Going to surreal and wonderful places with Marc Ellis

This podcast journey is taking us to some pretty surreal, wonderful places.

Last Tuesday we yarned for two hours with one of our childhood heroes, Marc Ellis.

He was our white whale, our dream guest from day one. A rockstar in sport, business and TV – with the best stories around.

It took us over a year to land him, but when he turned up and cracked open a beer within minutes of arrival, we knew we were onto a winner.

And it’s been our biggest hit. For context, it took us one year and 25 episodes of the Between Two Beers podcast to reach 10,000 downloads, and Marc’s episode alone has now done 30,000 downloads in five days.

The episode’s popularity was due to hitting the BTB sweet spot. It combined high profile-success across three different sectors with incredible story-telling and the strength to be vulnerable.

And it was exclusive.

Marc doesn’t do interviews like this. Certainly not for the last 10 years. We felt incredibly honoured.

The response and feedback to the episode has been overwhelming. It hit particularly hard for those who grew up in the 90s – where Marc was often part of the furniture. For many, it was like bumping into a dear old friend for the first time in years.

One of the unexpected by-products of having these long-form chats is the strong relationships we make with guests. As a result of our connection to Marc, he invited us to do a mid-week Q and A with Lord Ian Botham in front of a small live gathering.

This is the surreal part I was talking about.

Botham is an absolute legend of cricket and beyond, and his story of raising $90 million for Leukemia research (and in the process dramatically increasing the life expectancy of anyone with Leukemia) left the audience speechless. It was a night we’ll never forget.

We can’t wait to see where this journey takes us next.