Drake Bell Admits Touring Changed Once He Became a Dad on ‘The Good Guys’

Drake Bell is back on The Good Guys with hosts Ben Soffer and Bell’s former Drake & Josh costar, Josh Peck. The episode, while hilarious, sneaks in something genuinely relatable between the jokes: how fatherhood rewires your whole relationship with work. 

Bell’s coming off a monster run—“we did like 91 shows”—and even he admits the old lifestyle doesn’t hit the same once you’re trying to be present at home. “I can’t go out…I have to be clearheaded at home and with the kids.” Bell lays out the reality of being on the road while his family stays put, and how he’s built his schedule around being back in Florida for real life mornings. Peck and Soffer jump in with their own routines, anxieties, and little wins, and suddenly it turns into a relatable conversation for dads trying to make it all work.

Drake Bell Discusses Parenting While Touring on ‘The Good Guys’

Touring is a job. Fatherhood makes it a math problem.

The most exhausting part about touring for Bell isn’t even the stage time. It’s the in-between: “It’s like 91 shows and each one of those shows is like a round trip flight,” he reveals. That pace used to be manageable when the only person who paid for it was him. Now, the cost shows up at home.

He admits that age changes the stamina side—“you need your rest, you need your sleep, you feel it.” But the bigger shift is the headspace. Late call times and early flights aren’t just annoying anymore, they’re incompatible with the version of himself he wants to be when he walks back through the door. The whole point of slowing down on the road is to speed back up where it matters.

Life happens in chunks, not cities

Bell is clear that the solution wasn’t turning the tour into a family caravan. “[My] family stays home,” he says, which means the movement falls on him. The travel comes in concentrated stretches, and home life gets protected the same way. “I carve out tons of time to be home in Florida with my son,” and when he’s there, he’s not easing in or half-present.

That structure is what keeps it from feeling chaotic. He describes days that look deliberately normal—“wake up in the morning and get him ready for school and take him to school”—it’s a grounded routine, even if one parent disappears for weeks at a time. Instead of trying to blend the two, he separates them cleanly. Touring is one block. Parenting is another. And the switch between them is intentional, not improvised.

The routine isn’t strict. It’s protective.

Forget the narrative that having a routine means you’ve got to be type-A or obsessive. Soffer admits he questioned it at first—“I eventually learned that she’s 100 percent right every step of the way,” about his wife. What looked excessive turned out to be stabilizing, not just for the baby, but for everyone orbiting him.

Bell connects the dots fast: “It’s not just getting your baby in the routine. She’s getting her routine. You are getting your routine.” The predictability changes the temperature of the house. Lights dim. Energy drops. Everyone knows what’s coming next, and that’s the real value. Even when work pulls a parent away for long stretches, consistency fills the gap. “As long as there’s [a] structured routine, this is how it goes and this is what I can expect,” Bell says. Spend the time and effort to create a rhythm the whole household can settle into and trust.

Bedtime gives the relationship its own airtime

Once the routine sticks, the payoff isn’t just a sleeping kid—it’s reclaimed space for the adults. “Between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., it’s you two,” Bell points out. That window matters more than people admit. It’s the stretch where you stop being on-call and remember you’re a couple, not just logistics managers.

Not only is it a parenting hack; it’s relationship maintenance. When the house goes quiet, the night opens back up. “You wanna watch Netflix, you want to want to, you know, snuggle, you want to hang out,” he notes. There’s no pressure to be productive or intentional in a capital-I way. The win is simply having time that belongs to you again.

To hear the guys’ full conversion with Drake Bell, listen to The Good Guys wherever you get your podcasts.

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