I'm your host, Steve Hatherly. And today I'm very excited because my guests

are fellow podcasters. I think this is the first time I've had the

opportunity to say this. Jack McBain and Kevin Mitchell both come from

the United States of America. Both majored in communication in university.

And both host a podcast called A-Z English Podcast.

They have a shared love of podcasting, as do I.

They have lots of experience teaching English at the university level here in Korea.

I believe they've been doing it for over 15 plus years.

That's a long time. And I think maybe collectively, we have a

shared love of dogs as well, at least I do with… with Kevin.

Let me say hello to my guest today, Jack McBain and Kevin Mitchell.

Fellas, welcome to the show. Thank you.

Hey, Steve. Yeah, thanks for having us. Absolutely, absolutely.

Good evening. Good evening to you, Kevin. Has anyone ever

told you… you look like Neil Patrick Harris? That I haven't heard.

You've never heard that? That one. No, I… I do have a lot of Korean

students tell me I looked like Benedict Cumberbatch. Oh, interesting.

And I don't agree, but I think I see where they get it because I have a relatively narrow

face. Alright, yeah.

And Mr. Cumberbatch does as well. And I think there's a lot of just, yeah,

foreigner. Foreigner with somewhat similar face structures.

Podcast show idea for you guys, which celebrity do you look like most?

I'm not sure I want to hear the answer to that to be honest.

There's a reason that we are podcasters and not video…

Yeah, right. Right. Video stars.

I will ask you about that in a moments time, but let's talk a little bit about you guys

before we turn our focus to your podcast.

Jack, maybe we can start with you and you can tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yeah, sure. I… I actually came to Asia about 20 or so years ago.

I started teaching at the university level in Korea in 2006.

And I've been at the same school for 17 years. So. Yeah, yeah so.

That's a testament to how good a teacher you are, obviously.

I think so. Well, either that or they're too lazy to try

to find another teacher. Yeah, but yeah, I didn't realize that would

be my forever job. But you know, you… you kind of accidentally

stumble into these things sometimes in life. That is how it goes.

Where in Korea are you located? So I'm in Pyeongtech, but I actually teach

in Ansong which is the next city over, so not far from where I live.

Great to meet you.

Kevin. How about you? Uhm, so similar to Jack I think.

I didn't a plan to be a teacher for forever either.

And here I am almost… almost 20 years into being a teacher - total.

Not all of it in Korea, but it started when I was a student in university and I just did

it as a part time job and I liked it. It was fun.

I enjoy teaching. I like being with students.

And then I moved to Korea and started working at the university here and...

Yeah, I've been doing the same thing for almost 20 years total as… as well.

Korea's uh, a nice place to live, a nice place to… to teach in some ways.

I completely concur.

So the relationship between you two does it go back to America?

Did you meet here in Korea? Did you teach at the same school?

We do teach at the same school, so yes. Like… like a lot of friend friendships that

develop, uh, after university, our friendship began because we teach at the same university.

He's at the Seoul campus. I'm out in the Gyenggi-do area outside of Seoul.

But yeah, we have… we have been friends for a long time now, so yeah.

Yeah, we've been working at the same uni since… since I started.

Interesting. Years ago.

So when did the idea? Let's get into it now. When did the idea for the A to Z English podcast

begin? Was that early on in your friendship something

that you may be mentioned once or twice, maybe let's do it later?

Or was it one person idea and you decided to start Right away?

Tell us about that. Do you want me to handle this one Kev?

Field this one? Yeah, I think this should be yours 'cause

the podcast really was your idea. It was something that I think we were bored

during COVID and then it went from there. So go ahead, but you've… you've been interested

for a long time in podcasting. Well, right. I mean it, it's kind of like,

you know, you want you go to, uh, a blockbuster movie and you say I want to be an actor, I

want to make movies, you know something, but. The threshold is too high. It's too difficult

to do that. But when I really got into podcasting, I was

like, you know what, it's not that difficult to start a podcast.

It's difficult to build a community of listeners, but, but it was something that was just kind

of eating away at me for a while. And finally, I asked Kevin and another friend

of ours. I said, you know what, guys? Let's start a podcast. And we actually started a

podcast called The Seoul Patch.

Which is up on Seoul and we just talked about Korea related topics.

I've heard of that podcast. Oh, really?

I… I must admit, I must admit, I apologize. I… I… I don't think I've heard an episode,

but I know that I've heard of that podcast before.

Oh, wow. OK, well, that's inspiring. That's that's awesome.

Uh, we what happened was we kind of decided to make a kind of right turn towards something

that was maybe a little more practical for listeners, which was a Language Learning podcast,

which combines my love of podcasting and I think Kevin also enjoys it.

And also our experience as English teachers. And so that's what started the A-Z English

podcast? Pretty much, Yep.

So it wasn't a tough sell I guess for you then, Kevin to come on board and join Jack?

Well, like I was saying a minute ago, it really started at first during the COVID pandemic

when we were all just stuck at home.

And not meeting friends. And not being social. And so Jack got in touch and said, hey, do

you guys want to hang out and talk about Korea and record it and publish it?

And, I was like, yeah, that… that sounds fun because I was just lonely.

I needed friends. I needed something to do.

And there it just started and it just got better and… and it was fun to do. It was

fun just to… to hang out and talk w ith cool people.

So that suggests to me then that the podcast is about two years old, roughly.

Actually, yeah. Yeah, I would say yeah, but we started the

Seoul patch about two years ago and we've been doing the A-Z podcast for about 3 months.

It's still new. The Soul patch is on hiatus, but we plan to

bring that back once a week. Soon.

So the A-Z podcast. If you have to give a description about what it is, then what would

that description be? Kevin, I'll let you field this one.

So and the A-Z English podcast is a podcast for English learners, of course, people who

want to learn English. But it's focused on listening to native speakers

just talk and explain things in a kind of natural conversation with homework attached,

right? So there's, you can listen to Jack and I and our other host, Xochilt, she's not

here at the moment. You can just listen to us talk about different

things or explain some idioms. Or sometimes we get into some grammar too, but grammar

is not as exciting. But it's just us talking about topics so that

listeners can get a feel for what native English conversations sound like.

And like I said, there's homework connected, so it's not just listening, it's listening

and, you know, answer some questions and focus, so there's, uh, a study element for… for

our listeners and the students as well. Well, yes, I did listen to a handful of the

podcast. One of them was grammar related, related to the present voice and the past

voice. OK.

I think talking about it being eaten by a giant sandwich was a sentence that stood out,

stood out to me my first, right? Passive and active.

Yep, passive voice activation. My first thought was, “What kind of sandwich

would I want that to be?” Good question, good question.

Yeah, that's a good question, right. I… I would say ham and cheese if you had to ask

if I if you really pushed me, but yeah. Not… not a bad answer.

Another episode was about everyday idioms. Yeah, so there seems to be quite a variety

of topics that you study but or that you present. But when you do, when you did come up with

the idea initially, it's kind of such a broad spectrum, isn't it to start…?

English. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And yeah, English and then a podcast about English. So oh, OK, well, where where do we

begin? Where do we go? So that very first episode that you did, if you can remember

back that far, how did you decide what the content would be?

That's a great question. Yeah. So I think probably our second one, the first

one was probably just an introduction for us.

OK, fair enough. Yes. But then yeah after that and that's honestly

topics is one of the hardest parts of… of thinking of new episodes for grammar, for

idioms and… and for our chats. For the chats, it's just things that Jack

and I are interested in.

And… and hopefully topics that our audience are interested in as well.

So we have a lot of young listeners, so we're trying to find more younger topics 'cause

we're not so young and trying to relate. Jack, how do you come up with your… our

topics? Well, I think it goes back to my experience

as a teacher. I think one of the pitfalls that a lot of teachers, they come to another

country to teach English and they go, Today, I am going to teach the present tense and

the present continuous tense. And when I leave, after my one hour or whatever, everybody will

understand completely what I just lectured because…. 'cause I… I know that I organized

my lesson so well.” And then I come back the next day, and everybody

is making the same mistakes that they were before I lectured.

And what you have to… to realize is that, if you create a lesson for the classroom,

or a podcast episode or something, they're just listeners are going to take away maybe

if you're lucky 1 little piece of something that they hadn't put together.

But this idea that we're going to kind of solve the problem of tense or whatever is

I… I mean, it's a trap a lot of teachers fall into, especially new teachers.

But for us, we don't, we try not to worry about, you know, them understanding everything.

If they can just take out one or two key points during that… that lesson, I would consider

that a success. In my mind, yeah. Yeah, I guess that's a great point is that

if there's something, because everybody learns differently, also everybody has their own

agenda to write about what they need to improve or what… what they want to learn in the

first place. So yeah, designing an episode where you can

take away one or two or three things, then, yeah, that has to be considered a success.

So, let's talk, let's talk about the… the structures of the episodes. Do they follow

a similar breakdown each time you do it? The… the way that we have been organizing

it lately is that we try to do, we try to evenly distribute the types of episodes that

we are recording. So, we have what we call Quick Chats and those

are just conversations.

And what we do is we just kind of freestyle a conversation between the three of us or

two of us. And then we go back and we kind of cherry

pick vocabulary and put that into a study guide, provide a transcript for the students.

But in essence, it just gives them an opportunity to listen to a real time conversation between

two native speakers. Yeah.

The other ep… two types of episodes that we have our where we we'd have 3 idioms and

we just explain the meaning of them because, you know, idioms can be very difficult to

understand. Some of them are…. I don't even know the

genesis of, a lot of you know idioms like they're so old, you know, like talking about

like a horse, you know, lead a horse to water or something.

Right. Uhm, the other type is the… the grammar

episode that you listen to, and we're trying to kind of go through different grammar points

and provide examples. And I think those are maybe the hardest to

translate through a podcast format. Because you don't have a whiteboard. You don't

have, you know you can't draw a timeline and things like that. So, but those are the three

basic types of episodes that we have been recording most recently.

Which ones, Kevin, are your favorite ones to do?

Oh, the… the quick chats are the most the… the easiest and the most fun.

Because, I mean, like we said, it's we started this podcast just to hang out with friends

and that's what that is. The quick chat is just hanging out with…. with Jack or Xochitl

and… and just talking about something, so those are fun. I would say that the grammar

and the idioms ones though are kind of interesting to do as well, because, Jack and I's relationship

for the past many years has just been a friend relationship.

We didn't teach together. But in those episodes, it's much more teaching, right? It's like,

here's a grammar, here's an idiom, how do you do it? And it's very interesting to see

his style of thinking of ideas. Or my style of thinking of ideas and how those translate

into audio and into podcasts. And so even though they're not as fun necessarily to record,

they're equally interesting just to do it with someone else.