pretense. Like would, she would say something like, that book I gave you six months ago, do you have that laying around?

0:35:30 Tom: How was it? And I'm like, "Oh, that's good, do you have it, can you go grab it?" I'm like, "Oh, you don't know, I don't know exactly where I put it," and then she went, "Well, let's find it." And then they would go into my room, they do my room first or my brother's room first, whoever got caught in the in the ruse, and they would turn our rooms up like a CEO at a fucking prison. I mean, they would, they would upend they would upend the mattress, they would take everything out of every drawer, they would, I mean, they would pick pictures off the walls, I mean, it was a full search, right? Ostensibly for this book, but even if they found the thing that was missing, they would complete this complete top to bottom up- to you know that

0:35:47 Thomas: Jesus.

0:36:05 Thomas: I love that. They find it first thing, like the book's right there, and they're like, well, just to be sure, there's not another copy of the book.

0:36:11 Tom: Would happen and you'd just be like standing there and they would find like the most like random innocuous kid shit, you know, like a candy wrapper, and you're not allowed to have like candy or because like I wasn't allowed to eat like sweets or junk food and stuff like that, right? So like they find like a handy wrapper that I'd forgotten to like, like flush. Cause that's what I would do is I'd eat food and flush it. And that way you couldn't get caught.

0:36:13 Eli: None.

0:36:28 Thomas: Flush. Oh, my God.

0:36:29 Eli: Cool. Tight.

0:36:31 Tom: Right. They would do these like full top to bottom, like it felt like a, prison like turnover, you know, room searches. And I'll, and when I was younger, I would get caught. So I would have all these, I have whatever various stupid ass kid shit you didn't want to get caught with. And then eventually I learned they don't search the rest of the house.

0:36:50 Thomas: Smart.

0:36:51 Tom: So would, like, I would like turn the couch upside down when nobody was home and cut like a little slit at the bottom of the couch and just put stuff under the couch or like hide stuff like take a trophy apart and hide shit in trophies and like for real, like, I got all weird about it, you know, because like your shit gets tossed all the time, so what

0:36:57 Eli: Oh, my God. Look at Tom Shank Redemption.

0:37:04 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, man. Jesus Christ. So this was one day out of the week you lived in a prison.

0:37:15 Tom: Well, she didn't do this every week, but she just did this like randomly, so

0:37:18 Thomas: Yeah, So the horror of the psychological fucking distress stress was all the time, then, yeah.

0:37:19 Tom: Yeah, Right, so You're, it's right So, like, I got real good

0:37:24 Eli: Pennywise doesn't always appear to the kids, Thomas. Relax. He was there twice. Ever.

0:37:26 Thomas: This is That's horrible, like, that's evil.

0:37:32 Tom: And I never really understood what the fuck motivated that, but it's made me think a lot about privacy as my kids have gotten older and how much, it hurt me not to have privacy and how much it accelerated actually my desire to have things to hide, right? Because then it became a game, it became like, you don't trust me, I'm gonna make sure there's a reason for it, I'm gonna hide shit.

0:37:53 Eli: Right. Yeah.

0:37:54 Tom: I'm going to get real good at hiding shit. I'M TO GET WAY BETTER THAN YOU EVER THOUGHT AT HIDING SHIT, and I got exceptionally good at it, and now my kids are at that place where they lock their rooms, I stand, I knock at the door and I get annoyed when they don't answer the door, but I'm like, I don't know if you're putting your fucking underwear back on, you know what I mean? Like, you need some privacy, you're 15 or 16, it's developmentally appropriate to have privacy.

0:37:55 Thomas: Yeah. You're brewing bathtub gin Well,

0:38:10 Eli: Right. Tell

0:38:17 Thomas: Perhaps because I didn't grow up with the locks on the doors, I, that feels a little weird to me. Like, I will give my kids the privacy, but I don't know about the lot, like, what, what good is the lock on that? I'll just not go in there when they don't want me to. I don't know, I feel like, do you need a lock? I don't, is that good, am I weird?

0:38:33 Eli: You, how locks came about in my house is, um, as those developmental changes took place, my poor, poor, and I, true, I mean, poor, my poor parents would just be like, oh, I just gotta quick tell you that we're leaving for the, oh my God, what, how are you hanging from that? Truly, that was why locks got installed in my house, is that from age 11 until today, yesterday, and given any amount of time alone in a room, I would start whacking off.

So my, my, my father, I was talking to him once, and he was like, I, I was like, I don't know what we were talking about, I was, I was, was there any part of my childhood that was really hard for you, and he was like, I gotta tell you, when you first started learning to whack off, everything was a fucking trap. I'd be walking into the, I'd be like, oh, I need some toilet paper for that, there it is again, I'd, you'd be in your room, I'd come and I'd talk to you, I'd leave, and then I turned back around to add a sentence and you were already whacking off.

0:38:54 Thomas: That's fair yeah, Oh,

0:39:20 Tom: Yeah,

0:39:37 Thomas: Man, okay, but, but you still, if they just didn't barge in, it would have worked. Give the knock, I'm gonna give a knock, you I'll knock. I don't know, the lock scene thing seems weird, maybe it's because of how I grew up, but like I don't know,

0:39:50 Tom: Do You have a lock on your door, like your bedroom door now, in your house, yeah.

0:39:54 Thomas: Well, yeah, but at this age, if the one time we locked the door, we actually, we actually tried to get away with that for some lovemaking the other month, and it was the funniest thing in the world. Oh, I forgot about this. We, it was in the morning, it was like a weekend morning or whatever, and I was like, you know, hey, the kids are all set up, you know, like they're all, they're watching their fucking Harry Potter for the 400th time or whatever movie they were currently watching for the four hundredth time. I was like, why don't we, uh, you know, come up here? Get some, we, intimate time.

And so we go in, we're in the master bedroom, we locked the door, and not, you know, 30 seconds goes by and we're getting, getting involved in stuff, and we hear, you know, Phoebe be like, mommy, ma, like just realizing, like, that mom wasn't there, you know, mommy, and then storming up the door, and it was the most sitcom thing of all time, but it was so fucking funny because we're, you know, we're trying to bone, and the both the kids start running up because once Phoebe does that, Arlo just copies whatever, whatever she's

0:40:15 Tom: Oh,

0:40:57 Eli: Right.

0:40:57 Thomas: Doing, so they start yelling mommy, and then in Phoebe's mind, because mommy was gone for 24 seconds, she's dead, you know, like she's been killed and So she runs up and then the door is locked, something that Phoebe, they have not experienced, trying to get into their parents' room and the door is locked, and so we're engaged to the act of lovemaking, we hear this, was like, I'm not even exact. It was, it was like hell had broken loose outside of our door. It was the funniest fucking thing. It was so funny. I wasn't even mad. I was like, all right, that didn't work. And then I learned the lesson, which I should have known, which was we can't try to sneak off because Phoebe is so anxious about us all the time.

The next time, I was like, oh, just tell her you're going to do something, and then you, there's still, you you know, 50% chance she's going to come up and bother us anyway, but at least it's not like a sneaky thing. Cause I think she just, because you didn't say anything, and Phoebe is just at all times fucking alert about these things, she just lost her mind. But God, if I had audio of that, it was, it was the funniest fucking thing ever. They were kicking the door, you know, the sound of like kicking a door against

0:40:58 Tom: God, oh, My God,

0:40:58 Eli: Sure. Right. Of course. Yeah. Right. Yeah,

0:41:24 Tom: Jesus,

0:42:11 Thomas: The frame as hard as you can. Boom, boom.

0:42:11 Eli: Absolutely. Yeah. Like A cops episode, episode they've got a ram from the NYPD.

0:42:15 Thomas: God, God, it was so funny.

0:42:18 Eli: Where'd you get that preschool

0:42:19 Thomas: Yeah. They got that one from the Lord of the Rings.

0:42:21 Tom: There's fucking flash bangs breaking through your windows and shit. I we

0:42:24 Thomas: I didn't finish, believe it or not. I didn't. I wasn' t able to do it.

0:42:28 Eli: That's on you, my dude.

0:42:27 Tom: We've Got a knock and ask rule for all shut doors, like anytime you've got, out a door that's shut. If it's my door, if it's their door, you're not, no one's, I'm not allowed to just walk in. They're not allowed to just, you in and we lock our door. When Haley and I first, uh, got together, like, and got all the kids in one place, like they tell you, you know, if you're integrating a family, you don't, you don't just like bring all the kids under the other kids' turf.

So when they first meet you, we rented like a a house and we rented a house down in like St. Louis and we're there for a week and so you know and Hailey and I were, we're screwing around and the door didn't lock on the stupid, and the kids didn't know the knock and ask rule because they, you know, we hadn't all lived together at all yet. And the goddamn kids, like Aislinn, walked in on us two, maybe three times. I mean, there's gonna, gonna come a time in her life and she, see, she was little enough, she was maybe six, seven, so I'm not sure she's 100% sure what she saw. You

0:42:56 Thomas: Man, it' like cats.

0:43:28 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:28 Tom: Know, so it was like, "Close the door," and she like closed the door and then stood on the other side. He's like, "I need a snack," or whatever she was asking for, you know, but like there's gonna come time where she's walking down the street, she's gonna be like 22 and these memories are gonna flood back and she's just gonna be a drop straight to the ground, just collapsed in a puddle. I saw it, I saw it, I never unsee it.

0:43:29 Eli: Yep. Yep. Yeah.

0:43:35 Thomas: I Yeah.

0:43:52 Thomas: Yeah.

0:43:52 Tom: So we lock the door, like doors are locked, our doors locked, their doors are allowed to be locked, we knock, we ask. Now if they don't get the fuck up and answer the door in a reasonable amount of time, then there's, there's gonna be a problem, but like doors, I feel fairly strongly, like privacy is a big deal. Like, I, I would never go through my kids, I'll say never, it would take a lot, it would take a long time for me to like root through my kids' shit. You

0:43:52 Eli: Oh.

0:44:17 Thomas: Oh, I don't, I' never doing that. I don't' want to. I don't want to!

0:44:19 Eli: You guys are wrong You're wrong

0:44:21 Thomas: Why do you want, look.

0:44:22 Tom: You'd like you'd just like go

0:44:23 Thomas: Here'

0:44:23 Tom: Through their like dresser drawers and shit.

0:44:23 Thomas: Oh God,

0:44:25 Eli: In in front of them in a way that they could possibly know? Never. Never. I would never violate that privacy and trust.

0:44:25 Thomas: No. Why would you want to, oh, oh

0:44:31 Eli: Because maybe there's a naked picture of their gym teacher in there, Thomas. Maybe their gym teacher was like, I really love the slope of your neck and I have to murder him. I have to. I got to mow the lawn. I gotta murder the gym teacher.

0:44:48 Thomas: Man.

0:44:48 Tom: Now, I won't take their phone, and they, like, they, they know that at any time their phone, they, they can have to hand it over and I can read their phone.

0:44:55 Thomas: Okay, but my kids are not having the phone. That's, I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it, that's the place where I become as insane as, fine, my kids will be weird. They're not having a phone, they're not driving with other kids. Those are the two things I can't see backing down on.

0:44:58 Tom: You're gonna give them a phone. They're gonna be weird if they don't have a phone. Oh,

0:45:08 Eli: Thomas, the month Phoebe gets her first phone you have to match our patreon for a lovely dinner for me and tom yeah

0:45:16 Tom: Yeah.

0:45:16 Thomas: Oh my God, I can, I Can't do it. I Can do it, they're gonna, you want them to, Look, Tom, you're as anti-fucking social media for kids as anybody, right? I mean, how are you – but

0:45:25 Eli: Me too

0:45:24 Tom: I'm anti social social media for adults they

0:45:28 Thomas: They're just going to have a phone. Your kids are just going – oh, man, I can't see it.

0:45:28 Eli: No

0:45:30 Tom: Have them now, like, they, my older boys have phones and next year my daughter, when she enters middle school, she will get a phone and I'm scared to give her a phone, but I also recognize that the

0:45:42 Thomas: What's the rules on this phone? I mean are forbidding anything? Is there any special like software there that's stopping the Insta, whatever the kid app of the day is, or it's just a phone?

0:45:43 Tom: No, there's no special well, We first, we first set up the kid, they were, they were Android phones, so when we gave them to the kids, the teenagers, they were, were young teenagers at the time, younger, and we had that Google, Google has a thing, like a Google parental thing, I can see anytime they install an app, they have to ask for permission, so my phone will get a thing that says, hey, they're trying to download something, do you want to let them download it.

0:46:12 Thomas: God, I hate this so much. I can't believe it. I think you guys are right that there's no way I can pull this off. But the, but at fucking man oh, it's so bad though it

0:46:18 Eli: Way exactly

0:46:13 Tom: So, there's No way, there's just literally no way, it's they'll be so deeply, deeply ostracized from their peers, plus, like, there is, a world that we live in now that increasingly just will require a phone, it just will, it will require them to have comfortability with those kinds of technologies if they don't have them we

0:46:33 Thomas: Yeah, what about the hours on the is it, like, okay, you take it away at night or something, I just don't You

0:46:42 Tom: We used to put in, when it was a problem we had to put it in the hall

0:46:44 Thomas: If Eli's Got The the solution of cloning the phone, so so I guess you'll receive the nudes from the gym teacher at the same time as the kid, what, are you gonna monitor that, 24/7, like, like whenever you're, whenever Mac, whenever Max, there's so many places to send, dude, yes.

0:46:45 Tom: Yeah,

0:46:50 Eli: Yeah and of the texts of the day how many texts can a kid send I just looked through a conversation but they

0:46:52 Tom: I, no, I just thousands Thousands, Eli. Thousands?

0:47:03 Thomas: And there's some, there many, there're people that to send messages too. Like how do you know if they were on Insta or something or any, whatever the fucking Apple be 15 years from now, whatever that, oh

0:47:03 Eli: Got a full clone of the phone man you got a whole clone of the phone I

0:47:14 Thomas: Yeah.

0:47:15 Tom: You're Gonna have to get a guy, you don't know how to do that, you're gonna have you

0:47:18 Eli: Know how to oh yeah I'll get a guy are you kidding one of our nerds I'm just gonna be like hey nerds

0:47:18 Tom: Yeah

0:47:21 Thomas: Some pedophile that's going to have access to your kids, man.

0:47:24 Eli: Gather around and some of the nerds will be mad at me they'll be like no you need your privacy but one of them will be like hayman it's called father watch and you just downloaded in the app store I'll be thank you very much creepers please don't text my kids

0:47:31 Tom: No. I, the The Rule is like, you, you gotta if I ask for your phone, you gotta hand me your phone, that's it, but I, I will tell you too, like I don't ever ask them, I don't ever ask them, but they know

0:47:46 Eli: Oh

0:47:43 Thomas: Oh, yeah. I'm wondering if I can do that. Could I create a regime of fear such that, no, I don't want to do that, but yeah,

0:47:50 Eli: The opposite of my dad where it's like I will watch but you don't yeah

0:47:53 Tom: It's Yeah. Like, You're fucking like Kim Jong-un over there, like.

0:47:55 Thomas: I want them to have privacy, here's the, here'S, it's a weird, it'S coming from a weird place, I WANT them to have max privacy, and because of that, I CAN'T give them a phone, because if I give them A PHONE, then then I HAVE to be involved in that,I DON'T want to be INVOLVED in that. I, you know, I actually WANT THEM to have their own SHIT. Oh, man.

0:48:00 Tom: Right. I know. That's a, it's, I know, it's A, it's a tough, dude, believe me, it's a TUFF spot, like, it is, it's a crazy tough spot.

0:48:19 Thomas: Well, Maybe, The climate, it'll be ruined by then, maybe I don't have to. You know, 10, What's, that, like, four,

0:48:20 Tom: Oh. Wait, I'm yeah. Yeah, Eli?

0:48:22 Eli: Exactly they'll be running through the wasteland looking for water anyways it's it's a moot point all right I do all right gentlemen before we go important question you Know That Mortal Kombat Was Actually Based On A Scandinavian Worship Song Yeah It Turns Out It'S A Finnish Hymn And

0:48:24 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's good. Do

0:48:44 Tom: Oh. Oh. That's really rough, I-

0:48:52 Thomas: That's all for this week. I want to remind you, if you go to patreon.com slash Dear Old Dads, you episode already, and it is a very special one, let me tell you. Perhaps my favorite that we've done. It is so good, and it contains some news that you might be interested in, so go check that out. And there's also a bonus story in each and every episode. This week, it was Tom telling a very sweet story about his kids. We're getting close to a new for the month. And I'm sure you won't want to miss that, whatever it is. So all good reasons to hop on the Patreon. If you can't, we totally understand. You're still the best for listening. And we hope that maybe you'll tell a friend, you'll tale a parent, you'll post this in a parenting group or something, whatever, something. Get the word out on the show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.

0:49:44 Clip: Want to meet sexy DILFs in your area? Email the dads at DearOldDads.com, or better yet, send us a message on Patreon. You can follow us on all social media by checking the links in the show notes. And if you need more podcasts in your life, you can find Tom on Cognitive Dissonance, Thomas on Serious Inquiries Only, and Eli on Godawful Movies and all the Puzzle and the Thunderstorm shows. Dear Old Dads is edited and produced by my favorite DILF, Tom Smith, who also wrote and recorded the intro music, which is used with his permission. This podcast is a production of Daddy Issues LLC. Copyright 2022. All rights reserved.

0:50:23 Thomas: Might as well tell an hour on the topic, so I, my, I, life is miserable, my life is miserable recently because, is, are we still getting with this, all right.

0:50:32 Eli: AND I STILL DON'T HAVE A FUCKING MUTE BUTTON THOMAS I don't know what to tell you

0:50:34 Thomas: I'll figure I'll get it figured out. I I want a super cut of just an hour of Eli blowing his nose, and then we put, put that out April 1st.

0:50:35 Tom: You a fucking mute button.