Our co-founder, Dr Ewan Kirk, was recently interviewed by Kerrin Mitchell on Untapped Philanthropy. Discussing topics from starting out in philanthropy to the meaning of ‘impact’, even to Ewan’s love for cycling and all things space, the episode touches on several aspects of how to donate money thoughtfully and effectively.
Untapped Philanthropy is a podcast aimed at bringing together the biggest and best ideas about how we can better tackle philanthropy and provide the best outcomes possible. Host Kerrin Mitchell is the founder of a cloud platform which powers giving and impact in philanthropy, so her interest in how philanthropy will be changing in our increasingly fast-paced world runs throughout the series.
In this episode, Ewan delves into why ‘permission to fail’ lies at the heart of everything the Turner Kirk Trust does and why more charities and donors would benefit from taking the same approach. He also explains how he came to be involved in philanthropy, and what those in the sector must consider before committing to causes. Ewan gives a detailed look into his core principles and experiences in philanthropy, making this a must-listen episode!
Kerrin Mitchell (KM): Hello and welcome to the Untapped Philanthropy Podcast. I'm your host and Fluxx co-founder, Kerrin Mitchell.
Philanthropy has had many guiding principles over the last hundred or so years, and both funders and grantees have attempted to rewrite this playbook to varying degrees of success. This week's guest has a fresh take on what I think you, our incredible community, might find very interesting to hear.
Ewan Kirk is a tech entrepreneur and the founder and director of Turner Kirk Trust, an evidence-led multimillion pound family foundation that supports STEM, conservation, and early childhood development causes in the UK and the developing world. Ewan hello! Welcome, welcome!
Ewan Kirk (EK): Hello. It's lovely to talk to you, Kerrin.
KM: Thank you so much for joining us and I know we had a chance to catch up just prior to this around our love of cycling and all things, but today we're really focused on philanthropy. So, we're changing gears from our previous conversation to something slightly more akin to what we might cover in this podcast.
But, while I've had a chance to kind of get to know you, do you mind telling a little bit about yourself to the audience and what made you interested in the social sector and this industry?
EK: Sure, sure. I mean, we could of course have a chat about cycling, but I'm sure your listeners are less interested that and there's probably better cycling podcasts as well.
So, originally I was an academic mathematician. I have a PhD in general relativity, I ran a software company while I was doing my PhD, and eventually I realised that there wasn't going to be a huge amount of money being an academic. So, I went to the dark side and joined Goldman Sachs, and I was a partner there in charge of the geeks. The mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, the men and women who did all of the front office systems, risk management, structuring, and derivative design.
I retired from Goldman in 2005 and I had a year off. I bought more guitars, I bought more bicycles, I bought a motorcycle and then sold it because it was depleting and then travelled around the world with my family for a year. Then after that, I started a systematic hedge fund based in Cambridge. Very quantitative, very geeky, lots of programmers, lots of mathematicians, all designing models of the market. I sold that in 2016 to a Swiss asset manager.
Since then, I've been focusing more on technology investments. I run a thing called Deeptech Labs in Cambridge, or I chair the thing in Cambridge called Deeptech Labs, which helps deep technology companies accelerate their growth. I'm involved with the Isaac Newton Institute here, I'm on the board of some companies and of course I spend quite a bit more time now on philanthropy.
Because when I was either a partner at Goldman or running my own hedge fund, philanthropy was the sort of thing you did when you had a spare moment and people would come to me and say, “Look, we’d like to raise some money for this,” and I’d say “Hey, sure, here’s some money, now go away and never talk to me again, because I’m too busy,” and I’m not sure that's really necessarily the right way to do philanthropy.
So, what sort of made me- I’ve always been interested in philanthropy in terms of wanting to do good, but what made me interested in the process of philanthropy, which is a slightly different thing, was setting up our own foundation, our own trust, and working out what the right thing to do with that was.
KM: So as you got into this in the social sector, I agree it's so compelling because, to your point, to make the impact that you want to oftentimes being slightly more engaged or helping in ways that are beyond just money, but rather operational help or support. It comes in a lot of different areas and especially with your incredible background, albeit a PhD in relativity, all those things that may be helpful in philanthropy as well, but you do have incredible talents that you can bring to the trust. So, tell me a little bit about how you determined your areas of focus and, as you sort of went into building the trust, what did that look like in terms of you wanted to engage?
EK: Well, I guess the first thing that you’ve got to think about is – or at least acknowledge – is how much money do you have to spend? So, you know, we're not the Bill Gates Foundation, so that almost- that's the very first thing where it lowers your horizons. I mean, much as I would like to be able to solve the problem of malaria in Africa, I just don't have enough money for that. I mean, that's the simple things.
The other thing is, and I think I’ve said this quite a lot, is there are some problems which are truly government-sized, where it's just too big for philanthropy to actually do anything with. You know, there’s estimated to be I think something like $2tn of philanthropic assets in the world. Now that's a lot of money, but if you spent that all just doing stuff, it would then be gone.
KM: Mm-hmm.
EK: And $2tn is kind of some relatively small proportion of the US government budget and the US government spends that every year on some things which are clearly not philanthropic, like defence.
KM: Right, $1.3tn, you’re right.
EK: Yes!
KM: Per year, it’s no joke!
EK: Per year. But then it does spend quite a lot of money on things like education and health, which could quite easily fall under that philanthropic banner.
So, the very first thing is to say, “How much conceivably or realistically can I spend on a particular project?” and for us that number isn't a government-size number or a Bill Gates size number, so that cuts down your horizons a little bit.
The second thing is obviously areas of interest. I am super interested in STEM. STEM has been great to me, and it's been a good thing for me to be good at STEM and I find it exciting and interesting and intellectually challenging. My wife is very interested in early child development and conservation, so there's two areas that- it's not a question of having expertise in it, it's a question of having interest in it. Because you have think of philanthropy a little bit as something that you’re going to be interested in.
There are a lot of very important parts of philanthropy – pick one, medical science, curing cancer, solving the Alzheimer's problem, you know, my mother's got Alzheimer's, it’s sort of a personal thing – but I'm just not interested in that process because I don't really understand it and I certainly can’t add any value.
So the size is determined by how much philanthropic capital you have. The areas are constrained by interest, and then the process has to be constrained in some way as well. How do you decide what it is that you want to do?
One of the things that we have thought about a lot and are very keen on is the concept of ‘permission to fail’. It is allowing- donating money to relatively high-risk projects, which potentially could have a very big impact. But also acknowledging the fact that if you’re going to donate money to a particular cause, you have to make it explicit that it’s okay to fail. Because that's how experimentation works, that’s how physicists and scientists and conservationists and everyone, they go and try something and it should be okay to fail, and that gives you a lot of freedom.
KM: There's something very interesting that I guess maybe it's the academic side of you, but that's the beautiful part when you talk to- Who was it? Neil deGrasse Tyson was doing an interview and people were saying, “Are you going debate people about this?” He's like, “No, we don't debate. We're academics. We discuss, we show points and whoever has the right points, the other says ‘that is interesting’ and you build from that, it’s more collaborative.” But it’s a really interesting concept because I think you’re right, it is predicated at the most fundamental way on getting it wrong so you can get it right.
EK: Yeah, doing experiments!
KM: I think that's something that's so important to talk about. Yeah, when we talk about this idea of where we need to take this industry and this adversity to risk and this adversity to getting things wrong, it's like, oh my goodness!
Like, have we lost our bearings? It's almost like we're stuck. I sometimes think about this with philanthropy, this is kind of a Kerrin tangent, but I feel like we're oftentimes stuck between being heavily academic and wanting to be able to be very proof-driven and data-driven and all the things that make it solid academically. But then we don't have the business savvy to run the other way and say like, how are we gonna make this work? It's funny, this discrepancy between adopting principles of both, but being stuck in the middle is where I feel like sometimes philanthropy is.
EK: I think we’re a little bit stuck with this concept of impact. So, impact has been for decades a really big deal in philanthropy. Show me your impact.
So, somebody gives a hundred dollars, a million dollars, in Bill Gates’ case a billion dollars, to a particular project and they want to know that it’s had impact. They want to know that this number of people have been helped, this number of people have been cured of a particular disease, these numbers of wells have been drilled in Africa, these numbers of prisoners haven’t gone back to jail. Of course, nobody wants to waste money on low-impact things.
KM: Of course not, yeah.
EK: But it does stop the philanthropic organizations themselves, the charities. It stops them experimenting because they have to show results.
So, if they’ve said they’re going to drill or use drilling wells in Africa as an example, but there are thousands of them, obviously. If they've said, you know, for every hundred dollars you give us, we’re going to drill one well in Africa and we’re going to drill a thousand wells in Africa. They’ve kind of got to be able to go back to the donors at the end of the year and say, “Look, we drilled wells.”
Now, if there happened to be a better way to drill wells but it was going to require a year of research and development, and maybe a few of them failed until they got the whole process working better, then they can’t do that because they’re going to go back to their donors at the end of the year and say, “Sorry man, we only managed to do 300 wells,” and then they'll never get any money again.
And it should be the case that philanthropic money should be the most risk-tolerant of money anywhere, right? I can completely understand why, if you're a civil servant in the UK or the US working for the government and the government's got a program and it's a $100m program and it's supposed to do something, it's a really bad thing if the program fails. Because it’s on the front of the Wall Street Journal and you lose your job and politicians lose votes and everyone looks at you and you're an idiot. So, for government programs, they are very risk averse.
KM: It’s taxpayer money, sure. I mean, that makes sense that they would be hopefully discerning about it. But I agree with you. The private sector is so different in that sense.
EK: Yeah, because in many cases, of course philanthropic money- it's not an investment, it goes to zero. It gets vaporized doing good. So, you should be willing to see that money being used to experiment.
The classic example for us in the trust is we came across this charity called SolarAid and their gig is that they can get solar lights with, well, LED lights with a solar panel and a charger for your phone and they can get them delivered into Africa at some incredibly low cost to the dock in Kinshasa or wherever it is. But they obviously wanted to distribute them, and they didn’t really know the right way to distribute them so they came to us and said “Well, we’re thinking about doing this, what do you think?” And I said, “Well, why don’t you just pick five different ways of doing it?” Maybe you sell them outright, maybe you rent them, maybe it's a hire purchase agreement, maybe it's done through the schools, maybe it’s done through mobile phone distributors. Pick five different ways of doing it in five different villages and run the experiment for six months.
And this is the critical thing, and I literally don't care if all five fail. Because you have learned something. Right? And you will have learned that these five ways are not the right way to do it, so then you can go and try some other way. And that's a really great way of doing it.
KM: I mean, that's the interesting part about it. It's making sure, in the academic sense, if you were to have a failure, you would let people know, “Hey, I tried this. Don't do it this way.” And that's the part about the collaborative cooperative economy that we work in here in philanthropy, and that's the part that's so interesting is by not sharing it or by burying it into a document or into, in the case of my brain, technology that doesn't let that get out, you end up letting people trip over themselves to make the same mistakes you did. So, it's almost imperative that the guiding principles are ones of failure and sharing, and I wonder how many other things like that pop up to you in terms of the guiding principles about how you work and the things that you think are so critical to moving things forward.
EK: Yeah, I often, if I'm meeting people, very often we do things with university departments because they tend to be on the cutting edge, and one of the questions I ask… I’ll get a presentation about some really quite interesting research that's maybe going to go somewhere that's going to do something really quite extraordinary, and I always ask, “What is the experiment you would do if he didn't really care, you didn't have to write a paper on it, what's the most risky experiment you really want to do that would- might fail, but might succeed and would revolutionise what you're doing?”
And it's amazing how often the researchers say, “Oh yeah, I mean, you know, we're normally raising money to go and do this kind of trial. But actually, if I didn't, if it was OK to fail, I'd give this a try. I’d do something a little bit different.” So that's one of the things I think that's important.
I think it's also, to come back to the point about the size of problems, it's also important to think of philanthropy as a catalyst, as something which can make a change which – if you really want to make a big global change – then you can put the shoulder of either the private sector or the public sector can come in behind and really push it along.
So, try and do things which have a high catalyst quotient. Something that, if this does work, and it's really obvious- you know, we’re in the process of funding a little trial into helping kids to be better at STEM in the West of Scotland. We’re doing this through Glasgow University. It's a fairly low-cost trial, it will run for a year. But if it works – and it might not, and that’s okay – but if it does work, then this is a really cheap thing that the UK government or the Scottish government, whichever one it might be, can get behind. And it's a really easy thing to get into schools and if it makes a significant difference then bingo, you've catalysed a change. Now I am, as I said earlier, quite happy if this fails but wouldn't it be great if it succeeds?
KM: Right. And to your point, the marrying of that, again, activity, the impact, but also the policy side and in helping to encode whether it be a curriculum that can be disseminated out or various things, that's kind of the key, like you said, catalyst to saying how do we get that coming together and that public and private partnership is something that I think you guys do a lot better in Europe than we do in the US but we are starting to get there.
And I wonder sometimes if our rate-limiting step is really around the fact that technology hasn't gotten us there yet. And that's something obviously I personally care about, but it is very intriguing to see those, like you said, and understanding that there has to be some catalyst involved too. I'm with you.
EK: I agree with you. The one place I would probably disagree with you, and I hope you’re okay with me disagreeing, Kerrin.
KM: Oh gosh, always!
EK: I don’t actually think that philanthropy will in any way be powered by technology, not the process.
KM: Oh gosh, yeah. We'll take that probably- yes, agreed. Technology helps to ease human problems. It's never gonna be the answer. I'm absolutely with you.
EK: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of our problems will be solved by technology, climate change problems for example, or right at the forefront of- we need climate tech to solve these problems because they're coming at us pretty fast. But I think the process of philanthropy is quite hard to ‘technologise’, if that's a word. You know, I'm a massive fan of technology across the board. I'm a programmer, mathematician. I'm a geek, I love technology and I’m sitting here amidst-
KM: You’re part of the nerdery!
EK: I am definitely part of the nerdery! But I don't think there's that way of maybe, in catalysing philanthropy, raising more money, spending the money better, because it's a real one-on-one thing. I would never think about funding any project that I hadn't met the lead researcher on or met the person that was going to do it, because somehow, there is that very personal link, which is nice, you know, I like that but I think it'll be quite resistant to technology.
KM: Got it. So tell me, I mean, as we kind of look at what we can do to build further impact, to build further capacity, obviously you mentioned technology is one element. Partnership with the public sector is another, what are some of the missing elements that you think need to be in place that today's philanthropy and charitable giving may need to sort of embrace further for us to kind of usher into this new age.
EK: So, that is a hard question. And obviously, if I had some magic solution I’d probably keep it to myself and start my own podcast!
I don’t know, I think there is- it's quite easy for philanthropy to become fragmented in that one ends up with lots of foundations and lots of trusts doing lots of different things. Now, you know, obviously I am guilty of that myself, but we probably, like others, believe that we're very niche and very focused on this permission to fail and catalysts.
So sometimes, and again, I'm well aware that I'm guilty of this, sometimes people who donate money want to get too involved in the process. So, if Alzheimer's is your thing and you give $100m to Alzheimer's, then you want to kind of get involved in this and push directions of research or directions of philanthropy, which might not be right. It is very important to remember that the people who are actually on the ground doing the charitable work know a huge amount more about doing the charitable work than the donors do. The donors might be experts in business, or they might be experts in healthcare or mathematics or whatever that be, but they should not get involved in designing the projects, and we never get involved in designing the projects or designing the programs that we might invest in or donate to. Because it’s not our job to do that. Having engaged donors is great for charities, it’s just they have to not be too engaged. I think some of the power has to be reserved for the charity to tell the donor what the right thing to do is.
KM: Right. And as you look at those charities, are there structures that you have found work well? You know, when you look at after the money has been given and they're progressing through their impact and, like you said, defining some of the path forward as the resident expert in that, have you found there are ways that you engage with them from an ongoing, instead of a formal reporting or certain ways that you've found you've been able to support them best or give them space to sort of, like you said, reflect back any changes they need? Like what structures do you put in place to help with that ongoing support?
EK: I mean, ideally, what I'd like to do is say, “Here's the money. Now go off and do something good. See ya.” Now that's sometimes a little bit hard to do. So what we tend- And to be honest, a lot of people wouldn’t like that, a lot of people want the engagement with the donor. What we tend to do is, on an annual or a multi-year project, we probably want to have fairly informal reporting on a monthly basis. And by fairly informal, I mean send me an email, let know how it's going. You know, I don't want to have a 25-page report with charts and 4 different colours and a video at the back of it, just send me an email, let me know what’s going on. Most importantly, and this is the thing that I really emphasise, is tell me what's going wrong. I don't want to hear about the massive successes. What I want to hear about is what’s going wrong.
That's another thing that we try and focus the recipients on is don’t tell us all the time about how great it is because, okay, it's great. The thing that's interesting is what's not working. Because what's not working is telling you a lot more than what's working.
I've always thought that would've been a fantastic business book would just be a list of everyone that's failed horribly and what they do. Because you learn an awful lot more from failures than you learn from successes. So, we tend to do that and we tend to have just one sort of formal meeting at the end of the process where we get a proper report. But what I really don't want to do is to add an administrative burden. If you’re going to give people a donation to go and do something, they should just be focusing on that.
KM: Agreed. It's actually- so two things. One is I love the idea of a failure book because it is actually ironic when I started Fluxx 12 or 13 years ago, whatever it was, there are mistakes that I have made that- we have a new investor who's fantastic and he wrote a book that had ‘Here are all the places I failed’. I was like, I did every one of those! Where were you 12 years ago?
EK: That's right!
KM: Like every single one of those things he did, I was like, damn! It was so painful to realise that I could have avoided every one of those issues. But actually, the one thing I would say that’s really compelling, there's a group that we work with in South Africa and they do exactly that too.
They ask their colleagues and their impact and change makers what went wrong and they actually publish it on their website. So, one of the questions in their final report is if you could share one of your learning experiences, and by that they mean things that went wrong, and they publish it on the site so that it's actually open and they just put it on their website. It's the coolest thing. Because they're like, here's everything that was learned from the community on the monies we gave in X, Y, and Z areas. But it's that same concept, like you said, of what went wrong and how do we get it out there so that people don't make those mistakes again?
EK: Yeah, there's a- I actually thought that I'd come up with that idea myself but now I find that somebody has done it, which great! I sort of came to this because I think it’s true that charities, people who are spending philanthropic money, there is a resistance to admitting that you've made a mistake. And I guess it comes a little bit from that book from Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking. Part of the reason why air travel is so safe is because if a pilot makes a mistake, then he or she has to report it to the FAA or CAA and if they report it, there is no consequence to that. So everyone finds out about mistakes really fast and they don't make them again, and that is definitely not true in philanthropy. You see a lot of money ending up doing the same old stuff, which at the end of the day doesn't really work, which is quite sad I think.
So, yeah, if there one change I would make, I would make all charities focus on ‘here are the mistakes we made, please don't make these again.’ Or avoid them where possible.
KM: So I think one of the things that is so compelling to me in this conversation is just a way to think about things differently. And I think oftentimes, you know, at the very beginning of the episode we talked about how there are always folks that are trying to reinvent philanthropy and do things differently, and especially in the land of a lot of, we'll call it the ‘new money’ that's coming in, there's this almost bucking of the system. Like ‘we can do it differently’, but there's things to learn, and to your point, the whole idea of being able to be okay with failure, the idea that this is something that we can find resilience and power in the community to do things right, I think is so compelling.
So I'm so grateful that you've shared that with us. Are there any other chunks or things that you want to share with the community of just maybe soundbites, things that they might want to remember from today's episode?
EK: Oh gosh, these hard questions are coming thick and fast! Be prepared for failure. Scale your philanthropic goals to the size of your philanthropic pot, whether or not that's a money pot or a time pot, scale your goals to the things that you can do. And if you make a mistake, tell people so they don’t make the mistake again.
KM: I love it. Thank you so much. So as always, we're gonna wrap up the episode with little rapid-fire questions. You know a couple of them, but I'm also adding some on, because I've learned more about you from today's time together, so I'm going to improv on you here too. But we're just gonna run through them. Just answer them as quick, short questions. I encourage you to just say whatever first thing comes to your mind.
So, if you had a superpower, what would it be?
EK: Oh man. Um, if I had a superpower, it would be to – this is a cycling thing – it would be to generate 8 Watts per kilo.
KM: Oh, look at you! You just want to win the Tour de France! If you can generate 6.2 or 6.4, is that it, that you can win the Tour?
EK: That's it. And then people could- then Marvel could do the absolute worst Marvel movie which would be called ‘Bicycle Man’.
KM: You know, I actually hit over 3 on my- so I cycle too, and I hit over three and I was ecstatic and then they told me on the Tour it was like 6.4 and I was like, well, I have some challenges ahead of me to get there! That would be hard.
EK: I'm afraid that unless I get bitten by a radioactive spider, it's never going to happen to me.
KM: Yeah. Well maybe that's your superpower is getting radioactively bitten and then getting up to eight. Alright. What is the thing that you're most proud of accomplishing in your career?
EK: Starting a financial services firm that was dominated by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, the geeks, and making it a nice place to work and making a lot of people make a lot of money.
KM: Nice. Best book that you've read this summer?
EK: I've read quite a lot this summer, but the one I'm gonna go with is Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space by Stephen Walker. It's an incredibly well-researched and detailed book about Yuri Gagarin’s first flight into space.
It's fascinating. If you liked the book and the film The Right Stuff, you'll like this. And it's also just fascinating about The Soviet Union at that time and the sheer bravery and risk that was taken to do this. And it also weaves in the whole Kennedy, Bay of Pigs, the US falling behind... It's a fascinating read and really humanises quite a lot of the story and the author, Stephen Walker, has done an enormous of research into things that just opened up, archives that have opened up in Moscow. If you like space and look, you know, I remember watching the moon landings, I was a real space geek, it is fascinating. And even if you don’t like space, it’s a great human-interest book as well.
KM: So, I think we're destined to be friends because I went to space camp when I was 10. Like I was that into space that I went to a camp in Alabama, and I was not the coolest kid but I really did like- so I feel like we have a lot in common, friend. I just want to put it out there. We were destined to meet clearly.
EK: So, growing up and being in the west of Scotland, I would read books avidly about space exploration, and I would know all of these things. However, there were always references to objects which were in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. Now, when you grow up in the west of Scotland, Washington might as well be on Pluto.
KM: It’s very far!
EK: It’s a long, long way away. But I always had this dream that it would be this fantastic cornucopia of amazing space and flight stuff. And then 40 years later, I was doing some business in Washington and a flight got cancelled and I had entire day unexpectedly in Washington. And I went to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and I spent all day there.
KM: Oh yeah, I eat lunch there, I’m with you!
EK: I literally looked at every single thing, it was just joyous to see all these things which I’d known had been there since I was young, but then I could actually see Yuri Gagarin’s space suit or the Apollo Lander. That was an exceptionally geeky thing.
KM: I love that. And I actually like- when I have time and I'll be in Arlington, which is nowhere really that close to it, and I'll be like, “I have two hours” and I'll go eat lunch at the air space- I'll bring my little lunch and go sit in there. It's totally enjoyable. It sounds weird, but I'm like, it's open, it's free! I go and sit there and happily hang out with space equipment!
EK: There are worse things to hang out with!
KM: Okay, final question, and then I promise we can wrap it since I've completely lost track of what we're talking about – in a good way! So, this is an important one. Who was your favourite rider in the Tour de France this year?
EK: Wout van Aert.
KM: Oh, yeah! I mean, he's interesting.
EK: I know why he didn't win, because that wasn't his job to win. But boy is he just the all-round, totally amazing cyclist. It was just incredible. Actually, I'm gonna tell you a Wout van Aert story. So, I cycle a lot on Mallorca because I’ve got a house out there, and Wout van Aert some years ago was obviously out doing training on Mallorca and I follow him on Strava.
KM: I do too!
EK: So, I see his Strava segment time. And there's one segment quite close to where we live where I once got within about a second of Wout van Aert on this segment.
KM: What?!
EK: And as one of my friends said, “Yeah, but he probably stopped for a shit along the way!”
KM: Not gonna lie, I'm very, very impressed.
EK: Oh, no, no. Normally, he is… it’s half the time. I mean it’s just extraordinary.
KM: Yeah, no, it’s when you look at those numbers and you look at their Strava, when they’re like ‘Morning ride’ and it’s 192 miles, you’re like “What?!” It’s insane.
The other thing that was actually really funny- I was actually really intrigued on Wout because, you know, so much of me is like, why is he not a GC? And then he did this interview the other day and it was like, “I don't wanna be a GC. I like the classics. And I would have to change the structure of my body to be a GC.” And he was like, “I don't know that- I'd worry I would blow it all out.” And he's like, “I get enough joy from…” you know, it may change, but they were doing an interview, Christian Vande Velde and all were like, “I just don't think he's ever gonna do it.”
And then a couple people were like, “No, he is definitely going to.” But he seems to be adamant that he just really enjoys the [unintelligible] and just dominating the shit out of everyone on the entire field. Like, “You're at the front, go back and pick up Jonas,” and he is like, “Okay.” He brings him back up.
Ewan, thank you so much for joining us today. What a complete joy to have you on the podcast sharing about yourself, your work, and of course, cycling, which I appreciated. But most importantly, your insights on really how we can start to rethink the way that we gift, grant, and make impact in the world. So thank you so much for joining us.
EK: Absolutely. My pleasure, Kerrin. It was really fun to chat and I'm sure you don't often talk about cycling on the podcast, but it was definitely- We also talked about much more important things.
KM: We can start another podcast on our armchair expert work in cycling. All right. Our listeners can learn more about the Turner Kirk Trust at turner-kirk.org. Thank you all for joining us today.