SPEAKER_00 0:37

Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rod Davis, and this week we have a conversation with Dr. Ewan Kirk. Now Ewan is a philanthropist and the founder of the Turner Kirk Trust. And I had a great conversation with him all about his kind of central thesis that it's important to let charities fail, which might sound like a slightly negative approach to philanthropy, but actually it kind of captures a really important point about the role of philanthropy in risk taking and supporting organizations to try things out when they might be able not be able to find funding to do that from other sources. So I sat down a few weeks ago with Ewan and had what I thought was a really great conversation. So we talked about what it actually means to fail in the context of philanthropy and what distinguishes perhaps between a good failure and a bad failure. How it is that you decide beforehand what is a failure, you know, a risk worth taking and what might be something that's not worth putting money behind. We talked about whether philanthropy as a whole is actually too risk averse and doesn't really uh grasp the nettle of its central role in kind of supporting risk and whether actually it was missing a trick by doing that. Um we talked about how this need to be able to take more risks relates to the focus on measurement of impact and kind of setting firm goals and whether actually one of the things about allowing organizations to take more risk is to not put so many constraints on them, and whether that all ties into things like uh core cost funding as opposed to programmatic funding. We also talked a bit about whether sometimes a focus on risk might end up going too far, and whether actually there's a danger that in looking for big solutions and moonshots, philanthropists actually kind of get carried away and that they should perhaps um restrain some of those impulses a bit and focus more on the immediate needs of the here and now. We also talk quite a bit about the relationship between philanthropy and government, particularly whether in whether when in taking risks philanthropy needs to be thinking about what the exit is and whether actually the the natural eventual exit for most interventions is for the state to take over and what that actually looks like in practice. So without further ado, let's go into the conversation. Uh hope you enjoy it. I thought it was a really fascinating one. Um, and I will be back at the end for the usual bit of housekeeping. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Dr. Ewan Kirk. Hi, Ewan. Hi Rodri, how are you? I'm very good, thank you. Uh, great to have you on the podcast. Um, and so Ewan, you are yourself uh a philanthropist and you uh founded and run the Turner Kirk Trust. Um, and we're here to talk particularly about a really interesting point of view you've got about why it's really important to allow charities to fail. And I want to kind of unpack what you you mean by that and how it guides your approach to philanthropy. But maybe the best place to start just to say a bit about how you got going in philanthropy in the first place and what it is that the Turner Kirk Trust does.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Sure. Um well, I I you know my background is that you know after become after becoming an academic, I um went to the dark side and joined Goldman Sachs and I was a partner there, and then I ran a hedge fund. And it was definitely the case that during that whole period I did philanthropic things, but I really didn't have the bandwidth to think about it. Uh, neither I nor my wife, who we run the trust together, really had any bandwidth to think carefully about philanthropy and what it should be for us. So you know, we didn't really have any focus, uh, we didn't do any follow-up. It was, you know, my my little story is you know, people would come and say, Oh, you know, would you like to support this? And I would say, sure, here we are, have some money now, never talk to me again. And that's not really the best way to think about this. So when you know, I finally sort of disengaged from that whole financial services uh world, we sat down and thought carefully about what it is we wanted to do and try to have some areas that we focused in and also try a little bit to think about the process. You know, whilst we can fund reasonably sized projects, we're we're not the Gates Foundation. And so something like, I don't know, solving the malaria problem is really not something that we can do. So we thought carefully about the areas that we were interested in and that we could potentially have some impact in, and then try to focus on those.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

And what was it that led you to focus on the particular cause areas and rather than you know the overall approach that that you ended up settling on? Was that informed by your own experience in academia or your career beforehand?

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Um, I think it it depends on one's background and experience. I like, I personally like getting involved in things that I have domain-specific knowledge. So STEM is something that's particularly interesting to me and has informed either my academic career or my commercial career. So, and for Trish, it has been things like conservation and child development. I think the other thing that philanthropists sometimes don't think about is to try and have an exclusion list. Um it's easy to get involved in a lot of different things, but if you think about it as what are the things that we just either don't want to or can't, or it is not efficient to get involved in support, that makes it uh that make cuts down what you work on quite well. So, for example, our trust just doesn't support any medical charities, medical research. Now, that is not to say that um medical research is not an important thing, but medical research gets about 50% of all of the philanthropic donations in the UK in any one year. So, in some way, medicine is doing okay, and there are areas which it is much harder to get funding, and it's quite nice to focus on those areas. Uh, I should just add, it's important to focus on philanthropic projects that you're actually going to enjoy being involved with.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

I think, yeah, I mean, that's absolutely crucial, and I think having that that self-awareness, because you know, as as you were saying earlier, being realistic about what you are actually able to do with the resources available to you means you can't do everything. So you have to have some process of of narrowing down. Um, and in and I want to come on to how you actually go about um uh delivering your funding, and particularly something that you know I've I've seen you say that that really struck me, which is that a lot of your approach is about allowing the charities that you fund and the organizations you work with to have permission to fail. I wonder if you can say a bit about what you mean by that and why it's so important to you.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

Permission to fail is one of the mantras that we have at the trust. And some of that comes from you know a fairly fundamental thing, which is you learn more from failure than you learn from success in most cases. So, one of the things that we noticed early on when we were starting this process is that there is a very big focus on impact. And that is, in a sense, rightly so. You know, with if you're giving some money to some project or some cause, you want to know that your money is having an impact. That to use the example, if you are giving money to a donkey sanctuary, you kind of want to know that donkeys are being saved with your money. And you want that to be a measurable impact. Measurable impact is something that's has been a big theme in philanthropy for a couple of decades. However, the downside of that is that the organizations that you fund are then under incredible pressure to demonstrate impact and to demonstrate that your money has had that impact and has been successfully deployed. Now, what that causes, or the unintended consequence there, is that it's very hard for the recipients of philanthropic money to experiment, to do those things which have a high probability of failure. Now, that's bad. It is the case that philanthropic capital should be the highest risk capital in any project because philanthropists are the ones who are effectively, you know, their the return on capital is zero. Well, it's not even that, it's an entirely loss. So what we say to charities is or what we try and seek out are projects which have a significant probability of failure, and which are which were they to succeed, would be transformative or catalytic or however you want to do that. And so we, you know, we go to universities or we go to charities and we say, so what are the things that you just can't get funded because they might fail?

SPEAKER_00 10:40

And I I it's absolutely fascinating. And I think, you know, because in in terms of linking that that question of uh measurement and particularly measurement of impact to the challenges around being able to take risks and and uh failure, it does seem as though it's a really clear link. But I'm assuming you also kind of in some sense want to know that the things you're funding are are successful in some in some sense. So, how do you square that circle? Do you have, assuming you don't set specific outputs or outcomes that you want organizations to deliver because you want them to have the freedom to try things and experiment and fail, if they get to the end of a project and it doesn't deliver the outcomes that they said that they were aiming for, but it does achieve other things? What are the ways that you have of kind of measuring whether or not you feel satisfied with that?

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Um that's a great question, Rudri. Um, I mean, obviously, it would be unfortunate if we were to fund a project and the people running the project spent all the money on booze and fags and parties. Um we'd rather that didn't happen. Um so some element of uh reporting and following up during the course of the project can make you feel comfortable that the money that you have donated to this, so that you're funding this, is at least going to the project that you wanted it to go to. Um, you know, you didn't you definitely don't want to, in any sense, waste money. However, there's maybe a way of thinking about this is how you think about the outcome ex ante and ex post. So if ex ante at the beginning, this was a good idea or something that could potentially generate some interesting research or interesting results, or do something uh valuable in some particular sphere, then you made a good decision ex ante. Now, at the end of the decision, or the end of the project, I'm sorry, if it has turned out that that was not the case, that's okay in a sense. Ex post, if it didn't work out, that's all right. That's what permission to fail means. And at some fundamental level, even if a project fails, you have got some value out of it. And the value that you've got out of it is we tried this and it didn't work. And so therefore, other people shouldn't do that. It's it's the null result problem in science. I mean, there's been a big problem that, of course, for scientists who are applying for grants, doing an experiment, you know, getting a million pounds from EPSRC and doing an experiment and it turns out that there is no effect, it's kind of hard to publish that result because it's not considered very exciting. But if you don't publish that result, if you don't tell everybody that I did this and it doesn't work, then there's going to be loads of other people doing the same thing and finding out that it doesn't work. And it's it is one of the problems, the sort of deep-seated problems in philanthropy, is that there isn't really a forum to publicize in the same way as scientific journals have publicized projects which work and equally as important projects which don't work. If if I could wave a magic wand, I would kind of create a central clearinghouse for philanthropists and the charities that they fund, where it is public what people have funded and it's public what the results are, and encourage people to, before they go and do something, to work out whether or not somebody else has done it before.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Yeah, I mean it's a really interesting idea. And I guess in in terms of what you're saying there, it feels as though part of it is about distinguishing, in a sense, between you know a good version of failure and a bad version of failure. As you say, if there are things that you could have known ex ante that clearly were always going to cause something to fail and you go ahead anyway, that's that's a bad failure. Whereas if after the event you tried something and it didn't work out, then that is a sort of good failure. Do you think part of the problem is that we just don't draw that distinction clearly enough in philanthropy at the moment? So failure is just kind of lumped together as one homogeneous thing.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

I I think more broadly than philanthropy, I think we don't draw that distinction very well across all sorts of spheres. Um, government policy, for example, is a is a place where it's very hard to fail. It's very hard to say, well, we thought this was a good idea, but it turned out not to be. It might help maybe if I give an example. There's one classic example, which the trust funded, which we we use a lot, but it's a very good example. I mean it's maybe the best example of how permission to fail can work well. So a few years ago, um a charity came to us uh called SolarAid, um, who had a process of getting solar panels which charge a little battery, which can power an LED light for six hours, and also has a USB port that you can charge your phone on. Now these don't cost very much, you know, maybe $10, $20 to get delivered from China naturally to Kinshasa or wherever it is in or Kigali in Rwanda or wherever it may be. Now, what they wanted to do was to take these lights and distribute them to villages. But what they didn't know was what is the business model to do that. Is it giving the lights away? I mean, that's that's a typical philanthropic way of doing things, although the research when you if you give people malaria nets for free, they use them for fishing, which you know is maybe not a good thing to do. Maybe you could rent them, maybe it could be a higher purchase agreement, maybe there would be some way of saving up for a light, and who's the right person to do that? Should there be uh somebody in the village who does this? Should it be somebody externally? It's just a whole load of variables and no data. So we said to them, why don't you go to five different villages and run five totally different pilots to attempt to try different? Um I'm struggling to avoid the word business model here because people don't often use the word business model in philanthropic terms, but you should. And so, you know, what is the right distribution model? Why don't we say distribution model for these lights where you get the most lights to the most people, and the most people benefit from having solar lights? So, and and you know, the kicker on that was, and we literally don't care if all five of them fail, because if all five of them fail, that means there must be another way of doing it. So they went away and did it, and it turned out that one of them was the best way of doing it, far and away the best way of doing it, which incidentally happened to be distributing lights through schools, because the lights are seen to be a way of doing your homework at home. Now they have a lot of other uh benefits, but um that was that was the kicker, that was the killer feature, if you like, to use that uh apt term. So, in some senses, since we did five experiments, in some senses 80% of that money was completely wasted. Or was it? You know, it it was the right thing to do, and it turned out to move that charity on quite a long way. So that there's a good example of what what why, in a sense, even ex ante, we knew that some of these things would be worse than others. Otherwise, there's no point in doing five experiments. You know that one way of doing it is going to be wrong, you just don't know which one it is. And you know that one is going to be the best, but again, you don't know which one it is. So do them all, find out what's best, and don't worry about the fact that the other ones failed.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

It's a really interesting example. It makes I mean it makes me think of um something else, which is that obviously there's a whole spectrum of points at which you can kind of apply philanthropic funding from the kind of highly upstream where you're putting money into early stage research or policy and advocacy work to try and kind of tackle fundamental underlying causes of an issue, and then all the way downstream to to where you've uh actually kind of delivering services. It feels as though that one, in a way, you know, the the intervention was already there and it was more about the implementation. Have you found in your funding so far that there's been a spread of different opportunities to fund at different points, or have they tended to bunch more at the upstream or downstream end?

SPEAKER_01 20:10

They tend to bunch more at the early stage end. Some of that is due to the level of funding that we can provide. Uh, you know, as I said earlier, you know, we're not the Gates Foundation, and so therefore you have to pick your projects where your level of funding can be deployed effectively. And often that is at early stage experimental projects. It's something that you uh you find where were it to succeed, then you then that would have a big effect in taking forward uh some form of change. Um later on in the process, uh certainly very late on in the process, it's very hard to make real impact as a philanthropist because the scale of the problems that you're trying to solve are enormous and they're just not accessible to any reasonable degree of philanthropic capital.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

Yeah, yeah, and it's a good point. And it's it certainly comes on to something I want to talk about in a moment about where the balance of expectation lies between what we look to philanthropy to do and what we have to reasonably expect the state to do. Just before we do that, I just wanted to ask, um, you know, obviously your own approach is guided by this idea that you need to empower charities to organizations you're working with to have room to fail and to take risks. Is that something that you you want to promote as an idea that that all other funders should be doing? Or do you think it's something that that only a kind of subset of them will ever do, and that there will be other funders that take a kind of lower risk or a more risk avert uh risk averge approach, and that's fine.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

Well, I am Of course, arrogant enough to believe that my way of doing this is the best way of doing things. Um, and and if I was king of the world, of course, everyone would have to do things, Mike. Maybe the meta thing to say here is there should be room for all philanthropists to experiment on their own way of doing things. And maybe maybe we fail. Who knows? I I I think it's definitely worthwhile having the conversation. There are there are some charities that are definitely going to find it pretty hard to fail consistently, um, certainly the largest ones. And also the larger philanthropic organizations probably find it hard to fail consistently. If you are funding something, I don't know, I mean, numbers are hard here, but if you're funding something at £10,000, £100,000, £250,000, it's probably easier to fail than if you're giving £50 million to something, depending on the size of the charity and so on. So one of the other things is about making a large number of small diversified bets. You can tell that I used to be in the financial industry. Um putting all your eggs in one basket is probably a very bad thing to do because failure is something that happens. And so failure should not be something that, oh yeah, oh bugger, I've just I've just blown my entire trust fund on some something that might have worked, but it failed. So there's an approach there that you have to think carefully about how you're doing this kind of thing. I think there's another element of this which is maybe a little bit more subtle, which is there is a tendency, of course, for philanthropists to tell charities what to do. So rather than the people who are on the ground who are proposing the project, they come and say, We'd like to do this. And philanthropists often kind of get too involved and start to direct, they conditionalize their donations on something being approached in a particular way, and I'm not sure about that. Um, it's very hard for charities or academic institutions. If somebody comes to you and says, here's 10 million pounds or 100 million pounds, and I wanted to do this. You know, I want to create a professorship in donkey sanctuaries, or I want to build a building for art history. I don't know. I mean, I'm you know making these things up. It is almost impossible for a university or a charity to say, well, that's really great. We'd love to have this money, but we don't want to spend it on the thing that you want to spend it on. We want to spend it on something else. That's a really hard thing to do. So it's very important because you are paying the bills as the philanthropist, charities tend to be less able to say, actually, we don't want to do what you want to do. And and that's that's that's a really hard thing to do. Um, it's it's kind of like telling your boss that he's wrong, or telling your boss that she's doing the wrong thing. There's there's a an activation energy which you have to get over there. So we try and make it explicit when we're talking to charities about projects that they are the experts. They should do it, they should do it the way they want to do it. We've picked the overall area. We we might be, you know, or I am very interested in how you develop mathematical skills when you're quite young, because if you don't develop them when you're quite young, you don't really, you don't really get on in mathematics very well. But I you know, I might have some views about how I think that should be done. But if we're going to fund projects, then it's really up to the project coordinators, the people who are actually on the ground, the experts, to tell us we think this is a good way of doing this.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

I'm I really it sounds, you know, it's fascinating and it's absolutely the right approach. Do you think it requires a level of self-awareness and and I guess to a degree, humility that not all philanthropists are going to have? And is that is there anything that you can do to kind of shift cultural norms among potential philanthropists more towards recognizing the need to have that humility?

SPEAKER_01 27:04

It's definitely it definitely is a cultural problem. And uh a good example is um when I was at Goldman Sachs at some point in my career, I got promoted to partner. And the senior partner in the firm, you know, when he when he was patting me on the back and saying, Well done, uh and I was thinking, Oh, you know, this is great, he said to me, um, the thing you have to remember is that you automatically now speak with a louder voice. So try and speak quieter, try and say less, because everyone's listening. And I think trying to control that desire to direct, it is a self-awareness thing. You have to be aware of the fact that you you you might be paying the bills, but you're not really very sure. So I'll I'll I'll give another example. Um, we're we're currently in the process of funding a sort of mathematics of conservation challenge at Imperial College. They've got a group who do brought together conservationists and mathematicians, which is kind of perfectly designed for our trust. And they want to do some, or what we suggested to them was why don't you go away and have a have a look at thinking about very short projects, six-month projects, where you can work on something that is really risky, it might not work. You know, this research might not be there, the data might not be there, whatever it is. Go ahead and make some proposals. Now, both of us, the founders of the trust, are on the group that is reviewing the proposals, but we're not going to choose because we're not the experts. I'd like to see, I mean, I'm I'm interested in, I think we've got 12 proposals come through. So I'm really interested to go through them. But at the end of the day, it is the it is not our job to choose which ones get funded. It is the job of Imperial College or the mathematicians that run this.

SPEAKER_00 29:15

Yeah, absolutely. Um I just wanted to circle back a little bit to the the question we were talking about before, in terms of whether you know philanthropy as a whole should essentially shift more towards a culture of taking more risks and allowing failure. Assuming that you were kind of successful in that aim and that happened, I guess that what I was wondering is at the point then where you you've provided that philanthropic risk capital and you found something that works or is sufficiently low risk that it doesn't really need to be kind of seen in those terms anymore. What's the exit? Would would there be other philanthropy that is less risk tolerant that would come in and keep funding that over the longer term? Or do you look at that point to to the state or to the private sector, either to take that on in state provision or to make it something that is a kind of viable business proposition?

SPEAKER_01 30:10

I think it has to be the latter. There isn't enough philanthropic capital to be able to fund major changes. Um there's recent statistic I uh came across is that there's currently about two trillion dollars of philanthropic capital, which sort of seems like a lot, right? That sounds like an absolutely massive number, but that's a stock, it's not a flow. So the question is how much actual philanthropic funding is there? And you know, if if we assume that uh I don't know, 10% of all philanthropic capital is deployed in any year, then we're talking about $200 billion. Again, that seems like a lot, but it's not. I mean, it's roughly about $20 per person in the world per year. $20 per person per year doesn't transform the world. I mean, it really doesn't. So the only two domains which have enough money to make these kind of changes are the private sector and obviously governments, and governments, given the nature of things that that tend to be funded by philanthropy, so education, medicine, welfare, infrastructure. You know, let's take the solar lights problem. Then it would be it would be possible to give every uh house in every village in Malawi a solar light system for about I don't know, it's quite a small amount of money, 100 million, 200 million dollars. So it's quite small to literally electrify in some senses everyone in Malawi, that would be a great thing, right? But that's way outside philanthropic capital. And once you've done that, well, you've done Malawi, but then you've got Tanzania, you've got Rwanda, you've got everywhere else. So whereas even for somewhere like Malawi, spending of that nature over the course of five to ten years, it's not a huge part of the budget given the welfare. So I would say in most cases, philanthropy's job is to create a template that can then be used by government to extend the template analogy to stamp out hundreds of versions of whatever project it is that you have done. It's not philanthropy's job to step into the shoes that the state should have. If we have a state, what's and we do, and they are generally very good things, then philanthropy's job is to sort of say to the state, hey, you're doing this, or you have this problem, and that problem might be anything that ranges from prisoners who re-offend to Alzheimer's, then we have come up with here is a way of solving this societal or medical or welfare or research problem. You and I need to run with this because we proved that it works.

SPEAKER_00 33:49

And does that require then that we put more emphasis on in ensuring that we have effective mechanisms for doing that so that there isn't the danger that we're producing lots of good innovations and interventions and finding things that work, but then there's a gap between that and what what the state actually is aware of and is willing to take up, and and that we may need to make sure that that gap is kind of constantly closed.

SPEAKER_01 34:14

Absolutely. And that relationship between the philanthropic sector and the government sector is often difficult. It depends on who you know. Somebody knows somebody, and you know, maybe you can get to meet the minister for X at some point. I mean, there's lots of opportunities to do that, but sometimes that pitch is a little bit here is my hobby horse. I think this is really important, rather than you know, you must invest more in name your thing, and people go and talk to their MPs about it, without really having the evidence. And I think what government should insist on that there should be a channel to do that, but it should be evidence-based because almost by definition, charities themselves are incredibly passionate about their cause. And how does an MP or a minister distinguish between this incredibly passionate person who's hugely passionate about donkey welfare? I use that example a lot. And there's nothing wrong with donkey welfare, it's an important thing for donkeys, but maybe not societally important. Um, how do you distinguish between somebody who's incredibly passionate about donkey welfare and wants the government to create a chain of donkey sanctuaries and somebody who's maybe less passionate but has some really good evidence that these interventions in primary schools is going to help the development of mathematical skills for five to ten year olds? It's really hard to do that. But it would be it would actually be quite valuable for the government to have some process of evaluating these things and a method for charities to say, we're going to go and try this. If it works, it will show you this, and therefore you can take it and sort of prejudge these experiments so that they're kind of registered. There's somebody who's responsible for understanding whether or not they're good or bad. I mean, I'm I'm no great fan of bureaucracy, and I'm sure that something like this would be very difficult to do, but it would be it would be quite an interesting way of leveraging government. The other place that you could leverage, of course, is the private sector. This is harder because making money as a charity or doing things commercially as a charity is often seen to not be a good thing. There's stories from the 90s and the early 2000s about, remember microloan banks that were a big deal. I think it started in Bangladesh, and then people rolled them out across uh Africa and other parts of the developing world. And the idea there was that it people could borrow uh five dollars for three weeks and and actually use that to go to market and buy a pig and slaughter the pig and sell the bits of the pig for ten dollars. And suddenly somebody's made five dollars, right? I mean, that's that's an amazing, that's an amazing multiplier effect. And I think they worked fairly well. However, there was always this tension about in these things because it's it the banks themselves, however small they were, you know, and some of these banks would have overall capital or loan base of 10,000 pounds, you know, less less than that, certainly not Silicon Valley Bank to use a topical term. They had to be self-sustaining. So in that sense, they had to charge interest rates that cover their costs. And suddenly this doesn't feel quite like charity, does it? It's something else. Wait, you know, I'm running a bank and it charges some of the poorest people in the world interest on the money that's lent to them. That doesn't seem right to me. So now, yeah, I mean, my view was that these are good things, but there was certainly an underlying tension there. Similarly with the Solar Aid project, which uh I referred to earlier. A number of the models, in fact, the one that was chosen, involves people buying their lights, you know, really using their real money to buy lights, which doesn't, I mean, it there's definitely some underlying feeling of being a little bit uncomfortable there. However, that being said, the private sector has been in the past and continues to be a pretty solid contributor to welfare and human happiness. Um, I mean, there are obviously exceptions to that, but the private sector produces things that people want and that makes them feel good. So it seems like that is a place that charities should also get involved in. Uh, whether or not there's some kind of commercial sort of entrepreneurship spin-off from charities, I hadn't really thought about this before. But if you know, if a charity has a model that works, then maybe that is, but maybe the right thing is to spin off a company from it, uh given that the charity has shown that this process works, then maybe you should start a new company and start to do it as part of the private sector.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

Picking up on that and actually tying it to what you were saying earlier about the the risks of philanthropists sometimes having kind of pet projects that they want to push with government. When it comes to risk in philanthropy, I think one of the fascinating things at the moment is there are some examples of, I think, unarguably genuine risk taking, but ones that have still proving to be quite controversial. Because if anything, I think people feel as if they're going too far in allowing the donors or philanthropists themselves to decide what are worthwhile risks. And I'm thinking here of things like some of the examples that have come from philanthropists from a tech background where they're very focused on kind of big bets or moonshots and things like kind of you know the existential risk of AI breakout or kind of uh human colonies on Mars or life extension technology. Um, what's your your take on that in in the context of your focus on risks? Do you think actually that kind of goes too far? And there's actually an argument we need to slightly rein in some of those wilder tendencies for philanthropists to want to take big, big risks.

SPEAKER_01 41:20

I think it's a dumb thing to do. I mean, you're like life extension technologies or moonshots to Mars or whatever. I mean, you know, the reason the reason why there's so much interest in Silicon Valley in life extension technologies is that there are all these people hitting their 50s and starting to feel their knees going and losing their hair. Um, and so yeah, it's it's the it's not really philanthropy, it's self-interest. So, however, it's not whilst I might think that this is a dumb use of philanthropy, and there's an opportunity cost here because the dumb use of philanthropy means that that philanthropic capital can't be deployed anywhere else. You can't really tell people that they can't do that. If somebody wants to waste a million dollars of their ill-gotten gains on some quack life extension technology, then fair enough, you can't really stop them. It is the the only thing that we should be annoyed about is that's money which could go to causes which have a it's not just a better chance of success, have more impact on human welfare in some very broad sense. Yeah, I mean, they it's not just the tech things that are what one would say wasting philanthropic capital. There's just, you know, across the board, there's lots of people that give money to things which, in my opinion, they probably shouldn't. But that's just my opinion, and I can't really control that for other people, sadly. But if you're if you're offering that I could, Rodri, I'd be very happy, happy to take up that sort of capricious autocrat role if if I could. It's just I I you know I I think but I I think control one of the things that people really like about philanthropy or doing it, is that there isn't much external control. So what that means is it's really beholden on you to have a bit of self-control.

SPEAKER_00 43:36

And I guess if if you accept that the the fundamental nature of philanthropy is is voluntary and it's you know free decisions by individuals to decide to give away their private assets for public goods, then you have to kind of take the rough with the smooth and accept that they won't always spend that on things that you you agree with. And I guess it's just the questions are whether there are limits to that. And I suppose On on the the examples like life extension technology and things like that, it's maybe it's it's more about allowing people to be free to spend their money on that, but not allowing them to characterize it as philanthropy. It needs to be characterized as self-interest or commercial investment.

SPEAKER_01 44:17

Uh yeah, that's that's true. Um it's a little bit like the the whole art philanthropy scam. Maybe I shouldn't use the word scam, but I'm gonna use it anyway. The whole art philanthropy scam in the US, you know, buy a painting for I don't know, yeah, a million dollars, get some art value value to say it's worth $10 million, donate it to the Met Museum in New York as a 10 million donation, and bingo, by the time you get the tax back on that, you've actually made money. That's I mean, that's just a terrible thing, right? I mean, that's that's I mean, you know, who's who's losing money there? Especially the government. I mean, it's uh you're stealing money from the government. Philanthropists get a lot of support in some way from from the state. Generally charities are tax advantages advantaged, donations are tax advantaged. So there is some control, there is some obligation there to do the right thing because the state is funding or at least supporting philanthropic activities. Whether or not it should is another question. I'm not entirely sure I can make a coherent argument as to why charities should be tax advantaged.

SPEAKER_00 45:44

I I mean, I think the the crucial point there is most governments, when pressed, can't generally make a coherent case. It tends to be done on assumption rather than.

SPEAKER_01 45:56

It's also one of those policies, I suppose, which is in practice impossible to change. If I was if I was the Chancellor of the Exchequer and I stood up and said, right, we're removing all of the tax advantages from every charity, you know, the the following day I would be out of a job and you know, newspapers would be covered with pictures of children with terrible diseases sort of lying in hospital beds saying, He's made me die. You know, I mean it's just it's just an apple. Or to to refer back to the previous thing, pictures of sad-looking donkeys. Um so uh yes, I mean trying to change this is difficult, but I think it's important for philanthropists to realise that the that this support from the state is an obligation back to the state not to do outrageous, stupid things.

SPEAKER_00 46:56

Yeah, I think and that's a a great uh thought on on which to leave things. Um, listen, just remain to say thanks ever so much for finding time to come on the podcast. It's been absolutely fascinating having a chance to talk, and certainly you know, wish you all the best with all of your future philanthropic efforts.

SPEAKER_01 47:11

Thanks very much, Roger. It was a real joy to be able to talk about all of this stuff, and um it's it's an ongoing project, all these things are. And I'm sure that you know in a few years' time I'll have slightly different views. But right now, right now, this seems like the right thing to do at the right time.

SPEAKER_00 47:40

Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Ewan for finding time to come on the podcast. It was really great to have a chance to talk to him. Um I'll put links in the show notes to things that might be relevant that you might be interested in. If you're interested just more broadly in uh writing and podcasts and thoughts about philanthropy and civil society, do check out my website at whyphilanthropymatters.com. You can follow me on Twitter at Rodri underscore h underscore Davis or at philiteracy. Uh, there's also a Twitter account for this podcast, which I won't read out here, but I'm sure you can find it. Uh, you can find me on LinkedIn and Mastodon and YouTube and all those other sorts of places as well. Uh if you've got ideas for people that I could talk to on the podcast or topics we could cover, do drop us a line. Uh, you can find the email address on the website. And other than that, just like, subscribe, tell all your friends about it. If you know people that you think might be interested in this podcast, please do point them in this direction, and I'll see you next time. Bye, but I'm gonna go to the club.