Scrubbing Squad, Doncaster (2026)

22/04/2026

La Mula earned a 9 out of 10. El Cóndor earned a 10. Nellie earned an 8.

Meet Nellie.

She is the boat that has never sunk. Never failed to start. She has crossed the Red Sea, navigated the Bermuda Triangle, and sat through a storm off the Galápagos that Lobster Bob still does not wish to discuss.

So why the 8?

Because of the registration number. PZ 1953 N.

Bob knows what the PZ means. Penzance. He knows what the 1953 means. He does not know what the N stands for. He has asked his co-owner twice. The man smiled both times and said nothing.

Nellie was designed this way on purpose.

She is the only vehicle in Lobster Bob's entire fleet that Lobster Bob does not own alone. He shares her with Cpt. JT Peg, a Cornish former Navy specialist with salt in his bones. JT registered the boat without telling Lobster Bob which he lobbied hard for the name La Tormenta, which he felt communicated the correct level of respect for the sea. JT looked at him for a long moment and said: Nellie.

That was the end of the discussion.

Most children's IP gives you characters with clean backstories. Everything resolves. Every mystery gets a tidy answer. We decided not to. We wanted one character in this property where the protagonist himself does not hold full authority.

Where the child can sit with a mystery at the same level Lobster Bob does. The N probably stands for Nellie. Lobster Bob suspects this. He refuses to confirm it. Neither does JT. Neither do we.

This is what we mean when we say the vehicles are characters, not props.
528 destinations. Three vehicles. One of them Bob does not fully own. One rating he will not fully explain.

That is the shape of the IP.

The world is your classroom. Humility is your compass.

Parents: 528 destinations. One guide. Your child is the missing passenger.
Book Your Tour. Join the Waitlist: scrubbingsquad.com

Publishers, studios, and licensing partners: the Lobster Bob's Scenic Tours media slate is now open. DM for the 1-pager.

22/04/2026

It is 6.13pm in a kitchen somewhere.

A seven-year-old is on the floor, crying about the wrong cup. The iPad went on at 2pm. It was meant to buy twenty minutes. It bought four hours. The parent did what they needed to do. The washing is folded. The email is sent. Now the child is inconsolable.

If you have lived this scene, hear me. You did not cause this. You reached for a tool that millions of parents reach for every day. The tool is the problem.

The apps your child watched this afternoon were not built to teach them. They were built to hold them. Teams of behavioural psychologists are paid to keep your child's eyes on the glass for as long as possible. Every autoplay. Every red dot. Every algorithmic nudge. Every single one is engineered.

Pew Research Center's 2025 report on children and tech shows what parents already know. The value is real. So is the cost. Four hours inside dopamine-engineered content does not produce a focused child. It produces an exhausted one.

So the meltdown at 6pm is not a parenting failure. It is a biological tax. Your child paid it. You paid it with them.

The system is broken. Not your child.

This is why we are building the Scrubbing Squad.

The Scrubbing Squad is the Hero Community for Children. The screen has one job: brief the mission. Then the screen ejects. On purpose. We built Green Eject into the system itself.

The app does not beg your child to stay. It walks them out. Into a hand-wash scrubbed to standard. Into a bedtime routine run by the child, not the parent. Into the real world, where they are the hero.

Every kit sold puts an identical one in the hands of a child who could not otherwise afford it. That is the Poverty Lock. That is the deal.

We are pre-launch. The waitlist is open now. Founding members get exclusive benefits all the way to launch. First access to the kit. Founding pricing that never returns. A place inside the hero community from day one.

Heroes Start Here.

Building for 10 million heroes.

Join the waitlist at scrubbingsquad.com.

21/04/2026

The Atlas Mountains in Morocco. The road forks without warning about forty kilometres past Ait Benhaddou. The map showed a clear line to the village I was heading for. The old man at the petrol station did not.

He pointed the other way. He used his whole hand, not a finger. He said something in Berber that my driver translated as: "Not that one. The rain last week."

I looked at the map. The map showed a road. A clear, flat line. The old man had lived on that road for sixty years. The map had been printed in Europe by someone who had never been to the High Atlas in spring.

I went with the map.

The rain had taken out a section I could not see on paper. La Mula (LAM-001-VE) and I spent the next four hours not making progress. She did not complain. She only complains about things that matter.

I reversed out eventually. Picked up the road the old man had pointed to. Arrived at the village just before dark. On the way back out two days later, I passed him again at the same petrol station. He did not say anything. He did not need to.

I have done this in the Andes. I have done it in the Scottish Highlands. I have done it in the Sahara. Too many times to mention, mijo, though this one is earning its place.

Paper does not know what happened last week. People do.

Listen to the locals, not the map.

The World is Your Classroom. Humility is Your Compass.

528 destinations. One guide. Your child is the missing passenger.

Book Your Tour. Join the Waitlist: scrubbingsquad.com

21/04/2026

Every app on the market measures success by how long your child stays on screen.

We measure success by how quickly we get them off it. Jonathan Haidt described two childhoods.

1: The play-based childhood that built resilient children.
2: The phone-based childhood that is breaking them.

We built a platform that uses the screen as a launchpad, not a destination. Brief the mission. Deploy the physical tools. Lock the screen. Send the child into the real world.

For Rohan, who thinks in pictures, that means a visual mission card and three minutes in the garden.

For Arjun, who navigates by sound, it means the texture of something real instead of another audio reward chime. Green Eject.

The screen turns off. By design. Every time.

Read full newsletter here - https://tinyurl.com/UHNLWK29

20/04/2026

Last week I introduced La Mula a vehicle in Lobster Bob's Scenic Tours universe.

This week I want to tell you about the thirty seconds that cost her a point in Lobster Bob's official rating.

A riverbed in Namibia. Dry for eleven months of the year. If your map says the road is on the other side, the riverbed is the bridge. Lobster Bob saw a dry riverbed. He also saw the two hours he would save by crossing it.

What he did not see was rain falling somewhere to the north of him.

- He did not see that rain hitting hard ground that had not held water in months.
- He did not see a flood picking up speed across flat land with nothing in its way.
- He did not see because the water had not arrived yet.

When it arrived, it arrived as a wall. Not a rise. Not a creep. A wall. That is what a flash flood does in an ephemeral river. One moment the ground is dust. The next moment it is a river. There is no middle.

La Mula was halfway across.

She pulled onto the far bank while the water was still climbing behind her. The whole thing took less than a minute.

That evening, at a farmstead, a herder told Lobster Bob the river runs eleven times a year. He said you can see it coming from the birds. The birds lift off before the water does.

Lobster Bob had not thought to look at the birds.

That is why La Mula is a character and not a prop.

This is the scale a children's IP gets to work at when the story is real.

- A specific riverbed.
- A specific piece of local knowledge the protagonist did not have.
- A specific lesson that only lands because something specific went wrong.

The Bob'ism earned that day: "Listen to the locals, not the map."

We are now opening media slate licensing conversations.

Parents can book Your Tour and get on the Lobster Bob wait list at scrubbingsquad.com

20/04/2026

This is Sgt. Peck.

American. Chief of Training Missions. The Positive Enforcer.

Every Squad member was built for a reason. Peck exists for the parent asking their child to brush their teeth for the seventh time this morning.

You know the feeling. You have already checked the bag. You have already laid out the shoes. Now you are in the doorway, keys in hand, listening to the electric toothbrush still sitting in the charger. Again.

It is not your fault. And it is not your child's fault either.

The instruction is fine. The delivery is broken.

Sgt. Peck takes the delivery off you. He turns teeth-brushing into a hygiene mission.

He turns packing a bag into an equipment check. He turns homework into training. The child initiates it. The child completes it. The child owns it. You stop being the bad guy in your own kitchen.

He is American. Precise. Warm. His backstory is Special Forces, retooled for childhood. He calls children Private. He says "we just hit a snag" instead of "you got it wrong." His mandate is Education, the Green pillar, Discovery Camp.

He is also a scaffold. For children with ADHD. For children on the autism spectrum. For the child who freezes when the instruction is spoken and moves when the instruction is visible. Peck makes the sequence physical and the feedback instant.
His line is "Elite excellence is the only standard." It sounds hard. It is not.

The standard is that the child did the thing. On their own. Once. Then again tomorrow.

Discipline and warmth are not opposites. Sgt. Peck is the proof.

When the mission is done, the screen turns off. Green Eject. By design.

He is one of seventeen Squad members we have built. The waitlist is open now.
Building for 10 million heroes.

Heroes Start Here.
Building for 10 million heroes.

Join the waitlist: scrubbingsquad.com

19/04/2026

Picture the moment right after your child finishes something.

Not on screen. Something real. Something they went and did because a mission told them to.

They come back. They hold the card to the reader. The app confirms it. The Squad stamps it done.

Then Green Eject fires.
The screen turns off. Not because a timer ran out. Not because you intervened. Because the platform is built to send the child back into the world the moment the mission is verified.

No bonus level.
No extended session.
No algorithm deciding what to serve them next.

Just: go back out there.

That is the design. Every mission exists to get a child off the screen and into a real-world task. The technology's only job is to confirm they did it and then stand down.

I hear from parents every week who are exhausted from being the one who says time's up. Who has to wrestle the screen away. Who gets the meltdown when the device goes off.

Green Eject means the platform does that for you. Not because a timer ran out. Because that is what the platform was built to do.

A screen that sends children away from itself.

Every Sunday we publish a Green Eject post because this is the principle everything else is built on.

If you believe that is the right thing to build, join us.

Building for 10 million heroes.

Heroes Start Here. Join the Waitlist: scrubbingsquad.com

18/04/2026

Mt. Everest. The Pyramids of Giza. The Amazon Rainforest. The Great Barrier Reef. The Northern Lights. Stonehenge.

Not game levels. Real places. Places Lobster Bob has been. Places he is taking your child next.

528 destinations across six continents. Every single one real. Every single one earned.

Most children's travel content gives them a cartoon version of the world. Lobster Bob's Scenic Tours does not.

The destinations are accurate. The geography is real. And the failures Bob made along the way are specific enough that your child will repeat them at dinner.

A dry riverbed in Namibia that turned into a wet one without warning.
An aviation authority with questions about a tail number.
A boat name dispute with a Cornish sea captain that has never been fully settled.

The child learns from all of it.

Every destination completed earns a stamp in the Scenic Tours Passport. The stamp matches the place. Mt. Everest looks like Everest. The Amazon looks like the Amazon.

528 stamps to collect. Six continent badges to earn. One Full Fleet badge for the child who completes them all.

The only route to it is through every destination. No shortcut. No premium lane. Just the tour.

The passport is permanent. It does not reset. It does not expire.

Your child is the only missing passenger.

Book Your Tour. Join the Waitlist: Scrubbingsquad.com

18/04/2026

Howard Schultz built Starbucks around a simple idea.

People need a third place. Not home. Not work. Somewhere in between that feels like theirs.

Nobody has built that for children.

Home. School. And then what? A screen. An algorithm. Something that takes and takes and gives nothing back.

Grandparents see this every time they visits. The child is not bored. The child is occupied. There is a difference. Occupied means something else has their attention. Bored means they are ready for a mission.

They want to give them the mission. He just cannot find the modern version of it.

The Scrubbing Squad is the third place for children aged 4 to 11. Physical products connected to verified missions in the world. A child who earns their Hero status by doing things, not watching things.

Uncle Jamie was built for this moment. The grown-up who arrives with a mission already prepared, hands it over, and steps back to watch the child rise to it.

Home. School. The Squad.

Three safe places. All of them telling the child the same thing.

You are capable. Go and prove it.
Join the Waitlist: scrubbingsquad.com Heroes Start Here. Building for 10 million heroes

17/04/2026

Lobster Bob does not like waiting. He never has.

El Cóndor YV-528 has been correcting him about this for years.

She is a Cessna bush plane. She flies every Air Track destination in Lobster Bob's Scenic Tours. She has crossed terrain and altitude that would have finished a less patient machine.

She is patient because the air requires it.

You cannot force a thermal to carry you. You cannot push through turbulence and come out ahead. The air is bigger than the plane. The only move available is to read what is already happening and work with it.

Bob knew this on his first flight. Every pilot knows it technically.

He understood it properly around year three. There is a difference between knowing something and understanding it in your body. That gap is the entire distance between a competent explorer and a humble one.

El Cóndor has never once been on the wrong side of that gap. She reads the conditions. She moves with them. She arrives.

Lobster Bob is still working on it.

That is what the Air Track teaches. Not the view from the Grand Canyon. Not the scale of the Amazon from altitude. The specific education that only comes from being small inside something much larger than yourself and learning to stop fighting it.

Your child does not need to know any of that yet. They just need the seat.

Lobster Bob's official rating for El Cóndor: 10 out of 10. He denies this.

Those who know him well stopped asking.

528 destinations. One guide. Your child is the missing passenger.

Book Your Tour. Join the Waitlist: scrubbingsquad.com

17/04/2026

Friday Mission Briefing. Week 2. Refresh Camp.

Sgt. Rose has a message for your child this morning.

"Namaste, hero! Sgt. Rose here! Time to check your self-care!"

This week's mission is Battle Prep: The Toothbrushing Mission.

It is two minutes long. It happens every morning. It is not optional.

Sgt. Rose is the Chief of Personal Hygiene. Indian. Hygiene Pillar. The Unstoppable Dignity Champion. She grew up in Mumbai where presentation meant everything and showing up ready was never negotiable.

Her position on toothbrushing is straightforward.

Cleanliness is Dignity.
She does not see a chore. She sees a hero preparing for the day. Every brush stroke is Battle Prep. Every rinse is a decision to show up ready.

The mission runs on S.O.L.O. format.
- Signal: Sgt. Rose delivers the brief. Two minutes. What to do, in order. No guessing.
- Operation: The child brushes. Properly. Without being asked.
- Log: Evidence of Effort captured. The platform records it.
- Out: Green Eject. Screen off. Out the door, ready.

The parent does not repeat the instruction. Sgt. Rose delivers it once. The child executes because the mission belongs to them.

That shift, from parental instruction to personal mission, is the whole point.

Take Anika, a mum who wants her daughter to understand that looking after yourself is something her culture has valued for generations.

Or Maria Elena, who needs a routine that works without any additional cost or kit.

Or Sarah, who has repeated the same toothbrushing battle every morning for three years and is exhausted by it.

Sgt. Rose was built for all three.

The app is coming. The mission exists now.

Join the hero community. Sign up at scrubbingsquad.com and be first to get exclusive access for your Heroes.

Heroes Start Here.

Join the Waitlist: scrubbingsquad.com

16/04/2026

Something new launches today.

Lobster Bob's Scenic Tours has a newsletter. It is called Postcards from Lobster Bob.

It publishes every Thursday on LinkedIn and on the Scrubbing Squad blog.

Here is what it is not. It is not a list of destinations. It is not a travel guide. It is not a children's magazine.

It is a postcard. From Lobster Bob. Written after the trip.

He has already been. He has already got something wrong. He is reporting back in his own voice, with the specific details of what happened, what surprised him, and the one thing worth carrying away from that destination.

The first edition covers the Drake Passage. Six hundred kilometres of open ocean between Cape Horn and Antarctica. Nellie PZ 1953 N crossed it.

Lobster Bob went below deck.

More than once.

The number is on the record.

Each edition also carries one Bob'ism, a rule for exploring the world, earned through a specific failure in the field, three sentences maximum, and impossible for any adult to argue with.

If you have children who are curious about the world, subscribe to the newsletter on LinkedIn. If you know someone in publishing, broadcasting, or children's education, share this with them.

The media slate 1-pager is available on request, email mike@scrubbingsquad.com or book a call.

528 destinations. One guide. Every Thursday.

The world is not going to wait forever.

Lobster Bob's Scenic Tours.

Read The Postcard and subscribe at https://tinyurl.com/PostcardLBST-drake

Scrubbing Squad

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