CTRL ALT gives you the lowdown as YouTube heavyweight Casey Neistat starts a podcast with businesswoman spouse Candice and hold nothing back!
The notion of a podcast featuring one of YouTube’s most innovative and successful creators sounds like a fantasy for those who hope to emulate the success of the 10.5 million subscriber holder Casey Neistat. Yet rather than how to make it as a big-time YouTuber, it’s more about how to live with one.
As Candice puts it herself in the promo clip: “Listen to Casey be extremely positive about life and Candice bitch in return”.
Partnered with his wife in more ways than one, ‘Couples Therapy’ is a two-person podcast about the lives behind a YouTube career.
But ‘Couples Therapy’ is in itself a misleading title as Candice Pool Neistat and hubby Casey often regurgitate notes from the mother of two's weekly sessions with the ‘Dr. P’, a presumably uber-expensive New York therapist.
The issues brought up there regularly shape the conversations for whole episodes. We learn that Casey only attends real therapy when there is a big fight to sort out.
The series is the brainchild of Casey, whose creativity in his former daily vlog brought Candice into the public sphere, but her regular attempts to doge the camera led to criticism from online trolls to calling her ‘bitchy’.
Never mind Casey, Candice is extremely driven and successful in her own right, so much so that it’s hard to see who pushes the other into achieving more. She owns and runs two jewellery companies in Manhattan New York, Love Billy! and Finn which have been periodically plugged and shown off in Casey’s videos. More interestingly though in both companies Candice employs only female staff; something Casey admits in one episode he most admires about her.
Candice’s awkwardness is obvious during the first episode as she stumbles her way through. Unsure regarding the technical elements of making a podcast she comes across a little reserved at first, but soon finds her voice and in most episodes has something to complain to Casey about.
Whether it’s leaving her alone and pregnant while he studied at MIT - the prestigious technology university in Massachusetts – or buying a Tesla on an impulse; in more episodes than one Casey is painted as the bad guy.
What’s strange about the whole concept is that the couple have seemed very private in the past – despite 10 million people viewing Casey’s love visual letter to his wife- they here tell stories of their early years and parenting.
“You were in Paris and asked me out on a date for when you got back and I was like ‘yep’ then three weeks later we were married for the first time” laughs Candice as she mentions that after they married when only dating for a few weeks their parents made them get it annulled.
In fact, the addictive entity of this podcast is their brutal honesty, revealing harsher truths like after a nasty breakup Casey destroyed Candice’s new relationship just to prove he could. While Candice opens up about feeling distant and cold towards her daughter Francine after giving birth, an issue new mother's sometimes find.
It all feels like the information you shouldn’t know, the dirty underwear hidden from the world in the smiley Instagram perfect reality we find ourselves living in. But here is a digital star revealing it all.
They touch on mental health, depression and raising their kids in ways they see fit, impacted by their two very contrasting upbringings; Casey leaving home at 15 and scrubbing dishes and Candice from a doctor’s family living in Cape Town, South Africa.
Casey is as confident here as on video, but both hosts get the same amount of airtime, even on one episode when the couple are hundreds of miles apart, with Casey away on a trip and Candice pregnant with their second child at home.
Content has never really been repeated over the seventeen episodes so far, as the Manhattan power couple have new stories and fights to fill you in with.
One thing that the podcast never has is guests. They prefer instead to include a 10 minute or so section at the end of the show to air questions submitted vocally by listeners asking the pair about their lives and for advice.
The latter is where the podcast can sometimes feel awkward as during one episode a teenage girl who has found out her Dad is cheating on her mother asks what she should do. The discomfort can be sensed through the airwaves as the couple fumble to shift responsibility for shaping this young girl’s relationship with her family for the rest of her life.
There’s no right answer for such a question and Candice is quick to point out that adults have reasons for sometimes doing bad things so she shouldn’t hate her father, but you get the sense any Casey isn’t comfortable being an agony aunt.
There’s enough in this sporadically increasing series for the Casey Neistat fan and the typical modern man, with life lessons on relationships and parenting that hit home whether you can afford a Tesla or a Ford Mondeo.
You can listen to the podcast here.
Rating: 3 ½ out of 5
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