Lessons In Elite Leadership - Eddie Jones

Eddie Jones is the Head Coach of England Rugby Union Team, ex-player and an author. Eddie has played for Australia and coached the South Africa, Australia, Japan and England national teams. And after decades at the peak of elite sport, he's picked up a tip or two about how to lead a team and deal with setbacks. Expect to learn the 5 values that every leader needs to have, Eddie's non-negotiables for making him the best leader he can be, why he bought a samurai sword to attack some fruit with, his tips on how to make a good first impression, how to deal with pressure, how he copes with media scrutiny and much more Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Leadership - https://amzn.to/3Dx6HAo Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #leadership #rugby #eddiejones - 00:00 Intro 00:29 Why Leadership is a Difficult Skill to Learn 04:52 What are the Values of a Good Leader? 16:49 How Eddie Changed England’s Direction 27:42 How Eddie Deals with the Media 34:23 Eddie’s Thoughts on The Last Dance 38:37 Examining Different Roles Within the England Team 44:35 Principles for Success Under Pressure 54:40 How England Prepares for the World Cup - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The really important thing there is as a leader or as a head coach, you need to know yourself. When we're a young coach coming through, we think we know everything and we think we can do everything. And the longer you coach, the more you realise, know your strengths, coach to your strengths and then bring other people in that complement, supplement and add to the team environment.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  Eddie Jones, welcome to the show.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Nice to be here, mate.

• 0:28Chris Williamson?

  Really glad to have you here. So why write a book on leadership at all? Do you want the world to have better leaders in it? Or are you trying to synthesise what you learned? What was the compulsion to do it?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Well, on the back of the last book, McMillan approached me during the lockdown to do a book on leadership. And I'd always thought, there was a couple of books when I was growing up as a coach, learning my trade, that I really appreciated the help I got from. One was from Pat Riley, the L A Lakers winner with him. And the other one was Bill Walsh from the San Francisco 49ers, which I think is called Winning Edge. And I thought, well, maybe if I can put down some of the thoughts that I've had in my career, might help some young aspiring coach coming through to help them in their difficult way of learning how to be a coach.

• 1:21Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think it is such a difficulty? Why is leadership such a fine skill to attune?

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Well, I think, yeah, coaching, as I do for a living, it appears easy, but it's such a complex, convoluted, ever demanding profession where you're dealing with young athletes who increasingly want to be more individual, which is the way the world is. And you're trying to put them together in the one team and do the same thing in a period of time. And they extract from them effort that they don't normally want to give.

• 2:02Chris Williamson?

  Does that suggest that it's becoming a bit more difficult to be a leader or be a coach now? It sounds like people are becoming more individualistic, which is making coordination more challenging.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Look, I don't think it's become more difficult. I just think it's, there's more parts to it now. You have to take into consideration a lot more things than previously. You had to, just for instance, yeah, within coaching a team, you have to take a lot of consideration into the, the learning environment we, which you create for the players. Yeah. Whereas previously, you know, if you look back 20 or 30 years ago, you could stand at the front of the room and say, this is what we're going to do. And everyone would say, well, how much, how much, how hard do you want us to do it, coach? And now you have to explain why you have to do it. You have to make sure you have the right number of messages. You have to have the messages in the right way. You have to have the right, right sort

• 2:56Speaker 00

  of visual presentation for the players. So all of that's become, become more challenging to, to extract the maximum effort from the players.

• 3:08Chris Williamson?

  How do you balance that need for team members to listen to your instructions, but them to also come up with their own solutions? I think you've got a story in the book about when you presented one of the players with sort of a, here's a problem, you need to fix it, but also the players still need to listen to your words. How do you find that balance?

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, increasingly, Chris, it's, it's more about the players finding their own solutions. I think coaches are more facilitators now. And what, what we need to be really good at though is, is setting the standards of performance and making those performance standards very clear for everyone, but then guiding the player to where they need to go to achieve those standards rather than commanding the players to do it.

• 3:53Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. That's interesting. What, when do you think that you're at your best? Are you at your absolute best now as a leader?

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Uh, well, I think you never get there, mate. I think you're always chasing. It's like that lucid dream. It's that, that pie in the sky type thing where you're always trying to become a better, a better, a better coach and a better leader. You know, we had Roy Hodgson come and visit us during the last six nations. And yeah, Roy's 72. He's coached, I think, four different countries, most of top football clubs in the world. And yeah, his opening statement was, oh, boys, I'm still trying to work out how to be a good coach. And I think that's so true, that you're always chasing to be a little bit better because. Yeah, there is no finite state in sport and there is no finite state in any high performance

• 4:44Speaker 00

  organisation. Yeah, there's always what's coming next, who's chasing you, who's trying to do a little bit better than you.

• 4:52Chris Williamson?

  What are the values of a good leader to you? You break that down into a sort of a big five. How do you go through courage, hard work, discipline, iron will and curiosity?

• 5:03Speaker 00

  Well, I think all of those things are important and they're all important at various times. I think, as I spoke about in the book, there's a cycle of performance that you need to go through where you need to build up the team. And particularly at the start, when you take over a team, I think you need a lot of courage to come up with a vision that's probably higher than the players have ever wanted to achieve. And then you've got to sell that vision to the players. You've got to make sure that they're prepared to work hard to achieve that vision. And that message has got to be fresh all the time because, you know, the more you can repeat the message, the more chance you've got people to believe in it. You know, that's the one thing that's very consistent. We're

• 5:46Speaker 00

  lucky enough recently to get Doug Lemoff in, who's a school teacher in the USA. And he started a number of schools called uncommon schools and he's basically set up schools in the most underprivileged areas in the cities of America and created this fantastic learning environment where kids are doing significantly better than the norms for their areas. So we got him in to create, to get our coaches to learn more about being better teachers rather than just being coaches, because that's what it is now. It's teaching

• 6:28Speaker 00

  the players, you know, guiding them, sometimes telling them, and most of the time trying to create the environment for them to learn by themselves.

• 6:37Chris Williamson?

  Is there an insight that was surprising to you when learning what he does? Or was there something that you realised that you were doing incorrectly?

• 6:48Speaker 00

  It's not as severe as that, but what it is, it's the nuances of getting the message through. Like he did this presentation on rugby and he doesn't know, he doesn't know anything about rugby. But he did this presentation and our coaching sat there, our coaching team sat there in awe about his ability to capture the information succinctly, put it into a way that, that most people can remember it. So it's that understanding of how the brain operates, understanding then how you, how you create that, that right message for the players so they're able to remember what you're doing and, and just some of the things, you know,

• 7:30Speaker 00

  like if you want the team to do a tactical, if you want a team to follow a tactical area of the game, the need to practise at least four times during the week, the brain, the brain won't take that in unless you do it four times. And if it's more of a message, if you haven't repeated that message at least seven times during the week, the chances again of the players being able to remember that message is, is, is not great.

• 7:57Chris Williamson?

  So the value.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  Those little things are really important.

• 8:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the value of repetition from someone who doesn't have a clue about rugby, but was able to come over and give people who've spent their entire lives doing rugby some new news.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, and a survey of repetition without having repetition. Yeah, that's the important thing because if we keep repeating the same message and you keep saying it the same way, people get bored of it, you know, and, and particularly in today's society where, you know, if you haven't got a new, something new on your podcast, people don't come back to it, do they? You know, because there's always something new that they can go to. You look at, you know, soft drinks or drinks in the, in the shops now. Like 30 years ago, you had Fanta Coke, lemonade and water properly. And now you've got, you know, each week there's a new flavour, a new sparkling, you know, lemon, yuzu, whatever it is, juice coming out because people want new things.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  And it's the same when you're giving messages to players now, if you keep saying the same thing. They won't listen to you. So you've got to present the same message in a number of different ways. So it's that idea of having repetition without repetition, same as coaching on the field, you know, the importance of fundamentals in any of the games we play, whether it be football, whether it be American football, whether it be rugby union, the fundamentals are the bit that gives you the beauty of the game. But young players don't want to do the endless drills of passing the ball without thinking. So they've got to be able to create those drills that are repetition, but at the same time, the players think they're doing something new all the time.

• 9:37Chris Williamson?

  So there's an element of novelty that delivers the same message that you've wanted to get across to them?

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Hundred percent, mate. Stumbled that beautifully.

• 9:45Chris Williamson?

  And you, am I right in saying that you said for physical activities, you're looking at four times a week? And for, what does messages mean? Is that more kind of like philosophies and theories, seven times within a week?

• 9:58Speaker 00

  All the message about how we're going to play, just that key tactical message that you want to stick in their head. If you're not repeating that seven times during the week, the chances of the players remembering that is not great.

• 10:15Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. I wonder whether, I wonder whether the immersive element that you get when players turn professional or when they go to an international stage, I'm wondering how much more of a benefit those players are seeing because they're living and breathing it. Think about the step change between a club level player who maybe is only with his team, what, once or twice during the week, and then again on game day, and then as this perhaps young player works opened up, not only does he get better, but his ability to get better increases so much more because he's starting to hit this critical mass of messaging opportunities with the coaching staff that he works with.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I also think it's the ability to learn and, and yeah, you see the players who go from one level to the, to the next, um, their ability to learn quickly is, is one of the most distinguishing factors. Like, I know in English cricket, they had a theory that if a player went from county to test cricket and within the first three innings of test cricket, he wasn't able to get 50, the chances of him adapting and being a really good player is, is quite, quite low. Um, and I think that's so true in most sports. You see, when a young player goes up to the next level, that if they adapt really quickly and that's their ability to learn, if they're able to do that, their chances of being successful

• 11:37Speaker 00

  players far higher than the player who's slow to adapt.

• 11:41Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. So it's like a, uh, like a stress test at very, very high levels of pressure. This person's put into a new environment, new, new stress is put upon them. How do they adapt and grow and learn? And that adaptability is, um, a scalable insight that works out how effective they're going to be over time.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and the other part of that is that they've got to have an open mindset, you know, they've got to be open to learning and they've got to have an element of curiosity and they've also got to be humble, mate. Because, you know, the hard thing for, for players particularly is to understand sometimes they think they've made it, they've got to the next level. So why do I have to improve now? And if you're humble, you always want to improve. And you see with the really great players, you know, you look at Federer, you know, he's, he's what, he's 40 odd now and he's still got a tennis coach because he wants to improve. And every time he comes back for a new season, he's got a new stroke or variation of his stroke. Imagine if like every team sport

• 12:45Speaker 00

  player had that approach to their game, that every off-season they develop a new part of their game by themselves and come back with a new string to their bow. And the, and the really good players do that. And not so good players think they've made it and they don't think they've got to keep improving.

• 13:02Chris Williamson?

  Is there a tension between the hard work and the iron will and the discipline and the curiosity that those first three are to do with kind of drilling and iterating on what you already do and the curiosity is on growing. So you kind of have this exploit and then this explore element that there's two things going on. Is there a tension that you find between those?

• 13:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a constant battle mate. The way you've said it is right. And there's this constant battle in terms of coaching, whether you're supporting or challenging the player. So you've always got this and with your environment, you've got the constant battle or tension between being comfortable because you need them to be comfortable sometimes. You know, if you keep pushing all the time, they get too uncomfortable. But then when they they start sitting comfortably on the chair, then you've got to make sure you're making a bit more uncomfortable. So, you know, in terms of high performance environment, that's one of the things you're constantly appraising. That support challenge, that

• 14:05Speaker 00

  comfortable uncomfortables, that that sitting and moving, you're always appraising where you need to be and trying to find the right way to keep moving forward.

• 14:15Chris Williamson?

  How do you avoid burnout, both for yourself and for the players? I know that you're someone who in the past has, how would you say, pushed the limits of this to its, to up towards its absolute peak?

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I think the first thing is you've got to keep loving it. You know, if you love, if you really love something, it means a lot to you, don't get burnt out. Because the passion's there, the desire's there, the enthusiasm there. And it's, you know, I'd never feel like I'm doing a job. I always feel like I'm doing something I love doing. And that's why I'm still able to coach at 61, because it's not a job to me. It's something I love doing. And I think the mistake I made when I was a younger coach was that I expected everyone else's players and assistant coaches to have that same desire to want to be like that all the time. But as I've got older and got more experience,

• 15:14Speaker 00

  I've understood that, yeah, everyone's got their own way of doing it. And sometimes it might have manifested itself in this strong desire, but they've still got the desire there. So it's been more, having more empathy about the way other people do their job.

• 15:29Chris Williamson?

  It wouldn't work for everyone to have your approach either, right? Let's say that you are the bazooka or you're the hammer that sees everything as a nail. You don't need that. Sometimes you need other people that are more creative, that are more relaxed. I know that you've got a lot of women that are contributing as parts of your coaching staff now that also add a total different perspective into this too.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I think, you know, the recent period of time has shown how important diversity is in life. You know, not that anyone thought it wasn't, but I think that's really reinforced. And I think in the sporting environment, it's become even more important to understand how important diversity is and that, and that respect's almost more important than harmony in a team organisation, I think, having the respect of diversity, respect of different opinions, respect to people's backgrounds, respect of gender, all of that, all of that is just so important to an environment now.

• 16:25Chris Williamson?

  Well, the bottom line is it's not diversity for diversity's sake either. The reason that it works is that you get an effective outcome, that you have a team that performs better, that's more effective.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  A hundred percent because everyone thinks the same way, everyone behaves the same way. Yeah, you don't get any new thoughts, you don't get any creative conflict. You need to have that diversity to keep, keep the ball moving.

• 16:50Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about when you arrived at England in 2015 then. How do you begin changing the direction of a team when you're a brand new leader? You're this fresh behind the face sort of guy that no one has an existing relationship with, but many people may have preconceived ideas about. Where'd you go?

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Well, I probably learnt, learnt the most, I'll just tell a little story about how I approached it, being a casual teacher or being a supply teacher, as they call it in England. I did that for the first couple of years when I became a teacher because there wasn't any full-time jobs. So I'd go to a school and I I used to go to my old school and and the classes you got were always the tough class because teachers don't take days off when they got the top students. They take days off. They've got the the the rat bag. So I'd have the bottom bottom class of year nine boys, you know, when hormones are pumping through their bodies, they they know everything. They don't want to be told anything by a teacher. And I

• 17:53Speaker 00

  quickly learn out, you know, when you have those guys maybe four or five times a day, um, you've got to quickly work out, right, who's who's going to, who's going to be difficult for you? And you have to find some way to some way to establish a relationship. Who's going to help you? And again, you have to find a relationship with and then you have to make the the content of your lesson interesting that that makes them want to be part of the lesson. So when you go to a new team, it's no different. You know, you've got to try to find the players that you think you need, but maybe going to be difficult and find a way to establish your relationship quickly with them. Uh, work out the players who are

• 18:34Speaker 00

  going to be with you from the start because they're driven. Uh, make sure they understand your philosophy and and where you want to go. And then create a training program that's interesting, that makes the players want to be there. Um, and so you do that process, you know, and when you're with a England side, you've got five days to do that before you play a game. So it's, you know, you've got to get on your horse and you've got to do it quickly.

• 18:59Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about how you um, bridge the gap between the difficult ones and how you encourage and utilize the motivation of the driven ones. Have you got any strategies around how you approach that?

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, you've got to, you've got to fill the difficult ones. The difficult ones are difficult usually for a reason. They're either, they're either really high performing players, which most of them are, or they're players you've got to get rid of. So you quickly got to make it, you you know, if they're high performing players, they're difficult for a reason. So you've got to try to find out what they really value, um, what drives them. Like, yeah, I think I I've spoken before about James Haskell, always been this muscular player, but never really performed for England. But I've met him a few times socially before that in Japan. And I knew that, you know, he wanted to be loved. So.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, some of the most overtly ostentatious, out there type players are the players who are the most insecure. So I immediately had a conversation with him and said, mate, you're going to be so important for this team. You're likely to be our starting seven for the Six Nations. So you do these one or two things for me, you're going to be there. And that immediately made him feel good. So he wanted to be part of the team. Then for the other guys, it's giving them roles, I think, is going to improve their rugby. So you're looking to each player quickly to establish a personal relationship,

• 20:32Speaker 00

  trying to understand what's important value for them in terms of their sport and in terms of their endeavour, and then create that link with them.

• 20:42Chris Williamson?

  So with the difficult ones, you're looking to either bridge that gap or get rid? And with the guys who are driven, you're trying to give them responsibility that allows them to take ownership and move forward?

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and also show them how much you care about them. The big thing about about any team is that the players want to know two things from the coach. Firstly, that they can improve them, and secondly, that they care about them. So you've got to have the knowledge of rugby, particularly for those driven guys. They want to know that you've got the knowledge to take the team going forward because they want to be part of the successful team. So you've got to quickly assess in the team, and I think you see this in football all the time, where coaches are able to come in or managers are able to come in a short period of time and turn the team around. They're able to work out quickly how they can improve the team, and therefore how they can improve the individual players' chances of being

• 21:38Speaker 00

  successful. So you've got to work out what that is very, very quickly. And for England, it was quite easy because they've always been a strong defensive and set piece team. So I just focused on what they were good at previously, and then gave them a picture of where we could go potentially.

• 21:57Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting as a non-professional athlete, looking at these pros, because from our perspective, these guys just look like Titan, athletic titans, right? Just these immovable objects that go on the pitch and completely work to what the tactics say that they're supposed to do. But you're right, the only reason that a manager or a coach is able to step into a team, whether it be football or rugby, and make a quick change, they're not changing the skills of the players. The players haven't acquired some new move or something within the space of one day or one week that this coach has been there. It's about the communication. It's about how they're framing that player's role. It's about how they're talking to them. It's about making them feel comfortable, confident, secure within their position within the team and giving them responsibility to drive them forward. I'd never thought of it like that before, but it makes so much sense.

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  That's the only way you could turn something around that quickly.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, 100%. Well, you look at, yeah, it's one of the most interesting things for me is watching how other coaches operate. And having seen Rannick come into Manchester United, yeah, every time he talks, he's very clear about what he wants. Like, this is how the team's going to play. We mightn't play like that now, but this is where we're going. He wants players with a strong mentality. It doesn't matter how talented they are, they've got a strong mentality. And you can see, you know, every time he talks to a media conference, he's talking to his players. So he's reinforcing, you know, we said about reinforcing the messages. He's constantly reinforcing the messages he'd be telling

• 23:28Speaker 00

  within the, in the team room. He's saying that to the media. So they're hearing that, right? So we know what this bloke wants. For us to be successful, if we're going to do this, we've got to do these things. And at the same time, I'm sure he gives them enough freedom to, to, to impose their own personality on the team. I reckon that's another important point that, yeah, a team generally wants, wants to be like the personality of the coach. But at the same time, the coach's skill is being able to, to not, not delete the player's personality from, from that. So you want the players to be themselves, but you want them to be part of a group that plays like the coach wants them to play,

• 24:12Speaker 00

  so they get on the same page. But at the same time, for the players to be able to have, be their own personality.

• 24:19Chris Williamson?

  You see this in businesses as well, right? The owner or the director or the CEO or whatever. The culture is just a trickle down, little microcosm of whatever it is that they do. In any case, you see elements of their personality borne out in the company culture. It is just like a little projection of how that person operates.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And then the individuals are able to add to that. So they're continuing adding. Like we had a sports site come in between 2018 and 2020 for the England side. And one of, one of her great quotes was that, remember every conversation you have with a player or with a staff member, you're either adding to the business or you're taking away from the business. You never, no conversation is neutral. And it's so, so right that every conversation you have, whether it be passing a guy in the hallway, you can either add to the team business that, that day or take away from the team business. And your ability to, to keep adding to the business is the key thing.

• 25:23Chris Williamson?

  Talking about James Haskell, you said that he was an important part of like lightening the dressing room up, being kind of the, the life of the party, so to speak. Are there some other support systems that a leader needs that might not be so obvious at first? You know, you wouldn't think that in a high performing sports team, that having a life of the party or someone that lightens the load would be in there, but it seems like it was quite an important role.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Mate, it's really important. And again, it's that diversity of character that you need. So you not only need that in the players, but you also need a staff member that's able to do that. So we had a guy called Scott Wiseman, who coached with me in Japan. I brought him over to England for the last two years. Like he was the sort of bloke, like honestly, he's 50 now and he's still got the same, same pair of board shorts he had when he was, when he was 21, you know? And they tell this story about New South Wales, they're driving to training. They see this guy in the board shorts on a skateboard. You know, with his cap backwards, pushing along on his skateboard, going to training. And this is the, you know, one of the most important assistant coaches.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  So having a guy like that who's good at his, good at his coaching, but also can add a bit of frivolity, bit of humour. Like humour is such an important thing in a sports environment. Or any competitive environment that you have that balance between seriousness of the job and that humour to to get people to feel good about themselves.

• 26:49Chris Williamson?

  It's funny to think that a lot of a lot of bad leaders that I've spent time with, they want other members of the team to be exactly like them. But as you've said, we're not going to get that diversity through that way. And especially whatever it is that you have, having more of that isn't what you need. It's more of the things that you don't have that are then going to spread out that creativity.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, no, that's right, Chris. And I think that the really important thing there is as a leader or as a head coach, you need to know yourself, you know, because when we're when we're a young coach coming through, yeah, we think we know everything and and we think we can do everything. And the longer you coach, the more you realise, know your strengths, coach to your strengths and then bring other people in that complement, supplement and add to the team environment.

• 27:42Chris Williamson?

  I'm fascinated by the idea that the coach can use opportunities with the press as a chance to communicate to the players. I think that that, I mean, you've had some pretty advanced media strategies over the last few years, the way that you went out and attacked the All Blacks in advance of your game with them. And then there was the sort of the V formation that you guys formed around the hacker. Can you explain sort of the plan behind that that whole week?

• 28:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, New Zealand, New Zealand are the darlings of world rugby, you know, everyone loves them. And they should because they're the most successful team in the world. So they've got and they've got this mystique about them with the black jersey doing the hacker. And having lived in Japan, I know how much the Japanese love them. So with a guy that's worked with me for 20 years now, David Prembrake, who's one of the brightest people I know, he always at the start of the week will send me some lines about where we think we should go. So firstly, we wanted

• 28:46Speaker 00

  To put the New Zealand media on call that we wanted them to stir them up a bit. So they'd ask Steve Hanson, who was the head coach, some questions. So we came up with that line of they're just fans with keyboards to stir that up a bit. And then we wanted to make sure that New Zealand understood we were coming after them. So we used some language at the start of the week about how we're going to chase them down the street and all these, these sort of things. And the busiest person in the New Zealand camp, be the sports psychologist, who was well renowned and one of the most successful. And then we had this idea, right, that's all well and good, but once we get to the

• 29:30Speaker 00

  ground and they start the haka, the whole crowd gets in trance by them. And then they become, the crowd supports them. So what we wanted to try to do was get the crowd to think about something else. So came up with this idea that we'd encircle the haka, so we'd make a circle around it. But that was the coach's idea. So I gave it to Owen Farrell, the captain, and I said, mate, this is my idea, or our idea, but then you do, you talk to the team and you do what you think's right. So they came up with the idea that they'd make a V and stay within the distance I was

• 30:13Speaker 00

  supposed to stay, which I think you're not allowed over halfway line. But unfortunately, we've got a bloke called Joe Marley who doesn't tend to listen to most people, and he kept going. So we ended up with this, you know, this quite confrontational V and you could hear the buzz in the crowd, you know, all of a sudden, well, this is not, we're not here to just watch the All Blacks. This is a, this is a proper game and it's on. So we got that right approach, but yeah, you do that in other games and it doesn't work and you look like an idiot, mate.

• 30:47Chris Williamson?

  The video, if anyone wants to go and watch it on YouTube, you can see the referee or the linesman sort of trying to pull Joe Marler back and saying, no, no, you can't, you're on this half of the pitch. You need to be in your half. The game hasn't even begun yet.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  But again, you know, that's, that's a good example of diversity because Joe Marler, like he's completely, he's all man, own man.

• 31:10Chris Williamson?

  Is he one of the most unique players that you've coached?

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Hundred percent, mate. But one of the best players I've coached too, like great team man, really respected within the team. But yeah, he's got his own way. He wants to be portrayed and we give him the freedom to do that. And as a result, he, he keeps wanting to play for England. Like he's retired two or three times. Yeah, he's got five kids under 10 at home, so he's got plenty to do at home. But he's a, he's a great fella, great fella.

• 31:40Chris Williamson?

  He's so entertaining to watch, you know, he's, it doesn't make, it doesn't surprise me that he's a fan favourite. And then when you find out that he's like a player favourite too, I guess Haskell's probably something similar, right? Like just that pure character, it's, um. It sets the, it, it, and it gets, you have to forget, or people sometimes forget when we talk about high performance, that although sport is about winning and about performing effectively, it is an entertainment. I know that you've got some problems at the moment to do with the ball in, ball out of play, um, time, which although partly that's to do with how the game's played and the dynamic, it's also to do with how enjoyable it is to watch. So if you've got a character on the pitch with his crazy hair and his like mad after match interviews

• 32:22Chris Williamson?

  and there's things that the referee's mic picks up as he's like Joe Marler's giving the referee a slap on the arse or whatever it might be like that's, that kind of makes for a spectacle that people want to watch.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  And it goes back again, you know, you don't want to be annuling the, the players' personality. You want them to have their personality and, and the crowds want to see that. They want to see players with personality. And yeah, as professional sports got tighter and tighter, uh, particularly, I think it's been harder for players to, to be their own person because it's, you know, the academies want players who behave themselves. They don't want players who are, are difficult, who, you know, want to do their own thing. So those players have to work really hard now to come through.

• 33:05Chris Williamson?

  Is there almost a sense of deprogramming that when they get to the top level? That you go from being a wild young kid, you need to show to the academy usually, you know, if you've got some academy coach, my housemate's the ex physio of the junior academy at Falcons and now the junior first team. And I think that, you know, they want kids that show that they can listen to discipline. They want kids that can do the thing, but then you get to the top flight and actually you're now trying to bring, you're almost trying to deprogram that. You're trying to bring some of that individuality back out again.

• 33:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's a, it's a constant battle that we've got, that, that we want players, particularly I think in the media to be their, their own selves. We, yeah, obviously there's a team line we want them to follow, but we want them to be able to tell stories. We want them to be able to entertain the, the people who, who pay, you know, ultimately the crowds pay for, for the players to play the game and, and they need to be able to entertain. Um, yeah, I think that's just such an important part of sport going forward. And you see the American teams are probably best at doing it, aren't they? You know, I remember seeing that Cam Newton for, um, I think he played for Carolina Panthers,

• 34:16Speaker 00

  you know, real character, the way he used to dress coming to press conferences and people remembered that.

• 34:23Chris Williamson?

  Did you watch, uh, The Last Dance, Save Last Dance, the Michael Jordan documentary on Netflix? What were your thoughts about that?

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Oh, well, again, I reckon that's a great example of a, a coach knowing what the team needed. Like when Rodman, having Rodman there with Pippen and Jordan, he had the right balance in the team. When it was, when Jordan was out and there was just Pip, Pippen and, and Rodman, Rodman's force within the team was probably too strong and there wasn't enough ballast in the senior player group to, to, to manage his idiosyncrasies. Because if they were able to manage it, he was a force for the team. But if they weren't able to manage it, then he became a negative force for the team. So I thought that the way Jackson was able to manage that, and you didn't hear much

• 35:12Speaker 00

  from Jackson in the, in the, in the series, but you could see his influence on the team and, and, and the, the way, the other bit I really liked was that, you know, in NBA, it looks like in the lead up to the finals, it's all about attack. But as soon as you get to the finals, it's all about defense, which is, is the same in most sports, you know?

• 35:35Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by that?

• 35:36Speaker 00

  You've got to be a good attacking team to get to the finals, but to win the finals, you've got to be a good defensive team.

• 35:41Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. I wouldn't have thought that that would be the case.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that the thing that stood out to me, how hard they played in defence in the finals, like John in the finals, his defence was incredible.

• 35:55Chris Williamson?

  And you think that you're going to see the same, or you do see the same pattern come across into rugby as well?

• 36:00Speaker 00

  A hundred percent, mate, so clearly, because they're tight games, you know, and they're fifty fifty games. So the team that generally makes the less errors wins.

• 36:08Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, that's an interesting one. So what about your habits for leadership? What about your routines and the non-negotiables that you have in your daily existence that make sure that you're performing as well as you can as a leader?

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you've got to have a routine as a leader. I certainly have developed that over the years. I've always had quite a strong work ethic. So I've always worked long hours, but I've become much more effective in working more effective hours. The book that I read and got a lot out of was a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport, which is about understanding when your most profitable periods of the day are. Make sure you do your hardest work there. Make sure you cut off all the distractions you have and do your best work then. Then the other periods are more lighter periods of work. So that's

• 37:06Speaker 00

  really helped me a lot, that book. And I was lucky enough to have a Zoom with him over. Any aspiring coach or any aspiring leader should read that book.

• 37:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he's been on the show about A World Without Email, which is his new book that he is trying to turn people's worlds upside down with. There's one thing actually I wanted to suggest that you might really enjoy. It's a book by Stephen Kotler called The Art of Impossible. So you think about how someone like Mihai, Chiksek Mihai, or Cal Newport, they come at flow from quite a psychological perspective.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:39Chris Williamson?

  Stephen comes at it from a biological perspective. So he looks at the biological prerequisites that cause a human to be in a flow state. And that book, that book's really, really impressive. There's something nice about having someone that's like... Spitting sawdust around what you need to do in order to prime your body. So it's a primer on peak performance. But given your daily routine, which I know you tend to work on a morning, right? You get up sort of relatively early and then you crack it out. That aligns, interestingly, that aligns really, really closely with what Stephen talks about. And he's done some of the most advanced flow research on the planet. He owns the Flow Research Collective,

• 38:21Chris Williamson?

  which is this big group and blah, blah, blah. And it's funny how people that maybe don't know the neurology of why it's happening, they just arrive at an effective strategy simply by trial and error.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, read that book, mate. That's a good tip.

• 38:36Chris Williamson?

  Good man. Good man. So talk to me about some of the new additions to your team. We've spoken about the fact that we've got women on board and you've touched on there's a media person, you've got a guy that used to speak to psychopaths and stuff, and you've got all manner of different team members. Who are some of the interesting new ones?

• 38:53Speaker 00

  We've put on, we use a forensic psychologist now, and she used to, she used to assess psychopaths in one of the jails in England. And basically to see whether they were going to kill again.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  And if they were going to kill, they had to stay in a high security jail, obviously. If they, they felt, if she felt they could move to a more less secure, or she tells a story about how she'd sit in this, the room, the jail room with these psychopaths, having to, having to try to analyse them. So we've got her on to work with the coaches. So it's the first time we've had a psychologist for the coaches.

• 39:33Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so she's not just working, sorry, she's not just working with the players. You've got her working with the coaches to assess their mental state as well.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  She's working with the coaches to, to improve our collaborative.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Improve our collaboration as a team and also to improve our, our language and our communication, just as we spoke about before, just the, the power of language now, it's always been important, but I think it's even more important now. So she has a, her name's Nashida Solham and she's written a book called Pin Code and basically she's got, yeah, the approach of how you should prepare for every conversation, your advanced preparation, the way you use your body and, and the way you approach your conversations is just so important. So she's been, she's been fantastic for us.

• 40:27Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. I'm going to steal that and I might ask you for an intro to her once, once we're finished as well. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. Um, it's still, it's still fascinating me, the level of intricacy that you're seeing with rugby. I don't know how this compares with other sports, but like I say, I've watched my housemate from a front row seat move through the layers of, you know, a top level club. And what, one thing that struck me from that is that there are different groups, and I imagine this must be the same in most elite sports, but specifically within rugby, um, you know, he's part of the physio team, but the physio team needs to coordinate with S and C, but S and

• 41:08Chris Williamson?

  C also needs to coordinate with coaches and everybody has their own priorities. So it feels to me like the physio team are kind of erring on the side of, well, look, we know how long this injury may take to come back. The coach wants the guy to be on the pitch. The S and C person wants to deliver the player to come back on the pitch. So it makes sense that coordination and communication between you guys and really, really getting that right and not causing rifts and politics within that coaching community, even before you even get to the players. It makes a lot of sense that getting that right is, is pretty crucial.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  It's absolutely crucial mate, and it's having that holistic approach to the player. That you can't treat the player for just one thing, that everything's connected. Yeah, so their their physical state is is connected to their fitness level, which is connected to their ability to play the game. So we do a lot of case studies on the players and get all the all the particular people involved. Making sure that that the approach we take to the the player is the right approach. And again, then it comes back to the language of how you approach that. Um, so the language involved in that's just so important. And and because rugby is rugby is a really big complex game.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Um, that's not won by individuals, it's won by a team. And that's why in rugby you don't tend to get huge superstars because it is, it's the ultimate team game. Like a Messi in rugby would be hard to to to have because because he can't do that without everyone else doing their job because it takes at least eight players to win the ball before it gets delivered to him.

• 42:47Chris Williamson?

  There's no Ben Stokes on the rugby pitch.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  No, no, there's not, and it's difficult, difficult for those players to actually survive in the game. Because it's such a a complicated game and and our job as a staff is to make it simple. Yeah, we've got to make this complicated game simple for the players. Because we know the neurology of the brain of the players are thinking all about this, they can't perform on the field. So our job is to make sure we keep that simple and the communication between all those departments has got to be so concise and so much on the same page. Because you imagine now a player comes into a new player comes into a team. Yeah, we've got 22 staff members.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  So they've got now established 22 relationships with 22 staff members. Yeah, that's a hell of a lot of work to do. So if each of the the staff members telling them slightly different thing, then you can imagine how confusion can come into a young player's head. So our ability to make sure that the messages are clear and concise and simple and and and driving the player to the to the one goal is just is just massively important for us.

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

  Do you try and restrict the number of people that communicate sort of strategies and tactics to the players in order to reduce that degrees of freedom as well?

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Hundred percent, mate. So we, we've broken the down, broken the team down a little bit like NFL, that there's four groups of players, each have a a head coach, so to speak, for that group. And we want most of the communication to go through that person. Yeah, particularly when the player's going through a difficult stage, we'll try to channel all that information through the right person.

• 44:35Chris Williamson?

  What about during half time, or you could imagine that this would be any high pressure, time sensitive communication opportunity? Have you got some principles that you go into that with, or that you tell the coaches to go into that with? Are they trying to have one thing that they'd speak about? Are there some underlying rules?

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, most, most two things at the most, absolute most, you know, so those old, you know, on any given Sunday type speeches don't happen anymore, mate. It's one or two points. And we know that the more stressed the player is, which they use the art half time, they got physical stress, they might have tactical stress. That their ability to absorb information is less, so we need to keep that information so concise. So one or two messages we're trying to get through at the very most.

• 45:26Chris Williamson?

  Nice. What about when you notice in yourself? Is there something that you detect if your balance starts to go off? If you find yourself becoming less effective or just that you're getting, you're straying away from the principles? Is, are there any warning signs that you find in yourself when that's happening?

• 45:45Speaker 00

  Uh, well, I, I've deliberately put another guy on, a guy called Neil Craig, who's, who's an AFL coach.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  Previously in another life as sports scientist. So he's basically, he's a bit older than me. Um, and he sits there next to me all the time in everything we do and, and keeps giving me feedback about, about what I'm doing. Um, so that if I'm do straying away, if I'm doing too hard or too soft or not talking enough or talking too much, he's giving me that feedback. So every morning we'll have a coffee at half past seven, go through it. And I heard another story from a, a Australian friend of mine who coached the, the boomers at the last Olympics and they won their first medal ever. And he went and visited the Milwaukee Bucks.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  And he said, you know, he had a good, good relationship with the head coach. So he'd see that he was there for 10 or 12 days. He said, there's this little bloke every day running around with his kneepad. You know, and, and he, he didn't know what he did because no one spoke to him. He didn't have, no one introduced him that he had a role. Anyway, about the ninth days there, he said, who is that little bloke that's writing these things down? And the head coach says to him, he's the most important bloke in this, in this, uh, organisation, he says. He writes down everything I do well. He writes down everything I, I don't, don't do well. And at the end of the day, he gives it to me straight. And, and you need someone in that, the organisation to be doing that all the time.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Like, it's like having a truth teller there, but someone who's, who's not afraid of, of being absolutely honest to make sure that they're picking up things when you're moving away from what you should be doing.

• 47:30Chris Williamson?

  It's like an external impartial conscience.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah.

• 47:38Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, the situations are so highly charged and emotional, especially when you're getting toward game time, right? We've got the World Cup coming up in less than, less than two years now.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:49Chris Williamson?

  Your ability to judge your own performance and, and remember what, what you said and what you did is basically zero. Like you're the worst, you're the worst witness to your own mind, but to have someone there who's on your shoulder. What do you call that person? Is he the coach's coach? What is he?

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Uh, well, we just call him crazy. Again, he doesn't have a, he doesn't have a role, mate, but everyone knows what he does.

• 48:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Keeps you, it keeps you in check.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Cause he's, cause he's seen as being neutral. He's also acts as a source of uh that any of the players or the coaches could talk to because he knows nothing about rugby, knows absolutely zero, the best way, you know. So they have very honest conversations. So he only, not only acts as that for me, but he acts it for the coaches and some of the senior players as well.

• 48:42Chris Williamson?

  What's this story about a samurai sword and a kiwi?

• 48:45Speaker 00

  Oh, that was just like, yeah, because the players have so many meetings, we're always trying to come up with novel ways of reinforcing the theme as we're talking about. So we had, as we said with the New Zealanders, we had that, we had that theme, we're chasing, we're after them, you know, we're after them this week. They're not coming after us, we're going after them. Anyway, I'm a half Japanese, so I always wanted to have a samurai sword. I always thought of myself as a samurai, you know, if I was born 700 years ago, I would have been a samurai. I don't know how many fights I would have lasted, but anyway, we're down in Miyazaki, this tiny little coastal town um for a week, and I asked the interpreter, uh who'd worked with me for a period

• 49:26Speaker 00

  of time, to go and try to buy me a samurai sword. So she traced around Miyazaki and found this tiny little shop, and only one person could go in the shop, it was that small, and there was this uh man in there about aged 80, and he'd been collecting these samurai swords. They had this collection of samurai swords. And the one, the one that, that we bought um was about 300 years old, like we had the papers that said it was a legitimate samurai sword. So that was grand, like that was like a childhood dream to have that. So I thought, now, how am I going to use this? And I thought, well, we can't use, we can't use it on any of the players, uh because it might

• 50:09Speaker 00

  be a nasty cut. So I thought, oh, well, kiwi fruit. So the night before, I got some kiwi fruit up to my room, and I was practicing chopping this kiwi fruit up. So, you know, we, we had the team meeting, gone through all the tactical stuff, and I said, boys, this is what's going to take. We're gonna, we're gonna chase them down the stream, we're gonna chop them in half, and just cut up some kiwi fruit. And it was a bit of fun, you know, everyone's laughing and, and yeah, everyone wants to see the samurai sword afterwards. So it was just a way of, of um. Of reinforcing the message.

• 50:39Chris Williamson?

  I want to see the room service assistant that arrives at your room with dinner that night as you've got a samurai sword, this half Japanese man's got a samurai sword in his like shorts and vest, whacking seven shades of shit out of a kiwi on his desk.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll probably get arrested, mate. I wanted to bring the samurai sword back to England, but I think I'd get arrested if I brought it back.

• 50:59Chris Williamson?

  Dangerous, dangerous weapon. Yeah. I heard you say, um, I was watching one, one of the many Eddie Jones press interviews compilations that exist on YouTube. And you said, I never worry about things I can't control. How do you avoid being swept away in those uncontrollable concerns and stuff like that? How do you notice when you're getting outside of your domain of competence and control?

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Again, reflection's a big thing. I think, yeah, at the end of every day, and I'm not as deliberate as I should be. And I go through phases. But I'll try to reflect very clearly on the day, what, what I did well, what I didn't do well. I've used like a high performance journal. There's those about, or I use just a little book like this sometimes. And I'll just write things down and I try to be as, as deliberate as I can about reflection each day. I think, yeah, that's one of the most important skills as a coach you need to have is that ability to reflect, record, write it down. If you haven't done it well, write it down. If you have done it well. Again, that reinforces the message that of

• 52:12Speaker 00

  what you're not doing well or what you are doing well. So reflection's the most important thing. And that hub R7 coffee with Neil Craig's the other one.

• 52:21Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about dealing with public criticism.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, when you're young, it's hard, mate. It's hard. When I was a young coach coming through, I felt, I felt all the criticism that was, that was, that was directed towards you when you weren't doing well. And I enjoyed the praise when I was doing well. And.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Probably coming to, coming to England really helped me. I remember one of the first lunches I had was with Sir Alex Ferguson. I was lucky enough to meet him and he said, mate, don't read any of it. Stop reading it. And from that day onwards, I haven't read it. So I really don't know. I don't take, I don't, don't read it at all. My wife might mention something or my mum, my mum's ninety six, lives in Australia and she reads every newspaper. So she said, they said this about your mum. I don't care. I don't wanna know. Um. So I just don't take any, any, uh, any of it in at heart at all. So I don't even read it. So I don't even know.

• 53:28Chris Williamson?

  So ignorance is your solution?

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, uh, yeah. I think otherwise it's, I think it's so hard. That, yeah, I heard, I heard a play the other day. I was watching a documentary actually on Australian swimming. And the, the guy was saying he was a hundred meter sprinter. And he said, you know, he reads social media. He says there's seven hundred good comments and then there's one bad comment. And he says that one bad comment sticks with him and he wants to ring that person up and ask him why does he say that? And, and I think in, in, in sport, if you have that sort of attitude, it's, it's very difficult because you're wasting time. You're wasting time on that one negative comment. Um. That used to be written on the toilet wall.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  You know, you walk in the toilet, someone said, someone had written on the wall, so and so is the so and so and all this sort of thing. And, you know, because you'd only be in there for the toilet, you'd see it, you'd go out. But now, you know, players have, players and coaches have to live with their, and then it becomes a, a storm. And if you, if you try to, try to at all rationalize why people try to do that, all you're doing is wasting time.

• 54:40Chris Williamson?

  How do you help the boys deal with pressure? You know, we've got this big World Cup coming up. There is some expectation after a run of good form recently. How are the, especially the younger lads that maybe don't have Joe Marler's five attempted retirements and all of his, all of his experience. How do you help them deal with that pressure?

• 55:00Speaker 00

  We want them to see it as a privilege. Like it's a privilege of being part of a good team that you're, that you, that the pressure's there and the external pressure is no greater than the, the expectation that's within the team and the expectation that's within the individual. And one of the things we've started doing with the players is coming up with a concept of a trademark game. That we believe that, yeah, a trademark game is a game where you play at the absolute minimum you have to play, but you play with absolute effort and absolute control. Now, we reckon if we have 75% of our players playing at that, because that's hard, that's hard to do.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  If we have 75% of our players playing at that, then we'll win, we'll win most games. So we want the players to concentrate on their effort and what they can control rather than things they can't control. So it's again, getting back to what can you control in your performance? Control that. You can control your effort. You can control, if you can control your emotion, you have to work on that. So they're practising that trademark game each week, trying to, trying to get brilliant at that trademark game. And if they can do that, then the, then the better games will automatically come for them. So they don't have to aspire to be brilliant every week, because that's where I think the pressure comes from.

• 56:20Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so you are allowing a release valve. You've got a realistic view of their performance, that it is going to fluctuate from the absolute perfect to sometimes below that. And to say, look, it's okay.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  It's okay as long as you're playing with effort and control. Like, there's a young player that we've, we, we just brought in, I won't mention his name.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  But he's, he came in on the back of some brilliance at club level. Came in and played for England, had a couple of games and he was brilliant, did some brilliant things. And now he keeps chasing that brilliance. And rather than just chasing, play, play, play hard, play, control your emotions and that will come sometimes, other times it won't come. That you can play really well and you can maybe not score goals, but you can play really well for your team and help your team win. But because there's an expectation of you scoring goals and then if you try to score goals, you're creating further pressure on yourself rather than just play hard for the team. Like be the best player you can for the team, control your emotions, control what you can

• 57:27Speaker 00

  control and ultimately those better performances will come.

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  That's such a really interesting way to look at things, to avoid aiming for brilliance every single time, especially when it's not just you. You know, you could maybe argue in a sport like powerlifting where your opponent is the bar and it's gravity, the, how would you say, the degrees of freedom have been constrained, right? There's no, there's no opponent trying to punch you in the face, let's say, in boxing or in, sometimes in rugby. And with that, having a, having an approach of look, your best ever game isn't the standard that you now need to try and beat. That's just where you can get to and what did you do that got you there? And we continue to try and iterate on that.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And the best example in rugby recently has been Dan Carter, who, most of his games he was very solid and then occasionally do one or two brilliant things. But people would harp on about brilliant things, but it was actually his brilliance was his solidarity. And that's, you look at most team sports, that's what it's about. It's about being solid, working hard, then all of a sudden you get the one opportunity and if you're in the right place and at the right time, you get that opportunity to do something brilliant.

• 58:43Chris Williamson?

  In England, it seems like rugby is still a private school dominated sport. How important do you think it is to have players like Ellis Genge who are sort of showing that whatever, normal guys can make it to the international level?

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Very important mate, because again, you know, diversity is important going forward. And so we're so pleased we've got guys like Genge, guys like Sinclair have come through. They're not out of, not out of the pathway, so to speak. They've, they've fought their way through. Got, you know, I've had previous to guys like Mark Wilson, who went back to university to study. Yeah, those sort of players are really important for us.

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. Eddie Jones, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go if they want to find out more about the book?

• 59:30Speaker 00

  Uh, well, Macmillan, Macmillan publishes them and I'm sure they'll be at most bookstores, mate.

• 59:36Chris Williamson?

  It'll be linked in the show notes below. Eddie, everyone will be behind you over the next couple of years. I'm really looking forward to seeing what the outcomes of all of this. These new psychologists and the person that's looked at psychopaths and the guy that's on your shoulder telling you when you're getting it wrong. I, um, I really love to see people take the minutia and the fine tune, fine grain stuff right up to 11. We saw this with Team Sky in the racing, right? You know, we saw what happens when you really take a granule of you. And then you deploy that to a, to a team in a way that makes sense. So yeah, man, I'm, uh, I'm confident going into 2023. All the best luck.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  Good on you, mate. I really enjoyed chatting to you. I enjoyed your questions. So all the best, mate.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:00:34Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped growing? You starve, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:00:41Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.