I guess just thinking about those, those top five players based on James's question, who do you think's the one that would best fit what Mark McVeigh wants to do?

Yeah, hi, uh, Humie, and hi, uh, everyone.

It's, uh, it's nice to be here.

F- for me, uh, Ethan Drever leads the race just, just by a nose to, to Heath, uh, Melady.

Both very good players.

I'd be happy with either, either of them, but for me, Drever is probably my preferred option out of, out of the two.

He's, uh...

I guess, what have you noticed about Draven that has him so high for you? And I guess, how far away is he talent-wise from those top two picks in Walker and Cochran?

Yeah, you're right.

I was keen on him in June.

I saw him play in a trial game at Hawthorne's home ground, a big metro, a big country game.

And he just did some things there which I just thought were just exceptional.

He was just so clean and one-touch.

And since then, he's really consolidated my sort of initial feeling on him.

I guess, how has his post-champs form gone and is what people have seen post the championships really is what's start to seeing people, you know, temper their expectations of him?

Everyone sort of mixed in as well, which was funny.

Yeah.

And, and, and, and so the atmosphere was slightly, slightly different, but not, but not bad.

And also the last World Cup was obviously in Qatar, also quite an unusual kind of, kind of atmosphere.

So it was just, just different.

Um, but the, the Americans seemed to, largely because the, the Team USA had a great start, they really kind of bought into it.

Um, there was a bit of momentum.

Yeah

What did you see on Saturday that, uh, has meant that you have kept him as that number one pick in the open pool?

Yeah.

A lot can change in a few days, uh, Hughmie.

I, I was thinking that, you know, maybe we can pick up a, a ruckman with a pick in the, in the, you know, 10 to 20 sort of range.

Maybe...

I think Herbert probably would go too early, but someone like Benjamin Van Royen, I thought maybe we can be happy with him.

But, um, I think Van Hatum is putting up, uh, an irresistible sort of case to, to be picked.

Is that-- Is Butler moving back in this rankings more about Drever, or is there something about Archie's game that, that has meant he's fallen a little in your rankings?

And more than a million people couldn't hack it, people like Solomon Butcher, a photographer from Lincoln, Nebraska.

He lasted two weeks.

After two weeks, he said it was too hot, too buggy, and too dirty.

And so he returned to Lincoln and took up his photography business again, thank goodness, because he gave us some of the most wonderful, penetrating photographs of homesteaders in the 1880s.

They're mostly taken outside, away from the homesteaders' dirt homes.

One woman, who was from Boston, had her men carry out her organ into the pasture in front of the house so that people back in Boston could see that she still was somebody with culture.

So here are people who are striving to create a new future for themselves, and what we find is that they're very proud of the accomplishments they have made.

They don't look like people who are downcast and depressed.

I guess, where are you-- where do you stand on James Hird coaching Essendon heading into, heading into next year?

Yeah, I, I'm, I'm open to it, but I'm sort of not locked into it.

But there's a few things for me.

The f- the first thing is sort of, it's been peddled a little bit in the media that, you know, he's been out of the game 10 years, so, you know, he's a bit out of touch.

It's not like he's been living in a cave for, for 10 years and not been to the footy or seen any vision and, you know, it's not like he's been relying only on stick figure interpretive drawings of, of AFL games.

So I think that's, that's an agenda that's been pushed that's, that's not quite right.

He, he actually has been doing some good things at Port, Port Melbourne, and one anecdote I heard recently was that a, a mum was talking about her son who, who played in a pretty good local footy competition for a big club for a couple of years and then moved to Port Melbourne, um, a year or two ago.

... that should make Essendon fans excited if, if we do end up with him?

Mm

...

when I was at uni...

So I'd had a, I'd had a sort of problem at school where I just got in trouble for trying to make people laugh, and then at uni there was a comedy club, and I started to do a bit of that.

So a bit of, like, stand-up and sketches, and really enjoyed that, and it felt like it was a good sort of outlet where I wasn't getting bollocked, and, and it was fun.

So sort of va- vaguely through that, I thought, "Okay, maybe this is a..." So I was doing...

When I came back to London, I was doing open mic stuff and, you know, it- liking it.

Yeah.