On journeys heroic and unheroic, manager red flags and ‘dishwasher-proof’ assets
In our regular video series, we interview the wealth sector’s key decision-makers to discover how they think about life, both within the world of investment and beyond it; what brought them into the business and what keeps them here; and what makes them and their companies tick
Potentially the biggest problem with the way people think about money, argues Simon Evan-Cook, founder and manager of the Downing Fox range of multi-asset funds, is that they do not want surprises – and wealth managers and other advisers must therefore do all they can to avoid such surprises occurring.
Talking with Wealthwise editorial director Julian Marr in the above video, he continues: “What people do want is an investment that looks a little bit like how the market is moving – not so much when everything’s going well; definitely not when markets are tanking. They don’t want to be in the product that is dropping by 50% when the market’s dropping by 25% – and you need to be aware of that. That is what clients get upset about and, for advisers, that is the thing that causes them to get calls from clients.”
Evan-Cook’s solution is to aim to provide clients with what he calls an ‘unheroic journey’ by constructing a portfolio of fund managers, who are undergoing the more conventional ‘heroic journey’ so beloved of Hollywood and, indeed, most writers of fiction.
“The ‘heroic journey’ is the template authors use to make their stories more exciting,” he explains. “So everything from Homer’s Odyssey through to Star Wars all follows the same path – it has got to be dramatic. And most amazing fund managers have all had years when they have looked incredibly heroic; but they have also all had years when they have been very close to kind of ‘career death’ – but they have come through that.
The point being that, while one fund manager is going through a trough, you have another one who is going through a heroic moment.”
“Now, that’s great and they are trained for that but the client – the doctor, the nurse, the teacher – they are not trained for that. They are trained for their own everyday life – they don’t need heroics as far as fund management is concerned. So the whole point of Downing Fox is we find these ‘heroic’ fund managers – because they are the only ones who are going to make you excess returns over time – but, crucially, we find different managers who are on different journeys at different times.
“The point being that, while one is going through a trough, you have another one who is going through a heroic moment. And we have been seeing that this year – fund managers in the growth space who have had a horrible time; and managers in the value space who are actually going up while markets are going down. So we are finding we are very much reducing volatility – and that has to be good for advisers and their clients, because you just don’t want them having that horrible, horrible year, even if over 10 years, they make a lot of money.”
‘Don’t overcomplicate things’
The conversation includes plenty more of Evan-Cook’s wide-ranging analogies and opinions, including his ‘dishwasher philosophy’ on asset classes, his concerns around the ‘Court of Trump’ and ‘House of Musk’, which unconventional thinker is “probably the tonic the world needs right now” and the advice he would give his younger self that he struggles to take today.
As for what he looks for in investments – and what he assiduously avoids, Evan-Cook says: “If you look in our equity components or our 100% equity fund, you will find only the most active fund managers. We are not interested in anything that is passive and we are not interested in anything or anyone who is aping passive.
“So the first red flag has to be someone who is closet-tracking the index and we do a lot of work on finding people who we think are just ploughing their own furrow. If they are a value manager, we want them doing pure value. If they are a growth manager, we want them doing pure growth.
“We also want trustworthy individuals. When things are going badly – or maybe they are underperforming – you want to know this person is at least someone you can trust. More esoterically, we don’t particularly like macro managers – not in terms of our equity fund managers, anyway – and we do like bottom-up stockpickers.
“When you look at the greats over the years – Anthony Bolton, Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch – that was their edge. They just found amazing companies and they made sure they weren’t overpaying for them. That is all we want. We don’t overcomplicate things by trying to find people who are reinventing the wheel.”
A full transcript of this episode can be found after this box while you can view the whole video by clicking on the picture above. To jump to a specific question, just click on the relevant timecode:
00.00: What excites you about the current investment outlook? What worries you?
03.12: What do you most look for in an individual investment? What constitute ‘red flags’?
05.01: To what degree should professional investors be thinking beyond so-called ‘traditional’ investments? Towards what?
07.01: What drives your approach to client communications? Should professional investors aim to attract the ‘right’ type of client?
12.11: What was your path into investment – and, if you hadn’t taken it, what do you think you would be doing now?
15.21: What was the biggest investment mistake you are prepared to admit to – and what did you learn from it?
17.48: Outside of work, what is the strangest thing you have ever seen or done?
19.22: What are your best and worst-case scenarios for the future of wealth in the UK?
22.10: What advice would you have given your younger self on your first day in this business?
23.23: Two ‘Choice Words’ recommendations, please – one a book; one a free choice?
Transcript of ‘Choice Words’ Episode 9:
Simon Evan-Cook, with Julian Marr
JM: Well, hello and a very warm welcome to another in our series of ‘Choice Words’ videos where we get to speak to some of the key decision-makers in the world of UK fund management, UK fund selection and UK fund research and find out what makes them tick. I am Julian Marr, editorial director of Wealthwise Media, and today I am delighted to be talking to Simon Evan-Cook, who is the founder and manager of the Downing Fox range of multi-asset funds. Hello Simon.
SEC: Hello – delighted to be here.
JM: Thrilled you are here – and quite thrilled, actually, to have got your job title more or less right! We have hit a high point already! Let’s jump straight into my first question. Setting the scene and thinking about the current investment outlook – what most excites you? What worries you?
SEC: Right. So we are filming this mid-March 2025 – and I think it is important to say that because the most exciting thing for me currently is I am running an equity portfolio. And, if we just look at the equities part, that consists of heavily contrarian, non-mega-cap, non-US equities – and that [other] stuff has been tanking.
So that is very exciting for me because we are finally seeing this thing happen that I have been talking about non-stop for the last couple of years. Obviously, we saw it happen in 2022 but we are seeing it happen now. And that is quite exciting because I think, longer term, what’s exciting in markets is the fact there is a lot hand-wringing about, Where can you invest? Everything looks expensive or dangerous.
Actually, when you look at equity markets and you get away from those US mega-caps and their massive impact on an index, there is tons of good stuff out there. There are massive returns to be made from UK equities, UK smallcap, Europe, Asia, emerging markets, Japan – there is tons of stuff out there – and, all of a sudden, it feels like people might start looking at that again and forgetting about the Magnificent Seven and Nvidia and all that type of stuff.
So that is definitely the most exciting thing. In terms of the most frightening thing, I guess maybe that all comes with a bear market attached. That, possibly, might be concerning – though I’m confident enough that the stuff we own will hold up well enough. If you go back to 2000 and look at what happened in that bear market, the likes of an Aberforth, which is UK smallcap value, or an Anthony Bolton – so Fidelity UK special sits, which was all-cap UK, but contrarian – that stuff actually made money in that bear market.
So I feel, if you are off the beaten track, you can do well – but, you know, no-one enjoys a bear market. So that is the thing that maybe concerns me a little bit at the moment – that we get what we want, but it comes wrapped up in some fairly nasty wrapping paper.
JM: Great start. And since you timed this as mid-March – and I think that is a very clever thing to do in the context of that answer – if you are watching this in mid-April, I apologise. We have a few of these videos ‘in the can’ and we are trying to publish them in order. If you are watching this in mid-May, we just dropped the ball – I’m sorry! And I’m now incentivised to get this one out! So that answer set the macro scene.
More active the better
JM: On a more individual level – and you did touch on this already – a little bit, what do you look most for in an individual investment? And what do you see as red flags?
SEC: As a fund selector, we are proudly all active – certainly on the equity front anyway – and the more active the better. So if you look in our equity components or our 100% equity fund, you will find only the most active fund managers. We are not interested in anything that is passive. We are not interested in anything or anyone who is aping passive. So the first red flag has to be someone who is closet-tracking the index.
So we do a lot of work on finding people who we think are just ploughing their own furrow. If they are a value manager, we want them doing pure value. If they are a growth manager, we want them doing pure growth. So that is probably the first thing we want to be looking for. We also want trustworthy individuals. So we do have a ‘no-arsehole’ rule in our fund selection – if you’ll pardon my French …
JM: Very fluent French too!
SEC: We want people who we are going to work with and we can trust, again. When it is all hitting the fan and things are going badly – or maybe they are underperforming – you want to know this person is at least a trustworthy individual. So that is up there. I guess, maybe more esoterically, we don’t particularly like macro managers – not in terms of our equity fund managers.
We do like bottom-up stock pickers. And I think, when you look at the greats over the years – we already mentioned Anthony Bolton, but Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch – that is what they did. That was what their edge was. They just found amazing companies and they made sure they weren’t overpaying for them. That is all we want. We don’t try and overcomplicate it by trying to find people who are reinventing the wheel. So those are quite a few of the things we are after – and a couple of red flags. Hopefully that answers your question.
Dishwasher philosophy
JM: It absolutely does. Thank you for that. To what degree, should professional investors be thinking beyond so-called traditional investments and towards the world of alternatives?
SEC: If you classify ‘traditional’ as equities, bonds, cash – and maybe I would put gold and property in there as, you know, they have been around a long time – then I think you don’t need to look beyond those. I mean, within our own funds, we basically only hold equities, cash and government bonds. I do see the point of gold, and I do see the point of property.
I have what you might call a ‘dishwasher philosophy’ on assets – and I borrow this from Rory Sutherland, who wrote the excellent book Alchemy. If you want to make every utensil in your kitchen is dishwasher-proof, he says, there are two ways you can do that.
One is, you can go around and look at all the labels in shops and try and buy a load of stuff that is dishwasher proof – but you are almost guaranteed to find a few things you bought are not dishwasher-proof. His alternative way of doing it is to say, Look, if you want to make everything in your kitchen dishwasher-proof, just run everything through the dishwasher for a year – only the stuff that survives will therefore be dishwasher-proof.
And that is exactly my view on asset classes. All of the classics have been through so many cycles – you know, dishwasher cycles or economic cycles or cycles of war – that I think you can trust them and know that they are still going to be an asset class in five years’ time, in 10 years’ time, in 50 years’ time.
Some of the newer things, I’m not so sure about. And some of the other things – you know, when you look at some of the alternative assets, they are basically equities in disguise anyway. If you buy an investment trust that buys, I don’t know, song rights – that might be a perfectly good asset but, to me, it behaves like an equity. So it’s an equity. ‘Sceptical’ is maybe too harsh a word for it, but I am pretty old-school on the asset front.
The hero’s journey
JM: Excellent. Let’s get into client communications. You are good at this, I can safely say. When you were at Premier, you wrote regular columns for me for three years when I was editing Professional Adviser. Thank you very much for that. I am not sure you knew you were doing that but it was great! Then you have your blog – Never Mind the Silver Bullets – and all these different things you do. So what drives your approach to client communications? And also, because I know this is something you are very good on – not least, because we quote you at length in one Wealthwise piece on the idea of the ‘unheroic journey’ and maybe we can talk about that – how do you keeping clients involved in the whole investment journey so they actually benefit from their exposure, rather than getting in at the wrong time and getting out at the wrong time?
SEC: It’s a great question – and there are so many things. I think, ‘thing number one’ is ‘keep it simple’. The moment you find yourself prevaricating – example given – into longer words and making things more complicated, you are probably giving yourself away that you don’t really understand that subject. I think when you understand a subject is the point when you can explain it in very simple terms and make that understood to someone who didn’t understand it before. So keep it simple.
And take it from the point of view of your client – this is something I am still learning today. I think, if there is one thing I have been guilty of in the past with writing, it is that I’ve written about stuff that interests me. I think that’s a really good thing to do but, in doing that, I have possibly attracted more competitors to read my work than I have clients.
So now I am trying to refine what I write to think about, OK, this interests me – but why does this matter to an adviser? Or why does it matter to an adviser’s client? It is a nice little thing to add on and I just think it helps, again, to see it through their lens and to understand, What is worrying them? Can we help them, in some way, to mitigate that by talking about it?
Now, you mentioned the ‘hero’s journey’. That is another device I like to use. Happily enough for me, I seem to be reasonably good at picking analogies – you’ve already had a dishwasher thrown into the mix. I think that really helps – particularly in our world, where everything is non-tangible. You can’t see what we do – you can only describe it. So if you can find some way of pinning that onto something people understand, so much the better for it.
With the heroic journey, when I came up with that analogy – when the penny dropped – it was because, if there is a problem with the way people think about money, it is potentially that they don’t want surprises. People do want an investment that looks a little bit like how the market is moving – not so much when everything’s going well; definitely not when markets are tanking. They don’t want to be in the product that is dropping by 50% when the market’s dropping by 25% and you need to be aware of that. That is what clients get upset about and, for advisers, that is the thing that causes them to get calls from clients. So people get really upset.
So, generally, the very best fund managers are on that heroic journey – and, just as a reminder and to go back a little bit, the ‘heroic journey’ is the template authors use to make their stories more exciting – so everything from Homer’s Odyssey through to Star Wars all follows the same path. It has got to be dramatic.
And I think most amazing fund managers – Woodford, Lynch, Bolton – they have all had years when they have looked incredibly heroic; but they have also all had years in the trough, when they have been very close to kind of ‘career death’ – but they’ve come through that. Now, that’s great and they are trained for that but the client – the doctor, the nurse, the teacher – they are not trained for that. They are trained for their own everyday life – they don’t need heroics as far as fund management is concerned.
So the whole point of Downing Fox is that we find these heroic fund managers – because I think they are the only ones who are going to make you excess returns over time – but, crucially, we find different managers who are on different journeys at different times. The point being that, while one is going through a trough, you’ve got another one who is going through a heroic moment.
And we are seeing that at the moment – we have got fund managers in the growth space who have had a horrible time over the last month; and we have got managers in the value space who are actually going up while markets are going down. So we are finding we are very much reducing volatility – and that has to be good for advisers and their clients, because you just don’t want them having that horrible, horrible year, even if over 10 years, they make a lot of money.
JM: Excellent communication – love that. Plus picking out Homer’s Odyssey and Star Wars – two of my absolute favourites! One minute you are destroying the Death Star, the next you are having your hand cut off by your father. That is the plot of Star Wars, of course, not the Odyssey!
SEC: Though maybe The Odyssey would have been the better for it!
Unconventional route
JM: Indeed. A more personal question now – what was your path into investment? And, if you hadn’t taken it – in a parallel universe – what would you be doing now?
SEC: My path into investment was pretty random. I did economics at university. I don’t know why I did economics at university – it just seemed like a good idea at the time! My father was in accountancy so I guess I thought I’d end up in finance somewhere. I then got a job at Fidelity but nothing special – I wasn’t on the graduate scheme or anything. It was just local to where I happened to live. I quite enjoyed it. I did reasonably well at it.
I then moved to Rothschild and spent some time there – but, if I made one mistake, it is that I was trying to focus on making as much money as possible, not on actually doing what I wanted to do and what I enjoyed. The irony of that was I ended up doing something I didn’t enjoy – and I didn’t make very much money from doing it!
So I was kind of failing on both fronts and there was a point in about 2003 when I woke up and just thought, Look, if I’m not going to make a lot of money, I may as well at least focus on doing something I really enjoy doing and I love. And so, Right, I’m going to pivot to writing – and I’m going to start with writing about financial affairs and financial goings-on and then, if that takes me into another field of writing, then great, that’s the path I’m going to follow.
And as soon as I did that, there’s a thing called a ‘halo effect’ where, if you’re doing something well – in this case, writing – people think and assume you are good at other things related to that. By this time, I had joined Premier – as their investment communications person in David Hambidge’s team – and, after I had been there six or seven months, one of the fund managers left – and David offered me the job.
And, obviously, I just grabbed it – I thought, Great, I am going to take that opportunity and I have just loved it ever since. Luckily for me, the halo effect proved actually to be true – in this case, it was something I proved to be quite good at – but I was just able to attack it and I loved it and it was something I was able to focus on. So that was my unconventional route to where I am today.
I think the good thing about having had that unconventional route is all the stuff I learned on the way to doing that – about writing, about speaking to people, about all the various different jobs I had in that 10 years before the role at Premier – that now comes into play because I have had a more rounded kind of upbringing, if you like. By ‘upbringing’, I mean ages 21 to 29 – and those things now play in.
So in the fund management world, I can do not just fund management but some of the other stuff around it – and, when you look at someone like Warren Buffett, he’s a great fund manager because he is great at investing, but he’s also a great fund manager because he is able to bring people on that journey with him by explaining what’s going on.
JM: And I suppose, in the alternative universe, then, you would have remained a writer?
SEC: Well, yes. I suppose I was heading towards writing. My ambition in life, from a very young age, was to be a movie director. I doubt I would have made it that far because that’s quite a tough job to get into! But yes, somewhere in writing would have been, I hope, where I would have ended up.
JM: So somewhere between Homer and Star Wars!
SEC: Absolutely!
‘Naive for two reasons’
JM: Well, you mentioned making a mistake – I am not sure it was necessarily – but, in terms of investment mistakes, what is the biggest one you are prepared to admit to? And what, if anything, did you learn from it?
SEC: There have been quite a few over the years! I think probably the biggest is, while we had a very successful run at Premier, later Premier Miton – you know, we won lots of awards and we raised a lot of money and had very good performance – through all of that time, we had a massive underweight to US equities, in a time when US equities were killing it. The reason we did well was because we had very good fund selection – even our Asian managers were outperforming the US equivalent, because they were that good at what they were doing.
Still, that was a mistake. At the time, we were very much valuation-driven – and valuation only. We looked at a simple measure like Cape – so long-term price-earnings ratios – and said, The US is more expensive than everyone else, so don’t hold the US and do hold everywhere else.
I think that, with the benefit of hindsight, was naive. And it was naive for two reasons: because you should pay more for a high-quality thing – be that a country or an equity – plus the US undeniably has the best companies on the planet. There are a few who can compete with US companies – but, by and large, there are more there.
I think what we also missed was the fact that the world can change every now and again. So having put this view in place in 2006 or 2007, we then missed the very obvious thing – that the iPhone had been launched – and that changed the world entirely. The way we all now operate has been changed by that fact since 2008.
We should, at that point, have spotted that something like Google – or even Microsoft coming back – deserved to be massive companies, with network effects. So I think we were far, far too early to the point of being wrong. So I do look back on that. It was a mistake we got away with, thankfully, but it is one I learned a lot from.
JM: Very good. Yes, I think I was predicting the crisis for bonds for a good eight years in a row before I got it vaguely right!
SEC: That’s the thing. These things can take forever to come about. Sometimes they come quick; sometimes they can take a lifetime.
JM: As far as I can tell, I may have been the first person to use the phrase ‘Bondmageddon’ – but, by the time it actually became true, many years had passed!
Dolphins and (navy) seals
JM: Now, what is rapidly becoming everyone’s favourite question on this series, What’s the strangest thing you have ever seen or done outside of work?
SEC: I have been racking my brains over this and I think the strangest thing I have ever done would be a swimming-with-dolphins experience in New Zealand. Now, that may sound quite idyllic – when I say that, you probably picture blue waters and lovely bottle-nosed dolphins and gentle swimming – it was nothing like that! The whole experience was almost like an SBS-type deployment!
We were got out of bed at four in the morning in coldest New Zealand; we were dressed up in frogman suits – you know, proper, thick wetsuits – and we were herded onto the back of this boat. We were then jetted out into the sea in near-darkness and, as soon as they found a pod of dolphins, they sounded an alarm, and everyone was shoved off the back of the boat with, Swim as fast as you can and you might see a dolphin or two!
And, yes, we did finally get to see some dolphins but it wasn’t anything like the experience I imagined it would be. At one point I even had a seal come up and swim around me – so that was lovely. But, when you took a step back and looked at where you were and what was going on, it was a very strange experience. So I think – of all the things I can mention – in the world of strange, that’s probably up there.
JM: That is an awful lot of work just to have some fun and bank a special memory!
Meteor strikes aside …
JM: OK, a quick pivot now to your view on the best and worst-case scenarios for the future of wealth in this country?
SEC: I’m always tempted, when someone asks me for a best case or a worst case, to go wildly over the top – and the worst case, obviously, is that a meteor strikes the world and we all die – and under those circumstances, by the way, our performance would be no better than average! So I don’t claim to have any kind of answer to that – but let’s take it up to maybe a more realistic range.
I think the worst case is we carry on along the path we have been following, which is that maybe stuff is getting strangled. From my perspective, it seems that the powers that be favour the big and the powerful and they are doing everything they can to help the big and the powerful. Be that politicians or regulators, they seem to believe that fewer big things are good.
And I have the opposite view – I have the view that you want loads of small things creating lots of ideas and, from those ideas, many things will crash and burn and disappear but the next big things and the next great ideas and the next sources of wealth will come from that. Yet it feels a little bit like that is being strangled currently.
So my concern is that ends up with a slow death for wealth and you end up with something that approximates feudalism in the Middle Ages in the UK, where a very few people do incredibly well. In the US, you look at the ‘court of Donald Trump’ and it almost seems like you have the ‘House of Musk’ appearing and the ‘House of Thiel’ and it all starts to rhyme a little bit. So my concern is that we head back to that place where only a few people have any power and are creating any wealth.
The best case is we have, I guess, what you maybe saw in the 1970s and we do get a burst of inflation – you know, people say that is the way to solve the debt crisis, and I happen to agree with that. So maybe we have to go through something a bit horrible, like the 1970s, to reduce that down to allow people to be able to buy houses again, to be able to start businesses – and then you get that wonderful growth.
I always use the analogy of it being a bit like a garden or a flowerbed in a garden. Sometimes you need to trim that thing back – and then you get the most explosive growth that follows after that. So my best case is that we have a few bad years of inflation but the animal spirits then ignite – because you get younger people able to start businesses and take risks and all that wonderful stuff. So that’s my hope.
JM: And no meteors – so there is an upside as well. Mind you – down in the basement here in our club, I think could be the one place you survive a meteor strike!
‘Enjoy the ride’
JM: Just two more quick questions – first, What advice would you give your younger self?
SEC: I would give the same advice I give myself today – and which I keep failing to take – which is, ‘Enjoy the ride’. I look back and I think, you know what – that was fun! I have met so many great people. We did really well. We have created some value. We have made some good products. And yet, all the time I was doing it, I felt perhaps more stressed and I felt like I didn’t have enough time to get everything done that needed doing.
With hindsight, obviously I did have enough time to get everything done that needed doing – because everything happened and it worked and it all went swimmingly. But, at the time, you just feel like, Oh my God, I’ve got to do this and I could be doing more – and I am absolutely back in that same hole again today where I just feel like I could be doing X, I could be doing Y. I could be writing more. I could be speaking more. I could be meeting more advisers. We could be doing more with the funds.
But they are doing just fine – you know, they are doing the job that we set out for them. So if I could just take my own advice – what I would have said to myself 30 years ago – which would be, Chill out, enjoy it and, you know, every now and again, just take stock and think, We have moved forward and we are not in a bad place.
Tonic for the world
JM: Very good. Finally, then, we call these videos ‘Choice Words. It is obviously a pun on fund-picking and everything else – but we are now looking for you to pick a couple of personal recommendations. We normally do look for a book – and then the other one is a complete free hit. What would you go for?
SEC: Well, let’s go with the book, first of all. I have already mentioned it once – and it is fresh in my mind because I first read it about seven or eight years ago but I have just been re-listening to it, which I think is quite an interesting way to kind of revisit a great book, because it gives you a different perspective on it. It is Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense by Rory Sutherland.
I love this book. Given what we were just discussing about growth, I think all politicians and regulators should be made to read this book – because it’s all about crazy ideas that shouldn’t work but do; and how we need to have a little bit more of just allowing people to have crazy ideas and giving them the ability to have them. And, quite often, these crazy ideas seem absolutely sensible in hindsight – but, until someone’s been mad enough to try them, you don’t get them to happen. It’s a fantastic read – it’s wonderfully entertaining and well-written.
JM: Yes, he is absolutely brilliant. He is probably the single person I have quoted most in conversation – just through reading his ‘Wiki Man’ columns in the Spectator. All those ideas seem so fresh.
SEC: I think he is a genius. He is someone I look up to a lot. He is very refreshing – and I think he is the tonic the world probably needs right now. As for the other thing I would recommend – let’s pick a movie, because I’m a movie buff, and this is one I use quite a bit when I’m discussing the heroic journey, among other things. If you are watching it in the UK, it’s called Le Mans ‘66 and, if you’re watching it in the States, I think it’s called Ford v Ferrari. Same movie – starring Matt Damon, Christian Bale.
Again, why I love it is because it is hitting at something that a lot of advisers, particularly, will be struggling with at the moment – it is the story of someone who is excellent in their field and just wants to be the world’s best racing driver but, to do that, he has to wrestle with the kind of corporate behemoth that is Ford. So it’s about these two racing drivers, one current, one ex, trying to move forward and do the right things in order to make a car that could possibly win Le Mans – and to let this guy drive it, who is a bit of a maverick genius but who doesn’t get on with corporate people very well.
It’s such a great story because you’ve got these two characters and it gives you one character, in Christian Bale’s form, who is just a complete rebel – but to the point where maybe he blows it up, because he storms out of everywhere he works for and therefore ends up never actually becoming the best driver-slash-fund manager because of that.
And then you have Matt Damon’s character, who is more of a pragmatist, who can see what is needed to be excellent – but also sees you need to be pragmatic and toe the line a bit in order to get the big company to do the excellent thing. It makes me kind of well up a little when I’m watching – I shouldn’t be crying at a movie about two men driving cars! But it is absolutely playing to something a lot of people are struggling with currently.
JM: Well, it’s quite a circle – and appropriate to finish on a nice analogy as well. Brilliantly done – Simon, it’s been great to talk to you. Thank you so much.
SEC: Likewise, Julian.
JM: And thank you all – he says optimistically – very much for watching.
Please do look out for further Choice Words episodes as they are published
