While we were in Sydney last month I stopped by Pitt Street Mall with Sophie and Alice to see my brother busking.

You can see the interview I did with him here:

Yes… this is actually my brother! So you might have seen him in that video that went viral, which as we mentioned in the video, isn’t online anymore unfortunately. But you can go check out his YouTube Channel here.

We filmed this early in morning and didn’t have proper lights, so I apologise for the quality.

Here is a commercial he is in:

Since it was a long interview we did have to cut some bits. Some more things related to the saga of the guy who profited off the viral video, he also tried to claim ownership of the bucket drumming in this commercial! Unbelievable right? All he did was upload a video of my brother (as did many other people) and yet he believes he owns everything my brother creates. While having a viral video sure gave my brother a big boost, it’s unfortunate that it also created these problems.

If you have some more questions for my brother, you can leave them here and next time I see him we can do a follow up video!

Here is the second part of the interview with Typhoon who has been living with my parents out in rural Australia. I filmed a little bit of him every time I went back home.

To just expand on what he was talking about in regards to other Koreans: It’s something that frustrates my husband a lot too. Many Koreans go back to Korea and tell others, “Don’t go to Australia. I didn’t learn any English there. It’s not a good place to learn English.” The reality usually is that these people went straight into the Korean community, got a job with only Koreans, lived with Koreans and only met Koreans. That’s fine if that’s what they want to do, but not so good for improving English, which is usually their goal. Having large Korean communities in Australia is a great thing, but can also mean that some Koreans don’t ever step outside of their comfort zone. The same thing happens in The Philippines. Many people go there to learn English but instead just party with other Koreans and not go to English class. Bit hard to learn English that way! Typhoon wants to encourage others to try new things and step outside of their comfort zone.

What Typhoon and his girlfriend did was travel to a more rural part of Australia right away, which is why they made lots of Australian friends, experienced different things and why Typhoon plays soccer on Australian teams.

We are hoping to do a few more interviews like this with other Koreans that are living in Australia.

Click here for the first part of this interview.

How do you feel when people use adblock or tell other people to use adblock?

It’s something we understand from a consumer’s perspective because ads are very obtrusive and they do ruin the experience and it’s something that I wish wasn’t necessary-

Well okay, we’re trying to think of a way… because I understand that. I read a lot of manga online and it has obnoxious ads everywhere and I’m like “I shouldn’t but…” and I’ll block them so I can actually read it. But we’re trying to think of something now, which we saw from another YouTube website, where it allows you to remove the ads and stuff from our website but people have to pay once per year – like $5 or $10 or something.

I know that it sucks, like I’d rather offer everything for free but you can’t operate that way, so we are trying to find a way to create a better user experience for people.

But it gives them a choice-

If they are interested. Like a premium version.

Like if they don’t mind ads and it doesn’t bother them then go for it: it’s free. And we are actually very careful with our ads, like we don’t want ads coming up like “Date sexy Korean girls”. So we know our advertisers and we are trying to think of a way to help people that don’t want the ads.

And some people have complained about some of the ads that are generated. Like some of them are generated ads and we have an advertiser manager and when we hear a complaint we are like “Well this ad was offensive can you remove that ad?” Because we can’t see every single ad, every country has different ads. So we understand you (to the fans)… we just wish you didn’t…. *laughs*

I sometimes watch things on the website Viki and they’ve recently put ads on and there are so many complaints about the ads and I just think “You are getting this content for free…”

Yeah someone is subbing it for free.

And a lot of people don’t understand. They are like “I want MY video right now.” Well…. You don’t have a video, you know? We have a video and we are showing you this video.

Someone took the time to listen to this video or drama and they are writing up subtitles for it and they are putting it up and they are taking that from their personal time for you, so we totally understand that.

So how does your family react to your fame?

My parents don’t really understand it all, they are like “Simon when you come home?? … The family!!?” So my family still has no understanding of how the internet operates, they barely know how to use the site, they are very old European people.

My family are very proud. Our families buy our t-shirts and they are all excited. “I want a Nasty hat! Send me one!” They are very excited about it and they tell everyone they meet that is…. remotely Korean. Someone is like, “My friend lives in Korea!” and my Mom shoves my Dad out of the way, “Here! Take this card and check out this!” and I’m like “Okay calm down Mom.” It’s so embarrassing I went to Sephora, it’s a makeup place, my Mom was talking to the woman about BB cream because she wanted to buy BB cream. I looked at it and I tried it out and I’m like, “Mom this isn’t BB cream.” They are saying it’s BB cream but it’s not.  So my Mom says to the woman, “Well my daughter lives in Korea and she’s a famous blogger and she blah blah blah”, and I was like shrinking into a hole of embarrassment! Because you are not famous until someone knows you. I’m famous to the people that know me but I’m not famous like Lady Gaga where people know her but don’t listen to her music

Until someone can say, “I know who this is but I don’t listen to their music.. then you are famous.

Questions from blog readers:

Leann Beasley Reemer: Do you guys watch any other YouTube channels or are you too busy making your own videos?

We’re not religiously following other channels but we do peruse the popular page from time to time to see what’s up there. We’ve seen some PewDiePie videos. We watch Nigahiga videos.

*in PewDiePie voice* Pewdiepie! He’s so crazy sometimes it’s like, “Okay dude you are about out of my range now! Mychonny we’ll watch sometimes… who else… oh there are these 2 weird Canadian guys that will only put up a few videos

Oh yeah like 4 hilarious videos!

They are like farm boys that live outside of Toronto somewhere and they make videos about being farm boys and what life is like and it’s produced so well.

And they just insult the hell out of city people… and they talk about banging your sister… it’s a lot more civilised… I can’t do it justice.

Okay who else… Jen from FromHeadtotoe. But also, when I’m looking for inspiration for makeup I just go with whoever is the shortest, because makeup artist people talk forever, it’s like 10 minutes of me like scrolling through… anyone else?

I like some Wong Fu Productions as well.

Samantha Thierry: If you could have a vlog about living in a different non Asian country what would it be? I’m hoping Eat Your Taco.

Haha. Oh my god.

You know we actually have Eat Your Sushi bought. We bought it 4 years ago and it’s just sitting and waiting and one of those days we might go there, but that’s Asian so… We thought about France, that’s one of the goals. We thought we’d be in Korea for 1 year, Japan for 1 year… then France…

I just really like coffee culture and café culture and I like pastries… I like eating, let’s just say that.

I just imagine us being… we are really inspired by Anthony Bourdain’s The Layover, in which he just travels to different countries for 36 hours and he is like, “Here’s all the stuff you gotta eat and how sh*t faced drunk you gotta get.” So that’s something we’d like to do, well not necessarily make videos of getting drunk, but the idea of travelling around and eating…

It’s hard for me to pinpoint a specific thing.

Kim BJ: One of my buddies eats kimchi with bread. He said it’s a “kimdwhich. I’ve never tried it. What do you guys think? I’ve kinda been wondering.

A kimdwich??

Okay I wouldn’t recommend that in Korea because Korean bread is so sweet it tastes like cake..

Awesome French toast.

Yeah it’s good for French toast if you want something sweet…

Okay if you use an older kimchi, which maybe you warm up and you add chopped pork, if you did that and put that on bread with maybe even like a hot dog or sausage?

Sourdough! That would be good on a sourdough.

That would almost be like a sauerkraut hot dog or something. It would probably be really good. Or like sautéed pork and…

But Wonderbread and fresh kimchi, I don’t think so.

Martina says no.

Okay, we are finished. Thank you!

Well thank you!

Awesome. Good questions!

So that’s our interview with Simon and Martina. I can’t even explain how nice they were. Just such warm and friendly people. When I talked to my mum later and told her how nice they were my mum said she could tell just from the videos that they are nice people. So take that nice feeling from videos and times by a hundred. 

For those that haven’t seen it, here is our video of that day:

There is still time to enter the Spudgy and Meemers Bag Giveaway.

When we heard Simon and Martina, the Canadian couple of Eat Your Kimchi fame were heading to Australia we knew we had to meet them. They have been a huge inspiration to us and one of the reasons why I first started blogging and why my husband and I are now blogging and making videos together.

Since starting the My Korean Husband blog I’ve realised how little people really know about blogging. It can be really isolating simply because friends and family don’t usually understand exactly what it is all about. This is one of the reasons why I was so keen to talk to Simon and Martina, not only because they blog about Korean stuff like me, but because I really wanted to talk to people that understand.

It’s fascinating what blogging has become in recent years and the huge differences between old media and new media. We have celebrities such as movie stars in Sydney all the time but I don’t think that many can command the number of people and passion that there was at the Korean Cultural Office last Friday. This is something that is so positive about blogging/vlogging. It’s authentic. When you see a movie star you really don’t know that much about their personal life or what they are really like. Bloggers however, have usually shared their real and authentic lives and their audience feels like they know them, that they are a friend, so there is a much bigger connection there. Not only that, but bloggers are accessible. They interact with fans and appreciate them so much.This is why there were so many people to see Simon and Martina and why the line for the meet and greet stretched so far down the street and why there were more people than the event organisers could have ever imagined.

Even with such a huge look into their lives I was still a bit apprehensive about meeting them. I figured I’d have to explain who I was as we are a much smaller blog than them. I worried about taking up their time. All those fears disappeared when they walked in the room though. Martina spotted me and said, “I know who you are!” and she then proceeded to talk about which of my comics she liked best. From the first second it was obvious that Simon and Martina (and Soozee) were just some of the friendliest, warmest and most genuine people you’ll ever meet.

We gave them a tote bag with a comic printed on it. I knew they’d be getting so many presents that day and wanted to give them something lightweight and that they could put other presents into. Eat Your Kimchi fans know that their pets are just a famous as they are, so I made a comic about one of the stories they told about their dog and cat.

So, on to the interview!

What advice would you give to someone wanting to start a blog?

We have friends and we know people who look at our blog and they are like “I want a blog but is anyone going to watch? Is anyone going to read it, I need the right equipment. I can’t do it without this.”

And a lot of people find other excuses not to blog because they think if they are not going to do it perfectly, then there is no point in doing it. Or if they are not going to be famous then there is no point in doing it. But we started doing it because we were passionate about the topic and we just did it for 2 years without being YouTube partners. So we didn’t earn a dime off of anything, we just did it because it was something we were passionate about. So that is my advice, do something that you are passionate about, don’t do it because you want to become rich and famous.

Yeah I was going to say the same thing. Enjoy the topic at hand and don’t think that just because your topic has been talked about, that you shouldn’t do it, because we meet so many people that say things to us in Korea like, “Oh I live in the countryside and I really want to start blogging but you are blogging and you guys are so big so…” But do we live in the countryside? Do we blog about the countryside?

No!

Every person’s perspective is different so if you are a student, if you are a housewife, if you are a couple that are Canadian that moved to Korea… you are still not us. So don’t feel intimated.  We felt intimidated by Zenkimchi who were before us, but now we’ve friends with them and we find out they are just normal people too…

There are so many niche markets out there. Just because you are not going to cover the biggest topic ever…  cover your own thing and people will interested.

Just make sure that you like it, don’t do it for some other reason or else you are going to feel like you failed.

Blogging is an end in itself not a means to an end. Whenever I hear potential YouTubers say like, “I need this type of camera….” Well Jenna Marbles has like 10 million subscribers and she shoots it on the shittiest quality but people out there like it! So just do it.

I mean… before we were full time obviously no, we just took our camera everywhere and it was for fun and we just did that. When it became our job, we still loved doing it as a fun hobby, but when you socialise you have to remember that you have an audience that is like, “Oh I’m really looking forward to your WANK!” or “I’m really looking forward to you doing a cooking video”, so now we think about our audience more than our social life. So now we can’t be like it’s our friend’s Christmas party and we are going to stay overnight, we can’t think about that because we have the EYK awards or…

We skipped our Music Monday 2 weeks ago because our video editor Leigh was moving to Busan (for school) and a lot of people were like “Why wouldn’t you do it???” Well, like I’m sorry but saying goodbye to her was more important.

My human friend was more important than that.

And people don’t realise that. People now think of us like “You are a professional corporation. You owe us the product at this specific time, at this specific date and your private life be damned.”

So that’s why we enjoy having Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, all these different options to reach out to people because that’s how we got to know the Nasties (EYK fans) and the Nasty community is awesome! They all understand, they’ll be like “Why are you videotaping when you are sick Martina?!” and I’ll be like “Sorry!” They are taking care of you, you know?

Our dedicated core fan base has more understanding of our personal life. Whereas all the people who view us for…. say K-pop Music Monday only, some of them are more fans of the K-pop bands than they are of us and they just use us as a “Well I want you to promote my band” and as a result they don’t care how we feel at the time, they just want the product.

I’m like ‘I want to make videos about Etude House and I want to try on makeup every day and Simon’s like “No.”

But also, the worst thing about the blogging profession is that is no such thing as holidays. Like if you take a holiday and you don’t put up content, then people don’t view your site and you don’t get ad revenue . Because that’s pretty much how we survive now, off of ad revenue. So for this whole time we haven’t taken any holidays, we are going to take our first one in January finally. We’ve decided Soo Zee is going to take one. Soo Zee works just as hard.

I take all my days off on Korean holidays but I feel like I should be working! Because I have so many other things I want to do in the Eat your Kimchi studio so I feel like…

Soo Zee will be like, “Well I know that it’s Chuseok but I’m just going to come in…” and we’ll like “Nooo you’re not! You are forbidden!”

It’s only over the past month or 2 months that we started giving ourselves weekends off.

We decided everyone at work was working too hard. The 4 of us… with Leigh…

They have a cardboard cut out of intern Leigh’s head with them.

So we became really close as a family and crew and everything and then we see each other all the time and then all we do is work and think about ideas.  So we need to take a day off where all of us just go and do nothing, so that was Sunday.

  We are supposed to talk about the good things!

Oh that is the good things!  For us it’s an enjoyable job so you don’t have that line between… 9 to 5 let’s go home. You just keep going along, we go out for supper, we don’t think about it, but then we stay at work until 2am.

We’re still doing something that we are passionate about. It’s not like we punch out and are like “Finally I’m done!”

So what’s the biggest misconception about blogging?

       OH MY GOSH…

      I was going to say video editing.

        There is a blog dedicated to hating us on Tumblr.

I see that occasionally when it’s tagged and comes up on Tumblr and it makes me so angry.

We are like “don’t tag your hate”. We agree with people that say that.

There was this one hilarious one where I burst out laughing. This person said something along the lines of “I don’t understand why Simon and Martina take so long editing their videos to make Music Monday because I make a 10 minute unpackaging video and it only takes me 2 hours…”

  You are unpacking a cd! You aren’t actually making anything of it.

You don’t worry about lighting, you don’t worry about audio, you don’t worry about setting up the tripods, you don’t worry about scripting. The files that we export are ginormous.

Our music Mondays have been getting shorter lately because we are trying to not spend 48 hours at the studio, because Music Monday is the day where we come in and we work until sunrise the next day. So the longer the video, the longer we are there.

  So more exporting time, more editing.

And we have so many ideas, like for every music Monday we do, we have at least 3 to 4 skits that we have to chop, so even after we make the skit we have to be like “Which one of these is funnier?” And we are trying to gauge the reaction. So it’s not just like “We wrote this, lets film it”. Then we have to decide what to keep and then the video has to be exported and then you have to upload it YouTube, then you need to caption it…

Some people think you just walk into the studio, play some K-pop music and press record on the camera and then dance around and then “voila” it’s all magic, just done… Well we do pay a lot of attention to detail. Like Soo Zee as well, the things she does as well, even like looking at the shirts and the shirt design. Working the logos and our media kits as well.

Soo Zee went to art school so she not only does business side she does all the designing as well.

My actual goal is to have Eat Your Kimchi branding, so we are trying to match up aesthetics with other stuff, like tshirts have to be all in the one style that matches Eat Your Kimchi, so we have a colour scheme…

Which we don’t know, because I’ll be like “I want this to be pink and purple and orange!” and Soozee is like “There is no orange in this!”

Some people might notice that our thumbnails have a unified theme and with the font. So all those have a similar colour to our website. So we are trying to keep the same kind of visual cues. These look like small details but they take a lot of discussion and work to do.

Yeah because we’ve started YouTube about 4 months ago…

    I saw your videos!

     Yeah your dancing video.

And just even the simple videos take so much editing and we are not even proper editors.

We didn’t take any courses, just pressing buttons. Undo! Undo!

And then you freak out when something happens. The sound went the other day and it’s just banging buttons.

Or it just crashes and you open it up and your work is gone and it’s like…….

We filmed a ‘WTF’ recently and we realised the audio wasn’t recording the whole time. So we had a whole video filmed… and that’s it! You just have to scrap that footage.

And also the discussion off camera, like one person will have a perspective of what they expect it to look like and you have an idea in your mind and then when you see it on camera and you are like “This didn’t work out the way I thought.” So then you have to think about how to change that for next time and then you argue about it, “Well next time we should put it up higher or lower” so all that stuff comes in.

Click here for Part 2.

Here is the short video we did together. A shout out to people who are both Eat Your Kimchi Fans and My Korean Husband fans:

Big thank you to SQ Entertainment.